While all of the above clients provide perfectly usable Windows installers, did you know that you can actually use them as portable apps too?!

What’s the big deal about portable apps, huh?

Okay, so a portable app does look and work like a normal installed app. From that perspective, it’s really not that different. But! It’s portable, and that’s what magical about it. It won’t add junk registry items to your computer. It’s just one single folder that you can put anywhere (Dropbox!), use on any number of computers, and delete anytime.

Portable apps do have poor system integration, but that hardly matters in the case of DC++ client – all you do with the app is open it, join a hub or three, and share your files like crazy. Absolutely no system integration is necessary.

Get those portables!

We shall be covering more about the awesomeness of portable apps (including the PortableApps.com platform) in future posts, but this post is here to help you find portable builds for your favourite DC++ client. So lets get started.

Official DC++

You’ll find all the available DC++ builds on this SourceForge page. Click on the version number (currently 0.782), and download the .zip file from the list. Once downloaded, unzip the folder contents to somewhere on your computer (again, I’d recommend the Dropbox or SugarSync folder, if you use either), and create a shortcut for the DCPlusPlus.exe file on your desktop or taskbar.

Strong DC++

Visit the Strong DC++ files on SourceForge, click on the latest version number (currently 2.42), and get the 32/64 bit .7z file depending on your OS. Rest of the process is same as above. Do make sure that you’ve an archiving app like PeaZip, that can unpack the .7z file.

Apex DC++

Again, say hello to the SourceForge page for Apex DC++. Click on the latest version (currently 1.4.2), and download the ApexDC++_x.x.x_slim.7z file, x.x.x being the version number. The other .7z archives contains the source files, and is not meant for normal users.

Do note that Apex DC++ will add itself to the “Installed Programs” list, allowing you to uninstall it from the Control Panel.

There are, of course, many other DC++ clients, and you can quite possibly find their portable builds with a bit of Googling and searching their SourceForge archives.

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If you’re a regular Google Talk user, here’s a useful chat bot that you should add to you chat list now – the Google Talk Guru, straight from the Google Labs. You can “friend” the bot by adding guru@googlelabs.com to your contact list.

Guru helps you get some specific information like sports results, current weather and forecast, currency conversions, word definitions, etc, just by chatting with it. For example, if you want the weather stats for your city, just initiate a chat with the Guru bot and type “weather <city-name>”. Guru will search Google and almost instantaneously deliver back the stats to you. Not revolutionary, but useful to have nonetheless.

Here’s a list of the queries supported by Guru, along with examples (screenshot taken from its homepage):

I can confirm that most of the stuff works as expected, however Guru is absolutely horrendous when it comes to queries regarding tennis (my favourite sport). You’re in luck if you like football better.

[via Mashable]

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imgur

While the desktop uploaders for imgur are pretty good (especially the ones for Mac OS X), you can actually convert a tiny Chrome extension to a full fledged desktop tool for the purpose. I like to install as few software on my system as possible, and this extension-cum-desktop-app helps me reduce that number by one.

Without further ado, lets see how we can turn a Chrome extension for imgur to a desktop app.

• Launch Chrome, and install the “imgur” extension from here. If you don’t have Chrome, you can download it from google.com/chrome.
• Once it’s installed, you’ll find a small “i” icon next to the Chrome address bar. Click on it.

• The extension will launch a new tab with a dark background. Now all we have to do is to create an application shortcut for this tab. Click on the Chrome “wrench” icon, and select Tools –> Create application shortcuts.

• Specify where you want to place the shortcuts, and click Create when done.

• You can now use this shortcut as your pseudo-desktop app. Clicking on it will launch the dark-background page; simply drag your photos / screenshots into it, and the extension will upload them to imgur. The links to the uploads will be displayed just below every image – you can right click and copy them to share them with others.

The imgur desktop uploader should be sufficient for most cases, but it has some limitations you should keep in mind,

• The extension uses the imgur anonymous API, which means there is no support for imgur accounts. Support might be added in future.
• All your uploaded images are put in one single gallery, regardless of whether they’re related or not. You can browse through this gallery on the imgur website by clicking on the “External Gallery” link at the top right corner of the app.
• All uploaded images are public by default (though anonymous), so you might not want to upload sensitive or personal pictures.
• The app requires you to have Chrome installed (even if you don’t use it). Uninstalling Chrome will break the shortcuts.

If these limitations are a deal-breaker for you, try some of the more powerful uploading tools as listed here. For everyone else, this imgur uploader for your desktop can be very handy for quickly uploading and sharing screenshots and photos.

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For a start, Twimbow is colourful. With the exception of Brizzly, most Twitter clients (desktop or web) are usually monotonously coloured and look boring. Not with Twimbow. This webapp is illuminated with all sorts of colours that make it stand out from the crowd. And colour doesn’t end just with the interface – you can actually add a #colour hashtag at the end of your tweet and Twimbow will show that tweet in that colour (obviously, this is not supported in any other client, and the fun kind of wears off after a while). Despite that, it could be a killer feature for casual Twitter users who are overwhelmed by the jam packed web clients of today.

The default interface of Twimbow has got 3 columns which, at the time of writing, do no look like they can be modified. The first one is the ‘Personal Buzz’ – which is just entirely different from what you’ve seen on any Twitter client so far. This column shows everything that has to do with you – starting with your tweets, retweets, mentions, replies, DMs, favourites, and whatever else – all of which is distinguished by, gasp!, colour codes. This is obviously a very new approach to separating your activities from your contacts’ activities on Twitter, although it’s not without its caveats. While Personal Buzz can be really helpful, it can quickly turn into a hodge podge of complete Twitter craziness if you do/receive any of this in excess – tweets, replies, DMs etc. Twimbow seems to be doing some sort of background filtering to keep this column relatively clean, but it still tends to get messy at times.

The second column, Home Buzz, is about everything else – the tweets, from people you follow, that are unrelated to you. At this moment, this column doesn’t automatically refresh itself, and you’ve to keep clicking on the top to show newer updates (not unlike the Twitter web interface). This column also allows you to filter users by the lists you’ve created, which is really handy if you ask me.

The final column is simply a search stream on everything about Twimbow. There’s seemingly no way of removing it at the moment, but then it peacefully stays out of your way and also offers you an useful insight into what early adopters have to say about the service, if you’re interested.

There’s also a neat Monitor tool at the bottom that lets you keep you updated on anything, or anyone, on Twitter.

Twimbow is still in pre-alpha, meaning it’s still very very new, and it’d be rude to be demanding every feature out of the box right now. But there are still a few things I’d like to see rather sooner than later,

• An ‘options’ dialog. Somewhere. Anywhere. As a self-proclaimed geek, I’m obsessed with the settings of any program that I use. If I can’t find one, I get mad. Twimbow is still circulating among a few pre-alpha testers, so that may be the reason for the lack of options, but they should get to implementing one soon.
• Ability to upload images. Almost every other Twitter webapp does it now, and it’s actually a feature that people are gonna use.
• Ability to customize width of the columns. Not every computer screen is the same, and things can look too big or too small on non-standard resolutions.
• Twimbow uses fade-in pop-ups to show dialog boxes to update your status or to see user profiles. I don’t like those all that much. The hovercards and normal text boxes on Seesmic Web are tons better.

Of course, everyone is going to have his or her own demands, but I feel like Twimbow should have these features straight off the bat. Right now, it’s doing great for something that’s in as early stage as pre-alpha.

I’ve seen lots of people sign up for Twitter and then abandon it, as they fail to understand what the hell to do in here. For them (and everyone else as well!), Twimbow is a nice way to keep the Twiverse colorful and engaging, while still being simple and fast at the same time. As for me, I’m gonna stick to Seesmic Web for now because I just seem to like it that much better.

If you want to try Twimbow right now (and you should), comment with your Twitter handle below (something like, Hey I am @sharapova and I’d like a Twimbow invite!) and the @Twimbow team will automatically send you an invitation through Twitter. Else, you can simply @filos (who is one of the ones behind this project) and request for an invite.

—————

Bonus

• Try the #rainbow hashtag on Twimbow.
• Twimbow supports desktop notifications on Chrome, just like the new Seesmic Web. Also, it runs the smoothest on Chrome.

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…Generally speaking, creating an actual 360 degree view effect requires you to snap photos of the same object from numerous closely spaced angles, arrange them all together in proper order and queue them in a fast slideshow mode. And if you do happen to have a bunch of such photos lying around, you still need to be able to cook up some javascript work to be able to swivel through those photos.

Thankfully, Picasa Web makes the process of adding swivel effect a smooth one. It not only has the feature baked in, but also makes using it really easy…

How to Get a 360 Degree ( Swivel ) View Of Your Photos in Picasa Web Albums [Guiding Tech]

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… bookmarklets share the same problem as regular bookmarks – they can grow into a wild, unsorted bunch very quickly. Sure you can put them in a ‘bookmarklets’ folder, but if you’ve got anything over 10, finding the right one for any particular webpage will make you pull your hair apart.

This is where is web app Bookmarklet Combiner comes in handy…

Read the full post on GT, and let us know of your view on the app.

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  by dreamglow pumpkincat210 

Web applications often lack the flexibility provided by their desktop counterparts. Although they’re designed to provide a unified and pleasing experience to most users, they don’t have those configuring options that would otherwise allow you to tweak the app to suit your needs.

Let’s take Facebook for example. The largest social networking site in the world is best accessed from its web interface because of all the features it provides, but there remain a few quirks that you really can’t do much about. Photos can’t be rotated. There is no threading in comments. You can’t apply themes or even custom colors to your profile. These and more, depending on how you use Facebook (or any  other web app). So how to address these issues? Simple, just install a userscript, and watch along as the problem magically vanishes!

Userscripts are tiny bits of code written in JavaScript that add useful functionality to your web apps. You can think of them as a cosmetic makeover of the web apps that you use. Userscripts are browser-specific and website-specific; a particular script, if installed and supported by your browser, will work only for a particular website (or a group of websites). Unlike regular extensions, user scripts won’t slow your browser down.

How To Install A User Script?

As I said above, you need to install a userscript on your browser for it to work. Now, of all modern browsers, only Google Chrome and Opera support these scripts out of the box, although you can bring the functionality to other browsers with simple add-ons. To install a script in Chrome, all you have to do is download it. Chrome treats these scripts as regular extensions, and will install them as one, which you can then manage from the Extensions page. Getting user scripts on Opera isn’t as straightforward as that on Chrome, but it’s not much difficult either. You can learn how to make Opera use the scripts from this doc.

A vanilla Firefox install doesn’t support user scripts. However, there’s nothing to worry as the awesome Greasemonkey add-on brings the functionality to the open source browser. In fact, Greasemonkey for Firefox is so popular that most user scripts are usually designed to be fully compatible with it.

Internet Explorer can be made to allow userscripts with the previously mentioned IE7Pro add-on (it works with IE 8  despite the name).

The last of the major browsers, Safari, plays very badly with userscripts. There is no way to install scripts in the Windows version, while Mac users may try their luck here.

Where Do I Find User Scripts?

UserScripts.org is the largest source of user scripts available online. All scripts are free to download and use. They’re specifically designed for Greasemonkey, though most will run just fine on Chrome and Opera, if not all. IE users using IE7Pro can try IEScripts.org instead.

Caution

Userscripts are relatively simple to create (for programmers, at least!), hence you’ll literally find thousands of them doing practically the same thing. Finding that exact script for your particular need will need some tinkering around. Whether you’re looking in UserScripts or IE Scripts, make sure that you search with accurate parameters to get the best results. Lets say you’re looking for a script that’ll change Facebook’s colour from the monotonous blue to something else; for this you should search for something like ‘facebook colour’ or ‘change facebook colour’. From the results that will be displayed, look for one that has high ratings and has been downloaded more number of times than the other scripts displayed, and install it.

Again, owing to the ease with which they can be created, there’s a good chance you’ll come across scripts that contain malware. So never install them from unknown sources. UserScripts is huge (and safe), and you’ll almost always stumble across whatever you’re looking for.

Some Useful Userscripts

There are thousands of amazing userscripts available, and it’s not possible on my part to list even a part of them. However, here are three of my absolute favourites. All of these work flawlessly on Firefox (with Greasemonkey) and Chrome, and I’ve no idea about Opera (they should work!).

Greased Lightbox

If you’ve ever searched for images on Google (and you certainly have!), you know how frustrating it is to get to the actual image which you can save to your computer. Enter Greased Lightbox. With this userscript installed, the images, when clicked, will instead appear on a fancy ‘lightbox’ overlay. The images can be scrolled back and forth, and even viewed in a slideshow.

[That’s Lady Gaga without makeup!]

Grease Lightbox works on Google Images, Wikipedia, MySpace, DeviantArt, FFFFound!, flickr, and Blogger. Neat!

YouTube Video Download

Well, this userscript is the easiest way to quickly download any YouTube video. Install it, and you’ll find the amazing Download button below your YouTube video. Click on it, and you’ve options to download the video in any of the available formats!

FFixer

This adds a ton of stuff to Facebook, and is quite likely to fix any issues that you’ve got with the interface. I don’t use Facebook a lot (though this is changing fast!), but I can assure you that you’ll be a happier soul using Facebook after installing this.

I’ll definitely be covering many more userscripts in future, but that’s it for now. Enjoy the web your way with userscripts!

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What Are Userscripts, And How Can I Use Them? | PC Tonic

First up is Picasa, the extremely popular photo organizer from Google. There’s a good chance that you’re already using it, so you don’t have to install another software either! To make a collage, select the pictures you want to include in the collage (you can select an entire folder as well), click on the ‘Collage’ button in the tray, select / modify the style of collage you want (there are a few options), and click on ‘Create Collage’. Your pretty looking collage will be all ready in seconds. Picasa is a cross-platform tool, hence Mac and Linux users can enjoy all its goodness.

For all its prowess, Picasa’s collage making abilities are pretty basic. If you’re looking for something more snazzy, ShapeCollage has got you covered. ShapeCollage offers tons of options and custom shapes for creating collages. Drag in the photos to its window, tweak the settings to your liking (or just leave them alone), and click on the ‘Create’ button to get your geeky-cool collage which you can then save in JPG or PNG format.The best thing about ShapeCollage is that you can create collages in practically any shape you want! It’s a Java-based, cross platform tool. The free version puts a ShapeCollage.com watermark on the collages created, though it’s barely visible.

If you aren’t in the mood to install an extra software just for creating collages, check out the online version of ShapeCollage! You don’t get the fine-grained control as in the case of the desktop app, but you can create butterfly shaped collages all fine. They even have a Facebook app for all those souls who spend 37 hours a day in Facebook.

Don’t like Picasa or any of the ShapeCollage offerings? There are more! PhotoJoy is a candy-faced, Windows-only tool that can turn your pictures into collages, screensavers, and desktop widgets. The good thing about PhotoJoy is that it won’t nag you to upgrade (since the entire package is free) or watermark your images. It also sports a very pleasing and simple interface, which even your mom will have no problems getting used to! Do note that it installs a ‘Games’ icon on your desktop without asking your permission.

Update : As noticed, you may have problems uninstalling PhotoJoy from your computer, so you might want to have a look at Revo Uninstaller, which can scrub such tools off your PC.

There are quite few online collage makers besides ShapeCollage online as well. Photovisi brings the sophistication of desktop apps to the web with a myriad of options to tweak your collages. A collage can include upto 30 photos, which can be uploaded from your computer or pulled from Flickr. Collagr is another web based tool, that can import photos from Flickr and Photobucket to create fancy collages.

================

Got your own favourite collage making app? Share in the comments!

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Free Tools To Make Cool Photo Collages | PC Tonic

Update : Okay apparently IPL starts today. Bah!

Take me out, and India has got only about 1.2 billion people remaining, with everyone and their moms worshipping cricket. Then, there are the four of you non-Indians who love it too! Anyway, here’s a tip for all you cricket fans – go subscribe to the official IPL channel on YouTube – youtube.com/ipl. It’ll be brimming with live matches (with an unfortunate 5-minute delay within India), match highlights, and tons of on-and-off field coverage once IPL gets underway.

I know a lot of you guys were already planning on hacking me to death for denouncing cricket, but let me remind you of the bigger picture – IPL + YouTube + cheer girls + cricket = your ultimate, wet dreamy nerdiness! Yours truly cricket hater is just one obscure guy, unworthy of attention.

[Source : YouTube Global Blog]

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Simply put, TypingWeb is awesome. That is, if you really want to learn proper typing. It contains a variety of courses, each of which contain a set of tutorials.

The wonderful thing about TypingWeb is that you don’t even need to create an account to get started! Simply go to the website, click on ‘Start Typing’ and, wham, you land on the page shown above. Most of the typing games available can also be played without an account. However, you do need an account for some special courses (‘certifications’ and ‘problem keys’) and for appearing typing tests.

I’d personally recommend you to get an account, as it’s free, and gives you full access to the whole shebang. You can also go pro to remove all ads from the web pages, but that’s all it does.

Verdict

TypingWeb is a complete tool to get a grip on your typing, not to mention the fact that it’s entirely free! Highly recommended for all the typing master wannabes.

By the way, if you’re still scratching your head over who the heck Mackenzie is, see it for yourself.

This girl can type at 119 wpm and plans to break the 200 barrier. She’s totally out of my reach but TypingWeb may help you crawl your way towards her!

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Hone Your Typing Skills in TypingWeb | PC Tonic