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Today’s technological scenario is all about integration and making every task simpler and every information easily accessible. Well, similar are the thoughts of UXLabs at Microsoft. They have created a very sleek Facebook client application that brings the complete Facebook experience right on your Windows desktop – Fishbowl.

Although in a ‘trial’ (beta) stage, Fishbowl offers some features that surely will excite Facebook power users. Apart from the seamless integration with Facebook, here are some of the plus points of Fishbowl:

» Fishbowl offers mini-mode which is more fun and less obtrusive.

» Smooth user interface and sleek navigation. It supports drag n’ drop pictures to publish them on Facebook. Furthermore, it can go full screen and play a slideshow of your albums.

» You can update your status, view your friends’ albums, their updates, news-feeds and other notifications.

» “Interest Level”, my favorite feature, helps you filter your stream anonymously in order to avoid boring updates from friends.

» If you are a Windows 7 user, you can monitor your Facebook stream right from your taskbar using jumplists.

If you want to give it a try then click the link below.

Download Fishbowl / 6.6mb

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In PDC ‘09, Microsoft unveiled a prototype called Pivot, created by Microsoft Live Labs that claims to revolutionize the way we search the web by introducing a new dimension called ‘visual search’. Redmond company explains that Pivot lets users experience the web in a more subtle and ‘visual’ way, instead of series of pages.

Powerful, informative and fun – this is what Pivot is, in it’s classical sense. The introductory paragraph of the official Pivot website reads, “We tried to step back and design an interaction model that accommodates the complexity and scale of information rather than the traditional structure of the Web.”

Currently available to a handful of people, you can request for an invite in order to use Pivot. I was lucky enough to get an invite. Upon installation, I was represented with, what seemed like, a homepage:

Pivot can be used in two ways:

» As a regular browser to surf the web

» As a visual search tool to browse collections.

When used as a regular browser, Pivot is just a clone of Internet Explorer, only a bit less customizable. When it comes to rendering pages, it uses the same Trident layout engine used in IE.

The beauty of Pivot is in its ability to browse specially created collections which are infact massive information clusters. As of now, the Live Labs have offered sample Pivot collections to mingle with. Ofcourse users can create their own collections and share it with others. However, understanding the basic architecture and the three types of collections is a bit too nerdy. That is why, Microsoft has challenged developers to create custom collections based on existing web services.

Minimum requirements:

» Windows 7 / Windows Vista with ‘Aero’ enabled. (Pivot is not compatible with Windows XP and Windows Server Editions as of now.)

» Internet Explorer 8.

» .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

» 2-GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor.

» At least 256 MB of video memory.

Note: Pivot does not support Intel integrated video chipsets without additional acceleration hardware.

The road ahead...

Considering the strong foundation on which Pivot is built, one can expect it to be helpful in these scenarios:

» Create collections from data in existing online services.

» Use collections as a front end to desktop search.

» Display data sets from academical studies.

» To visualize stock market data.

» Using Pivot for personal photo galleries, or social networks.

Finally, here is a demonstration video of Microsoft Pivot in action.

Demo video:

Download Pivot / 28mb

Note: You are required to enter an installation code without which Pivot won’t install. You can either wait for your installation code or get one from me. I have 2 codes which are good for 19 more installations. Just leave a comment with your e-mail address and I shall give it to you.

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I have seen many of my friends who recently switched to Windows 7 but have all the nostalgia and love for the aging Windows XP. They are not wrong. Windows XP did rule for quite a long time and I see no reason for someone not to get used to it. One of the many things people still crave for is the Classic Start Menu from the Windows 2000 and XP era. It was a minimalism norm back then. Even Windows Vista has it but Windows 7 doesn’t. So if you are the one using Windows 7 and missing those fly outs of the classic start menu then you might want to check out CSMenu.

CSMenu is a light weight application built specially for Windows 7 that acts like the classic start menu. It does nothing fancy. Just brings back the pure classiness which is favored by millions.

While CSMenu is a freeware, there’s an advanced version too – The Classic Menu with Aero, a shareware. This version give a little eye candy by making the fly-outs transparent.

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Instead of exploring new things all the time, sometimes I dig into what I have already got and I always come up with something new. Very few of us might know that Microsoft also offers lots of free games to its users. ‘The Games’ section in Windows Vista and Windows 7 is often listed in the feature lists but rarely anyone plays the games offered. And if you have checked the link in the ‘Game providers’ subsection lately, then you will find that Microsoft now offers 100+ free games to its users. So if you think you’ve had enough of solitaire and minesweeper, I’d say you do the following:

Click Start > Games. In the ‘Game Providers’ subsection, click ‘More Games from Microsoft’.

Alternatively, you can click here: Microsoft "Play Your Game"

And guess what, that’s it. Just click “Play Now” button to play your favorite games. You can also download trial versions of these games. Enjoy!

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Microsoft SyncToy needs no introduction. It is an excellent freeware utility that syncs files and folders and is mostly used for sharing multimedia and documents across computers and also used for backing up important data.

Microsoft has released its updated version, SyncToy 2.1, with some new features and improvements to meet the Windows 7 standards. The new SyncToy 2.1 has native 64bit support and is available for both (x86 and x64) architectures.

SyncToy 2.1’s help section enlists these new features:

» New Platform: SyncToy 2.1 uses the latest synchronization engine from Microsoft Sync Framework 2.0.

» Better Performance: File copy speed is significantly increased.

» Exclusion Filtering Based on Name: File exclusion based on name with exact or fuzzy matching.

» Improved Robustness: Instead of failing the whole synchronization session on an unknown single file error (including network issues), SyncToy 2.1 flags the error and continues with the remaining files.

Download Microsoft SyncToy 2.1 / 3.5mb

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Blogging is amazing when it is unrestricted and hassle-free. And to make blogging a smooth experience, there are many desktop blog-publishing applications available but most of them are ‘typical’ softwares that you need to install. Some might require you to download a suite in order to get a simple blog-publishing application. Here is something for those who love blogging on Blogger and hate installing a blog-publishing software – Blogger Buddy.

Blogger Buddy is a Windows Vista/Windows 7 Gadget that lets you create new posts and publish them to your Blogger blog. It also lets you preview the content before you publish.

Although a mere 120kb download, this small utility has full fledged text editor where you’ll find everything you need.

Features of Blogger Buddy:

» Unlike a typical blog publishing software, Blogger Buddy is a Windows Vista/Windows 7 Gadget.

» Just 120KB download size and low on resources.

» Rich text editor.

» Post previews are available before publishing to Blogger blog.

So, if you are a Blogger user out there, I would recommend you to use thisgadget for posting to your blog just because it is too hassle-free and has a footprint of an ant.

Download Blogger Buddy / 120kb

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There are many services out there on the web which are just ‘a violet by a mossy stone’. Hidden from the world, yet very useful. Google Pack is one such service where you can download software in, well you guessed it, packs. Though currently in beta, things are pretty neat.

What’s Google Pack?

It is a bunch of very useful software (especially for Windows 7 users) that includes a salad mixture of utilities like – Google Chrome browser, Firefox, Google Earth, Spyware Doctor, Picasa, Skype, Adobe Reader, Google Desktop, Google Talk, Google Apps like Calendar, Docs etc and Real Player – All packed in one suite called Google Pack.

So if you are too lazy to download all these utilities one by one, here is a blessing for you. Just head over to pack.google.com and select the programs you wish to download and click ‘Download now’.

Features of Google Pack:

As Google states it: Google pack is a bunch of free and ready-to-use software selected by Google. Adding to that, it saves time to download software from a one stop shop. Almost all software provided in the Google Pack are must-have for a Windows 7 user.

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I haven’t used offline mail clients to an extent that I could actually write a post about them. I never felt the need to have one because I am always connected to the internet and Gmail does the best job for me. Such was a scenario until yesterday when I had to use Outlook. While using it I felt the need to sync my Gmail contacts with Outlook and one of my friend suggested a really helpful piece of software that does this precise job – Go Contact Sync.

Go Contact Sync is a perfect synchronization tool to manage contacts between Gmail and Outlook. It’s a free, open-source tool that supports contact categories and their photos so that your address-book (contacts) look exactly the same on both. Finally I can get rid of entering the contact details again and again.

Features:

» Smooth synching of contacts between Gmail and Outlook.

» Multiple sync options, categories and contact photos are supported.

» Automatic synchronization feature.

» Choose one-way or two-way sync according to your preference.

You can also use Go Contact Sync to backup your contacts too.

Download Go Contact Sync / 1.1MB

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Want to make your wired connection a wireless one but don’t have a wireless router? Wish to share your wired internet connection when your friends come over with their laptops? Well, how about turning your own laptop into a WiFi Hotspot to which other laptop computers can connect to and share the internet connection? ‘Connectify’ does the precise job of transforming your laptop to a secure WiFi hotspot.

The setup is simpler than you think. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Connectify website and download the installer. It’s a painless 1.4 MB download.
2. Install the software and click its icon in the notification area.
   
   
3. Everything is pretty intuitive. Give ‘WiFi Name’ which will be the SSID of the wireless network and the ‘Passphrase’ for security. Choose the internet connection and click the red ‘Hotspot Off’ button. The devices that connect to your laptop are shown in the box above.

Once done, your laptop will now act as a red hot WiFi Hotspot! Let other WiFi enabled devices to connect with internet using your laptop computer as a WiFi hotspot.

Features of Connectify:

» Easy to setup a WiFi Hotspot within seconds.

» Secured WiFi connectivity.

» Eliminates the need of a wireless router for internet sharing if you have a WiFi enabled laptop.

» It is a software based wireless router that takes any type of internet connection (wired or wireless) and lets you share it wirelessly.

» Runs on Windows 7 32bit (x86) as well as 64bit (x64).

Connectify website explicitly states that the Beta version of Connectify is built for Windows 7. However, if you find any problems with Connectify in Windows Vista or Windows XP, mention it in the comments.

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I am sure this will excite the hell out of you especially if you are a beginner and have just started a blog or a website. There are a lot of statistical analysis tools for websites available out there that does pretty much the same job so I am not going to discuss the charts here. I want to show you how you can get ‘real-time’ notification when somebody views your blog or website right on your desktop. Something like this:

To set it up, you’ll need ‘Woopra’ client (available for Windows, Linux and Mac). Here is the step-by-step procedure involved.

1) Go to Woopra.com and signup for free. Provide required information about your website/blog on the site.

2) Download Woopra client and login using your credentials. The details of the website you submitted at the site will get displayed within the application itself.

You will find charts and figures which might very well interest you but here we’ll just discuss how to setup real time notification when somebody visits your website. So once you are done looking at the charts, proceed along.

3) In the left pane, click ‘Notifications’ option.

4) In the right pane, click ‘Create a new Event Notification’ button.

5) In the window that appears, first enter an appropriate label to the notification you are about to create. Click ‘Next’.

Note: You will find loads of options you can set a notification for. As far as this tutorial goes, we won’t be needing them.

6) Click ‘Next’ a couple of times till you get the ‘Edit Notification’s look and feel’ option as shown below.

7) Here, set ‘Country Flag’ as the Notification’s Icon and write a ‘custom notification message’ below. Use ‘Tags’ for extra information like page URL, page title, etc. in the notification.

8) Finally, click ‘Apply Notification’ and wait for someone to visit your site. When your website is viewed, you will get a notification like this:

Once you click the notification you will be able to see the stats of visitor and based upon such information, you can know which part of the information or which posts interests your audience. The best part is, you get all the information real-time.

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Now come on face it. You love torrents. You love to download all legally distributable¹ ‘videos’ and music files from torrents. But many a times you can’t control your anxiety and want to grab a sneak-peek preview of what’s getting downloaded. Ya, I do it too and it’s always fun.

However, you know that you are not lucky always. The problem is, even though it seems that the video or a music file have downloaded fairly well, the first piece or the 0th piece is yet to be downloaded. In that case, even if your torrent client has downloaded the rest of the file, it can’t be previewed in your media players because the header of the file (the first piece) is missing. So how to go about it? Well as they say, first thing’s first. Let’s see how you can download the first piece first so that you can preview the file while it’s still being downloaded. We will use ‘uTorrent’ for that matter. Download uTorrent.

1) Open uTorrent and click ‘Options’ > ‘Preferences’.

2) In the window that appears, click ‘Advanced’ in the right pane and search for ‘bt.prio_first_last_piece’.

3) Change its value to ‘true’ either by double-clicking it or by selecting the ‘True’ radio button. Click OK.

Behold, you have cast the spell! Now onwards, uTorrent will try to first fetch the first and the last pieces. However, do keep in mind that, this works optimally only when the torrent has good amount of seeders.

¹TechExplorer.in insists you to use torrents for sharing general public licensed media or media that you own. Discussing piracy is strictly against our terms and conditions. 

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I love music. I love by 20GB+ of music library. And I love it more when they are properly organized in an orderly fashion. That’s why I always double check ID3 tags for proper Artist, Album and Year information before adding any new mp3 song file to my library. Nowadays the music players have become so flexible that they can organize your music collection based on ID3 tags and presents you automated playlists based upon them. But for this, you need to have a music collection that has superbly well-organized ID3 tags.

While on one hand you can easily set Artist, Album, Year and Contributing Artists tags through the mp3 file properties, very few might know that you can add more information about Lyricist, Copyright, Mix artist, Recording company, Composer, Publisher, Album art and even full Lyrics into the mp3 file itself. All these information can be added to the mp3 file. All you need is a good ID3 tagging software and I think MP3Tag is the best out there. Download it and get ready to optimize your music library by adding extended ID3 tags:

1) Open MP3Tag and drag n’ drop some mp3 files into it. Select mp3 file(s), ‘Right click’ > ‘Extended tags…’

2) In the window that appears, you can edit the existing extended tags or make your own.

3) Press the ‘Add Field…’ button as shown above and the ‘Edit tag info’ window will appear. Use the drop down to select the desired field you want to set. Enter its value in the ‘Value’ field below. Press ‘OK’. Likewise you can set many such extended tags which are inaccessible otherwise.

4) Some of the important extended tags you would want to set are: Composer, Lyricist, Lyrics, Copyright and Website information.

Download MP3Tag

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