processing

The Web's best desktop-app replacements

Microsoft Office has been and will continue to be the most popular productivity software in the world. That's not likely to change with the release of Office 2010.

But the fact is, much of the work we do in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office apps can be accomplished perfectly well using the basic features available in the Web-based equivalents to these and other desktop apps. Here's a quick look at three such services, all of which offer both free and paid versions. I'll also describe a bunch of specialty sites that can help smooth out your … Read more

EtherPad dies this week: Here are six great clones

At the end of this week, EtherPad shuts down for good, taking user creations with it. The online word processor, whose parent company was acquired by Google last year, has not accepted user sign-ups for months now. But just in case you're one of those users who has not moved on, or is just now discovering EtherPad's strengths, there's good news: the service has been open source for the past five months. As a result, there are a handful of open-sourced clones that provide the same EtherPad experience with a few extra bells and whistles.

One thing … Read more

Productivity confounder

Well, we thought we were testing DD Thought Tickler, but, after installing the program, we found what we'd gotten was Thought Retriever, which, according to the publisher, is "another application that's built on Dynamic Draw..." Wait, what's Dynamic Draw? For software designed to reduce confusion, not increase it, it was a bad start. Regardless of which program this is, it did nothing to organize our thoughts or increase our productivity.

The Thought Retriever interface features a gridlike panel with vague commands along the top, bottom, and sides. Not knowing where to start, we consulted the … Read more

Evernote doubles note size limits, adds versioning

Evernote has pushed out a useful update to its premium service that adds a few more reasons to spend the $5 a month (or $45 a year) fee. Premium users now get double the storage on the size of notes, which has jumped from 25MB to 50MB a pop.

More impressive though is that the service is finally getting versioning control. Versioning is something that's especially important in word processing. If you're working on a particularly large piece of work, you might very well cut out portions here and there that you wish to bring back later on. … Read more

Process Explorer updates advanced features

Stalwart freeware Windows utility Process Explorer adds several advanced features in its most recent update. Version 12 expands on the must-have set of tools that previous versions have provided, making the lightweight tool even more useful.

If you've ever tried tracking down a process in Windows Task Manager, even in the latest version that's shipped with Windows 7, you know it's like looking for brevity in a shaggy dog joke. Process Explorer, which started out as an independent program but has been maintained by Microsoft for years now, makes the job a lot easier. It displays running … Read more

Find the process you want, when you want

If you've ever tried tracking down a process in Windows Task Manager, you know it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Process Explorer makes the job a lot easier. This freeware utility displays running processes in an intuitive tree format that includes not only process names, but also program icons and other data, such as description, image, and processor time.

It also can identify the process for a given application window or look up a process name in Google--a handy way to spot spyware. The latest version, more than three years in the making, introduces several … Read more

Pictures, proper

Acumen Business Systems' Multiple Image Resizer .NET, or MIR .NET, is a free tool designed to help digital camera owners manage their saved pictures. It can resize single images or automatically resize whole folders full of huge digital snapshots at once. It's compatible with a wide range of image file formats and includes useful features, such as the ability to select image output resolution in dots per inch. Different methods of resizing images allow for different levels of image quality, which we like for the ability to resize a lot of different images to fit, say, a Web page, … Read more

Pages is easy on the iPad

Pages for iPad may not be as sophisticated as other desktop word processing apps, but it packs plenty of punch when you just want a way to produce nice looking documents on the go. After only a few minutes playing around with the controls, we were able to create documents with stylized text, imported images, tables, and graphs, and make formatting changes on the fly, all using the touch-screen keyboard. The program comes with several common templates to start from including standard letters, letters with photos, resume layouts, project reports, and many more. With Apple's keyboard dock connected, Pages … Read more

Obama faces major online privacy test

When Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency in 2008, he promised that as president, he would "strengthen privacy protections for the digital age."

That pledge will be put to the test as the Obama administration considers whether to support a new privacy proposal released by a coalition including Google, eBay, Microsoft, AT&T, the ACLU, and Americans for Tax Reform. CNET was the first to report on the proposal in an article published Monday.

The group, the Digital Due Process coalition, is calling for a federal law requiring police to obtain search warrants before tracking Americans' … Read more