1. OpenOffice/LibreOffice Draw

OpenOffice Draw and LibreOffice Draw are two separate software but since their usage and functionality is very similar, I would mention them together. These are the closest and the biggest open source competitors of Microsoft Visio. Draw is an all purpose drawing, diagramming and charting tool. The feature that I love in Draw is the grouping feature. You can easily group different objects together and then do different actions on the group like moving the group, connecting with other groups etc. In addition to other formats (XML format is the default), you can also export your diagrams as SWF Flash files.

Download OpenOffice Draw

Download LibreOffice Draw

2. Dia

Dia is an open source software very similar to Microsoft Visio. When you start it for the first time, you will see that the user interface resembles with Visio a lot. The feature set of dia is also very similar to Visio. You can create UML diagrams, flowcharts, network processes and architectures, entity relationship diagrams etc. easily with Dia. The default file format for any file created with Dia is .dia but there are a lot of file formats that you can export your diagram including Microsoft Visio vdx format.

Download Dia

3. LucidChart

If you are looking for a web based alternative to Microsoft Visio, LucidChart is the perf5 Best Free Alternatives To Microsoft Visioect choice. It provides a drag and drop web interface to draw any kind of diagram. LucidChart gives you an option to build your diagrams in collaboration with your team. Multiple people will be able to work with the same diagram making it the perfect choice for small teams. One of the great features of LucidChart is that it can export or import Microsoft Visio vdx files very easily in your LucidChart account. One thing that is missing in LucidChart is the built in categorization of different shapes for different areas like networking, engineering etc. You don’t need to signup for an account on LucidChart. You just have to open the site and start drawing.5 Best Free Alternatives To Microsoft Visio

Visit LucidChart

4. Diagramly

Diagramly is another web based diagramming and mind mapping software. It has a very responsive and easy to use interface with the tools on the left hand column and the drawing on the right hand column. You don’t need to signup for an account to use Diagramly. You can just visit Diagramly and start working on your diagram or mind map. When finished, save the diagram in an XML file locally on your computer. If you need to edit the diagram again, just visit Diagramly again and open your locally saved file for further editing.

Visit Diagramly

5. Pencil Project

Pencil Project is an Open Source alternative to Mcirosoft Visio which is actively maintained by the development community. Their goal for Pencil Project is to make it a tool to make diagramming as easy as possible and usable for everyone from a newbie to an expert. It is very similar to other desktop based tool with a distinction that it can be installed as a Firefox extension so that you can easily create your diagrams while browsing the Internet.

Download Pencil Project

I hope you will find these free alternatives to Microsoft Visio very useful and I would like to have your thought on how much these free software have been able to replace Visio in your work?

Image credit: Big Stock Photo

1. Openproj

Openproj is so far the best free and open source alternative to Microsoft Project. Openproj is the best alternative because there is very little time and effort required to shift from Microsoft Project to Openproj. It can even open MPP and MPT files created from Microsoft Project but one drawback of Openproj is that it will not be able to save the file back to MS Project file format but rather save it in an XML file which can be opened universally by any XML reader.

Download Openproj

Openproj is compatible with Mac OS, Windows and Linux.

2. Gantter

Gantter is a free web based project management application that is especially targeted for small businesses and home users. The biggest feature of Gantter that I like the most is that it can be easily integrated with Google docs. You can also import your MPP files created in Microsoft Project but Gantter will save files in XML format. You can either save your projects locally or on Gantter cloud servers.

Visit Gantter

3. Teambox

Teambox is another free web based project management tool.  Teambox is much like a social network of all the people who are working on a project. You can easily assign tasks, leave comments and fix due dates and this functionality is given just like we post anything on Facebook or any other social network. This makes it stand off from other project management tools. If your requirement is heavy collaboration among the team, Teambox is the perfect solution for you. The free edition of Teambox supports up to 3 projects and 50MB of online space.

Visit Teambox

4. Rally Community Edition

Rally Community Edition is another web based free and easy to use project management tool. This tool is an ideal solution for small business free for up to 10 users. You can easily plan and track tasks with Rally community edition. The distinction of Rally Community Edition is that it provides personal dashboards for all the users and combines social media tools for better collaboration and getting the right things done at the right time.

Visit Rally Community Edition

5. FreedCamp

FreedCamp is another feature rich web based alternative to Microsoft Project. The thing that attracts me towards FreedCamp is their claim on their homepage:

Over 48 universities, and 31 thousand professionals from 188 countries use Freedcamp every day!

FreedCamp offers an extremely easy to use dashboard which even newbies can get familiar with easily. FreedCamp works in modules and you can install any application that suits your project. This approach is especially successful as people have the flexibility to work on only the tasks and tools that they would like to use. All extras will never be installed. You can install the basic apps during the signup process. The basic apps includes a to-do list, discussions, milestones, time and files.

Which is your application of choice for managing your projects whether at the office or at home? What do you think is the best way to manage projects easily? Is it through using the software or doing things manually?

Image credit: Big Stock Photo

TimeSlotTracker is created in Java, and that explains why it is cross-platform compatible. To make it easy to install and use, there is the native installer for both Windows and Linux. If there is anything unpleasant about a java-based app, it must be the ugly interface and the inability to integrate with the OS theme. This is what it looks like in Ubuntu.

Luckily, you can change the theme layout in TimeSlotTracker.

Once installed, the app comes with a list of task and sub-tasks. You can only have one main task, but you can add unlimited sub-tasks (and sub sub-tasks) to it. Each sub-task is equivalent to a project. Using the Play, Pause and Stop button at the toolbar, you can quickly and easily get it to track the time spent on each project.

At any point of time, you can pause or restart the timeslot. I love the part where you can edit the selected timeslot. This is particularly useful when you have forgotten to start the time tracking while working on a project and only remember it an hour later. You can start the time tracking and edit the start time to an hour ago.

Taking screenshots while tracking time

Another feature of TimeSlotTracker is to take a screenshot of your desktop on a regular interval. This allows you to track the task you are doing while the time tracker is active. It is a good way to convince your client that you are indeed working during the tracked time.

The screenshot feature can be enabled under the “Configuration -> Monitoring” section.

Reporting feature

TimeSlotTracker also allows you to export your data to several formats, including HTML, XML and CSV. You can also choose to export a Summary report, Detail report or Journal report. It will be great if it supports PDF format too.

Conclusion

I am not sure about Windows or Mac, but in Linux, the TimeSlotTracker is almost the perfect app for me. Being cross platform compatible also means that you can easily port your data from platform to platform without any issue, which is important since my work requires me to work in different OS. In Ubuntu, I do have a minor issue with the “Minimize to tray” feature. Once minimized, I am not able to restore back to maximize mode. The “Tip of the day” popup is rather annoying too, but it can be turned off at the Configuration section, so it is not too bad. All in all, if you are looking for a good, useful, and free time tracker software, TimeSlotTracker could be the one for you.

TimeSlotTracker

1. Evernote

Evernote is the most popular and the closest alternative to OneNote. Evernote can help users organize different types of information without having to follow a defined set of architecture. The biggest advantage of Evernote, which even OneNote doesn’t have, is the synchronization feature. All your notes created in Evernote will automatically be synchronized on the Evernote servers. These notes can be access from anywhere else as it’s saved on the cloud. There are two editions of Evernote; paid and free. The difference is the cloud storage capacity.

2. Tiddlywiki

Tiddlywiki has been my favorite for quite some time now. I had organized all my documents in separate Tiddlywikis before I started using Microsoft OneNote. For those who don’t know, Tiddlywiki is a non-linear web notebook. All the data is stored in a single document. The best feature of Tiddlywiki is that it does not require any software download and installation. You just have to download the Tiddlywiki html file and start using it in any standard web browser. The down side of Tiddlywiki is that it is not very user friendly and you have to learn a lot of shortcuts in order to create different tiddlers.

3. CintaNotes

CintaNotes is a relatively simple notes taking application and not a standard alternative to Microsoft OneNote. If you want to organize only text snippets to your liking, then CintaNotes is for you. It is portable and light weight. The strongest features of CintaNotes include the tagging system. By tagging different snippets of text, you can easily organize your notes the way you want without having to drag and drop things around.

4. Tomboy

Tomboy works very similar to a web content management system and makes it easier for you to organize and connect to the information. The feature of Tomboy that I like the most is that it makes those words in any note a hyperlink which match the title of any text snippet. You can organize your data using different fonts and styles, highlighting and making use of bullet points. You can extend the functionality of Tomboy by installing different add-ins.

5. Nevernote

Nevernote was created in response to Evernote. In the beginning, it was only meant for Linux but now it can also work on Windows. Although it is very similar to Evernote, I don’t like the user interface of Nevernote. It’s not because it is not functional or easy to use, it seems to be designed in Java and is not very fast and sleek. But the overall interface is easy to use and self explanatory.

If you don’t have Microsoft Office suite and don’t want a paid note taking application like OneNote, you may want to select one of the above mentioned apps for this purpose. What are you using for your note taking needs and organizing information?

For further reading you may want to learn about Growly, an alternative to OneNote for Mac and Webnotes which is an online alternative to OneNote.

However, by clicking that box saying that you understand the Terms and Conditions, you are still just as bound to abiding by them if you read them or didn’t. This means the Terms and Conditions aren’t there to read as much as they are there to hold you to something you would be willing to do.

In this world of business that is conducted online, the people placing the Terms and Conditions on their website or software probably aren’t reading it either. Google shows over 20,000 Terms and Conditions generators out there to generate the wording and code to make it easier for business and websites to place it on their site or add it to their software package.

In lieu of being a speed-reader, the best way to know what you’re agreeing to before you click that box is to skim the text. There is so much information contained within this text it’s often laid out in outline form. It starts with roman numerals, and includes indents with capital letters, regular numbers, lowercase letters, etc.

Much of this is information you don’t need to read. Looking at the above sample, you know who the buyer is. It’s you. Why read the text explaining what it is? If you know what the word conspicuous means, there’s no reason to read most of the next five paragraphs. Simply skim it to make sure they aren’t applying a different meaning to it.

There are a few words you want to pay particular attention to while skimming, and perhaps read those areas a little more in depth. One of those words is liabilty. This pertains to how you will be held responsible for buying or using the software, app, or website. You want to be sure you know what you are agreeing to with this.

The other words you want to pay close attention to are “fees”, “compensation”, or anything else that translates into money going out. That’s always my fear when downloading software. I’m always afraid that while it says it’s free, I’ll be expected to pay after a certain time or when I use it a certain way. Be absolutely clear with this wording to be sure you don’t get stuck paying for something you don’t want to.

EULAlyzer

If you need even more understanding being following a few key terms, there is software out there that will help you understand the Terms and Conditions of software. EULAlyzer is a Windows-based software that will tell you how safe the software you are about to install is, and also helps analyze that Terms and Conditions agreement highlighting the key phrases that you should pay particular interest to.

By skimming and ignoring portions of text that either don’t pertain to you or are explanations of terms you already understand, and by knowing where to go for more help when you need it, you will be able to click that checkbox at the end with much more confidence. You can change hours of boring reading into minutes of skimming, skipping, and double-checking.

Best Online Alternatives to PowerPoint

Prezi

Prezi is my favorite online presentation building tool. Prezi takes a different approach than the traditional presentation software, including Microsoft PowerPoint. In Prezi, instead of the slide by slide sequential presentation, we can build a complete presentation structure on a single canvas and then zoom in and out of the parts on which we are emphasizing. This helps the audience to see the bigger picture and the core concept of the presentation remains in mind. Here is a very interesting introduction to Prezi:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxhqD0hNx4Q

There is also a Prezi Desktop version for Pro members which can create presentations offline.

SlideRocket

SlideRocket is just more than a presentation tool. In addition to presentation, SlideRocket can provide user engagement analytics. The unique feature of SlideRocket is that it can integrate content from sites like Flickr and Youtube. The plugins can also be installed expanding the features of SlideRocket. Here’s a video on introduction to SlideRocket:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nija_9mLTPE

Google Docs Presentation

Google has silently sneaked through what used to be Microsoft’s area of expertise – Office Suite. Now Google offers Google Docs which very much competes with Microsoft Office. Google Docs Presentation was added to Google Docs 4 years back and is an online alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint. The user interface of Google Docs is very much similar to PowerPoint but has less functions and is easier to use. If you need a traditional presentation builder which can build presentations online, Google Docs Presentation is the perfect choice for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_vsNV3po2k

Best Offline Alternatives to PowerPoint

While it is best for me to save everything on the cloud when I’m always online, there are certain times when you don’t get the Internet connection. In this situation, if you need to build a presentation on the go and you are looking for Microsoft PowerPoint alternatives, here are several free alternatives that you can consider.

OpenOffice – Impress

OpenOffice is an open source and free office suite which includes a presentation software called Impress. It provides almost all the tools that presenters generally need, including drawing, outline, slides, handouts etc. Although it has got a lot of features, it has an old user interface. If you are used to the older Microsoft Office interfaces then you will love to work with OpenOffice Impress.

LibreOffice – Impress

LibreOffice is an enhanced version of OpenOffice suite. LibreOffice also includes a presentation software called Impress. I prefer LibreOffice over OpenOffice because it gives me more features as well as I can create, edit and save my documents in more formats then in OpenOffice.

I hope this list of Microsoft PowerPoint alternatives have been useful for all the readers. Which presentation software do you use? If you are using multiple presentation software, which software do you use for what purpose?

Drag and drop: Ease of use is the first and foremost feature that we should be looking for in any software. Drag and drop functionality makes a software easier to use so I prefer to have this kind of functionality in the slideshow maker.

Transition effects: The software should be able to provide different types of popular transition effects for the photo slideshows.

Timing: We should be able to specify our own time intervals between each transition.

Captions: We should be able to add captions to our photos so that we can write something about the photo right beside it. Text animation is an added plus.

Sound effect: We should be able to add sound effects to the slideshow whether it be music or our own voice.

Photo editor: The software should provide at least a basic photo editor so that we may be able to edit photos on the go without having to go to another program even for the minor edits.

Publishing methods: The software should be able to provide us with easy publishing methods according to our requirements. For example if I want to publish my slideshow on a DVD, there should be an option to do so.

Formats: This is important especially for those who want to distribute their slideshows. The slideshows should be in the formats that people will be able to see without installing any additional codecs or software.

Now lets talk about the free software which we can use to create great and beautiful slideshows and which have all the features that I have given above.

1. PhotoStage Slideshow Producer Free

PhotoStage Slideshow Producer is my most favorite slideshow maker. The biggest reason behind this is its ease of use. The interface is very similar to Windows Movie Maker which I have been using for years before. Everything is organized in steps. If you don’t know where to go, just follow the steps and you’ll be able to make stunning slideshows in no time.

I absolutely love the timeline feature that gives me a summary of what I have added. I can also use the drag and drop functionality in the timeline instead of using a step by step interface. There are more than 35 transition effects to choose from. You can also add effect to individual photos. In the next step you can either record your own narration or add some music to the slideshow. Saving options of PhotoStage Slideshow Producer is a feature that  I absolutely love. I have almost all the options that I like to have, like saving the slideshow on a CD or DVD, saving it locally on the computer, or on a portable device like iPod or iPhone, upload it directly to Youtube or Facebook or saving the whole slideshow as Flash movie.

There is a a commercial version of PhotoStage Slideshow Producer but I prefer to have a free one because it has everything that I need.

2. DVD Slideshow GUI

DVD Slideshow GUI is another free software for creating slideshows. While it is a very good software with lots of options, I don’t prefer it because it is not easy to use. Its interface is not at all user friendly. Other than that, it has almost all the options that are found in commercial slideshow makers. If you are used to the older menu and toolbar button style interface, you’ll love to use this software. It has about 237 transition effects included, 17 formats to publish the slideshow in which make it stand with other commercial options.

Slideshow Makers For Other OSes

These are the two best free slideshow makers for Windows. If you are using other Operating System, I’m just listing down some of the software available for those platforms:

3. Slideshow Makers for Linux

• Imagination
• PhotoStory
• ffDiaporama

Slideshow Makers for Mac OSX

• PhotoMagico (Commercial)
• Photo To Movie (Commercial)

Online Slideshow Makers

• ProShow
• Slide

I hope this has been helpful for every viewer and I’d like to thank everyone for taking time for reading. If you would like to add anything to this article, please leave a comment below. If you want us to write about a specific topic, you can request it from our contact form.

Noow is a pretty new competitor to the media playback game. Its claim is that it can play back HD video with amazing quality. Lets see how it stacks up against VLC.

The desktop applications

Both are applications you will need to download and install onto your machine. The look of Noow is clean and modern.

There are options in the left sidebar to video sources like Hulu and YouTube. Also near the bottom of that same sidebar, there are some links to podcasts.

VLC has a more plain interface. It is not as stylish as Noow’s player, but has everything you typically access right there in the open.

Noow media types played

Noow can play MPEG, AVI, DivX, H.264, Flash Video, QuickTime, Windows Media. There is not a full list of file types anywhere I could see.

While installing Noow, you may want choose custom install so you can turn on support for QuickTime, MP3, AVI, MPEG, Windows media files. These are not checked by default.

VLC media types played

VLC has a full list of media types it can play. If you take a look at the file types, I doubt there are many out there that VLC won’t play.

Having the ability to play a specific media type can take a lot of the guess work out of deciding on the player you want to use.

Noow special features

Playback location – If you need to stop a movie or video before you finish it, Noow will remember the location where you stopped and automatically start you there when you open the file again.

RSS feeds – Get the latest video from your favorite site using the RSS feed option.

Torrent files – You can use files from Bit Torrent

Space – You can set aside a certain space on your hard drive for your downloads and be notified when it is full.

VLC special features

Stream – You can stream your audio and video files to other devices. This can be super cool if you set up an old computer as a media server.

Remote – Your Android device can be used as a remote to control your media playback.

Appearance – You can download different skins to change the look of the player window.

Conclusion

I am still leaning toward VLC. My reasoning is, I am using Windows 8 for most things recently and Noow was a bit choppy playing video. I don’t expect all of the applications to work perfectly on a new OS. Noow worked great for me in XP. VLC has been a great all around media player for as long as it has been around. They usually adapt to new formats very quickly.

What kinds of features help you choose which media player to use?

One media streaming dilemma that still faces some Xbox 360 and PS3 users is the ability to stream content from another device, such as a desktop or laptop computer. If you have home movies, pictures or photos, a collection of MP3s, or other content that you have downloaded to your computer, it is a pain to have to copy that content to your game console. For Windows users, they can connect their Xbox 360 to their Windows computers without much difficulty. For the rest of us, there are third-party tools. One in particular that I have been using lately is PS3 Media Server.

PS3 Media Server

Despite the name, PS3 Media Server can actually stream to a number of UPnP-capable devices, including the Xbox 360, Android phones and tablets, XBMC, iPad, and Sony Bravia Internet TVs. It is also cross-platform and free and open source, with builds available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is written in Java and can stream supported content formats directly or even transcode incompatible content before streaming.

Installation and Setup

The Windows and Mac versions comes with .exe and .dmg files respectively. The installation process should be familiar to you. For Linux, there are no distribution-specific packages, so you will need to download the .tgz file and extract the contents. You can copy the extracted files wherever you want and then just execute the PMS.sh file. As it is platform-independent, you might be able to get it to work with other Unix-like OSes, such as FreeBSD, as long as Java is installed and working.

After startup, the first screen will show you a detection process where PMS will look for a PlayStation 3 on your network. If it finds one, it will show a picture of one at the top and immediately make itself available to it. Regardless, it will continue searching for additional devices. If it finds an Xbox 360, it will display a picture of one on the bottom half of the window.

Your content will now be ready to stream, but you still need to tell PMS where the content is. To do this, click the “Navigation/Share Settings” tab. At the bottom is a section called “Shared folders”. Click the folder icon with the big plus emblem and select the folders you want to add to your streaming library. Once you have selected the folders you want, you will notice that the top middle button labeled “Restart HTTP Server” has become available. Click it to refresh your new shares.

There are many other features you can configure, such as image thumbnails, network features, and transcoding settings. To support transcoding, you will need to make sure you have Mplayer/MEncoder and/or FFMPEG installed. If you intend to stream HD movies while transcoding them, you will need a powerful computer. My laptop was unable to do it without stuttering through it. Without transcoding, everything streams fine.

At your game console, you should go through the normal process of attaching media streamers and playing content. On the Xbox 360 for example, it will detect your PS3 Media Server and play content from it as if it were a Windows machine. If you have trouble connecting, always go back and check the “Status” tab on PMS, and if necessary, restart it. You should now be able to enjoy your computer’s content from your living room anytime you want it.

PS3 Media Server

Installation

Sweet Home 3D is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. There is also an online version that you can use directly from your browser. To install the desktop software, go to Sweet Home 3D site and download the version for your operating system.

In Ubuntu, you can easily install via the Synaptic Package Manager, Ubuntu Software Center or with the command:

sudo apt-get install sweethome3d

User Interface

When you open the application, all you will see is a blank window with four sections.

The top left section is a list of 3D model (furniture) that you can drag and drop to the design pane. The top right section is the design pane where you can drag, move, rotate and resize your furniture and arrange them in the preferences you want.

The bottom left section show the description and attributes of individual item and the bottom right section is the 3D preview of your house design. You can change the view by dragging and rotate it around.

Getting Started

The first thing you have to do is to create the layout of your house. If you already have a digital copy of the layout plan, you can import it at “Plan -> Import background image“. Alternatively, you can start from scratch by going to “Plan -> Create Walls“.

Once you have created your layout, you can start to drag and drop the furnitures from the top left section and move them around in the layout. When dealing with the furniture, you can use the corner actions to change its appearance:

• Top left corner – rotate
• Top right – change elevation
• Bottom left – change height
• Bottom right – resize

At any point of time, you can drag your cursor to change the viewing angle at the Preview pane. You can also use the scroll wheel to zoom in/out of your layout.

3D Models

The furniture library is rather limited in the desktop version. What you can do is to import (Furniture -> Import Furniture Library) the extra library of 3D models from here.

Once you have finished your design, you can either save it for future editing (with .sh3d extension), print it or save as PDF. The layout that you created can also be exported to SVG format.

Conclusion

If you need a simple home design software that doesn’t require any technical background to use, Sweet Home 3D is a good choice.

Note: Sweet Home 3D is built with java and require java to be installed in your machine before you can use it.

Image credit: BigStockPhoto

Overview

GoToAssist is a very user friendly piece of software, with full support for both Windows and Apple OSX. When you run it, it provides you with a a support key to give your customer, and the option to copy the support URL to the clipboard or to email it. The customer can follow the link you send them, or just go to www.fastsupport.com and type in the support key and their name. Once they click launch, the download of the client side portion of the software begins and the support session is initialised shortly after that.

I have used GoToAssist from behind various different kinds of proxies and firewalls and never had any trouble establishing a connection both to and from such clients. Its routing abilities appear to be quite advanced.

GoToAssist offers a variety of great features that make your life as a remote support technician much easier. It’s possible to setup full unattended support with your clients (they must give permission, obviously), so that you can manage client machines out of hours or when they are not around. It also offers live chat during the session, file transfer, annotation tools and even a reboot and reconnect feature. The latter feature is invaluable as often a client will go off and do something else while you work on their system, and it can be time-consuming to have to call them back and ask them to reinitialise a support session once the machine has rebooted.

Options

There are a number of options in GoToAssist, primarily surrounding the quality of the visual experience at your end. The idea is to conserve bandwidth in order to improve the speed of your experience. If both you and the client have a fast broadband connection and are located in the same country then 24-bit colour and display effects should all work fine. If there are any bottlenecks, however, it’s probably best to revert to 256-colour and to disable any display effects as they will probably slow down your support session.

Speed

This is the one place where I find GoToAssist lacking in comparison to Teamviewer. Citrix does not specify whether GoToAssist uses multichannel routing, but my belief is that it does not. Speeds in Teamviewer are mostly superior to those of GoToAssist. That said, the speeds in GoToAssist certainly aren’t a deal-breaker

Wrap-up

If you’re looking for a strong alternative to Teamviewer then you could do much worse than to give GoToAssist a try. They offer a 30-day free trial, so you can evaluate if it works well for your needs. Please let me know how you find it.

1. Fix Audio/Video/Subtitle Sync Problems

One of the most annoying things that can happen on video playback is when the audio and video tracks do not sync up properly. Sometimes it’s a result of bad encoding software, sometimes it’s a result of a mistake by the person doing the encoding, but it’s always annoying. VLC feels your pain and includes a tool to adjust the delay for the audio and/or subtitle tracks to let you adjust things as needed. Just open Tools -> Track Synchronization to make your adjustments.

2. Watermarks/Overlays

Sometimes you may need to place some text or watermark into your video display (particularly when transcoding), and you don’t need a video editor suite to accomplish this. VLC’s got that too. Like some of our other tips, this can be found in Tools -> Effects and Filters, but this time under the Video Effects tab under Vout/Overlay.

If you want a graphic instead of plain text, you can do that with the Logo tab in the same section.

3. Control Playback Through the Web

If you’ve got your videos hooked up to play through a home theater PC, or just like to do remote control, you can command VLC from anywhere through its network interfaces for Telnet or Web. Just open View -> Add Interface -> Web Interface. It starts a small web server (you may need to adjust your system firewall settings to allow it) which can be accessed on port 8080. The web interface will let you start, stop, and set current playback and even adjust volume just as if you were clicking the buttons on the player window itself.

4. Mouse Gestures

Many people find mouse gestures to be a more natural way to interact with a computer than using buttons, and VLC has got those people taken care of as well. If you’re not familiar with them, mouse gestures let you use various click-and-drag motions to tell the application what to do. In web browsers, for example, you might drag the mouse anywhere on the screen from right to left to go back, instead of moving up to the corner for the button. It may not sound like much but many mouse gesture users will say it adds up.

To enable this feature, go to View -> Add Interface -> Mouse Gestures. You may need to restart VLC for the changes to take effect. The list of supported gestures can be found here.

Conclusion

As always, VLC delivers more than expected from a media player. There have been times when this author has run into some type of problem with a video and thought “I bet VLC is clever enough to have something for this…” and most of the time, I’ve been right. In case you can’t tell, I’m a fan.

A bit about Crave Invoice

This is a Windows application and comes in three versions – Pro, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Each builds on the last, so where Pro includes invoicing along with customer and product management, Enterprise adds inventory management and Ultimate includes all of Enterprise plus a plugin for managing production.

All versions have a 30-day free trial where you can decide if you like the program before purchasing a license.

Setup

As a Windows program, it installs like any other, and you’re greeted on the first run with a brief 3-step wizard to enter company information and, optionally, tax and currency info.

As far as wizards go, this one’s quick and simple, and I appreciate that you can choose to skip the tax and currency screens once you’ve completed the initial company info screen.

Basic Usage

Of the three editions mentioned above, we’re reviewing the Pro edition. It is the most limited of the three, but it provides the core modules used by all editions and demonstrated the functionality of the program. Once you’re done with the First Run Setup Wizard, you’ll get the main application screen

which is pretty straighforward. The first thing I did was to try making a new customer, and this is where I ran into the first of a few “quirks” in the application. When creating my fictional customer I decided to enter a London, UK address to see how the application would handle a non-US address, and got the following response

In short, it’s telling me that I did not enter a ZIP code (not applicable in UK). It doesn’t like that I did not enter any information for delivery address (in the next tab over). Crave did accept a London-style postcode in the ZIP box, and I was able to set the delivery information to Same As Billing Address so this was not a deal-breaker, but I can’t predict how the system might respond to countries without a ZIP equivalent. As deliveries have nothing to do with my business, and many others, I was a bit surprised that the Delivery tab would be a required field.

Managing Products

To simplify your bookkeeping, you can specify individual products and their prices with Crave and easily add them to your invoices later. Just choose the Create New Product button from the Quick Access Panel.

While it’s one relatively small portion of the overall application, I actually had two complaints about this section. The first is the lack of a description field, or any other way to include additional info/comments/notes about a product. Second, the Units of Measure field provides four options – NOS, KGS, LTR, and MTR without any tooltip or other information about exactly what those mean. From the looks of it, I’d think those might mean number of units, kilograms, liters and meters but there’s no clarification in the GUI or even the online docs to confirm that. A Google search for those terms brought me to a Foreign Trade Department website which confirmed my suspicions, but the software shouldn’t necessarily assume I’m up on the latest FTD abbreviation standards.

Invoicing

Surely, if there’s one place this software should shine, it should be invoicing. Why else put that in the name? For the most part, I’d say it’s justified. Crave makes it easy to pull up customer and products and combine them into a simple-to-use invoice generator.

This screen contains all the invoice generation options I need (plus a few more) and is fairly straightforward and intuitive.

Once I finished entering my invoice details, I hit a snag which very nearly caused me to completely dismiss Crave as useless – until I realized it was another GUI “quirk”. If you look at the above screenshot, you might notice two important things missing. You can print, but there’s nothing to email your invoice, or export it to a file! All is not lost, however, as both those functions are present, but for some reason they’re both hidden behind the Print button. Click that, and you’ll see a preview window which DOES have the controls to email and export.

Conclusion

It’s hard to nail down a single, solid opinion about Crave Invoice. Its primary focus – creating simple and nice-looking invoices, it does well. The graphics are good, but there are some downright silly usability choices (such as loading all screens into one overlapping space with no tabs/tiling/other sane organization). There’s very good reporting capabilities, but the usability troubles make it difficult to want to take advantage of that. I suppose if I had to sum it all up, I’d say that Crave Invoice has some pretty impressive functionality, but lacks quite a bit in form. It appears to be designed for a somewhat limited type of business, but for that type (small manufacturing) it could be extremely useful, provided you can get past those quirks.

Free Giveaway

The developer of Crave Invoice has gladly sponsored 10 license keys to giveaway to all of you. Here is how you can participate:

Update: Contest Closed

This giveaway begins now and ends Sunday, 4th September 2011 at 2359hrs Pacific Time. The winners will be selected at random and announced via email.

Share and enjoy!

Check out Crave Invoice.

MakeTechEasier would like to thank craveinvoice.com for their generosity in sponsoring this giveaway. Interested in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us.

The Premise

Raise your hand (or mash your keyboard) if you pirate music. I thought so. How do you feel about it? Indifferent? A little guilty? Uncomfortable? Well, with Spotify, you get the choice of a free account or a paid one, so if for some reasons, you object to paying $5/month for the best music application since Napster, then there’s still something in it for you.

The Offering

There are 3 plans available on Spotify – Free, Unlimited and Premium. The main differences between these three accounts is that the free account subjects you to the occasional ad, the Unlimited account has no advertising, and the Premium account lets you download up to 3,333 tracks to your computer and/or mobile device so you can carry them around with you. The sound quality on the Premium account is also higher (320kbps ogg versus 160kbps ogg). I’m personally on an Unlimited account, and it sounds great so I’m not sure how much benefit there is sound-wise unless you’re running it through an amazing home theatre setup. Keep in mind that Spotify is currently limited to people in Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom or the United States. For the paid accounts, there is no need to use a VPN to access Spotify outside these countries – you just need to make sure you can pay with a credit card or Paypal account registered in these countries. There are also many people selling US gift cards for Spotify on Ebay.

The Interface

Spotify’s main interface is very much an iTunes clone, but prettier. You run searches from the top left search box, and browse your results in the main window on the right. Double clicking a track starts it playing almost instantly, and you can jump through the track as if you were listening to a downloaded file. Clicking on an Artist’s name will bring up a list of everything Spotify has on that artist, as well as some artist information. Up the top there are tabs for Biography, Related Artists and Artist Radio. The biographies tend to be quite good, and the related artists section is very useful for discovering music similar to things you already like. Artist radio just plays a selection of related artists at random.

You can create queues in Spotify, much as you would in iTunes. If you have an artist’s page open, just right-click on the name of an album and click “Add to…” then “New Playlist”, and a new playlist will be created on the left. What I tend to do is create an initial playlist, then browse related artists, queuing additional albums until I build up a decent list of interesting and varied music.

Problems

There are a couple of issues with Spotify. Firstly, not all music is correctly categorised under the right artist – especially if the track was produced by a couple of different artists. As far as music that’s not available on there, the only thing I was not able to find was the genuine soundtrack to the Blues Brothers. There were many “tributes”, but not the real deal unfortunately. However, like I said – that was the only album I couldn’t find.

Wrap-up

All in all, the service is really quite good. If you’re tired of playing around with torrents, feel guilty for downloading pirated music, or just want easy access to music, Spotify’s well worth a try!

Download and install Wuala on your computer. On the first run, it will prompt you to create an account (or sign in to your existing account if you have one).

Once you are logged in, you will see your dashboard with several folders (Document, Music, Photos, Videos). Unlike Dropbox, Wuala does not integrate with your filesystem. Instead, it mounts itself as a drive in your system.

You can get it to sync with any folder in your computer. To do so, click on the “New -> Sync” option and select the local folder that you want to sync.

It also works the other way – syncing your Wuala document to your local computer. You just have to select the folder and go to “File -> Synchronize with this computer“.

There are several sharing options in Wuala. By default, all your files and folders are marked as Private. No one, other than you, can view your files. You can, however, change the file permission to Share or Public. For Share option, you can share your files with your contacts, either via email or web link. For Public option, the file/folder is publicly available for everyone.

Wuala Preferences

The Preferences section of Wuala is pretty comprehensive, covering everything from your account detail, connection speed, cache size, filesystem integration, notification and many more options.

Trading of local storage in exchange for online storage

When you sign up for a free account, you will receive 1Gb of storage space. To many of us, this is too little. If you need a lot of online storage space, and at the same time, you have plenty of free space in your local hard drive, you can trade your local space in exchange for online space.

It works like this: you need to first specify the amount of hard disk space you are willing to trade (say 100GB). Depending on the amount of time you are online (for example, you are connected to Wuala 70% of the time), you will be given a free online storage space equivalent to the product of the hard drive space you are trading and the time you spent online. In this case, you will have access to 70Gb (70% * 100Gb) of online storage space.

Alternatively, you can refer your friends to use Wuala and earn up to 3Gb of storage space. Lastly, there is always the premium plans that allow you to buy storage space for a annual fee.

Conclusion

Wuala comes with plenty of features and it is really an enjoyment to use it. Personally, I like its security feature and the ability to choose the folders that you want to sync. The only gripe is the 1Gb storage space. Most online storage services offer 2Gb (some offer up to 5Gb) for their free account. Upon comparison, Wuala’s 1Gb storage space is really pathetic and unattractive. With competitors like SpiderOak and Ubuntu One, this could really make a lot of differences.

Wuala is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone and Android.

Spring Publisher is a software that allows you to to design and print Business Card, Flyer, Postcard, Letterhead within a few minutes. It comes with several beautifully designed templates that you can use offhand. All you need to do is to drag and drop the design elements to where you want them to be, type in your name and address and it is ready to send for printing.

When you first launched the application, it will ask you if you want to create a blank project or select a template from a template library. Personally, I am not creative in nature, so I choose to use existing template.

The template library comes with a few templates that you can choose. You can also download more templates from the web template store (available for premium account only).

Once you have selected the template, you can start to do the editing. All the design elements are layered (like Photoshop), so you can easily move them around without affecting others. Things that you can insert to the design include images, text and shapes.

The element properties are shown on the right side bar and you can quickly edit the position, canvas size, width, height, color and many other attributes easily.

This is what I come up with after 5 minutes of playing with it.

Conclusion

Spring Publisher is like a stripped down version of Photoshop – comprehensive, yet easy to use. It is built specifically for designing namecard, letterhead and flyer. The drag and drop feature really make it easy to use.

The free version is fully functional, but if you upgrade to the premium version, you can access the online template library and download many beautiful templates for free. In addition, you can also print high quality output at 350dpi.

For you only, we have 8 license keys for the SpringPublisher PRO version to give away. Here’s what you need to do to participate:

This giveaway begins now and ends Saturday, 13th August 2011 at 2359hrs Pacific Time. The winners will be selected at random and announced via email.

Share and enjoy!

Check out Spring Publisher.

MakeTechEasier would like to thank springpublisher.com for their generosity in sponsoring this giveaway. Interested in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us.

The hardest part about using a service where there is no defined way to use it, is making a system of your own. While there are features built into Evernote that will make it easier to keep your information sorted, you will still want to keep it pretty organized.

Here are some ways that business owners can make use of Evernote.

1. Vendors

You can use Evernote to keep the contact info and terms for each vendor you deal with for easy access anywhere you may need it. Any bit of information you can keep about a vendor is good to have access to from anywhere. You never know when you may need to contact one.

2. Outsourced employees

If you run a business where you may have several outsourced employees or services, you can keep the terms of your agreements in a separate notebook for easy access if you need to recall the terms of your agreement.

3. Event planning

Create a checklist of tasks to do and keep it in a notebook along with people involved in each part of the event. Having tags assigned to each task may help you easily sort who is accountable for each part of a task.

4. Marketing ideas

While you are on the go, you will likely see an ad that you could mimic to promote your product or service. Either using a picture or a voice note, you can log the details of this great marketing idea.

5. Meeting notes

If you have an important meeting with a client coming up, you can review the details of your last meeting, or even the personal details about your contact (like their kid’s names or any special events that may have recently happened).

6. Products

If you are in a business where you have the freedom to add new products at your leisure, you can keep notes on potential products to carry. You could also look at how your potential competitors are marketing the same or similar products. This may help you decide what to sell and what to leave be.

7. Business Cards

An important part of any business is networking. When you network, you meet new people and need to keep their contact information handy. Evernote is a great place to store a copy of all those business cards. Take a picture of them and store them under a tag like business card and the event you met them at. When the time comes, you can search for that person by the text on the card or any tags you may have added.

8. Travel itinerary

Some businesses require travel. One big headache of traveling is remembering flight and other confirmation numbers. By saving a screen capture, PDF or by simply copying and pasting the information into an Evernote, you can set your mind at ease on your next trip.

9. Take photos of receipts

Anyone in business knows you need to keep a copy of a receipt for pretty much everything. Taking a picture of each receipt may be good enough for proof of your purchase.

10. Billable hours

If you are a freelancer, you can use a note to keep track of your billable time spent on each project for a client. I use this technique a lot because I usually have my Android phone with me when I am not in my office. Other times I have the web or desktop version where I can jot down billed time spent.

How do you use Evernote for your small business?

image: Evernote blog

• You choose a task that is to be accomplished in a certain time
• Set the Pomodoro timer to 25 minutes.
• Work on the task until the timer rings.
• Record the status of the task.
• Take a short break (usually 5 minutes)
• Set the Pomodoro timer again.
• Work on the task until the timer rings.
• Take a short break.
• Take a longer break after 4 Pomodoro timer rings.

This process continues until the task is completed.  This is a successful time management technique used by many professionals around the world. If you are a computer geek and most of your work is related to computers, you can apply this technique using software.

Pomodo7o is a tiny, portable and open source software which can emulate the Pomodoro technique on a Windows 7 computer in an innovative way. When opened, it will start the timer of 25 minutes (which is the default in Pomodoro technique) and will start displaying a progress bar on its own icon on the taskbar. The screenshot is given below:

When we look at the application, the application itself has only three buttons. Reset, Pause and Take a break. All the three buttons are self explanatory. Reset will reset the timer to zero minutes. If you want to stop working on your task for a while, you can press the Pause button. And if you want to take a break before 25 minutes, you can just press Take a break button.

The green taskbar will turn orange after fifteen minutes and then red when the timer is about to ring.

Then the pause icon will appear and it will display the same green to red taskbar for five minutes. The same Poromodo cycle will continue as discussed above. This will make sure that you’re working on your tasks efficiently and taking a break during your work timings making you more productive and fresh at the same time.

Download Pomodo7o and manage your time efficiently.

Please note that Pomodo7o is only compatible with Windows 7. If you want to use Pomodoro technique on other Operating Systems, you can try out the following apps but these apps may not be as simple as Pomodo7o.

Tomighty is a little advanced desktop timer which can emulate the Pomodoro technique with advanced functions and customizations, like setting a custom timer, a custom break etc.

Pomodairo is an Adobe Air application which can be run on any platform supporting Adobe Air.

Focus Booster is another application which comes in three flavors including Desktop app, Adobe Air and and an online version. Best for those who like to install the application on their computers.

I hope all these productivity and time management will help the user manage time more efficiently and be more productive. I use these time management techniques myself when I’m writing articles. This helps me focus on the article and the article gets completed in the allotted time.

Image credit: Il pomodoro.jpg

BDlot DVD Clone Ultimate is an application for Windows that allows you to backup your DVD to hard drive or USB with original contents. It can unlock all known DVD copy protections including DVD Region, CSS, CPRM, CPPM, RC, RCE, APS, UOPs, SONY ARccOS, Rip-Guard, Disney X-DRM protection, etc. Thanks to the GPU accelerating technology, your time and energy spent copying DVDs can be reduced to a great extent. On top of that, you can clone an entire DVD to a blank one and burn a desired DVD from ISO image file, hard drive DVD folder, VOB or MPEG file. Easy work maintains original high video and audio quality!

The usage is simple. You just have to insert in your DVD, choose the option: Clone DVD to DVD, Clone DVD to ISO or Clone DVD to VIDEO_TS folder and click RUN. That’s it.

If you prefer more option, you can go to the “DVD Title Backup” tab and backup individual title.

Free Giveaway

Thanks to BDlot, we have a free giveaway for the DVD Clone Ultimate software. Here is what you need to do:

1. Go to BDlot DVD Clone Ultimate website and download the software.

2. Apply the license code: BU-UPUWUDGU-IHGBRP to activate the software.

3. Enjoy!

Note: This giveaway expires on 13th July. If you don’t activate the software by then, the license code will not work anymore.

Maybe you’re a budding author who wants to self publish. Or maybe you’re a software developer who wants to distribute documentation in a slightly different way. You could be a blogger who wants to collect a bunch of their best posts into an ebook.

There are several ways to do that. You could fire up your favorite word processor, start typing, and then create a PDF file. Or you could go straight to a format that just about every electronic device can handle. The easiest way to do that is to write an publish using Sigil

Sigil is an Open Source WYSIWYG ebook editor that produces ebooks in the popular epub format. You can read books in epub format using just about any dedicated ebook reader, on most smartphones and tablets, and even on desktop or laptop computers.

Let’s take a look at how to use Sigil to write and publish an ebook.

Installing the Software

Sigil can run on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. You can download installers for each operating system from Sigil project’s website. If you’re in the mood to embrace your inner geek, you can also download the source code.

Once you’ve downloaded the installer, just run it. Sigil installs on your computer, and adds an icon to your Start or application menu. For example, you can launch Sigil under Ubuntu by selecting Applications -> Sigil -> Sigil.

Time to Get Writing

Sigil is WYSIWYG, which means working in it is a lot like working in a word processor. To get going, just start typing.

The main difference between Sigil and a word processor is that you don’t get all that much formatting. You can add:

• Headings
• Bold, italics, underline, and strikethrough
• Bullets and numbers
• Images

You can also justify and indent text. All of that is literally a click away on the toolbar. To apply formatting, just highlight the text and click one of the buttons on the toolbar.

Chances are that you’ll have more than just a bit of text. And chances are that you’ll want to break that text up into chapters. To do that, click to the left of the heading that you want to make a chapter title and the select Insert -> Chapter Break.

You’ll notice that something interesting happens in the left portion of the Sigil window. The new chapter is added to the Book Browser.

The Book Browser lists the chapters in your ebook. Out of the box, the chapters are named Section000x.xhtml, where x is a number starting at 1. You can change the name of the chapters by right clicking on them, selecting Rename from the menu that appears, and then typing a new name for the chapter.

You can also click and drag chapters in the Book Browser to rearrange them.

Once you’re finished, save the book. You can open the epub file whenever you want to edit it.

What If I Already Have Content?

A book in epub format is essentially a collection of XHTML files. So if you have content that’s already written in HTML or XHTML format, you can copy and paste that content into Sigil. To do that, open the HTML file in a text editor and copy it. Then, in Sigil, select View -> Code View.

Paste your HTML code into editing window then select View -> Book View to return to WYSIWYG mode. You’ll probably have to add chapter breaks, which was explained a few paragraphs ago.

Viewing Your ebook

Once you’ve got a draft completed, you’ll probably want to see what the product looks like. Obviously, the best way to do that is to view the epub on as many ebook readers (and other devices) as you can. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible. The next best thing to do is use the Calibre ebook management software.

After downloading and installing Calibre, use it to open your epub file. Then, click View on the Calibre toolbar. In the viewer window that opens, you can navigate through your ebook, change the size of the fonts, and see any formatting problems.

Conclusion

If you need a quick and easy way to write and publish an ebook, then you should give Sigil a look. It can actually do a bit more than what was described in this article, and once you get the hang of the software you’ll be able to create some very nice looking ebooks.

Photo credit: super