Picaboo allows you to create a complete photo album – with page flipping features, to give you that real and physical feel of viewing your photos. It also comes with images editing features and the ability to share your photo albums with your friends and families.

Let’s see how we can create an album with Picaboo.

Creating a photo album with Picaboo.

1. Download and install Picaboo.

2. On the first run, Picaboo will prompt you to sign up for a free account.

3. Once that is done, click on “Create Book” option button to create a new photo album.

4. Select the suitable theme for your photos. There are some beautiful themes included in the package: baby, birthday, bold and beautiful, catalog, collage, cook book, portfolio, holiday, wedding, travel and year book. In this example, we will use the “collage” theme. If none of the default themes caught your eyes, you can also find and download more themes online.

5. Browse and locate the folder containing the photos, then select the necessary photos for adding to photo album and click next to proceed with editing.

6. Picaboo will prompt on how to create the photo book. You can select “Auto Create album” or build the album page by page from “scratch”. In this tutorial I have used “Auto Create” to illustrate. You can also use the story telling option to explain each and every page with description about the photos.

7. Picaboo allows you to edit your album, like changing the background of the page, add corner style, photo tool to adjust positions and including the soundtrack in photo album. The editing tools are illustrated in the below screen shot.

8. At any point of time, you can scroll to any page of the album and make the necessary changes to that page.

9. Once you have finished compiling the album, you can click on the “Share” button on the menu bar to share the album with your friends.

Conclusion

Picaboo is friendly to use and offers wide range of themes which fills many occasions of our life. Apart from creating photo album, you can also create photo cards which can be used creatively as “birthday party invitation”. You can print the photos in the album to your local printer or place an order of photo to Picaboo (at a fee).

Have you tried Picaboo?  Share your experience with us in the comments.

Speedtile is a powerful web bookmarking site that allows you to organize your bookmarks with tile preview and sort them in different categories. It also comes with many other features such as bookmarks sharing and screenshots preview of bookmarked sites.

1. Easily bookmark with rich tile preview option

When you bookmark a site on Speedtile, it will immediately make a screenshot of the site and display it as an awesome glossy look tile. When you mouse over the tile, it will show a Vista-like glow which make it very intuitive to navigate around your pool of bookmarks. It also comes with an intelligent bookmarking solution that prevent you from bookmarking the same sites twice.

2. Share your favorite bookmarks with others

Each tile comes with a tool icon that allows you to share your bookmark. Shared bookmarks will have a ribbon added to the tile and the URL will be shown on a public site. Not all the bookmarks are shared by default. You have to manually select the tile that you want to share.

3. Get the screen shot of all the bookmarked sites

This the most interesting feature, speedtile actually takes a screen shot of a website and places it in the tile. The screenshot can also be viewed separately or be saved as an image. On the top right corner of the tile, click on the “zoom icon” to view the screen shot of the webpage.

4. Manage Bookmarks easily by organizing into categories

Speedtile allows you to create categories and sort your bookmarks to their respective category. You can move a bookmark from one category to another just by using “drag and drop” option.

5. Instantly bookmark with Firefox plug-in

Speedtile provides a handy Firefox plug-in for easy bookmarking in Firefox. Install the plug-in. Right click on the browser and select the option “Bookmark with speedtile “ whenever you wish to bookmark a site.

6. View tiles by order to locate bookmark

If you have plenty of bookmarks in a single category, you can easily sort the bookmarks with the “order by” option. Sorting options include last modification, most visited, sort by date and alphabetical order.

Conclusion

Considering that Speedtile is free to use and is available as an extension to Firefox, it could provide that alternative method to manage your bookmarks in style. What’s I find still missing in speedtile is the ability to import and export your bookmarks, which I believe the developers will include in the future.

If you have used Speedtile, share your experience with us in the comments.

Zoho chat currently supports Gtalk, Yahoo, AIM, Windows Live, ICQ and Jabber. Once you sign in to Zoho chat, you can easily add the corresponding IM accounts which you like to use and sign in to the respective IMs. There is also a setting for you to change your background picture according to your mood.

Features of Zoho chat

1. Chat with multiple logins of same client

Zoho chat allows you to login with two accounts of  a same IM client at the  same time, i.e. login to two Yahoo accounts or two Gmail account at the same time. To enable this option simply go to Chat Preferences, add the same IM client twice (or more) with different login credential.

2. Add live support and chat to your web page

Now, if you are selling a product or providing a services, you can add Zoho chat to your web page and have it acts as a live support for your customer. Once you have configured the widget, including the color and theme to suit your website design, just copy the javascript to the respective web page and your live support will be up in minutes.

3. Change background images to reflect your mood

Unlike other web app, you are not restricted to the same background in Zoho chat. You can pick a background picture from Zoho account or upload images or use your Flickr image. You can also make Zoho change the background picture on every login.

Conclusion

Zoho chat is a great online tool that is powerful in the backend and easy to use on the frontend. Features like live support, embedded chat enables us to add lively effect and interactivity to static pages. Zoho chat is also integrated with Zoho Mail and with give a notification whenever a new mail arrive.

Have you tried Zoho Chat? Share your experience with us in the comment.

Mindmeister is an elegant and easy to use web application that allows you to create mindmaps easily and quickly. In this article I am going to demonstrate how to use Mindmeister to create Mindmaps and share with your friends and colleagues.

1. Go to Mindmeister.com and sign up for a free account. You can skip this step if you have an OpenID account. Alternatively, if you just want to try out the software, there is a live demo on the front page where you can get a hands on experience.

2. Login to Mindmeister and click on “Create Mind map” button

3. You will now see the root node at the center of the screen. Before creating the mindmap it will be nice to get comfortable with the navigation structure in Mindmeister.

The toolbar at the top contains the buttons for you to add, delete and connect nodes. On the right side lies the navigator, text editor and icons where you can use them to enhance the overall look and feel. At the bottom is the Share button that allows you to share and collaborate your work.

4. Once you are comfortable with the menus, it becomes very easy to create a mindmap. First, click on the root node and edit the text to reflect your brainstorm topic/idea. Next, click on the Add button on the top toolbar to add new node. At the end of this step you should get something as shown below:

5. Keep on adding the nodes to complete the mindmap and if necessary, add icons to make the node more distinguishable or add links if needed. At the end of this step, your mindmap should be almost completed.

6. Once the mindmap is completed, click on the Share button to share and collaborate with your friends and colleagues. You can also make it public or embed it in your site.

Conclusion

Not only is it easy to use, Mindmeister is also a feature rich web application that allows you to create mindmaps and share with your friends easily. Some of the other useful features include making a clone copy of your existing mindmap or export your mindmaps as images or PDF files.

The free edition of Mindmeister allows you to create up to 6 mindmaps. There are also various paid editons for heavy users.

The question is: Is there any application that allows you to manage multiple email accounts? In desktop, Zimbra answers this question. For Web-based application that is independent of any application or platform. Zoho mail seems to be a great choice.

In this tutorial, I would like to demonstrate how you can manage multiple email accounts (in this case, Gmail, Yahoo and Live) with Zoho mail.

Steps to Manage Multiple Email accounts with Zoho Mail

1. Sign up for Zoho mail account or sign in with your Gmail or Yahoo ID.

2. Once you login to your Zoho mail, Go to Settings ->Common Settings -> My Preference and add your other email accounts.

3. After adding your Yahoo or Gmail email addresses, Zoho will sent you a verification ID of which you have to enter to finalize the email settings.

4. Repeat the above step to add as many mail accounts as you want. The following image shows the result after adding all the mail accounts

5. Now sign in to your respective emails individually which are all added in Zoho account to enable Mail forwarding options

Gmail allows you to configure all incoming mails to forward another email address, yet keep a copy of the original in the inbox

For Yahoo, the forwarding option is available only to the old users. New user will have to upgrade to the premium account to enjoy the forwarding service.

Similar to Yahoo mail, Live mail also have limitations in their forwarding options.

6. Once you have set up the mail forward options in all the Email accounts, you can now use the Filters and Folders options in Zoho mail to segregate the mails when they arrive at the inbox.

In the home page of Zoho mail, add folders like Yahoo, Gmail or any other name that you fancy.

Once you have added the folders, go to Settings ->Personalize mail options -> Filters. Add filters separately for Yahoo, Gmail and Live mail. Enter the Filter name and fill the criteria as “to” contains “yourname@yahoo.com” and perform move to the specific folder.

7. When composing/replying a mail, you can easily switch between the various accounts so other won’t know that you are sending from Zoho mail.

Conclusion

You might have plenty of email accounts, each set up for different purposes: personal, groups, newsletter, work and so on. What Zoho mail does and allows you to do is to become a hub for you to maintain all the email accounts. Other benefits include the offline mail option with Google Gears and the eye catching cool Zoho mail experience with a short mail alias name@zoho.com.

For those who are using Gmail to micromanage their multiple emails, you can try out Zoho mail and feel the differences. Tell us about your experience in the comments.

Double Killer is software that allows you to identify duplicate files (files of same content) and delete them with extreme care. Why do I highlight the term with extreme care? The reason for this is Double Killer checks CRC-32 values of every file and make sure that the file is an exact duplicate before it proceeds to remove it. For your info,  the CRC-32 value of a file is like the finger print for the file and is regularly used as an  important criteria to identify files of the same content.

To illustrate, let’s say I have a folder named ‘E-books‘ in different partitions drive and  I am going to use Double killer to identify duplicate files.

1. Download the Double killer from this site.

2. Unzip the zipped file and double click the DoubleKiller.exe file to execute it.

3. Go to ‘Options‘ tab and set the search criteria. It is important to exclude the system files and any files with extension.

4. Add the directories where you want to search for duplicate files. In our case, I have to select two folder named “E-books” from different drives such as D:\ and E:\

5. Once the required directories are added, click on ‘Run‘ button to start the search for duplicated files

6. Double Killer will then return results for files that have the same CRC check sums and list them based on criteria like size, date modified and CRC value.

7. You can now delete the duplicated files using the Delete options provided in Double Killer. To delete all duplicate entry, click on the ‘Check the last dupes‘ button.

8. Once Delete files in clicked all duplicates files will be deleted and ensure the CRC-32 value for files to safely delete.

Note: On some rare cases, you may see ’0000000′ in the CRC value (as seen in the screenshot above). In such incident, the application is not able to figure out the CRC value of the files for some reason. You may want to check manually if those files are duplicates and remove them from your hard disk.

That’s it. You should now have a cleaner hard disk with little or no duplicate files in your system.

What other software do you use to clean up your system?

Scribus is a popular open source desktop publishing software that allows you to create publication like e-books, brochures, type setting and other print publications easily. Being a close competitor to Adobe Indesign and QuarkXpress, the advantage that Scribus has is that it is free and supports many features like CYMK color support and PDF creation. Moreover, Scribus is available for Linux, Windows and MacOSX, making it a much worthy alternative to those commercial products.

In this article we shall discuss how to create a brochure with Scribus.

Steps to create Brochure with Scribus

Although this article deals with the Windows platform, the steps remain the same for other platforms.

1. Download and install Scribus software based on your platform.

2. Download the Scribus Templates tar ball. Unzip the tar ball and  locate  the file “br2-a4-3cols.sla” which is a brochure template file required for this article.

3. Open Scribus Desktop publishing application. Click File ->Open and locate the file “br2-a4-3cols.sla” from the downloaded templates.

4. Enable the Properties toolbar (Windows -> Properties) so you can edit the content easily from the window menu.

5. Once the Brochure template is opened, the editable text area will be highlighted with a red rectangle. Right click on the text area and select “Edit Text“. This will open a new text edit dialog box with more option for you to edit text, background, formatting and style.

6. The above step can also be performed by double clicking the text area. You can then edit and format it with the help of the Properties toolbox.

7. Repeat step 5 to edit the required text portions and add new images to the brochure template, if required. Drag the Image icon and drop it to any portion you want. Double click on the box to add image (see screenshot below).

8. Once you have finished all the editing work, save the document as “.sla” format or export as PDF file. Ignore any post script errors.

Screenshot of sample

The following brochure is a sample done with Scribus. You can also download/view the output PDF file here.

Which other desktop publication software do you use?

Yahoo Zimbra is an excellent desktop application which lets you manage multiple email accounts in a single window. Other than emails, it also allows you to manage your calendar, tasks, documents and briefcase all in a single suite. As the same as other desktop email client, you can download all your emails while you are online and view them later in your desktop (perhap while you are on the move?). Being a close competitor to Outlook and Thunderbird, one of the advantage that Zimbra has over  other is that it is easy to configure and you are able to integrate various services all in one place, such as browsing your Yahoo email, work with Google calendar and sync with Hotmail address book. In this article, we will discuss how to setup Yahoo Zimbra Desktop application in Windows.

1. Download Yahoo Zimbra Desktop application and install on your windows platform.

2. Click Add New Account.

3. Select the Email service provider. Zimbra comes with pre-configured setting for the various popular email services such as Yahoo mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Zimbra mail and AOL mail. You can also choose to configure your own IMAP and POP account.

4. Enter your email address, account name, password. Select how frequent you want Zimbra to check your mailbox and whether you want to synchronize with your address book and calendar services.

5. If you want to add more email accounts, click Add New Account. If not, click on Launch Desktop

6. On your desktop, click Send/Receive button and Zimbra will fetch all your emails from your online mailbox. There are also options for you to download your personal folders.

(Click to enlarge)

Zimbra is also available for Windows,Linux and Mac platforms.

What’s your experience with Zimbra? Share it with us in the comments.

1. GMDesk

GMDesk is a Adobe Air application which runs on your desktop. With GMDesk, you can access most of the Google services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Picasa and Maps. A good thing about this software is that it is cross-platform compatible and you can access your Google services under your own domain name. The only issue you might face with GMDesk is that some of the fonts in Gmail are smaller than the original one and could be straining to your eyes.

Screen shots illustrating the use of GMDesk

Preferences and setting for GMDesk Application

GMDesk preferences and setting

Access to other Google services using GMDesk

Installing GMDesk

• If you have not installed Adobe Air on your system, download the installer and install it. Ubuntu users can follow this guide to install Adobe Air in Ubuntu Intrepid.
• Either go to the GMDesk home page and click on the GMDesk Flash Installer to install, or if you prefer a manual method, download the AIR application from Google code.

2. Google Gmail Desktop Gadget (Update: no longer available)

Google Desktop is an application that enables the user to search the desktop like how you search in the browser. It also allows you to install little widget-like gadgets such as calendar, clock, games and weather information on your desktop. The Gmail gadget is one of the thing that you can install on your desktop for easy access to your Gmail account.

You don’t really get the full-fledged Gmail, but it will enable you to read your emails and star it without logging on in the browser. In the event that you need to write a new mail, there is a shortcut link to Compose that you can click to access your Gmail account (in browser) quickly and easily. Other shortcuts include Search and Signout.

The Gmail gadget is only available for Windows platform with Google Desktop 5 or above.

Summary of steps involved and software needed:

1. Download QEMU manager and Install on windows platform

2. Create Linux Virtual Machine and Install Ubuntu on virtual hard disk

3. Run the Virtual hard disk from windows platform.

4. QEMU manager and Ubuntu ISO image are needed as software requirements.

Steps to Install QEMU manager and Create Virtual Machine

1. Download QEMU manager and install on Windows platform. Screen shot of QEMU manager with virtual machines are shown below.

Click to enlarge

2. Create a new Ubuntu Virtual machine by clicking Options -> Create New Virtual Machine or by clicking the ‘+’ sign.

3. After creating the virtual machine, configure the virtual machine by setting the memory size required and choose the location of the ISO image which is to be installed into the virtual machine. Set the boot option as shown below

4. Once boot parameters are configured properly, click the ‘Run‘ virtual machine icon to launch the virtual machine.

5. QEMU will run the emulator and boot Ubuntu from the ISO image. Follow the onscreen instructions to install Ubuntu

6. Proceed with the standard Ubuntu installation procedure by choosing the keyboard map, region settings as per your preference.

7. Select Guided partition option and click Forward to proceed further

8. Enter your login option and proceed to install Ubuntu to the virtual hard disk.

9. Once the installation is completed, you will be able to run the virtual machine from the virtual hardisk. Make sure you select the correct boot parameters .

Note : The keyboard shortcut to switch focus and return back to Windows is CTRL +ALT .

Some of the advantages of using QEMU:

1. Easy to use and run with minimal system memory, say 512MB RAM.

2. There are option that allows you to create VMware virtual disk.

3. Plenty of options provided for optimal virtualization.

As for the disadvantage, there is no option for you to save the state of the Virtual machine  or to pause the virtual machine and shut the system.

Have you tried QEMU before? How do you find it?

In this post we show you how to transcode media files using VLC player in Windows platform using wizard as well as command prompt.

Transcoding Media Files using Wizard

1. VLC includes a transcoding and streaming wizard . To transcode a file, select Wizard option in the file menu

2. Select Transcode/Save to file option and click Next to proceed

3. Choose the input file which you want to transcode.

Note: You  can also use partial extract option and time length for the output file

4. Choose the output format you want and choose your desired format along with the bit rate option

5. Finally under the Encapsulation format, select the desired output format.

Give the destination for the target file

6. You can also use the console to see the background process while transcoding is being carry out.

See the sample console screen

Transcoding with the Command Prompt

The following command enable you to transcode a FLV format file to MPEG format

C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC>vlc -vvv “D:\688497.flv” –sout=#transcode{vcodec= mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128,deinterlace}:standard{access=file,mux=ts,url=”D:\ asd.mpg”}

Here is a breakdown of the agrument used in the command line:

access=file: instructs vlc to store the output in a file (and not stream it)

url: the location of the new (output) file.

That’s it.

Wink is a tutorial and presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. Wink is also available in several languages including English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese.

Here’s how we use Wink to create screencast easily.

Download and install Wink on your Windows platform [currently Wink supports only Windows 98, 2000 and XP].

1. Open Wink software and create new Wink project (File -> New). The project wizard window will show up.

2. Check the box “Start by capturing screenshots“, “Hide Wink Window“. In the dropdown bar, select “Screen“. Enter the region (screen size) that you want to capture and the timeframe of the screencast. Click OK.

3. The next screen will show you the hotkey to start the screen capturing. Shortcut keys that you have to remember are Alt + Pause, and Shift + Pause (key near scroll lock button on your keyboard). Click on the “Minimize To Tray” button to minimize the Wink window to the system tray.

4. Press ALT + PAUSE to start recording. Once the screencasting is started, you will be able to see changes in the Wink icon in the system tray.

5. Do all your demo on your screen. Once you are done, click ALT + PAUSE again to stop.

6. Right click the Wink icon and select Finish Capture to complete the project.

7. You should now see the entire frames of your screencast as thumbnail images at bottom of  the Wink window .

8. Select the frame in which you want to add the text, images, preset shapes from the properties bar .

9. Preview the frame in which you have added text and preset shape to it.

10. Once you have completed all your editing, we will now configure it to be saved as .swf format. Go to Property -> Settings. Select Macromedia Flash (*.swf) in the Output File Type.

11. Select Project -> Render to save the file.

12. You should now see the output file as swf format. You can also save the project as PDF or PostScript format

Wink is a freeware and you can download, install and use it for free. Don’t forget to see the tutorial that comes with it for more usage detail.

nLite and vlite are two useful tools that allows you to customize your Windows XP or Vista installation CD and add/remove extra components of your choice. You can use it to deploy additional software packages including drivers, service packs or to remove miscellaneous Windows components that you have no use for it.

Here’s how you can integrate additional packages to Windows XP with nlite.

Customize Your Windows XP Bootable ISO Image

1) Create a folder on your hard disk and label it XP_Source

2) Copy the full content of the XP distribution CD into this folder.

3) Start nLite. The welcome screen shows you which version of nLite you are running and allows you to choose an alternate language. To continue click on ‘Next‘.

4) Click Browse and locate the XP_Source folder that you have created just now

5) nLite recognizes the language and version of your Windows installation files and displays the information. Click Next to proceed.

6) You can save your current presets for future use or load presets from the last time you used nLite. Click Next to proceed.

7) Choose your customization

- To Integrate a Service Pack, first download the correct pack for your operating system and save it to your hard drive.

- Click on the ‘Select‘ tab and integrate the service pack.

8) Next we arrive at the option to integrate drivers that Windows does not install by default. These can be drivers for almost any type of hardware as long as you use the correct driver. Click on the ‘Insert‘ button to search for drivers to install, make sure that you open .inf files only