Everyone was expecting a tablet from Apple. But HP has come up with their new Dream Screen tablet. It does not run Windows or Linux, but uses its own platform that can play music and videos, open photos, and run web apps like weather, facebook, etc. It comes in 10 inches (US$ 249) and 13 inches (US$ 299) and 2GB internal memory along with a HP version of Apple Remote with volume and navigation buttons. You can also hook up Memory cards and USB drives and copy content.

Personally, I think it definitely needs a web browser! and a Video-out or HDMI port. This will be useful to connect it to a LCD display to watch movies and movies from a USB hard drive. That’s what I use my Mac mini for. A DVD drive is also welcome, it will then also act as a complete media center solution. And as HP has an AppStore for their Printers, they can also release apps for this device and it will be perfect.

Releasing October 11th. Buy Now: 10 inch 13 inch

Postbox is a feature-rich version of Mozilla Thunderbird. I had done a complete review of features of Postbox previously here. Postbix has finally come out of beta after 16 beta releases and is stable now. However, Postbox 1.0 is not going to be a Freeware and comes for US$39.95 for a license. If you want to try before you buy, Postbox has a 30-day free trial available.

If your question is “Should I get Postbox?”, then read on… If you just need a basic POP3/IMAP mail client to send plain and HTML mails, then Thunderbird is just fine. But if you are a power-user and want the Advanced search, Tabs, Auto-complete, ToDo lists and the cool Add-ons, then you can consider getting a license.

Personally, I think the price is a bit more and something like $19.99 could have been more appropriate. For that price I would consider getting Postbix and moving from Apple Mail.

Visit Postbox website

I really wanted to write this post from a long time. But with lack of Blogging time, I was covering more of current issues. I just read about Government sites implementing OpenID and even Facebook is doing it, so I said I will write this post at once. There have been similar posts over the course of time, but now this topic is getting more interesting. So here it goes…

As the internet is growing at a rapid pace and everything is heading to the cloud, the number of website memberships increase. Right from E-mail, Online Banking, Shopping, Forums, Blogs and of course Social Networking. With so many login credentials to remember, OpenID came up with the strategy of 1 login for all websites. You can use your OpenID to login to your E-Mail, Online Banking, Shopping, Forum, Blogs and Social sites. This is indeed a great way to go. You also have several OpenID providers to choose from, so you can get OpenIDs of your choice.

Continue reading…

Twitter has brought several creative web apps right from statistical URL shortners to Image sharing and file sharing services to Voicemail over twitter. And now we have TweetMyMac. TweetMyMac is an application for your Mac that lets you tweet to your Mac and get tasks done like Taking screenshots and tweeting them to you, taking pictures from your iSight cam and tweeting them to you, or shutting down, rebooting and logging off your Mac using tweets. It can also check your Mac’s IP address, open/quit apps and start/stop torrents from downloading.

So in short, you can now control you Mac via tweets!

Get it now.

Apple’s next generation OS finally starts shipping. Snow Leopard is available for $29 for Leopard users as an upgrade. The family-pack comes for $49 (5-user). If you are not a Leopard user or use an OS older than Leopard, then you have to get the Snow Leopard box set for $169. However, there was an article on Lifehacker blog about installing the $29 version on Tiger. Link is here. Snow Leopard only workes on Intel macs so Power PC users will have to upgrade their macs.

Amazon is giving Snow Leopard for $25 with Free Shipping. So, that’s the greatest deal on the internet.

Buy Snow Leopard for $25 from Amazon.

Buy Snow Leopard Family Pack.

Get Box set.

After the whole RIP drama, tr.im is back up! tr.im has been my favorite URL shortner, but not any more. I do not trust them, they can close down anytime (maybe next week) and come back up next month. Or even add Advertisements to URL redirects. So, you may not be sure how long your URL is going to be good. I do not trust them. I am using TinyURL at the moment.

Anyways, this was just for the information.

Happy trimming!

Twitter tremendously increased the number of URL shortening services with tr.im being very famous and preferred by many. tr.im had a simple and nice website with a dashboard that gives statistics of each URL trimmed.

The Nambu Network has however decided to shut down tr.im as they wanted to get money out of it by selling the service, or at least a part of tr.im, but no one showed interest in purchasing the service. The next thing was to start charging the users, which was not possible as there are a hundred other similar services that offer free URL shortening. So, to stop the database from expanding and bandwidth from being consumed, The Nambu Network decided to shut down tr.im.

Continue reading…

Automation is one of the several features that makes a Mac special and more useful. However, I came across a software called VisualCron that gets automation to Windows. Not just basic task scheduling, but advanced automation like setting a list of tasks and mentioning the occurrence, exception and processes of the task. This can bu done just with a few clicks using the user-friendly ribbon UI of the application.

I gave VisualCron a try and was impressed. It allows you to do the most basic tasks like sending a mail or restarting your computer to advanced tasks like taking a backup of your blog using FTP and e-mailing you when its done. You can also set time intervals such as every month and add exceptions to adviod the task to occur at a particular time/month, etc.

Continue reading…

Today’s post is about focusing on your tasks and getting things done. I love being productive and if you have seen the “My Softwares” page, you will know that I have made 2 Adobe AIR apps and both are GTD apps. So, I was surfing the web and found 3 forms that you can print and use to focus on tasks and complete them on time.

Daily Plan is my favorite. It lets you write top 3 tasks of the day and also reason them, this helps you to set the top tasks with a good reason. There is place for 8 other tasks you can list for that day. Once you fill the card, you can keep it in front fo your eyes and work on those tasks according to priority and then strike them off once they are complete.

Satisfying things I wanna to do This Week Dammit is a form that lets you manage tasks of a complete week by listing them and assigning the day of completion. You can also keep adding tasks as they come up. It again has fields for top 3 tasks of the week followed by other tasks. You can also take down day-specific tasks in the space below the particular day and write notes there. This form is a great weekly organizer.

Daily Re-focus allows you to write your monthly tasks and monitor the progress of the tasks by marking it as “no attempt”, “some progress” and “full force”. You can see the sheet everyday and work on the tasks and strike them off when complete. This one is not that useful for me as I prefer daily and weekly organizers, but its great for poeple working on many projects/tasks.

These forms are made by WhiteHatBlackBox.com

Google just announced about a new project they are working on. Its the Google Chrome OS. Google is amazed by the feedback of their web browser Google Chrome with over 30 million users. Now, Google thinks that the Operating Systems today are not Web-friendly or Web-optimized. So, Google is making an Operating System called Google Chrome OS which will be focused on Web users.

Google Chrome OS will be a light-weight and Open Source OS targeted for netbooks. The source code will be available in around the last quarter of 2009 where as the OS will be available to consumers in the end of 2010.

More on official Google Blog post.