Friday, October 10, 2008

Houdini Manages Hidden Files On Your Mac

11:30PM Gina Trapani | Mac OS X only: You already know the command-line method for revealing hidden files on your Mac, but you have to Google the correct command every time—but free application Houdini saves you the trouble. Fire up Houdini to toggle hidden file visibility on and off, move, copy, open, or delete hidden files or folders on your Mac. Just from the few Mac users who have trouble trying out my todo.txt command line tool because of the hidden configuration file involved, it’s clear that Houdini is a welcome alternative method to firing up the Terminal. Houdini is a free download for Mac only. Houdini [MacUpdate via Download Squad] More »

Finetuna Shares Images For Group Comments

11:00PM Kevin Purdy | Free image notation service Finetuna isn’t a robust photo editor in the mold of Picnik, but it does make it easy to share notes on images, photos, and other graphics files. Without sign-up or log-in, the site asks you to either upload a file or point to one online. You can add sticky-type notes, highlight sections, draw lines or underline text, and note that text should be added somewhere. Sending it out for review is as easy as entering an email address. Great for choosing logos, helping a photographer friend out with style points, and other types of editing help. Finetuna is a free service, and there’s a Firefox extension available for right-click image choosing. Finetuna [via CNET] More »

Zoho Mail Launches, Offers Offline Access Through Gears

10:05PM Kevin Purdy | Zoho Mail, a web-based email client long in private beta in the Zoho office suite, is now publicly available. Those with Zoho accounts and Google Gears installed will notice that you can hit an “Offline” button to download a pre-set number of sent mail and inbox messages, and reply to them for sending when you’re back online. Zoho Mail features both traditional folders and label sorting, or use of both, and POP import/export, with IMAP access promised in the near future. Zoho Mail is a free service, requires a sign-up with Zoho. Zoho Mail [via ReadWriteWeb] More »

Five Things To Do This Weekend

4:29PM Angus Kidman | Give your weekend a tech sheen by testing out these ideas from the past week on Lifehacker: Set up your Gmail beer googles and avoid an embarrassing drunken Saturday-night mail frenzy Make sure you know how to recover your Web mail password in the event of an emergency Jailbreak your iPhone so you can block annoying advertisements on it Buy a discount notebook before the prices go up Find out whether you can access your online bank on your mobile phone More »

Twitter Adds @Replies To Mobile Client

4:05PM Angus Kidman | Twitter has fixed one of the more annoying glitches in its mobile site, adding access to replies (messages preceded by an @ symbol and your Twitter name). While there are dozens of alternate Twitter clients available, the basic mobile site is still useful, and this is a sensible (if overdue) enhancement. Twitter Mobile [via Twitter Blog] More »

Microsoft Kind Of Promises To Fix UAC

12:00PM Angus Kidman | A huge part of Microsoft’s challenge with making Vista look like an improvement on its Windows predecessor is User Account Control (UAC), the security rewrite which means Vista constantly challenges any application which tries to do anything even vaguely out of the ordinary. Sadly, Microsoft hasn’t pledged to kill off UAC when Windows 7 arrives, but in a new post on its Engineering Windows 7 blog, it has suggested that it will try and tone down the more offensive nagging aspects: Based on what we’ve learned from our data and feedback we need to address several key issues in Windows 7: * Reduce unnecessary or duplicated prompts in Windows and the ecosystem, such that critical prompts can be more easily identified. * Enable our customers to be more confident that they are in control of their systems. * Make prompts informative such that people can make more confident choices. * Provide better and more obvious control over the mechanism. Microsoft has also acknowledged that the all-pervasive nature of UAC might be counter-productive: We are seeing consumer administrators approving 89% of prompts in Vista and 91% in SP1. We are obviously concerned users are responding out of habit due to the large number of prompts rather than focusing on the critical prompts and making confident decisions. My own take? In 18 months, UAC has never once flagged a security breach, but it has constantly interrupted me when I’m trying to get Vista to fix problems with networking, and has suggested that app installs from major vendors (Microsoft included) are untrustworthy, so any improvement would be welcome. Engineering Windows 7 More »

SonicSwap Streams And Shares Your iTunes Playlists

11:09AM Gina Trapani | New webapp SonicSwap hosts your iTunes playlists on the web and streams the music in them free and legally without requiring you to perform tedious file uploads or use any of your computer’s upload bandwidth. SonicSwap doesn’t host your gigabytes of music files—you just give it your current iTunes playlists, and it pulls the tracks and videos named in them from YouTube, and recreates them in a drag-and-drop web-based version of iTunes. Sign up for a free SonicSwap account, upload your iTunes playlists either via the web site or using an iTunes plug-in, and you can listen to and share your library’s playlists (including Smart Playlists) at SonicSwap, which includes video playback of the YouTube clip. Here’s a full screenshot what it looks like. More »

Gmail Labs Adds Advanced IMAP Controls

10:51AM Gina Trapani | Google adds another opt-in feature to its roster of Gmail Labs experiments: Advanced IMAP Controls, a way to selectively decided which of your Gmail labels are available to your IMAP client plus other tweaks. With the new feature enabled, go to the Labels tab under your Gmail account’s Settings area to select and de-select “Show in IMAP” on a per-label basis. Google describes a few other “obscure” IMAP features you can configure, as well. More »