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If you mashed up Facebook and Outlook with some professional networking features, threw in a dash of scientific interaction (think Berkeley's BOINC) and pointed the business end at researchers, you'd probably end up with something very much like Mendeley Desktop, a Web-based interactive network for posting, editing, reviewing, and critiquing academic research. It indexes and organizes your research, papers, PDFs, and other tools into an easy-to-use interface, but its online features also make it easy to access work posted by other researchers as well as access scientific, medical, and technical databases and sites.

Mendeley Desktop requires a free … Read more

Back in September at the IFA electronics show, Panasonic showed off a prototype of a dual-lens, dual-sensor 3D compact camera. Apparently that wasn't so much a prototype as it was a preproduction model because as of today the Lumix DMC-3D1 is coming to market.

The full details and specs are available on Panasonic's global site, but the gist is that it has two, 25mm ultrawide-angle lenses (that seem way too close together) each with 4x zoom paired with two high-speed 12-megapixel MOS sensors that can capture 8-megapixel 3D images or 9-megapixel 2D images as well as 1080/60i … Read more

Microsoft's Word and its clones dominate the word-processing scene, but some alternatives are worth a look, especially when they take a different approach. Take FocusWriter, for instance. It encourages focus and productivity with a full-screen view and a pared-down interface and features such as autosave, goal-tracking, formatting, spell checker, and find-and-replace. FocusWriter Portable is a fully portable version of this versatile freeware. You can save it on a USB drive and run it on any compatible Windows PC.

FocusWriter opened with a plain gray screen displaying our cursor. Hovering over the top edge produced a menu bar, while at … Read more

Amazifier is an easy tool for jazzing up your digital pictures. It can resize images, correct red-eye, and add frames, stickers, text, and other effects, but its unique interface makes for a user-friendly experience. We tested the freeware version; a premium upgrade adds more features. If you're new to photo-editing tools or feel intimidated by Filters, Layers, and Gammas, Amazifier could be just what you're looking for.

Amazifier's interface is designed to be as attractive and easy to use as possible, and it largely achieves that goal. A left-hand panel accesses its self-descriptive tools: Stickers, Text & … Read more

For many of us, almost every aspect of our personal business is online now: banking, bill paying, insurance, personal correspondence, and much more. Strong passwords are a good idea, and Web sites are increasingly requiring that users create more complex passwords and change them more frequently. That's all well and good, until you can't remember the password yourself. Passport is an extremely simple program that can store all of your passwords securely. It's a great choice even for people who aren't particularly computer-savvy but who know the importance of computer security.

The program's interface is … Read more

We've reviewed innumerable screen-capture utilities, ranging from tiny bare-bones programs to those that are practically image editing suites unto themselves. Plixia definitely falls closer to the bare-bones end of the spectrum, offering the very basics in screen-capture features and not much else. There are plenty of other programs that can do much more, but if you only need the basics, Plixia is worth looking at.

When Plixia is running it appears as an icon in the system tray. Double-click on it and your screen will go slightly gray, letting you know that Plixia is active. Then simply select the … Read more

We have to admit that when we first laid eyes on Bubble Breaker, we weren't impressed. It was nothing but a small rectangle full of colored circles arranged in a grid, and clicking on them in groups of two or more of the same color made them disappear. This didn't seem particularly fun or exciting at first, but once we played a few rounds and figured out exactly how the game worked, we couldn't tear ourselves away.

The object of the game is to attain a high score by popping bubbles, but this isn't obvious in … Read more

In nature, light ranges from blinding intensity to the faintest flicker. In photography and digital imagery, that range of intensity is difficult to capture. HDRI stands for High Dynamic Range Imaging, a technology that increases the dynamic range of luminance in digital images, allowing for a more realistic representation of actual light levels. HDRpad is a free HDRI tool. It blends digital images with different exposures into a single new image with HDRI properties. You can also use HDRpad to correct underexposed images. It's largely automatic in operation, though it offers custom settings, too.

HDRpad's interface is fairly … Read more

Abbreviations have become a pretty common part of online communication, but so-called Netspeak is not without its detractors; linguistic purists insist that it's an affront to the English language. If you want the economy of keystrokes provided by abbreviations without sacrificing proper word use, try InstantType. This simple utility will automatically paste the full text of whatever abbreviations you type, allowing you to save time and still sound literate.

There's not much to InstantType, really; when it's running it appears as an icon in the system tray, and right-clicking on it brings up a Settings menu. Here, … Read more