Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Photology Helps You Search Your Photos Using Intuitive Filters

11:30PM Lifehacker US Edition | Windows only: Photology steps away from tag based searching and allows you to search through your pictures with a variety of filters. There are filter functions for colours, dates, times of day, photo orientation, exposure, text of captions/file names/folders, and even filters for things like plants, sky, faces, beaches, flowers, snow, sunset and water. The simpler filters like the colour picker are a bit more accurate than the more advanced ones like clouds. In the screenshot above I had searched for the colour blue and snow. Photology kicked out a ton of blue skied and snowy wallpapers I had saved earlier in the holiday season but it also returned a picture of Wonder Woman standing on a cloud. (In defence of Photology clouds and snowbanks are quite similar.) Filters can be stacked, so if you need to find a picture from October, predominantly yellow, and taken in the morning you can use all three filters. In addition to helping you search through your photos, Photology has tools for photo adjustments like colour correction, red eye removal, cropping, etc. You can also upload your pictures from the application to a site hosted by Enoetic, the parent company of Photology. Pictures will be stored there for 7 days to share with friends. For a more permanent upload, you can also use Photology to upload to Flickr. Photology is freeware, Windows only, requires .Net 3.0+ framework. Thanks GisellaPot! Photology More »

Favorites Search Adds Easy Bookmark Recall To Internet Explorer

10:00PM Kevin Purdy | Windows only: Internet Explorer add-on Favorites Search is a small, handy button for your toolbar that adds a pop-out pane to quickly search your bookmarks. That’s nothing that Firefox, Google Chrome, or any Windows user who’s installed Windows Search 4.0 or set up Vista for Favorites indexing can’t do, but if you’re dedicated (or locked) into using IE 7 and just need some in-browser search functionality, DzSoft’s lightweight add-on is worth a try. Make sure you add its button to your main toolbar (right-click it and hit “Customize Command Bar”) for quicker click-and-type functionality. Favorites Search is a free download for Windows systems with Internet Explorer 5.0 and above. Hit the via link below for four other small, unique-function add-ons for Internet Explorer. Favorites Search [DzSoft via FreewareGenius.com] More »

Family Doctor Home Advisor Guides You Through Common Symptoms

4:30PM Angus Kidman | Random searching for symptoms online often leads to misdiagnosis, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for online tools when dealing with a family health crisis. Lifehacker’s sibling site babblebaby points us in the useful direction of Family Doctor Home Advisor, which has the twin advantages of being backed by a reputable medical organisation (the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners) and using a series of easy-to-navigate symptom charts using yes and no questions. There’s specific sections for babies under 12 months, kids and teenagers, so this is a useful bookmark for your medical arsenal. Family Doctor Home Advisor[via babblebaby More »

Why Drink Names Are About To Get Confusing

3:00PM Angus Kidman | If you like drinking fortified wines, you’re going to be in for a rude shock at the bottleshop soon. Under a newly-signed export deal with Europe, Australian producers will no longer be able to sell drinks described as “port” or “sherry”, since those descriptions are now reserved for the originals from the relevant European regions. A similar change has been taking place with champagne for some years, but that’s relatively easily recognised when described as “sparkling wine”. There are also bans on the use of the descriptors “burgundy”, “moselle” and “chablis”, though these have been enforced for some years and I can’t recall seeing moselle anywhere except on tap at the local leagues club. The two fortified drinks on the hit list pose the biggest challenge; as the Australian points out, port might be described as “vintage” (though I’d be asking “vintage what?”), while sherry has no really obvious alternate label, which might explain why a consultant has been hired to develop a new branding within the next year. (There’s a 10-year period to change the labelling for tokay, which would concern me more if I’d ever drunk the stuff.) ‘Port’ and ’sherry’ out as Canberra signs wine deal with EU [The Australian] More »

BigPond Music Cards Half Price Through December

1:30PM Angus Kidman | BigPond’s Music already has one arguable advantage over market dominator iTunes — DRM-free MP3 files. Right now it’s got another cost advantage: $100 and $50.gift cards are selling for half price, which could make for a neat and easy Christmas gift for a download fanatic. (Annoyingly, the deal’s not available online, but the saving’s big enough that arguably doesn’t matter.) BigPond Music Deal More »

DVDCoach Express Burns Downloaded Videos to Playable DVDs

12:00PM Adam Pash | Windows only: Free application DVDCoach burns any video file (like DivX or Xvid videos you’ve downloaded off BitTorrent) to a playable DVD. The application provides a simple front-end for converting the files to the proper format (using the very popular media conversion tool ffmpeg) and burning the results to a DVD. DVDCoach Express doesn’t have many advanced features—for example, you can’t create custom DVD menus—but what it lacks in features it makes up for in simplicity. Just drag and drop the videos you want to burn to DVD into the application, set the few preferences available (PAL or NTSC, aspect ration, and quality), and get burning. If you’re looking for a more robust feature set, check out how to burn any video file to a playable video DVD using other free apps. DVDCoach Express is a free download, Windows only. DVDCoach Express [via Download Squad] More »

Bit.ly Offers In-Gmail URL Shortening Gadget

9:30AM Gina Trapani | URL-shortening service Bit.ly now offers a Gmail gadget that helps you make sure the long web site addresses you send out via email don’t get wrapped and become unclickable. To install the Bit.ly gadget—which just adds a Bit.ly URL shortener module to Gmail’s sidebar—you have to have “Gadgets by URL” enabled in Gmail’s Labs section. Then, in the Gadgets tab in Settings, add this URL: http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107368512201818821991/bitly-shortener.xml When Gmail refreshes you’ll have the Bit.ly gadget on your sidebar, as shown. Gmail URL Shortener [Hackaddict.net via Bitly] More »

Voice Dialer Brings Fast, Impressive Voice Dialing To Your iPhone

7:00AM Adam Pash | iPhone only: As its name suggests, free iPhone application Voice Dialer adds voice dialing to your iPhone. More accurately, though, Voice Dialer is a contact search-by-voice app that also does autodialing. The difference: You can easily autodial any contact by saying “Call John Smith at home”—and Voice Dialer is great at recognising matches—but if you don’t say “Call” before the contact’s name, Voice Dialer will simply pull up matches. From there, you can also check out a contact’s full contact card to quickly compose an email, send a text message, or launch Google Maps at your contact’s address (the video demo illustrates these features nicely). More »