Windows Software

Today, MXPlay--the digital-music player that focuses on customizing and enhancing your playback sound, while also letting you mash up streaming audio with Web videos (covered previously)--launched a Windows-only add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Called MXPlay Web, the Firefox add-on part is a simple orange MXPlay button that sits in your toolbar. Whenever you navigate to a Web page that includes MP3 files, the button transforms into a musical note. Click that note, and you can "play" that Web page in a pop-up music player.

After you select "Play this page," MXPlay Web will list all of the available MP3 songs on that Web page. You can then mark any of your favorites and save them to a personal playlist. Unfortunately, once you create that playlist, MXPlay Web somewhat randomly puts them into an order that you cannot change manually.

Just like the full app, MXPlay Web lets you customize the sound of the music using the same unique graphic interface. Drag and drop the head icon (the listener) and each of your available speakers to a specific location on the screen, which affects sound levels and direction. A blue circle in the upper left lets you control the size of your virtual room, and the bars in the upper right offer three levels of reverb.… Read more

Inspiration for a blog can come from anywhere--at any time--so you'd best be prepared. Lighter than your Wi-Fi-enabled laptop and more immediate than jotting journal notes is TypePad Mobile (for Symbian, Palm, and Windows Mobile,) a blog-updating app offered by TypePad for its paid subscribers.

I evaluated TypePad Mobile on a gleaming HTC Vox S710 (watch Bonnie Cha's video review) running Windows Mobile 6. The smart phone's nice slider QWERTY keyboard and motion-sensitive vertical-to-horizontal display made for favorable testing conditions.… Read more

I'm not sure how you people can watch movies and TV shows on those little screens, but you sure are doing it! Every time I turn around on the bus or in the airport, somebody is watching video on her iPod. (If she's supercool, she's watching it on her new iPhone.)

It's easy to buy videos designed to view on those little screens, of course, but if you want to get your own DVDs and Web movies onto your iPod or iPhone, you'll have to dive into the wide world of video converters.… Read more

If eBay's 50 percent growth this last fiscal quarter is any indication, online auctions are still a favorite way to shuffle goods and pocket extra change. Power sellers--those eBay auctioneers who sell and gross high volumes--have gained the edge by applying their business savvy and possibly using one of the many auction software options from CNET Download.com. One popular program is AlienFiles, a listings creator and editor that supports multimedia files and helps manage your sale items.

There's plenty here for power buyers, too. Check out eBay Auction Sniper and AutoSearch, for instance, which automatically bids on … Read more

I know that 90 percent of Mozilla Firefox (download it for Windows or Mac) users who read this post will think I'm nuts. I can hear you now: "I love my Firefox search engines! How will I search Amazon?!"

Well, I love my search engines, too, but that silly Search box in the Firefox toolbar simply takes up too much room for my liking, especially because you can use all of the functionality of your favorite search engines directly from the Firefox location bar (also called the "address bar" by people like me). I'll show you how.… Read more

Recently Power Downloader was working on a top-secret project, which required him to grab screenshots of Internet criminals off the Web. Some pages had individual shots of the criminal in question, while other sites showed multiple photos on a page. As he slogged through the Web pages, Power quickly began to realize that the method of pressing the Print Screen key to capture what's on the screen was pretty inefficient. Once you have the screenshot in the clipboard, you still have to paste it into another program, and then name it and save it. Power realized that, when you have a lot of images to deal with, using the Print Screen process can be downright frustrating.… Read more

Imagine a work space with three monitors standing side by side, each displaying a different work environment. E-mail and IM are pulled up on one monitor, Word processing is open on a second, and a spreadsheet graces the third. Now imagine the cursor flitting effortlessly between the screens, clicking, copying, and pasting from one to the other. One keyboard sits on the desk, and just one mouse.

This is no multimonitor setup; each screen here is controlled by its own computer. It isn't remote access software, either, since the controlling console is linked to the satellite computer. It's Multiplicity, and minus one rather large and glaring kink, it's pretty close to a multitasker's dreamware.… Read more

With summer here in the northern hemisphere, many people are packing their bags, grabbing their plane tickets, and hopping a flight for a well-deserved vacation. Once on the plane, most of us face cramped seats, crying babies, and maybe a couple of bags of peanuts (if we're lucky). Most of the time, the promise of the destination is enough for us to deal with a long flight, and if all else fails, there's always the sweeping view of the country from the window seat.

This week, I rediscovered (it's now in version 2.0) a great screensaver … Read more

Killer Download is a new feature on Download.com in which we'll present a new program each week. Most will be free, but some might be good enough that paying a low registration fee is well worth the cost. If you find you have a better option than the software featured, let us know in the comments!

What method do you use to get the news? For a long time, I used my Web browser and grabbed bookmarks when I found good news sites. But before long those bookmarks multiplied, making it difficult to find particular sites; I realized I had to find a way to organize them all. The most obvious method was to continue with a regular Internet browser and put similar sites into folders, calling them "News" and "Blogs" and "Software," or whatever category fit the bill. This method worked fairly well, but I never knew when any of the sites updated without actually going to the site and checking. Naturally, all sites don't update according to a schedule, so I quickly figured out that I needed to try something else.… Read more