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Photology is a truly unique photo searching app that let’s you sort effortlessly through all of your photos in a most unconventional manner. For example, you can search for pictures by how blurry they are, what lighting conditions they are in, what type of object(s) they contain (flowers, people, water snow, etc.), text, date, groups, or a combination of any of the previous. Photology also allows me to categorize photos into groups, delete photos, and edit my photos with the nifty photo editor to make quick adjustments (rotation, color adjustment, red eye reduction, cropping).

In my testing of Photology, I found this original app to be snappy and quick when searching—surprising given that it was searching thousands of photos and looking for various features (content, color, brightness, etc. as defined in my search filters). Although it took awhile (10 minutes) initially to index all 10,000 of my photos, I could immediately begin to search, rearrange, group, and edit my photos during the indexing process.

All in all, Photology is a great app that makes searching your entire photo collection a quick and simple affair, while providing powerful although a bit unorthodox search filters through an easy to use and simplistic interface.

[Photology] Overview and Download

TINKER WITH THE ONLINE DEMO TO GET A FEEL OF PHOTOLOGY

What do you think? What other tools have you used before to search your photos? Tell the world in the comments!

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Shape Collage is a free but powerful photo collage maker that works anywhere Java does (that is, it works with Windows, Mac, and Linux computers). In my testings, Shape Collage proved to be an efficient collage maker that produces beautiful collages made from the pictures that I selected.

Playing around and creating collages with Shape Collage is absolutely fun!

Here’s some of Shape Collage’s features that I really enjoy:

1. The ability to type text and turn your pictures into a collage:
   
2. The ability to draw any shape you like and turn it into a photo collage:
   
3. The simple and clean interface that makes creating a collage just the way you want it as simple as a few mouse clicks.

So what are you waiting for? Jump in!

[Shape Collage] Overview and Download

So what do you think? How is this useful to use? What other tools have you used? Tell the world in the comments!

Did You Know?, Download of the Day, POWER USER, Windows Customization Download of the Day, Multimedia, POWER USER

PocketXpdf is a free, open source and lightweight PDF reader for those of you who own a Windows Mobile device. Although this cool app has only been tested on Windows Mobile 2003 and 2005, I am sure that it can probably run on later or older versions. In my testing, PocketXpdf rendered complex graphics, etc. flawlessly on a Windows Mobile 2005 device. It has the basic functions that you would expect from any PDF reader—the ability to zoom in and out, flip through pages, and even adds a feature that Adobe Reader doesn’t include—the ability to save bookmarks! The only limitations of this terrific program is not really of the program itself but of the physical limitations of the device itself—small screen size, limited memory capacity, etc.

To help with viewing PDF documents as well as for helping to cut the potential memory/resource overhead, PocketXpdf includes a handy feature that allows users to show only the text from a PDF document and be able to just read the text. This is a killer feature! With it, I was able to read many things that would otherwise have been difficult.

[PocketXpdf] overview and download

So what do you think? How is this program useful to you? How is it not? Are there any other programs like this that you know of? Tell the world in the comments!

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Download of the Day Download of the Day, PDF, POWER USER, Windows Mobile

Have you ever found yourself checking out a ton of books from your local library (or libraries)? Or, worse, not keeping track of those elusive slips of paper that have the due dates written on them? If you fall into this boat, Library Elf is for you. In short, Library Elf  links all of your library accounts and aggregates the them, notifying you via email which books are about to be due, when they are due, and so forth.

Library Elf comes in two forms: one as a paid plan, and the other as a premium plan. For most people such as myself, the free plan is good enough. The free plan will send you emails at intervals before library material(s) are due. You can also view your “daily snapshot” which shows you a really nice calendar that has warning and notices stuck to it telling you when something is due (and what it is).
As for the “premium service”, well, that just adds a few bells and whistles that most of us will seriously never need, unless we have a zillion library accounts .

I hope you find this service to be as useful to you as it was to me!

[Library Elf] sign up required

So what do you think? How is this service helpful or unhelpful to you? What other services have you used in the past? Let us know what you think in the comments!

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POWER USER, Website of the Day Management, POWER USER, Website of the Day

Have you ever checked your GMail email account at a library or other public location on a public computer and left without logging off? If so, anyone who uses that computer will be able to view, reply, and otherwise vandalize your email—not a good thing.

However, not all is lost. Here’s a few simple steps that you can follow to ensure that no one can access your GMail account if you forgot to log off:

1. Got to the GMail home screen.
2. Below all of your email messages (the footer), you should see some text that reads something like this:
3. Now click on the Details link.

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How To, POWER USER, Tips and Tricks How To, POWER USER, Tips and Tricks

Have you ever wished you could just access someone’s computer when they need help with something, instead of going through all the “I don’t have a window like that!” or “There isn’t an option like that!” rituals. With AMMY Admin, all your tech support woes are over.

So what is AMMY Admin anyway? To be brief, AMMY is a free, standalone program that allows you to take control of anybody’s computer as long as that person has internet access. When you “take over” someone’s computer, you can virtually access the keyboard, screen, mouse, and everything else of the computer you’re remotely using. The bottom line: You can control another person’s computer just as if it were your own.

AMMY Admin is a free, 144KB standalone executable program that runs wherever Windows does.

Note: Don’t download the AMMY Router.exe file. This is only for advanced users and you won’t need it for any practical purposes.

[AMMY Admin] overview and download

So what do you think? How do you like or dislike this program? What other programs have you used in the past? Share your thoughts with us in the comments!

Download of the Day, POWER USER Download of the Day, POWER USER

Have you ever wanted to add comments, annotations, stamps, diagrams, text, and more right into a PDF document without having to buy the expensive Adobe Acrobat PDF suite? Here commeth PDF-XChange PDF Editor, which is a great, lightweight but speedy PDF viewer as well. In my thorough testing of PDF-XChange, I found the product to offer a cluster of features that other free editors out there just cannot match. PDF-XChange simply has the most features, the best performance, and, very importantly to me at least, no nag screens.

Oh, and did I mention that PDF-XChange is also portable? That means that you can download the ~10MB folder and run it right from your computer, Jump Drive or other portable medium without having to fret about installation. This is one sweet app!

So now is time for my complete review of this excellent free product, complete with screenshots, sample PDF files, etc. I’ll start out with the PROS:

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Download of the Day, POWER USER Download of the Day, PDF, Portable, POWER USER

The Windows Clipboard is a very handy tool that we all probably use every day. (If you are not familiar with the Windows Clipboard, think of it this way: whenever you “copy” or “cut” a picture/text from somewhere, it gets dumped into the Window Clipboard.) Unfortunately, the Windows Clipboard can only hold one copy or cut action, and it gets overwritten every time you turn off your computer or copy something else. This can be extremely frustrating! if you have copied tons of stuff from a document or webpage and want to paste it into your document, for example, you will have to manually copy and paste, copy and paste, over and over again, because the Windows Buffer can only hold one copy/cut action at a time.

So, that is where ClipX comes in. ClipX is a free,lightweight (108 KB), and configurable Clipboard manager for Windows that does exactly what it says it does—it keeps track of everything you copy or cut and stores it in its history for you to easily retrieve at the stroke of a configurable hotkey (Ctrl+Shift+V by default). So with ClipX, if you want to paste something you just know you cut/copied from somewhere, just hit the keystroke and a dropdown menu will appear with all the things you just cut/copied (this too is configurable).

[ClipX] Overview and Download

So what do you think? Has ClipX proven to be useful to you? What other programs do you use? Share your thoughts with us in the comments!

Below are some screenshots of ClipX in action:

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Download of the Day, POWER USER Download, POWER USER, Program

Free, no install Windows application PowerMenu adds no-nonsense options to your Windows right click menu. The handy dandy features that PowerMenu includes are pretty self explanatory and the screenshot to your right pretty much states them all: It adds changeable CPU priorities of the current window, alteration of the transparency of the current window, always on top feature, and minimize to the system tray feature. Must I say more?

The features that  I use the most in PowerMenu is the Always on top feature and the minimize to tray feature. The Always-on-top feature is perfect for when I am following a tutorial and have 2+ windows open at the same time. Before I used PowerMenu, I had to keep swapping from the two windows constantly, but now that i use the Always-on-top feature, that is no longer a problem. The minimize to tray button is great for when I have a crowded Taskbar and want to save some room. Although virtual desktops can be handy here, I find a quick Minimize it to the tray feature quicker and more nifty.

UPDATE: Here’s how to hide PowerMenu’s system tray icon and start PowerMenu when Windows starts:

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Download of the Day, POWER USER, Windows Customization Download of the Day, POWER USER, Windows Customization

Have you ever had a whole bunch of URL’s that you want to open up all at once?

If so, website Linkrr will automate all those irksome copy and pastes into your navigation bar.

For example, if I want to open:

• http://swttfam3.hostrator.com
• http://nlego.hostrator.com
• http://microsoft.com
• http://titus-tech-blog.blogspot.com
• http://gmail.com
• http://picassa.google.com

…all at once or selectively, all I would have to do is:

1. Copy all the links at once
2. Head on over to Linkrr.
3. Paste the whole mess into the text box provided: 
4. Click the Make Clickable! button.
5. Click “Open Checked Links!!”
6. You’re done! (You can use the advanced features as depicted above, however)

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POWER USER, Website of the Day POWER USER, Website of the Day