typing

Think your clackety keyboard is loud enough? Think again! Funny Typing's fairly simple purpose is to make some noise each time you press a key. It's not bad looking, with a straightforward interface and a nice toolbar with large icons. It comes with several themes and the ability to easily download new ones from inside the program.

All the features are easy to find, and seem easy to understand, even without a Help file. You can use the predefined themes, alter them, or create your own. Response time between key press and sound was frequently lagging, and pressing … Read more

Between surfing for work and play, you may not realize how many types of files actually reside on your system. This free application will open your eyes as to the many file types you possess and help you manage them in a systematic fashion.

FileTypesMan loads a simply designed interface with two panes. The upper, larger pane lists all file extensions and types registered on your computer. For each file type, the following information is displayed: Type Name, Description, MIME Type, Perceived Type, Flags, Browser Flags, and more. The lower, smaller pane lists the files associated with the type you … Read more

Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.

There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it's rough going. Information isn't necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.

Google, which actually has a "data liberation team," announced the Blog Converters project to deal with … Read more

If you're not the type of person not to say 'no' to discounts, then Cellfire's mobile coupons application could potentially preserve your savings. The deals include local restaurants and retail services in the U.S., as well as national chains. Users can also save coupons for later use and participate in Cellfire's new program for cornering additional coupons by texting a keyword to 22888, Cellfire's short code. Unfortunately, Cellfire isn't always useful if your shopping habits don't mirror the offerings. Yet it's a broad enough service for us to lament that it hasn'… Read more

Installing an open-source enterprise application has never been easier. No hardware? No sophisticated IT department? No problem. At least, not if you use one of 38 JumpBox-enabled open-source applications, as it announced recently.

A rising number of companies offer virtualized instances of popular open-source applications, but JumpBox takes it a step further, deploying to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, almost completely obviating hardware and setup quandaries.

JumpBox offers small to midsize organizations a library of open-source applications packaged as pre-built, pre-configured virtual appliances through JumpBox Open, its annual subscription service. Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for 12 JumpBox … Read more

Six Apart's paid, hosted blogging service, TypePad, is getting improved community features. The first thing most users will notice is a new blog commenting system. It has both a cleaner display of comments (with icons for the comments, WordPress-style), as well as a simpler comment entry interface. Users can also reply to particular comments and the system supports one level of threading.

The updated comments service hooks into TypePad's new profile system. Commenters with TypePad IDs get a place that collects all the comments they leave on all TypePad comment-enabled blogs, and users can add feeds from … Read more

One of the first criticisms people had about the iPhone was that it was too hard to type effectively using the touch screen. It was all over the tech news sites and even here at CNET. Of course, as time went on and anyone who had the iPhone for a while figured out, you eventually got used it. Now, I can rattle off text messages and e-mails faster than I ever could using a regular mobile phone. But there are still some who find the keys on the touch screen too close together (or have large fingers) and no matter … Read more

Typing Genius, newly available through the App Store, is a new typing tutor for the iPhone that includes 50 randomized exercises in 17 categories. Key statistics are provided and tracked allowing users to see how they perform in normal mode, landscape, and without auto-correction. Tips regarding hidden shortcuts are also included.

The application's developer boasts "Most iPhone or iPod Touch users type at an average rate of 30-50 CPM (characters per minute). Typing Genius can assist you in reaching an average of 100-150CPM."

A number of other typing tutor applications for the iPhone exist, but none are … Read more

I remember learning how to type a long time ago with a fake keyboard sketched on a piece of paper. It was fun trying to imagine and remember all the keys' position, though I would never want to have to repeat that exercise. Good news is you don't have to, at least not the imagining part.

The color-blind need not apply, but KeyRight just recently introduced what is arguably the most colorful keyboard in the world. It's a part of the company's Look & Learn typing solution for those who want to quickly and accurately use a … Read more