desk

Most of us live with some amount of cable clutter--it's a fact of contemporary life. There are numerous cable minders, and many desktop monitors have them built in. Still, it's nice to see an elegant solution, especially one that doubles as a tablet or smartphone stand.

Cable.Gone's shape and materials set it apart from other cable minders. It's a slanted, rubberized plastic tube with open ends and a couple of holes in the middle. Cables can run from one end to the other or from either end to the middle. Running cables through Cable.Gone is an easy way to consolidate cables, save desk space, and reduce visual clutter.

Cable.Gone's cross-section is hexagonal, with one side lower than the other so the top surface is slanted. The slant is useful for propping up tablets and smartphones at an angle that makes them easier to see and type on. The bottom surface has a slot that makes it easy to insert cables. The tube is made of a rigid plastic with a rubberized outer surface, which helps hold tablets and smartphones in place.… Read more

It's been a little over a year since Seagate Technology announced the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk, which offered up to 3TB of storage, and today, the company once again broke the storage barrier by introducing its first 4TB single-volume external hard drive, the 4TB GoFlex Desk.

Four terabytes of storage is equivalent to about 160 Blu-ray Discs' worth of storage space. When used to host compressed digital content, the new drive can store about 2,000 HD movies or millions of digital photos.

Other than the substantial increase in capacity, the new GoFlex Desk is very similar to the previous … Read more

When Autodesk's SketchBook Mobile application launched two years ago, it garnered more than 1 million downloads within the first two months, propelling the company into a completely new business.

So it's surprising that Chief Executive Carl Bass didn't know about the application--which lets you make an array of sketches with your finger--until a week before the launch.

"We definitely didn't have the attention of the company," said Christopher Cheung, project manager in charge of SketchBook. "It was a small isolated project."

SketchBook's success was partly born of the extreme hands-off approach … Read more

Microsoft has reportedly been at odds internally over how aggressively it should expand its retail stores.

Citing sources close to the company, Business Insider reported this week that CEO Steve Ballmer and Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner have both been pushing for more Microsoft retail stores in a drive to match or even exceed the 300 Apple stores doing business around the world.

But others in the company have apparently been crunching the numbers to argue against such a rapid expansion. To match the appeal of the Apple stores, Microsoft's stores have proven expensive to build. Plus, most of … Read more

This year's Toy Fair in New York City was a little lacking in big-ticket excitement, but there were a few surprises for office geeks such as myself. Nanodots are high-powered mini magnetic balls, perfect for whiling away fidgety minutes at a desk. They come in packs of 216, cost around $30-$40 a set, and are tremendously addictive (just keep them away from small children--they're quite dangerous if swallowed). The problem with them generally tends to be finding a place to put them. They roll, they damage sensitive electronics, and they're easy to misplace.

The $20 Nanopad is a mat woven with iron, heavy and dense like one of those aprons you wear for dental X-rays. Nanodots stick to it like glue, and won't slide around and glom on to each other. On one side is a printed chessboard, perfect for building your own chess/checker/made-up board game set, if your inner geek dares. … Read more

Download.com is jam-packed with to-do list programs, and most of them are more or less the same. To-Do DeskList surprised us by delivering a fresh, unusual design and just the right number of features. If you're in the market for an unobtrusive but flexible task manager, this just might be the one.

To-Do DeskList's interface is sleek and attractive. The program appears as an icon in the system tray, and when you're ready to create a new task, you simply right-click on the icon and select Add To-Do from the menu. The program lets you set … Read more

This is TankBot from DeskPets, a fairly inexpensive (sub-$20, they say), treaded, remote-controlled toy robot that you can control with an iPhone or an iPod Touch, or even an iPad.

While using iDevices as a remote is nothing new--indeed, Apple has an app simply called "Remote" for controlling the Apple TV--the TankBot is unique in that it doesn't use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi as an interface but rather a dongle that plugs into the headphone port of the iWhatever.

Once attached, an app is downloaded. The device then uses its built-in accelerometer as a steering mechanism, allowing … Read more

Windows Explorer lets you open a USB drive or DVD when you insert them, but to return to them later, you've got to reopen Explorer and click your way to the disk or device. Thanks to Desk Drive from Blue Onion, though, you can instantly open your flash drive, CD-ROM, DVD, or other external storage devices and media. It's a free tool that sits in your System Tray until you insert an external device. Desk Drive then places a quick-access icon on the desktop that links to the drive and hangs around until you eject it. Desk Drive … Read more

Most of us are used to simply minimizing Windows applications to the taskbar, which is an easy enough way to set aside applications we're not using but plan to come back to. With T3Desk, however, users can create 3D representations of minimized applications on their desktop. This makes it easy to see exactly what you have open at any one time and easily return to the desired window.

The program opens with a large dashboard containing a welcome message, options, Help, and FAQs. Along the bottom a quick navigation bar lets users quickly access a variety of search engines, … Read more