Streaming music lovers already know that YouTube is a veritable treasure chest of music videos and other audio goodness, and new webapp MixTube makes listening to YouTube clips easy. Similar to Muxtape—but without the part where you upload songs—you create a MixTube playlist by adding URLs of YouTube clips to the app, like this Beatles playlist. You can also shuffle songs or put them on repeat once you’ve created your playlist. Not sure what happens to the MixTube audio if the video clip gets pulled, so make and email around your playlist while you can.
MixTube [via Waxy]Windows only: Free application ClickGone (or One Click App Killer—there’s some confusion over the actual name) turns your mouse cursor into a crosshair and forcibly kills the first app your pull the trigger on. Although it’s fun to fire up Internet Explorer and kill it for sport, the application is actually intended to kill off frozen apps quickly and easily. Assuming you were to create a keyboard shortcut to run ClickGone, it could serve as a simple go-to for knocking out a stalled application. This single-use utility is freeware, Windows only. One click & app is gone [Stylet Software via CNET]
Mac OS X only: When you’re feeling nostalgic for your old school DOS games—or even that copy of WordPerfect from back in the day—but you’ve got a Mac, DOS emulator Boxer comes to the rescue. Based on previously-mentioned DOSBox, you can run DOS-based games (here are three of them, all packaged up especially for use with Boxer), or even productivity applications for DOS, like Microsoft Word version 5.5, which Microsoft has posted as a free download (via). Here’s a screenshot of that time machine goodness.
Google Book Search has made Google Books embeddable à la YouTube videos. Check out the Google Operating System post for a closer look at what an embedded book looks like. Now if only sharing a book were as fun as sharing a video, they might be on to something.
Weblog ThinkNext has gone from Windows 7 screenshots to posting full video previews of Windows 7 apps in action, including a lighter Windows Media Player, a new Sticky Notes app, an improved calculator, and a glowing Start button. In the video of Windows 7′s lightweight Windows Media Player above, you’ll notice a nice minimalist interface that only appears when you hover over the video reminiscent of the iTunes video player. The post also claims it’s not just full WMP with hidden sidebars—it’s actually a lighter version of WMP that starts and plays files with less delay. Keep reading for a look at the other Windows 7 video previews.
Social psychologists say that workplace envy—experienced by more than half of employees surveyed—reduces productivity because workers withhold information and collaborate less with co-workers. Commonly-held belief is that a little workplace competition actually spurs productivity, because you want to do as well or better than your office mate. Which is it?
Windows only: Microsoft Pro Photo Tools is a full-featured metadata editor for your digital photographs. The app supports pictures saved in RAW format along with JPEG and TIFF, and editing your metadata works the same no matter what your default file type is. Apart from extensive run of the mill metadata editing, Microsoft Pro Photo Tools’ marquee feature is geotagging, which can add location information to your photos in a number of ways. Once geotagged, you can view any of your images on a Windows Live map. Microsoft Pro Photo Tools is freeware, requires .NET 3.0 and Windows validation (blech). If you’ve already got a favourite metadata editor for your photos, let’s hear about it in the comments.
Windows only: Check the various values and variables on your computer more easily using desktop diagnosis tool PC Audit. Available as a portable-friendly standalone executable, PC Audit checks system values covering everything from your BIOS version to Windows Product Key to startup entries. In addition, it will list all the software with versions you have installed and provide the full path name to all your active processes to help you identify and hunt them down if need be. PC Audit is a free download for Windows only.
PC Audit [via gHacks]Funny Photoshopper Donnie Hoyle demonstrates how to use the Photoshop’s Photomerge tool to quickly and easily stitch several related photographs into one. In the example, Hoyle merges related screenshots of a map together, but Photomerge is probably most often used for is creating panoramas from multiple photographs. As you can see in the video, Photomerge makes creating one large image from several smaller images a piece of cake: Just plug in your pictures and let Photoshop do the legwork for you. You can also use Photomerge to create collages or pull together a quick side-by-side shot, so you’re not limited to creating panoramas with it. Then again, if you prefer the freeware route, check out how to stitch photos into panoramas with free software. You Suck at Photoshop #17 [My Damn Channel]
Doc Searls blogs over at Linux Journal that Google’s Chrome browser is more than just an attention-grabbing software app. Combined with Gears functionality and the upcoming Android release, it delivers on Netscape’s promise of the browser as operating system, with online-and-off webapps replacing desktop workhorses. Over-ambitious forecasting, or do you also see Google as up to more than just browser polishing?
