There are plenty of Windows applications out there that will let you synchronize files across multiple folders. But there are a few things that set Allway Sync apart. First up, you can install Allway Sync on a flash drive to carry with you and use on multiple PCs. Second, Allway Sync is free for personal use and you're only required to pay for a license if you're a heavy user of if you feel like it. No one will ever make you pay, but the software is totally worth buying.
The latest version also adds support for synchronizing files with an FTP server or Amazon S3 storage. This makes Allway Sync a great little tool for backing up your files to offsite storage. The only problem is that there's no built-in scheduler. You have to initiate each sync job manually. If you're lazy and prefer automated backups, you might be better off with a utility like Jungle Disk. But the advantage of performing manual backups is that Allway Sync provides detailed information about each new, changed, or questionable file.
You've just downloaded that must have program only to realize that Windows has no idea what to do with it. After an hour of Google searching, forum posting, and being called n00b, you finally figure it out.
If only there was a guide that showed you how to get all those needed programs. We at Download Squad feel your pain and have put together a list of 10 free programs that will take care of those pesky "Windows cannot open this file" messages once and for all.
Note: See a blatant omission or oversight? Please add it to the comments. With your help, we hope to re-post a more complete list the future.
File Types: DivX, XviD, AVI, Mpeg 1-4, AC3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, FLV, OGG, VOB, and tons you've never heard of.
Description: Why there are 85,000,000 different audio and video types we have no idea. What we do know is trying to install codecs one at a time generally ends in a reformat.
Thankfully, the good people from K-Lite (Koors Lite?) have bundled all the software and codecs you need into one executable. Cheers!
Description: Before the days of Youtube, the Real Player and QuickTime were kings of Internet multimedia. Sure you had to deal with popups, reminders, updates, and bloatware, but that 1" video was so worth it.
Fortunately, the Real and Quicktime Alternatives removed the real in Real Player and restored the quick to QuickTime. Enjoy your 1" video!
One of the fundamental tools for developers is not just their development environment of choice, but also their version control system of choice. The debate over just which version control system is undoubtedly set to rage on for eternity, however one of the more popular systems is Subversion. On the Mac, up until now there's been a number of choices: Terminal (command-line) which is built into the OS and includes Subversion as part of OS X Leopard, svnX - another open-source graphical user interface, or using the built-in Subversion support in Apple's OS X development IDE Xcode.
For some of us here at Download Squad, a fear of the command-line, compounded with a little loathing of the svnX interface made the announcement of Versions.app - over a year ago - more than a little exciting. Promising an elegant and truly OS X interface to work with Subversion, it's taken a long time to come to fruition - however the betas to date do appear to deliver.
After having used Versions on a daily basis since its debut 2 weeks ago, it's certainly showing a great deal of promise - and makes version control far friendlier. As others have noted, the application not only makes working with existing repositories easy, but also has quick links to Subversion web-service Beanstalk, allowing you to easily create a new online repository and add it to Versions.
Pricing for Versions will be set 'when version 1.0 ships', and currently all (free-to-use) betas expire on July 1st.
With the announcement of the new iPhone, we figure there will be some new interest in this bit of software that's been around for a while: Do you have a computer without one of those newfangled infrared spots and a remote control? Do you still want to be able to change tracks on iTunes or pause a movie from across the room? As long as you have an iPod or an iPod Touch laying around, Signal is the app for you. Its interface is almost indistinguishable from the regular iTunes player on those devices, which makes it a breeze to use.
Here's how it works: download Signal and open it up, then input the IP address it gives you into your iPhone or iPod. Boom! You can access all your iTunes media from your device. Signal lets you change speakers, adjust volume, turn on shuffle or repeat, and pretty much anything else you could do from within iTunes.
There's a full demo, so you might want to try it out before you shell out 25 bones, but here are a couple of things to consider:. If you're going to buy a standard remote anyway (like the Apple Remote, for example), remember that Signal will work with your iPhone or iTouch from anywhere your network reaches, so you can use it to shoot around walls. Also consider that Signal has both Mac and Windows versions, where some other remotes only work with one platform.
If you're a devotee of Growl, the slick pop-up notification system for OS X, then you've probably got a wishlist of apps that need Growl support. Even some of the ubiquitous Apple apps like iCal and Address Book don't work well with Growl. No need to fret about that, though, just download OmniGrowl, and you can set Growl notifications for practically everything.
When we say practically everything, we mean OmniGrowl will give you Growl popups for traffic alerts, flight stats, weather, new RSS stories, daily deals on Woot, words of the day from the Oxford English Dictionary, and any potential leaks in your kitchen sink. Ok, we're just kidding about that last one, but OmniGrowl covers an impressive list of apps and functions. You don't have to go overboard, though: if you just want Growl for your iCal events and Address Book birthdays, OmniGrowl can handle that, too.
It has been a defacto standard for Web Browsers to be a free download for many years now. After all, who would want to pay for something that they can get for free so easily? Well, this is a question that Electrasoft must answer on a daily basis. A company that specializes in Web browsers, network utilities, and 90's era web design, they are among a dying breed for sure. We couldn't resist taking their shareware web browser for a spin, if nothing else for the sake of nostalgia.
The install program is a humble 300 kilobyte download, and installs in mere seconds. With another nod to old school internet culture, the installer is powered by the classic Winzip self extractor. Once installed, 32bit web browser delivers on its promises: it is indeed quite fast, and loads quickly. It seemed to render everything just as you would expect, and even supported flash out of the box. It's hard to say it it uses its own custom rendering engine or not, but it reports as Mozilla 1.6 to browser agent finding scripts.
While we can't see any use for this program in the mainstream, it might be a welcome addition to the many Pentium based Windows 98 machines that still hum away in some homes. It is fast, small code done right. It is available for $20 from the company's ordering page.
CaTraxx is a music management tool that aims to catalog all of your music, from digital media to CD's, cassettes, and vinyl.
CaTraxx will automatically scan your computer for any supported audio files and import them into its music database. Additionally, you can insert your CD's and CaTraxx will scan and download the audio tracks automatically. The program has a direct connection with the CDDB database; track and album information are instantly downloaded as you import your files.
CaTraxx also functions as a basic jukebox/media player, though iTunes and Windows Media Player would be better options if all you want to do is play your music.
So what good is CaTraxx? In our minds, it's beneficial to think of the program as a database rather than a music collection. So why do you need a database of your music? Well, for example, you might need a database for insurance purposes, in case your beloved vinyl collection is usurped by a thief (or vengeful ex). The database can also keep records of who borrowed pieces from your collection and when they borrowed it, so you never lose track of a CD.
CaTraxx is available as a fully functional trial; after that, it'll set you back $40. In our minds (can we say that twice in a post?), you'd have to be pretty obsessive of your collection to shell out that kind of dough.
How many of the applications you use on a daily basis are web-based as opposed to locally installed native applications? For me, the answer is way more than I ever would have expected.
Had you asked me this question a few years ago, I would have vehemently denied that the future of development is on the web. As much as I could see and understand the value of a ubiquitously available web-based application, there's just no way to approach the level of power and integration (not to mention the ability to be always-available) that is possible with well conceived and developed desktop software.
Of course, back then I didn't imagine that web applications could become as useful as Google Calendar or Remember the Milk. I also didn't imagine that light - yet still useful - versions of these apps would be available from my mobile phone almost wherever I was.
Most of these are probably pretty familiar names, but one is a newcomer in the web space: Evernote. Still in beta, the new version of Evernote contains a full-featured web version, but synchronizes seamlessly with desktop software on either Windows or Mac platforms. And it's a breath of fresh air.
Looking for a free application that will automatically save backups of your important documents which you can retrieve if something goes horribly wrong with your term paper, business report, or terribly important letter to your friend in Nigeria who has a proposition for you? DocShield will scan a folder for changed files at regular intervals and save copies to an archive. If you want to restore a previous version, just right click on the file in the DocShield interface and select View to get a list of earlier versions. You can open old copies of your document or save them as new files.
DocShield is a free Windows application. You can pay for a license, but the licensed version doesn't add any functionality, just a license number. In many ways, DocShield works just like FileHamster, a similar app we covered last year. But DocShield does a few things FileHamster won't, like backing up files to an FTP site. There's also a DocShield USB utility which lets you carry a portable version of your backups on a USB flash drive.
Stomp, billed as the ultimate video recompressor for the Mac, has just been upgraded to version 1.4.
Stomp is a wonderful piece of software for performing quick and painless video compression. There are a number of presets, such as iPhone, Apple TV, and YouTube, or Web for easy email-able videos (because we're all tired of receiving one gigabyte DV files of your baby's first steps). Stomp also includes video effects, cropping, and a set-and-forget batch processing mode.
Stomp 1.4 has a few choice new features:
New support for any QuickTime movie exporter, which means you can export your file as an MPEG-4, AVI, or WMV (if you have Flip4Mac installed).
The new version is a test release so the old cartographer's adage applies: here there be dragons. The demo will leave a nice, shiny watermark on any video you compress. Removing said watermark will cost you $29.95.
Wake Assist is a free utility (which runs as a daemon) that aims to fix a common problem that occurs on some Macs: the Mac is sleeping and when the user attempts to wake it, it rolls over and hits the snooze button. On our Macbook Pro for instance, we often open the lid after it has been sleeping only to receive a black screen and a still sleeping Mac.
The Wake Assist download comes with a .pkg for installing the daemon and an uninstall shell script should you choose to remove the utility. The daemon works by sending mouse clicks to the OS to show/hide the Apple menu when you attempt to wake the computer if it detects no user activity first.
Is your email inbox overflowing with thousands of messages, or is it virtually empty, with only the few messages that have come in since the last time you checked it? It seems like a simple personal preference, but the answer to the question of whether you are an email "filer" or "piler" says a lot more about you than you might think it does.
While nobody can see into your inbox, the fact is that if you simply leave everything there and let it get pushed down by new messages that are coming in, you're almost certainly not giving enough thought to the things that hit your inbox. For pilers, the only clue as to whether an email has been dealt with is whether it is marked as read or unread. But all too often we read emails when we are not currently in a position to do anything about them. Even if we're careful about going back and marking messages as unread, they still get pushed down, out of sight, out of mind.
Right now, many of you with overflowing inboxes are probably screaming at your screen. How can we be so bold as to assume that we know if you're on top of your email or not based on this simple criteria? And plus, just last week we were writing about the virtues of Gmail. Gmail! You know, the email client made by that internet search juggernaut, Google! Surely if you need to find an email, it's only a search away. So why bother filing things at all?
Okay, we hear you, and understand your position. But there's really no gentle way to say this, so we're just going to come out and say it.
You're wrong.
Okay, there, we've said it. Everyone take a deep breath! Now let's look at how we can take such a controversial position in complete and utter knowledge that we are right, with not even the remotest possibility that we could be wrong. Alright then.
SuperDuper!, the long loved Mac backup utility, has finally been updated for Mac OS X Leopard.
You might be wondering how SuperDuper! finds a niche even after Apple's own backup utility, Time Machine, has been integrated into every Mac with Leopard installed. The developers of SuperDuper! think of their relationship to Time Machine as complementary rather than competitive. Here's why:
SuperDuper! is for the disasters, the floods, the clicking hard drives, the machines that refuse to boot, whereas Time Machine's strength lies in the easy recovery of a single folder, file, or group of files. Time Machine can restore a full system, but that's not its bread and butter (and restoring from Time Machines requires you to have your Leopard DVD at hand).
SuperDuper! creates a bootable clone of your hard drive (which you can even place side-by-side with a Time Machine backup, if you have the space). Even if the original hard drive has been rendered unusable, you can boot from the clone and continue working. Tres cool.
The SuperDuper! 2.5 update is free for all registered users.
There are dozens of alternatives to Microsoft Word for people who need to create or edit text documents but don't feel like shelling out the cash for Microsoft Office. We're rather fond of AbiWord and OpenOffice Writer around here. Both are full-featured MS Word alternatives that are capable of opening and editing Word documents. And they both come in portable versions which can be installed to a USB flash drive for carrying from computer to computer if that's your cup of tea. Jarte is another portable word processor. Although you can install Jarte to a Windows PC, you can also download a zip file that contains all the files and settings you need to run Jarte on any computer using a flash drive. Jarte is based on Microsoft WordPad, but it includes a ton of features that you won't find in WordPad including advanced formatting options and a spell checker.
The program also has a rather unusual interface, including tabs for switching between multiple open documents. And while most word processor have a ton of toolbars atop the text field letting you change fonts, colors, or page formating, Jarte has just a few large buttons. You click on these buttons to find submenus with all of those other features, many of which you probably don't use very often. The concept is nice, as it saves a lot of screen real estate. But it's kind of annoying that it takes two or three clicks to perform some functions that take just one click on other word processors.
Jarte is available as a free download. But if you want some of the more advanced features like real-time spell checking, you'll have to cough up $19 for Jarte Plus.
Xslimmer is a program for the Mac that reduces the space claimed by Universal Binary applications and their language localizations on your hard disk. The programs remain fully functional, and you reclaim some coveted hard drive space. It's a win-win. Now you're beginning to see why we call this program "phat" (pun certainly intended and hopefully understood).
So how does Xslimmer work? By removing the variations of a program's code that does not apply to the architecture of your machine. When a Universal Binary application is created, it contains several versions of the code: a version intended to run on PowerPC machines (like G4 or G5 Macs), another one meant for the more recent Intel machines. This ensures universal platform support, but it bloats the application size. Xslimmer will remove the pieces of code that will never be run on your machine. Voila! More hard drive space, same programs.
It has been a defacto standard for Web Browsers to be a free download for many years now. After all, who would want to pay for something that they can get for free so easily? Well, this is a question that 
Wake Assist
