plug-in

Apple on Monday released its software developer kit to let programmers write plug-ins for Aperture, the company's high-end image editing and cataloging software.

OK, I recognize it's not the world-changing, paradigm-shifting, heart-stopping iPhone SDK, but it's still important for the "creative professional" market to which Apple has catered for years.

This tool is designed to let others extend the abilities of Aperture, a move that adds some spice to its competition with Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom. Adobe has scads of third-party companies that create plug-ins for regular Photoshop, but Lightroom still lacks the equivalent for … Read more

This free, open-source word-processor strikes us as a worthy alternative to pricey, big-name products. AbiWord has a quick learning curve, since the interface is very similar to other word processors. You'll find just about all the features you need, including the ability to cut and paste, to highlight, as well a bevy of common formatting tools.

Although we did miss a grammar-checking utility, AbiWord can check your spelling in many languages--you'll need to choose the appropriate foreign language dictionaries during installation. A huge plus is the ability to open and save Microsoft Word documents, though the program also … Read more

Actor Will Smith--or rather, his entertainment company, Overbrook Entertainment--is one of the investors behind a $2 million funding round for PluggedIn Media, a new site for watching high-definition and broadcast-quality music videos online, PaidContent.org reported Tuesday evening.

PluggedIn (wonder how much they paid for that domain?) reportedly has about 10,000 music videos in its catalog, thanks to contracts with Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group, and Universal Music Group. The videos are accompanied by artist profiles and some community features.

The site is powered by Move Networks, the high-definition content delivery network that pulled in $46 million earlier this week … Read more

OStatic has a list of six "must-have" Firefox extensions today. "Six?" you say. "That's not many." That's what I thought at first, but five of them I had never heard of, and have already downloaded two of them to start using immediately.

Take a look. Good stuff. I particularly like the Reload Every extension, which should make it even easier for me to force a page refresh on those football (soccer) score pages, so that I have completely updated reminders of just how far Arsenal has fallen in such a short period … Read more

Here at CNET Download.com central, we love Tab Mix Plus. It's so close to perfect, but the one thing it lacks is a decent method for restoring lost multi-tab sessions. Crashes can often lead to important tabs being irrevocably lost. Lucky for us all there's the Session Manager plug-in, a stand-alone extension that, when used with Tab Mix Plus, bestows the power of resurrecting dead multi-tab sessions to all us hapless tab abusers.

The easiest way to run Session Manager with Tab Mix Plus is to disable TMP's session recovery. It can only save two sessions, … Read more

Power Downloader always keeps his eye out for little tweaks and tricks that make using his computer simpler, easier, or faster, and today he's got a Firefox plug-in that does all three. When uploading a file to the Web, it's always annoying to have to navigate your files through the Web site's "Browse" option before locating the correct file path. Dragdropupload, while possessing a name bereft of certain punctuation complexities such as spaces, delivers the easiest way Power's ever seen for adding files to those pesky text fields.

With the extension installed, you can … Read more

Duke Energy and smart grid company GridPoint said on Thursday that they have found a way for people to charge plug-in hybrid cars in a way that won't bring the power grid to its knees.

The companies said that they have completed a test using GridPoint's SmartGrid Platform device to charge up cars after 10 p.m.

The timing of when during the day plug-in hybrid cars are charged is crucial.

Oak Bridge National Laboratories earlier this month released a study that found that timing is everything when it comes to plug-in hybrids.

In the worst-case scenario, the … Read more

Vuze/Azureus is the first torrent client to launch a counter-attack against Internet service providers that have been dropping and forging data packets sent by end-users. This volley in what might become the torrent wars of 2008 is a plug-in for the Azureus torrent client called the Network Status Monitor.

Every 10 minutes, the plug-in detects the number of reset TCP connections from your computer. It shows the results to users and, if you've checked off the Share Results box, it sends the information to Vuze, which promises that although they might aggregate the data or disclose it publicly, … Read more

Plug-in hybrids get far better mileage than standard cars or regular hybrids--and emit far less pollution.

But they are also tough to justify economically at the moment with existing technology, according to the first several months of data from RechargeIT.org, which is studying how well plug-in hybrids work in real-world circumstances.

Plug-ins, in fact, only cut gas consumption by about 88 gallons a year over regular Priuses in urban driving. That comes to an annual savings of $158 to $250 (when you factor in the cost of electricity too). With the conversion running around $15,000, the payoff … Read more