During the early 2000′s, netbooks originally emerged as low cost laptops with a heavy emphasis on web browsing and wireless internet – it was initially aimed at needy children in developing countries. It came bundled with an adequate enough OS to run the most basic of software (email, word processor, the odd mp3 player, etc) the focus was to keep the computer connected to the Internet so that the information the child received was always up to date.

However, word spread of the low cost laptop (netbooks usually range as low as $100 – $400). This option made especially perfect sense for traveling business people, however, the pre-installed OS (commonly Windows XP home edition) was sub par and forced the user to use either processor intensive, bulky, and outdated software which could reduce precious battery time, or search for time consuming workarounds to meet their needs.

That is what JoliCloud is trying to change. Designed for netbooks and using the best of what Open source software and open web technologies have to offer – JoliCloud is an Internet Operating System aimed at being a clutter-free, simple, yet slick solution to the current netbook operating systems out there. Using parts of the Ubuntu and Debian Operating systems (which are both Linux based) JoliCloud intends to blur the lines between web application and locally installed software. For example, Facebook, Twitter and Gmail (which are web applications) will look the same as Skype, VLCplayer, OpenOffice Writer (which are locally installed software applications).

With cloud computing becoming a reality with every forthcoming day – JoliCloud’s developer, Tarik Amin, foresees a future where applications designed for powerful processors will be a thing of the past. He sees everything being processed on web servers and all the user really needs is a basic computer with an internet connection of some sort (in netbooks case its 3G and wireless).

Already examples of this are evident, as GoogleDocs and Zoho are online office suites that don’t even use your hard disk to store data, it is stored on the service providers severs.

The world is slowly turning into a forever connected state. It’s not uncommon to hear about someone leaving their laptop switched on overnight to download the latest 100 MB office presentation to view it the next morning. Sure it doesn’t happen everyday – but it is happening…and JoliCloud intends to be the first OS to catch and surf this new wave.

As the name Implies, UIzard is a user interface wizard. What does that mean?

In its simplest form, you could call it a WYSIWYG HTML editor – but that doesn’t do it justice! Not only does it make it easy for the non-coder to make classy website front ends, but it also allows you to connect with databases, make complex layouts and time lines, even full blown application suites (whiteboards, word processors, online spreadsheets, presentation tools, and many others!) All of this is available at the click of a few buttons. In short, it frees you up. Now you can concentrate on how the website should look and feel to the user, rather than the stuff going on behind the scenes.

For example, do you need to place a Google map to your office in the about us page? Just choose the Google maps option from the tool box, click and enter the necessary information, place it where you’d like on the page, and you’re done!  Try coding that in less than 1 min!

Or how about taking all the RSS feeds of your favorite online web comics and mashing them up into one mega RSS feed with your comments on each strip and showing them on your page? Sounds complex, but it’s just a few clicks away!

The best part is – all of this is within your browser! You don’t need to purchase and/or download expensive web development software like Dreamweaver. There is also no need to learn or write any HTML coding at all, and since everything is done via your browser, you don’t have to worry about your online application working on different operating systems or your users having to install something just to run your webapp! (All modern O/S have a web browser of some sort!)

Created by Korean developer Ryu Sungtae, UIzard was made using Yahoo’s User Interface Library (YUI) which is a Javascript based library for creating interactive web applications. Although UIzard is currently in a beta state, the framework is open source and has a growing and active community by continually contributing new features and options and keeping it up to date.

Official Website: Uizard

When I left my job and started blogging full time, I actually got the time to explore and learn more about Facebook and today, I’m more than happy to be a part of it. I can definitely tell you that there is no way you can compare Facebook with any other social media website. It offers the most unique and attractive features with maximum comfort and security.

To make things a bit easier, developers are experimenting with Facebook and trying to produce new browser extensions that promise to make things much easier for you. Recently, I confronted a Firefox add-on that allows you to download an entire Facebook album with just a click of a button. I really find it hard to download pictures one by one but I guess that is not going to happen anymore. With FacePad, I can easily download any photo album I want in hardly a few minutes and, more importantly, I can do my work while it downloads all pictures on its own.

Upon Installation, you will be able to see an extra link that says “Download Album with FacePad”.  Simply click on it and wait for FacePad to download the entire album for you.

The best feature of Facepad is that it doesn’t limit itself to your profile only. That means that you can download your friends’ Facebook albums, Events albums, and Group Albums with the click of a button.

Check out FacePad

Three new game titles introduced are Guitar Hero 5, DJ Hero and Band Hero. I personally think that DJ Hero will be a great add-on as it comes with a turnable controller that allows you to create original mixes from hip-hop, Motown, Electronica, R&B and dance songs.

Band Hero will deliver an exciting music collection of some of the best hits ever to expand the appeal to a broad family audience who can play together on the guitar,drums, bass, microphone and experience a new genre of music.

Finally there is Guitar Hero 5 which will be featuring the hottest rock and roll artists we have today. The game gives the player groundbreaking control over the way they play, with the ability to drop in and out of songs while allowing them to change band members, their instruments and difficulty levels on the fly at the same time.

Activision

The whole process is really very simple. To get started, first sign up on the website using this page. Once your logged in upload an image file and click “Upload” to begin processing.

Click yes, and wait until it processes your file, which will normally take 30 seconds to get completed. Once it’s done, you will be able to download your file in doc, pdf, rtf, and txt formats.

Check out OCRTerminal

]]> http://www.zmogo.com/web/convert-your-images-to-text-with-ocrterminal/feed/ 0 http://www.zmogo.com/web/4-easy-ways-to-send-free-faxes-on-the-internet/ http://www.zmogo.com/web/4-easy-ways-to-send-free-faxes-on-the-internet/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 23:13:09 +0000 MoiN http://www.zmogo.com/?p=3116 I’m not really the sort of person who uses a fax machine, but I have co-workers who can’t imagine working without one. Say you need to send an urgent fax and your machine isn’t working. In such cases, you can either borrow one from someone else or go to any internet cafe to use their paid fax services. Or you could just stay at your home or office and use the following free services on the internet to send Faxes easily:

FaxZero

FaxZero is considered to be one of the most successful web services that let you send free faxes in a few simple steps. It limits the service to 2 faxes a day to the US and Canada as long as they don’t contain more than 3 pages each. You can send free faxes without signing up on the websites.

The easiest way to send a fax is to just type or paste the text of your fax into to the “Enter the Text” box. Or, you can click the “Browse” button to fax a file on your computer: you can send a PDF, Microsoft Word (.DOC) file, or Excel spreadsheet (.XLS).

Check out FaxZero

ScanR

Next up is ScanR. It is an all in one intriguing service that turns your camera phone into a scanner, copy machine and fax machine. It lets you upload and scan digital photos of whiteboards, documents, and business cards.  It also lets you view your scans online, share them with friends and coworkers, create and download PDFs, and fax scans worldwide.

Sign up for ScanR

Drop.io

I have personally been using Drop.io for quite awhile now. In addition to just sending free faxes, it also offers other great features for secure conversations and more. To use Drop.io simply register for a free account, upload your document and click on “Send as fax”. Enter the fax number and send it. The service is simply amazing but limited to United States only.

Check out Drop.io

Qipit

Qipit is a free service that includes sending domestic and international faxes. The costs that you have to bear are related to what your wireless carrier charges you if you are using Qipit with your mobile device. Qipit helps you upload photos of documents, business cards or receipts from a mobile phone or digital camera, and improves the image quality through a patented technology called Realeyes3D. You can easily send your images in a PDF format via Email or a free fax in no time.

It features

• Turning documents, notes and whiteboards into digital copies (PDFs)
• Email or fax qipit digital copies via email, your online Qipit account, or right from your phone
• Store all of your paper documents and notes as digital documents for easy archiving and sharing
• Tag your qipit documents for easy searching and sorting
• Publish and share your documents on the web

Sign up for Qipit

JpgFun

I have been using JpgFun for quiet some time, not only because it offers lots of effects but they keep on adding new ones every now and then. Jpgfun is an easy to use online service that allows you to edit your images with various funny effects.

To add your image on their ready-made effects all you have to do is:

1. Upload Your photo

2. Select what effect You want to use.

3. Mark the area You need.

4. Click ‘Create Picture’.

Once it is done processing your image, you can easily download it or use the embedded code on your website to share it with your friends.

Check out JpgFun

Fun Photo Box

This is another excellent tool to give your photo that crazy look. Fun Photo Box allows you to select an effect right from their home page so that you don’t have to browse through the whole website to figure out what exactly you have to do.

• Simply choose the effect you want
• Upload your photo
• and save results.

The process is really very simple and you don’t need to register or sign up on the website to perform these actions. Fun Photo Box supports the most common image formats which are JPEG, PNG and GIF. The maximum size of a photo can be up to 4MB. You can even post these pictures automatically to social media networks directly from the website.

Check out Fun Photo Box

PhotoFunia

PhotoFunia is an easy to use online photo editing tool that gives you a fun filled experience. You upload any photo and just wait to see the magic. PhotoFunia has the ability to automatically identify the face in the photo and let’s you add cool photo effects and create funny face photo montages.

Just select an effect you like from over 100 different effects, upload your photo, and PhotoFunia will handle the rest for you.

Check out PhotoFunia

WriteonIt

A fun website that allows you to create fake photos, captions and magazine covers. It offers more than 50 picture styles to choose from. Just like any other website you can add funny effects using Writeonit in 3 simple steps and unlike other websites Writeonit allows you to add text to your image as well.

Check out Writeonit

FaceinHole

FaceinHole is another great service that lets you add up your pictures in lots of pre-given pictures. With FaceInHole you can put your face on other photos and create fun pics. See how you would look like with a different haircut, morph your face into some famous picture or put yourself on a famous movie poster or CD cover.

Check out FaceinHole

The earlier beta versions of Windows 7 had quiet a few bugs but it seems like Microsoft has already taken care of them.  Windows 7 RC will expire on March 1,2010 and if you continue to use it after the expiration date your system will reboot after every 2 hours.

Rumors has it that the final version of Windows 7 will be coming out in October 2009. On the other hand Asus has also confirmed that they will be shipping their all in one Z5600 PC preloaded with Windows 7 in October 2009. Asus Z5600 touch screen PC features a 24 inch LCD screen and comes with a built-in TV tuner card, Blu-ray recorder, 2TB hard drive and is specifically made for Windows 7.

Even though Microsoft has not mentioned anything about the official release date of Windows 7 but the Release Candidate will most probably be available for download on May 5th. The new release comes in 64 bit and 32 bit versions.

SketchBox

SketchBox is a multifunctional sticky notes manager for your Mac Desktop. Unlike other Sticky notes it doesn’t limit itself to just writing text but you can even draw and set individual reminders for each sticky to use them as visual alarm clock.

SketchBox Sticky notes consists of three layers: The drawing canvas, a little text editor and an intuitive alarm timer that combines the best of analog and digital clocks. While editing text you can still see your drawing in the semitransparent background and vice-versa.

Anxiety

Anxiety is an excellentt To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. It is extremely lightweight and aims to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks, while remaining poised to melt into the background at a moments notice.

Anxiety’s sleek interface provides just what you need to jot your tasks down, without burdening you with cumbersome large windows. With a tiny desktop footprint and clean minimalist aesthetics, the application is simultaneously small, beautiful and effective.

Camouflage

Camouflage is a tool that allows you to hide all icons behind the wallpaper. If you were looking for Camouflage you probably have a messy desktop, so you should put this window in list-view to have a much better overview over the tons of files

Key features include

• Perfect system-integration: change your wallpaper and Camouflage will show the change instantly.
• Works with multiple monitors: attach new monitors and the icons will instantly be hidden.
• Drag & drop: drag files on the desktop and they will be copied onto your real desktop.
• Finder integration: click the desktop and Finder will be activated and opens or selects a separate desktop window. (You can disable this with the Popup Desktop option of the menu. To still open a window, press the option-key while clicking the desktop, or by double-clicking on the desktop)
• Support for Path Finder
• Ability to show and hide the icons
• Works with desktop managers
• Ability to ‘click through’ Camouflage to get the normal Desktop-Context menu

iClockr

iClockr is a simple tool to show you a simple way to track your time. The concept of iClockr is based on 3 columns including

Projects: A project is a bundle of tasks
Tasks: A tasks is a bundle of durations
Durations: A duration is the smallest brick to calculate your total time.

iClockr is a great tool to Track Timeline for Different Tasks and Projects.

Appointments

Appointments is an application designed to keep record of customers, contact persons and important events related to them. Information is collected in a structured way: there are separate dictionaries with customers data, contact persons, appointment managers etc. which are used to create appointments record. The application provides convenient user interface tools for sorting and filtering stored data.

Key features include

• Document based architecture
• File based datastore and
• Multiuser access

Paparazzi!

To take screenshots of the entire page I personally use Fireshot. It is like the perfect add-on for Firefox that also provides editing tool. On the other hand Mac users like to take advantage of a small utility known as Paparazzi.

You can grab a free copy of Paparazzi from here.

iStat Pro

iStat pro is a highly configurable widget that lets you monitor every aspect of your Mac, including CPU, memory, disks, network, battery, temperatures, fans, load & uptime and processes.

It even allows you to filter out specific disks, network interfaces, or fan sensors, if you’d like.

AppFresh

AppFresh is responsible to keep all your applications,widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up-to-date. AppFresh works by checking the excellent osx.iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.

AppFresh provides a central place to control the software updates available to your Mac, integrating most popular and most common update checking technologies such as Apple Software Update, Sparkle, Microsoft AutoUpdate, Adobe Updater, osx.iusethis.com and more.

TextWrangler

TextWrangler is the powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool. You can use this text editor for a wide variety of tasks from cleaning up data, to editing configuration files on your Mac or server, to writing HTML or coding.

Key features include

• Powerful single and multi-file search & replace
• Flexible ‘grep’ style pattern-based search and replace based on PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression)
• Sort Lines and Process Duplicate Lines plug-ins offer grep pattern support for sorting, extracting, and handling text
• Find Differences to compare two versions of a text file and merge the differences
• Support for a wide variety of BBEdit plug-ins

The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for “BOMArchiveHelper.app”, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder.

It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems. I personally find it useful for opening Japanese archives, but it should handle many other languages just as well.

These applications can definitely come in handy in everyday life routine.

Another recent discovery of mine is an excellent tool which allows you to access Google Analytics right from your desktop. Polaris is a desktop widget for Google Analytics that provides the easiest way to keep your data always instantly available to you.

Just like Google Analyitcs, “Polaris” also comes free of charge, but the free version is limited to one profile only. In order for you to view multiple profiles with Polaris you can update it to the full version for just $15/year.

The company claims that Polaris is one of the first Adobe AIR applications to be built using the recently released Google Analytics API and integrates beautifully with Windows, Linux and Mac systems. It lets you check your visitor numbers, traffic sources, keywords, referring sites and more.

Key features include

• A one-time easy setup
• Overview of total visits, pageviews and other useful metrics.
• Drag and drop date widget to switch between dates
• Day by day view
• Explore your traffic on the Google Maps report
• Learn which pages perform best with the top content report

Download Polaris

Recently I’ve come across something that is way more useful than I thought it would be. A free 24-in-one installer pack that allows you to install almost all the necessary applicatons a new PC should have.

Smart Installer Pack is a combination of tools such as browsers, messengers, torrents and Pc cleaners. The package includes Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Widgets, Skype, Google Earth, Winamp, Firefox, Bittorent, Gmail Notifier, Rocket Dock, Codecs Pack, Adobe Flash Player,Apple QuickTime, SunJava, Adobe Reader, WinRar, Open Office, Daemon Tools, ThunderBird, Gimp, Picasa, Avira Antivirus, Google Chrome, CCleaner and KmPlayer.

The best feature includes quick installation of each program. To get started all you have to do is download Smart Installer Pack, click on the icon of the application you want to install and it will be done within a matter of seconds.

Key features of Smart Installer Pack includes

• Easy, intuitive user interface design
• Contains usual start-up software
• Greatly improves the time needed to install that software, eliminating some of the unnecessary searching, downloading, etc
• All free
• The installer comes packed in a convenient executable file
• You can choose which software you want to install using suggestive icons
• The application is made as small as possible

You can grab a free copy of Smart Installer Pack from the official website.