Dashlane is currently in private beta, which means that you need an invite to start using it (thanks to The Next Web). Once you have have entered your email address you are redirected to a page where you can download the Windows or Mac client to your local system.

Dashlane currently connects with the Chrome and Firefox web browser only, with an Internet Explorer version in the making. Installation gives users choice to connect to one, multiple or all of the supported browsers, which is better than Norton’s all or nothing approach. It felt kinda weird though that you had to close all browsers, even if you unselected the extension from being installed in them.

The program ships with a desktop program that you can use for all management purposes, and a browser extension that handles input and detection in the web browser.

The browser extension basically acts as a link between the desktop app and the web browser. It can fill out login information automatically for you if you have configured it that way, and will automatically ask you if you want to send new logins to the password manager for safe keeping. It is furthermore possible to click into a login form directly to select one of the available accounts for the site.

You can configure the program to generate strong passwords for you whenever you register new accounts. Just click in the password field of the registration form, and then on the generate strong password button that appears right beneath it to create a strong password.

Dashlane furthermore can do all the form filling for you, if identity related information have been saved into the program’s database previously. The program takes care of multiple identities for you, and if you like also of ID related information and payments that you make on the Internet. These information can then be filled out automatically whenever you register a new account on a site.

One interesting feature of the desktop application is the security dashboard, which lists password strength ratings for all accounts.

Links point directly to low safety accounts giving users options to change their passwords on site directly to make them more secure.

The desktop app is protected by a master password which needs to be supplied on start before you are able to access the information. The developers have published a white paper that explains the security concept in detail.

You can synchronize password information easily, provided that your devices are running a support operating system and web browser. Data is encrpyted with an AES-256 key before it is written to the computer’s hard drive. Information may also be stored in the cloud, if users select to synchronize their information across devices for instance.

Users can access their data on the web as well, which is useful if you are on a public PC, mobile phone or computer that’s not compatible with the Dashlane desktop app. They should note though that the web app is read-only.

The program only asks you if you want to import your browser passwords into the password manager (and delete them afterwards). Users find desktop password manager import options under the File menu. Supported are popular password managers such as Last Pass, KeePass or 1Password.

Dashlane Presentation Video

Closing Words

Dashlane shows a lot of promise for a closed beta product. It is definitely superior to Norton’s password manager at this point in time. Not everything is golden though right now. The program lacks support for Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari currently, with only Internet Explorer listed as “soon” to be compatible.

An option to generate secure passwords, or to modify password creation rules, is not available currently.

It is also not clear if the developers plan to turn the service into a commercial password manager at a later point in time, or if they are going down the LastPass road which would keep the basic desktop version free.

If you are looking for a password manager for Windows or Mac, and are using Firefox or Chrome, I suggest you give it a try.

Even better, new technologies have made it a lot easier to setup a local web development system on any PC. Ampps, which stands for Apache MySQL PHP Python Softalicious, is a free web development environment for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems that can be installed with just a few clicks. Once up and running, it is up to the user to install web applications from the local admin interface. The program can install 260 web applications that include highlights such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, and lesser known applications such as the course management system Moodle, several types of Wikipedia-like applications or feed aggregators such as Gregarius.

When you first start the program after installation you’ll get into the admin console where you can configure Apache, MySQL and PHP, and start, stop and restart the services.

Links in the form of icons open the local web administration interface or the apps that are currently up and running.

The web admin interface displays a list of application categories on the left, and links to core admin pages to the right. Here you can install and maintain databases, manage and add domains, edit general settings or access PHP and Perl information.

To install a web application, you click on the download button next to it to bring up a page with detailed information about it. You can install the script right away, or look at features and screenshots, open a demo page or access ratings and reviews.

A click on install opens the software setup page with all information filled out automatically. While it is possible to run the setup with the selected values, it is suggested to change at least the admin username or password if required.

A click on Install on the page downloads and installs the latest package automatically on the local system. You can thereafter open the new application to work with it.

What sets Ampps apart from other solutions like WordPress Portable, XAMPP or Wampserver are the applications that the program ships with. The inclusion of phpMyAdmin and SQlite Manager is also a great help in importing existing data into the local development environment.

Web Developers and users who want to run web applications locally can make use of Ampps to do so. Ampps is available for Windows and Mac OS X. Downloads are offered at the developer website.

Frostwire takes that concept and makes it available as a Bittorrent client. While you can use the p2p software like any other Bittorrent client, it is the built-in search that many users will find most useful. The program supports eight different torrent indexers, including The Pirate Bay, Mininova, Isohunt or BTJunkie.

All you need to do is to enter a search term and hit the enter key to search all or only selected torrent indexing sites. Filters allow you to limit the search results, for instance to only display audio or document results, or files with a specific minimum file size.

Results are displayed with their name, number of seeders, total file size, source, creation date and file extension with options to sort by all values. This can be helpful to sort from largest to lowest file size or seeder count for instance.

Once you have selected files you have options to download them all at once to your computer with a click on the download button or by double-clicking individual files. All downloads are added to the transfer display that is displayed beneath the search results. Controls at the bottom of the page are available to pause, resume or cancel file downloads, or to play media type directly in the interface.

All downloads are automatically available in the Library tab. Files are sorted into categories such as programs, images or audio with options to create audio playlists right in the program. A search is also provided to find files faster, which appears to be necessary as it is not possible to display files by download. The explore option, available in the bottom bar and on right-click, lets you open the folder containing the selected file in Windows Explorer.

Frostwire can transfer files to connected phones or tablets, the interface does not seem overly intuitive though. There is also a chat available for users who’d like to chat with the FrostWire community.

The options hold several interesting preferences. Users of Apple’s iTunes software can configure Frostwire to automatically import downloaded songs into iTunes. It is furthermore possible to add or remove folders that are included in the library, to configure keywords that should not be displayed in the search results (with an extra option to ignore adult contents), and to change Bittorrent related preferences like the port that is used for all connections.

Users who would like an all-in-one program should take a closer look at Frostwire. Combination of search and downloading makes it much more usable than comparable clients. Features offered by other Bittorrent clients like uTorrent are on the other hand not available. This includes the ability to play media while it is still downloading or a web client to manage downloads remotely.

The program will install the Ask Toolbar and another program during installation if you do not pay attention to the process.

Frostwire is available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Android 2.1+ operating systems.

System Stability Tester is a free open source software for Windows, Linux and Mac systems that can stress test and benchmark a computer system. It does so by calculating up to 128 million digits of Pi which is extremely taxing for the processor.

When you first start the program you have the choice to run a benchmark or system stress test. A benchmark can be used to compare the results of a system to another system, the stress test to verify that there are no calculation errors.

You can also select the amount of Pi digits you want to compute, the turns, and the number of threads the computer should use for that task.

The stress testing application supports two pi computation algorithms: The Quadratic Convergence of Borwein and Gauss-Legendre with Borwein being selected by default.

Please note that you can only run a stress test if at least two threads are selected. The program then starts the calculation which can slow down the PC considerable during operation. Statistics are updated regularly that display the amount of calculated Pi digits, the state, and time it took to calculate them.

An overview at the top highlights the total amount of errors of the calculation as well as the processing time until the first error was detected.

You can optionally save a log file or a Pi file. The first saves basic information about the run, the second all Pi digits.

One of the core advantages of System Stability Tester is that it is available for Mac, Linux and Windows systems, which means that it can be used to compare the performance of computers running different operating systems.

Interested users can download System Stability Tester from the developer website over at Sourcerforge.

Insync is a new option for Mac and Windows users (and soon Linux as a Linux port is in the making) who want to synchronize their Google Docs documents with local PCs. The program uses Google’s own authentication system for authorization, which means that you do not have to supply your Google login information to use the program.

The first thing that you need to do after installation is to link machines to the service. Linked machines are the only systems that will synchronize documents with Google Docs. Linking did not work right away on a test system, a restart of the application did however resolve the issue.

A web page is opened if your run the program from a new system to link the new computer with the synchronization service. Once done, files will get synced automatically to the system whenever the app is running. Please note that you do not have options to sync selected files or folders with local machines. If you configure Insync to run on a system, everything will be synchronized.

Documents are by default stored in the Insync\Google Docs Email\ folder in the My Documents folder. It is possible to change the root document folder but not the folder name.

Any changes that you make locally to your documents will be synced with Google Docs automatically and vice versa.

The developers have hinted at the possibility to use Google Docs and Insync as a Dropbox alternative. Since it is possible to upload non-document file types to Google Docs, it is possible to use the service to host files online. The biggest advantage over Dropbox is the price for additional storage that is up to eight times cheaper.

Users who do not want to buy additional storage on the other hand get only 1 Gigabyte of free storage space, which is half of what they get when they sign up for a Dropbox account.

The Insync guide lists features that the program offers that Dropbox does not offer:

• Read/write + read only sharing permissions (on folder + file)
• File sharing (you have to share folders in Dropbox)
• Share recipients aren’t charged against their Google Docs storage quota
• Nested sharing (you know who you are!)
• Google Docs collaboration
• Leave Insync anytime and all your stuff are in your Google Docs account
• No direct access to your files (a rogue employee will have to create a program that uses the Google Docs API and steal your access credentials to get at your files)
• Insync only stores your file metadata

Some of the functionality is provided only on the Insync website and not in the client. This includes the ability to share documents among other features.

Google Docs users who want to synchronize their documents with multiple machines may find Insync quite useful for that purpose. The developers do have plans to integrate premium features at a later point in time. (via Caschy)

Businesses and organizations use vpn servers to secure data transfer. This can be useful in countries where services or websites are blocked, or data transfers are likely monitored.

Home users can benefit from vpn connections as well. They can use it to protect their connection on a public network or to access services that they would not otherwise be able to access.

Users from outside the United States, or US citizens abroad, can use vpn servers to connect to sites such as Pandora, Hulu and many other services that are limited to users from the United States.

All they need for that is a VPN that is located in the United States. We have covered several vpn services that offer free limited accounts for users from all over the world. This includes the popular Hotspot Shield, Ultra VPN or Vypr VNP which is free for Giganews Diamond account owners.

TunnelBear is a vpn service that is offering easy to install and use clients for Windows and Macintosh PCs. Users need to register an account before they can make use of the vpn. A free account limits the monthly data transfer to 500 Megabytes, a commercial account allows unlimited transfers. Free accounts are protected with a 128-bit algorithm, while paid accounts make use of 256-bit data encryption.

New users can setup an account right in the software during installation (please note that you need to confirm the email to log in). The program will handle all the heave lifting on its own, including the installation of a new network connection that is used to connect to the VPN.

The core application interface has only two switches. One to connect to the virtual private network, and the other to select a US or UK server to connect to.

The interface displays the current connection status and the remaining bandwidth for the month.

TunnelBear offers one of the most comfortable experiences when it comes to setting up and using vpn servers. The 500 Megabyte limit should be enough for users who do not access a lot of media in a month. Those users may consider paying the reasonable price of $40 per year for unlimited data transfers. The company is currently running a Twitter promo that offers 1 Gigabyte of additional data transfer when completed.

TunnelBear can be downloaded from the developer website. The software is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system, and for systems running Apple Mac OSX 10.6 or greater.

TweetDeck made the list of Melanie’s Top 5 Twitter Add-ons and has been recently acquired by Twitter. Rumors surrounding the acquisition suggested that Twitter might have the intention to drop all versions of the application and integrate the development team into the in-house Twitter team.

Those rumors have now been refuted with the release of native TweetDeck clients for Windows and Mac operating systems. The Adobe Air client is no longer available on the official site, and it seems as if the developers have moved away from it completely.

The move has not been officially announced yet, while desktop clients are already offered on the official TweetDeck website.

Users can start connecting their Twitter and Facebook accounts once the software has been installed on their system. The three columns Home, Me and Inbox are displayed by default. If you have followed yesterday’s news about the upcoming Twitter relaunch you know that this is the new Twitter terminology and layout (only discover is missing).

A click on Add Column displays additional data streams that can be added to the TweetDeck interface. This includes lists, trends, tweets, favorites and search results. The program displays configuration options. If you want to add a search column, you are asked to enter either a hashtag or keyword.

A new option is the notification option. A click on a column’s settings button opens a menu with options to enable notification sounds or popups.

Not everything is golden though. Several features of the Adobe Air client went awol in the first desktop version. Different column sizes, color schemes or keyboard shortcuts are nowhere to be found in the native client versions of TweetDeck.

It is not clear if the features have been removed intentionally from the client, or removed because of time limitations to meet yesterday’s redesign deadline. (via Caschy)

Celtx is available as a free version for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. There is also Celtx Plus, a commercial desktop version and an online studio version to manage team projects. Most users should start with the free version though to see if they can work with Celtx to create their novels, comic books, films, audio plays, storyboards or other types of media. The software is very versatile in this regard.

I’d suggest to load one of the demo projects on first start to get a feel for the program. A demonstration is available for each type of media supported by Celtx. The program layout adapts to the selected production type. If you have selected Novel for instance, you are presented with an interface divided into the project library, the novel’s chapters and the core text editor part. Other modules can be displayed, like index cards, the title page or the master catalog offering information about characters, items of importance or scene details.

One of the program’s strengths is the ability to add detailed information to the catalog. Character information for instance include a name and description, media, physical description, character traits, functions, motivation and backgrounds.

Even better, information added to the catalog are automatically linked in the play, novel or script. Additional options include adding notes to any part of the media, external links to websites that offer information or are important for research, options to add a synopsis or history to the project library and a lot more.

The text editor is decent enough. While it does not offer the full functionality of an Office suite like Microsoft Word or Open Office, it offers enough text editing and formatting options to the aspiring content creator.

It feels a bit strange that all guides posted on the site are for purchase only. A good starting point for new users are the Celtx Wiki and user forum.

Some buttons in the program interface, like Toolbox or My Studio, lead to the add-ons page on the website. Add-ons need to be purchased before the functionality becomes available.

Celtx is a sophisticated pre-production system. More than 1.5 million users use it worldwide to create media according to the project’s homepage. The program can be downloaded for all supported operating systems from the developer website.

TeamViewer 7 is now available for Windows, Mac and mobile operating systems such as Android or Apple’s iOS. The Linux download page lists version 6 as the latest.

The developers have added a lot of new features to the remote access software. It is a long list divided into the two core areas Remote Control and Meeting.

Remote Control

All users benefit from performance optimizations. Especially direct connections, file transfers and working with TeamViewer Manager have seen performance improvements. The new media features, e.g. screenshot creation during remote control sessions or the AVI converter make life easier in specific situations. The option to display multi-remote screens on a 1:1 scale may be interesting as well to some TeamViewer users.

• Drag & Drop Even Faster – Simply drag each desired file from and into the remote control window and drop it exactly where you want it.
• Enhanced Multi-Monitor Support – Do you and your clients both work with two or more screens? Then simply display multiple remote screens on a 1:1 scale on your own monitors – simultaneously and without toggling.
• Save Connection Settings per Computer – You can now store individual connection settings for each computer in your computers & contacts list. Thereby, saving you valuable time for all further connections to the same computers.
• Integrated Screenshot Feature – Create a screenshot at any moment during a remote control session. Thus, snapshots of the remote screen are acquired at lightning speed.
• AVI Converter – Convert your recorded sessions into AVI format and then edit your videos at will.
• Movable TeamViewer Panel – Position your TeamViewer Panel wherever you like on your local monitors so that you can see every important screen area at any time.
• Performance Improvement – Especially direct connections and file transfer are now even faster due to optimization of data packets and display settings.
• Optimized performance with TeamViewer Manager – Huge speed increases, especially for large databases. Through optimized database requests, TeamViewer Manager is now up to 4x faster.

Meetings and Presentations

Please note that TeamViewer 7′s meeting feature is only compatible with other TeamViewer clients, it is not backwards compatible.

Several useful new features have been integrated, from recording presentations and converting them directly to avi video files over participants who join the meeting on mobile devices to options to start meetings before participants are added which is ideal for testing and preparing.

• Instant Meeting – With just one click, you can start your meeting even before adding any participants – ideal for preparation and testing. Invite your colleagues, business partners or clients on the fly.
• Schedule Meetings – Schedule your meetings and send invitations directly from your email client. Use the new “My Meetings” functionality in your TeamViewer account to maintain the perfect overview of all your planned meetings. Transfer your appointments automatically to your Outlook calendar.
• Up To 25 Participants – Invite up to 25 participants to your meeting. From marketing presentations with potential new clients in a personal 1:1 scale, to large international meetings, anything is possible.
• Mobile Participation On The Road – With the new TeamViewer Apps for iPhone, iPad (coming soon) and Android, participation in meetings is possible at any time from the road. That way, you and your colleagues will never again miss important discussions.
• Presenter – Organizer – Participant – Assign different rights to your participants during a meeting. Name one participant the organizer. This person will have expanded rights in order to support you during the meeting. Alternatively you can give another participant the presenter role so that this person can share their screen.
• Communication Tools – Now all participants can see and hear each other. During a meeting, they are connected via Voice over IP and Webcam. Additional tools, such as chat, whiteboard or telephone conferences, support the acoustic and visual exchange of ideas. Choose from a variety of communication tools for lively meetings and presentations.
• File Box – Would you like to make files available for download during a meeting? Simply copy the desired documents into the shared file box via Drag & Drop and easily and quickly exchange them at will.
• Record Presentations – Record your screen presentations and convert your video into the AVI format. This way, you can edit your videos at will.
• Movable TeamViewer Panel – When presenting your entire screen, just drag your TeamViewer Panel to each desired position – even, for example, to a second monitor, to have a complete view of all the important screen areas.

Are you using TeamViewer? If so, which new feature do you like the most? (via)

DragonDisk is a free Amazon S3 file management client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The program can be used to backup, share and organize files in an interface that looks similar to that of many ftp clients.

The first thing that you need to do after installing the software is to add at least one S3 account to the account list. Click on File > Accounts to open the account management window. A click on New opens another window where you need to enter account related information. This includes the account name, access key, secret key, if SSL is enabled and several other options under the advanced tab.

Once you have configured the account you can log in using the Root pulldown menu on the left or right side of the software. The account name should be listed there along with all local storage devices.

You can load a second Amazon S3 account or display the contents of a local hard drive in the second part of the interface.

All files and folders are displayed by default. You can use filters to limit names or extensions in the file listing.

Once connected, you can copy files to or from the Amazon S3 storage, edit files, change permissions or metadata.

Another interesting option is the ability to create sync jobs that can be run regularly. You could use it to make a local backup copy of your Amazon storage or specific files stored there.

DragonDisk supports versioning, external buckets, reduced redundancy storage as well as various compression and encryption algorithms.

Interested users can download the free application from the official program website.

SuprSetr basically improves the photo set capabilities of Flickr, and here in particular the organizational process of Flickr set management. When you run the program for the first time after installation (under Windows) you are asked to authorize the application on Flickr to enable access to a user’s photos on the photo hosting site.

The program opens an authorization url in the default browser. This is a specific Flickr page where the user can accept or deny the authorization. Once authorized a list of all existing photosets are retrieved from Flickr. All sets are set to unmanaged at the beginning, which means that SuprSetr has no additional information about the sets that have been retrieved from Flickr.

The main window of the program displays a list of the photo sets. All managed sets are listed first, followed by unmanaged sets in alphabetic order. It is optionally possible to hide all unmanaged sets from the View menu.

The toolbar at the top offers buttons to add, edit, delete and refresh the sets, and to use the filter text box at the top which filters sets by their title. Sets can be viewed on Flickr with a right-click and the selection of Open Set in Browser from the context menu.

To manage sets, double-click one. This takes you to the Set Editor window. The first step is to check the Manage this set with SuprSetr box, the second to define the parameters that become available afterwards. Parameters include tags, date taken and uploaded and sorting.

Once you define the parameters of the set, SuprSetr will know how to search your Flickr stream for photos that match the parameters, and can then update the content of the photoset based on the search results. SuprSetr will add and remove photos from the set to make it match the results of the search. However, SuprSetr will NEVER delete photos from your photostream.

SuprSetr comes with additional tools and options. This includes Twitter integration to tweet whenever new photos are added to specific sets or all sets. Messages can be customized with placeholders:

• %t – This will be replaced with the photoset title
• %u – This will be replaced with the photoset URL. The URL will be shortened with bit.ly
• %c – This will be replaced with the number of photos that were added to the photoset
• %C – This will be replaced with the total number of photos in the photoset

The Tools menu leads to some nice to have tools like FavrTagr which analyzes all photos on Flickr based on the number of favs that they have received. For every ten favorites a new tag will be added in the form fav10, fav20, fav30 and so on. It is possible to create a new set based on these tags.

A second tool that is available is the Set Ordering Tool which can be used to reorder the list of photosets on Flickr.

Flickr users who work with photo sets and need better manageability of their sets can download SuprSetr from the project website.

While leveling the audio of podcasts, interviews and panel discussions is the core purpose of the free application, it can be used to level and normalize any kind of supported audio format. The supported audio formats are without doubt the greatest restriction or usability issue. Only wav audio and aiff audio formats are supported by the program.

Usage on the other hand could not be simpler. The Levelator comes without options or settings. All you need to do to level an audio file is to drag and drop it into the program interface.

The program displays a progress bar while doing its magic. The modified audio file is then in the end saved in the same directory as the original file.

The developers reveal a bit about the background process on the program website:

here are some hardware devices such as various AGC (automatic-gain control) components that can do moderate leveling, but since they have to operate in real time (i.e., without look-ahead), they can’t do much. And they aren’t cheap, let alone free. Even a skilled human can only react to changes unless s/he is lucky enough to be present during a recording session and can use visual cues to anticipate coming variations. Software can do better by performing multiple passes over the audio, generating a loudness map of where the volume changes. (It’s not actually that simple, but the metaphor is helpful.)

Bruce, with help from his son, Malcolm, had proven that he knew how to tackle these problems in ways that no one else anywhere in the audio/software industry has done to date. So we asked him, “Bruce, do you you think you can write a leveler that corrects for medium-term variations in loudness instead of the short-term and long-term variatons processed by compressor/limiters and normalizers, respectively?” Bruce and Malcolm took on the challenge, and eight months later we began testing The Levelator.

The big limitation of the program is the short list of supported audio formats. Many podcasts are not offered as wav files but mp3, which means that you will have to convert the mp3 files first to wav before you can use the program to level the audio. That may be fine if it is one or two audio files that you need to correct, but not so much if we are talking about dozens or even hundreds of files.

The Levelator is offered for Windows, OS X and Linux based operating systems. Interested users can download the free program from the project website.

The feed reader has just been updated to RSSOwl 2.1 which adds several very interesting features to the program. Probably the biggest feature in the new release is google reader synchronization which means news states, labels and stars are now shared between Google Reader and RSSOwl.

The synchronization can be activated via File > Import > Synchronize with Google Reader. One of the things that users need to know is that there is no automatic synchronization of feeds between Google Reader and RSSOwl, for that you need to use the Import feature. Whenever you add a new feed to one of the readers, you need to use it again to synchronize the feeds. The news items on the other hand are automatically synced after the initial setup.

The developers have improved stability, scalability and performance of the RSS reader significantly. Among the improvements are crash fixes, support for large profile databases beyond 2 Gigabyte, a new wizard to automatically repair broken search indexes and a reduced memory footprint.

Layouts have been improved. The developers have redesigned the newspaper layout, headlines layout and list layout. Layouts can be changed via the View > Layouts menu.

There have also been other user interface changes, for instance integration of the archiving feature in all layouts to quickly move news items to the archive bin for safe keeping, support for instapaper and readability or a per feed configuration of the layout.

Existing RSSOwl users will receive update notifications when they start the feed reader. New users can download the latest version from the official program homepage. There they can also read up on all the changes of the new release in the changelog.

The HTML format offers an alternative. While it is often not that pretty to look at it provides better controls to read and work with the text of a document. Tools like Calibre can convert pdf documents into various formats. Their disadvantage is that they often do not get it completely right, so that header, footer and other textual information are added that are not really needed to read the text.

Enter PDF Masher. The Open Source software turns pdf documents into HTML pages. Instead of relying on guesswork or an algorithm to extract text from the pdf document, it asks the user to identify and select the text that should be available in the next document.

You can load a pdf document via the Open File button at the top of the interface. PDF Masher scans the document and displays all the text that it found in a table like structure.

Displayed in the sortable table are the font size, x and y position, text length and the text itself among other data. This makes identification of text that you want included in the resulting document relatively easy. A click on a row display that row’s text in the lower half of the screen. Here it is possible to add, edit or delete text directly. That’s helpful if the automatic text detection created some mistakes that need to be corrected.

It is furthermore possible to ignore single or multiple text ids automatically so that they do not turn up in the new document.

Lines can also be set as footnotes and titles. Footnotes are for instance automatically added to the last page of the document, so that they do not appear in the document.

The developer has created a small video that demonstrates the programs functionality.

PDF Masher is a handy program for users who want better control and readability on their mobile devices. The manual conversion options may take longer than automatic conversions, but they ensure that the accessibility of the document is improved.

Users who want to convert multiple documents at once need to look at other programs for the job. If it is just one document, then PDF Masher is one the best options, provided that you are fine with the resulting HTML format.

PDF Masher is available for Mac OXS, Linux and windows operating systems. It can be downloaded from the developer website.

Pogoplug can be a bit of a drag to install. Its installer does not go as fast as those of many other programs, so those who tend to sit and watch downloads and installations may be staring blankly at their screens for a few minutes. Once finished, however, you will be able to configure Pogoplug by clicking on the new icon on your taskbar – it looks like a pink circle with a line inside of it.

The program will make you begin by creating a new account, requiring your email address and the creation of a new password. You can then choose which general folders you would like to be included in your cloud, including your documents, music, and picture folders. By unchecking the boxes, you prohibit access to the files within those folders from access by Pogoplug.

Once you have selected your folders and clicked Next the program will offer to give you a tour. If you tend to pick things up pretty quickly, don’t waste your time with it. Finally, activate your email and you should be ready to go.
To access your files remotely, simply visit my.pogoplug.com and sort through your various files from there. You can get to them from literally any Windows-based PC directly from the web, sparing you from having to download and install programs on the various machines you may want access from.

A quick look around Pogoplug’s website shows that it does much more than simply throw your files into an online folder and expect you to manage them. It actually sorts them into categories based on what it assumes they are. By selecting different tabs along the top of the screen you can find your files sorted into their various types – Music ends up in Jukebox, Images in Gallery, Videos in Cinema, and so on.

If at any point you decide you no longer want or need a folder to be made available through the Pogoplug’s cloud, simply click on the icon in your taskbar again to return to your preferences. By selecting the Remote Access tab you can change which folders are allowed access and even turn off remote access to your folders altogether.

One last reminder – your computer needs to be turned on any time you want to access your files. If you’re far from that computer and are wondering why the online interface is denying you, it’s probably just because it’s turned off. Happy sharing!

Pogoplug is not only available for Windows PCs and Apple Macintosh systems, but also as an app for Android and Apple smartphones.

MakeMKV is a Blu-Ray and DVD ripper that is dead easy to use. It actually takes only a few clicks to turn any DVD or Blu-Ray disc into an MKV file on the computer hard drive. Even better, it is possible to include all the information and chapters on the disc, including HD audio or chapter information.

Here is how it works. Make MKV is available for Windows and Mac. Windows users need to install the program before they can use it. To rip a DVD video or Blu-Ray video disc they need to start the program, insert the disc into the drive and click the rip button that is displayed prominently in the program interface. Make MKV will analyze the disc and display title information on the next screen.

Titles with less than 120 seconds of playtime are skipped automatically, which can be changed in the program options. All titles are displayed in the interface with the possibility to include some or all in the resulting mkv video file.

You can select an output folder on the same screen, or keep the default output folder that you can configure in the preferences. A click on the Make MKV button rips the selected titles from the DVD or Blu-Ray and saves it as an MKV file to the local system.

The ripping and converting is relatively fast. It took about 12 minutes to rip and convert a full DVD movie to the hard drive. Each title is saved as a mkv file to the selected output directory.

The program can read Blu-Ray discs that are protected with the latest versions of AACS and BD+, as well as DVDs that make use of DVD copy protection.

Make MKV is currently offered as a free beta version. The developers seem to have plans to offer a free and commercial version of the application after beta. The free version will be able to turn DVD discs into video files, while some or even all of the Blu-Ray ripping capabilities may end up in the commercial version. For now though, everything is free.

Interested users can download Make MKV from the developer website of the same name.

A big advantage of flash cards is that they can be easily created. You can use most types of paper for instance for that. Users who like more control over their flash cards can use a software like Cabra instead to create the cards. This can be helpful to print multiple sets of cards, or to use machine typed cards.

Cabra is a multi-platform application to create flash cards. The application requires a recent version of the Java Runtime Environment on the system, but has no other dependencies besides that.

You can import existing projects into the application or create a new project. New flash cards are created with a click on the create a flashcard button.

Creation is simple and straightforward. Just enter a question, word or phrase under question, and an answer, word or phrase under answer. You can optionally add a picture or photo to the card which is automatically displayed on the question side of the card. Only plain text can be added to a card, with copy and paste being supported. This is handy if you have the questions and answers in text form and want to turn them into flash cards.

A click on study in the main interface offers to test the created cards. This can be used as a way to test the cards, or as a learning tool.

The card manager lists all existing flash cards of a project that has been loaded, the notes tab offers to add notes which anyone who loads the project can access and change.

Projects can be exported which saves them to the local system, or printed which will print the flash cards on a connected printer.

Cabra offers different themes that users can make use of if they like. It is easy to create new flash card sets with Cabra. Interested users can download the latest version of the open source application from the developer website. A handful of sample projects are available for download on the web page as well.

One of the most important aspects of a movie collection manager is how movies are added to the program. This can be a very uncomfortable process if you need to hack in all the movie data manually, or very comfortable if the software does that for you.

Filmotech offers several options in this regard. It is still possible to add a movie manually to the database. You can speed things up however by searching for a movie title or part of a title on the Internet.

The program displays matches in the very same window. Selecting a movie from the list displays all movie information in a table like form. You can use these information to compare your movie with the selected on. Filmotech downloads a movie poster automatically which can be added to the movie database as well. It often lists ten, twenty or even more movie posters that you can select one from.

One interesting aspect here is that you can select the information that you want to add to the movie in the database. If you do not want to add a poster or description you can uncheck the checkbox to do so. It is furthermore possible to edit fields right away in case you want to add information to the movie.

You can add multiple movies at once under Import. Support are imports from files like xml, csv or plain text files as well imports from Ant Movie Catalog. A disk scan option is available as well which you can use to scan a folder on the hard drive for movies. These movies are then automatically added to the database. You may still need to look the titles up on the Internet, but that’s done easily by selecting a movie a movie and a click on the Internet button afterwards.

Export options are provided which can be handy if you want to access the database on multiple systems. Information can be exported as XML and CSV files or in XMBC compatible format.

Each movie can be edited individually once it has been selected in the main interface. All editing options are divided on three tabs. The movie tab lists standard information like the movie title, actors, country, rating and description.

Media Information lists detailed information about the movie media, from the disc format to editions, languages, subtitles and bonus content. Links to the movie trailer (on Youtube for instance) and the actual movie can be added to the listing as well.

Lending information are listed on the third tab of each individual movie. An overview is available under the Lent button at the top.

Three additional core features are available that I’d like to mention briefly:

Statistics – You can access all kinds of movie statistics, for instance about the average runtime, the popular genres or ratings.

Cover Printer – you can create and print custom covers for all movies in your database.

Publish – It is possible to publish the movie collection on a remote server so that it can be accessed from the Internet.

Filmotech is without doubt one of the best movie collection managers. You can download the free program from the official website.

Wikipedia has grown over the years. The largest repository on site, the English language version of Wikipedia has broken the 13 Gigabytes barrier lately, and that’s text only. If you add images, you end up at 30+ Gigabytes of space.

Some users may not have Internet access all the time, which means that they cannot access Wikipedia during that time. Maybe you are on Safari in Africa, miles away from the nearest settlement, or on an Island in the Pacific Ocean with less than optimal Internet connections.

I have reviewed quite a few solutions to access Wikipedia without Internet connection. WikiTaxi or Okawix come to mind, or the manual option to install Wikipedia locally.

Okawix has been reviewed before at Ghacks, but that review is two years old. The developers have continuously worked on the application, which justifies another review. Wikipedia in this context refers to all official Wiki projects. This includes Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikibooks and Wikinews.

The program is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and the Android operating system. The Android version has not been available back then, and is one of the core improvements.

The offline reader ships without local Wikipedia databases, which means that you need to download at least one on first run. Databases are available as direct downloads in the program interface, and linked as torrents on the program homepage.

A language screen is displayed if you select to download a Wikipedia database from within the program interface. You need to pick one or multiple languages that you want to download first, and on the second screen one of the available Wikipedia dictionaries or encyclopedias.

The size of each download is displayed on the second page, ranging from less than 100 Megabytes to Gigabytes of data. A click on Download opens a new screen where the installation directory is selected. You can enable image integration which usually increases the size of the download significantly.

The download is then added to the install group on the left sidebar. Already installed Wikis are displayed under the local group.

Installation depends largely on the size of the selected Wiki, and the Internet connection. A progress bar is shown during installation. You can install multiple Wikis at once, but you need to go back to the selection screen after each item that you have added. An option to select multiple Wikis at once would have been handy. The program seems to look up occasionally during installation.

It is usually easier to download the Wikis as torrents. You only need to double-click the downloaded file to add it to the program database, at least that’s the case under Windows.

You can use Wikipedia as you would online once installed, with the exception of account and website related features. You can search Wikipedia for entries, navigate the pages or click on links to be taken to other pages, all without Internet connection

The search is limited to a single Wiki, which you have to select before you begin the search. That’s another aspect that could be better.

The software is generally responsive, but feels heavy at times, especially during installation of Wikis.

Okawix nevertheless makes it relatively easy to download Wikipedia to a local computer system. Interested users find downloads, torrents and documentation on the developer website.

Miro, in its core, is a video player. The developers have moved beyond that however and included lots of interesting options and features that make Miro more of a media management, downloading and viewing software.

You see, Miro supports Bittorrent, online video portals like YouTube and video conversions, something that only few video players offer at this point in time. Even better, it includes a show list to get you started right away.

As I said, Miro 4 Beta introduces new features. From improvements under the hood like a noticeable better performance when using the client, over geeky stuff like navigating the user interface with the keyboard, to something for everyone like the ability to sync devices or sharing with Miro libraries on a local network.

Especially the new synchronization and sharing options could prove to become very popular on campuses, companies and other mid-sized local networks.

Here is the full feature list of the first Miro 4 Beta:

• Share with other Miro Libraries on your local network
• Sync devices and copy media
• More ways to make playlists
• View the playback and download history
• Improved searching and organization of your music
• Easier ways to add music and video to your collection
• UI Navigation with the keyboard
• Better performance

Not everything is explained in detail in the beta version yet. The help file for instance loads the latest stable help which does not mention the new features at all.

Probably the biggest feature in Miro 4 is the ability to import music from iTunes.

Even better, it is possible to monitor the iTunes library for new music to add it automatically to Miro as well. The beta of Miro is available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Expect a final release of Miro 4 in the coming months. (via Caschy)