Filed under: Windows, Productivity, Freeware

No, it won’t really turn your folders gold, but Visual Subst does deserve a medal. It’s little more than a GUI frontend to the Windows prompt’s subst command, but if there’s one thing we like more than commands that save repetitious typing it’s pretty graphical systems to utilize them.

What subst does is create a symbolic link - assigning any folder on your system its own drive letter. Most of us aren’t even close to using up all 26 letters, so why not set up a few of them as ridiculously short routes to get at our commonly used folders?

Visual Subst makes the process ridiculously simple, just select an available drive letter, browse to your folder, and click the green plus. Just like that, your new virtual drive shows up in My Personal. Now getting at the temp folder is as easy as windows + r, t:, enter. Easy. Check the box at the bottom, and your new drives return after a reboot.

For a 110k application, Visual Subst is a no-brainer. You’ve got to have it, we swear!

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Filed under: World wide web, Pic, Productivity, Social Software

Memeo’s new Share application is designed to make the process of sending high-resolution pics a little easier, by sending them directly to another users desktop or putting them in an RSS feed they can look at in iPhoto.

The application, which is currently in beta, isn’t meant to be a substitute for any pic sharing application you might currently be using, although photos shared using Memeo Share can also automatically upload pics to your Facebook account. Share is instead designed for sharing high-resolution photos and video with small groups or family and friends without having to send individual emails containing each item due to their size. Those who receive your pics can then decide what photos they want, and print out pictures they like at a quality resolution.

Memeo Share is offering a free lifetime use for the first 1,000 people to sign up for the beta with the public preview limited to 10,000 total sign ups. Get yours here.

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Filed under: Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

Have you ever been working somewhere and needed to focus on what you were doing, writing, saying, but there was too much ambient noise around you?

You know, peoples iPods crankin’ or chitter chatter chattin’.

SimplyNoise is about to become your best friend.

At desk jobs (ewwww), they sometimes pump in “White noise” to push out sound and give you a bit more privacy, but you can’t control how much of it you get.

SimplyNoise works kind of like an air conditioner in that you can amp it up to as much as you need. SimplyNoise’s site says that white noise can help get you in a zen state, give you more privacy while on the phone, help you fall asleep, and even ease migraines.

Since we’re all writers, and some of us have annoying construction going on outside of their condo during the day, we’ll put it to the test and you should too.

Let us know in the comments if white noise is the right noise for you.

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Filed under: Text, Utilities, Linux, Productivity, Freeware, Unix

One of the longest ongoing debates in the productivity/Getting Things Done crowd is about which app works ideal for keeping tasks in order. Different factions support everything from power tools like OmniFocus to good old pen and paper. Apparently, though, some people miss classic command-line productivity apps like Lotus Agenda. If you’re running a Unix-like OS, and you need a solid GTD system, you might find Beeswax, a free, Agenda-inspired app, worth a look.

It’s a tiny tricky to explain how this works, so you might need to check it out for yourself, but we’ll do our best. Basically, you have to-do items, and you’ve categories. If you assign sub-items to an item — you know, something that takes multiple steps to do — it’s treated like a category. Items can be assigned to multiple categories, so everything is flexible. If you’re someone who hates anything that requires a mouse, this is right up your alley.

[via 43Folders]

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Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, Apple, Microsoft

One of the only features some of us here like about Windows is that you can alt-ctrl-del and look at the open tasks and programs running at any given time.

It’s nice to know what’s sucking up all of your memory (pr0n) and what’s bogging down your processor (DVD burning).

Sloth for Mac OS X shows us exactly what’s running, Windows style.

You can see which application is running which process, reveal the directory it’s running out of, and kill it off if you want. If you’re super geeky and/or bored you can even look at the IP and Unix sockets to see what application is connecting to the interwebs at any given time.

This is a really handy dandy tool, and the source is available too for monkeying…er, slothing around.

One of the superior parts about Sloth is that it’s a Cocoa app, and runs nice and slick on your Mac.

[via chris pirillo]

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Filed under: Business, Windows, Productivity, Microsoft, Commercial, Freeware

Ever created a PowerPoint that everyone in your organization wanted a copy of? Sure you could go ahead and clog up your corporate email server with the 200MB + file or you could just convert your PowerPoint to a smaller flash file with iSpring and publish it to an internal or external website (slideboom account required) for others to view.

Converting your PowerPoint presentation to a flash movie couldn’t be any easier as the iSpring installation puts the conversion buttons right in your PowerPoint menu bar. In addition to the one click conversion iSpring also grants for some customization such as generating HTML codes, looped and automatic playback, slide advance via mouse click as well as changing the duration of the slide.

iSpring comes in 3 flavors ranging from the free version which we tested on up to the Ultra version which allows the creation of E-learning content to additional playback controls. In our testing we found the free version more than sufficient for most PowerPoint presentations.

So before you send that PowerPoint thru your company email, try converting it with iSpring instead.

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Filed under: World wide web, Productivity, Social Software

All of us could use a personal assistant every now and then, especially when it comes to planning your itinerary for a trip where you’ve to put together reservations for restaurants, entertainment, and rental automobiles into something you can follow once you reach your destination.

TripIt is a site designed to take confusion out of trying to organize all your reservations by doing it for you. The service takes all the plans you’ve made for your trip such as plane reservations, rental vehicles, and restaurant reservations and organizes them, adding important things like directions to get to where you’re going and a projected weather forecast for your trip. Your TripIt itinerary can then be printed out and taken with you as well as forwarded to friends in email, synced with your personal calender, or viewed on your mobile device.

TripIt grants you to add information to your trips manually or if you schedule events with one of TripIts supported websites you can just forward your reservations to the site via email and have them added to your itinerary for you. Currently TripIt supports a slew of airline websites, restaurant reservations through OpenTable.com, and they just added support for a variety of event sites such as Ticketmaster.

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Filed under: Design, Utilities, Productivity

If you’re moving to a new place or just want to reorganize furniture in your current living space, PlanningWiz may be helpful by letting you plan and lay out objects in your rooms. Set your room dimensions (you can select Imperial or Metric system, but for some reason you can’t choose Imperial on the first step) and start selecting furniture pieces to start experimenting.

You can select furniture from categories like “child’s bedroom,” “bathroom,” and “kitchen,” and you can drag-to-resize the furniture objects to match the dimensions of your existing (or future) objects. PlanningWiz also lets you customize the design with color, text, and dimension guides.

The plan can have a custom scale from 1″:1′ down to 3/32″:1′. Plans can be saved to your free account space, printed, or shared via e-mail.

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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Windows Mobile, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, iPhone

If you’re not one of the 125,000 people who got a chance to try out the cross-platform note capture app Evernote during its private beta, don’t despair. Evernote has launched an open beta, so now everyone can give it a try. If you were already in the beta, does this change anything for you? Yes, indeed it does: there are now two types of Evernote accounts, free and premium.

Free users keep all the features of the shut beta, with the caveat that you’re now limited to 40mb a month of uploaded notes. If you’re a power-user, or someone who’s really sold on the Evernote lifestyle, go premium for 5 bucks a month or $45/year and get rid of that cap. Premium also comes with the option of SSL for all your uploads (for all those photos of the enemy base, we guess) and priority access to the queue for Evernote’s text-recognition features.

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Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity

If you’re like us, you’ve to read long blocks of text on a monitor all the time, and it’s kind of a pain for your eyes. E-books and long PDF articles would be great if they could somehow get diced into neat, readable columns. Hey, it works for newspapers. Well, Tofu brings that pleasant reading experience to the Mac.

In a nutshell, Tofu cuts up what you’re reading — whether it’s a PDF, a doc, or a chunk of text you’ve selected — into columns. This is a good, because monitors are wider than the human eye is really comfortable with, and columns fit the text into your optimal scanning area for easy reading. Tofu’s full screen mode and adjustable text size and colors are crucial, too. This app is good enough that we’ll think twice before printing out something we have the ability to just read in Tofu.

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