Downloads:

By Jason Fitzpatrick, 3:00 PM on Sun Mar 15 2009, 9,984 views

Windows\Mac\Linux: If you’ve got a virtual pile of e-books but no good way to organize them, Calibre is a feature rich e-book manager, complete with Cover Flow-like looks and network sharing.

Whether or not you have a portable e-book reader, Calibre is packed with features to help you organize your e-books. To start, you simply tell Calibre where you store your book files. It does a pretty good job pulling the necessary information and self-populating, although you’ll still find yourself making occasional edits, like swapping the author and title fields. If you’re a LibraryThing user, you can also hook into that account to populate the fields.

Calibre has a Cover Flow-like browsing feature for skimming through the covers of your books. You can leave comments on your reads, and a tagging system for organizing your collection beyond the basics of genre and author. Calibre supports extensive file conversions, with the ability to convert over thirteen document formats into EPUB, PRF and MOBI formats for use on popular e-book readers like the SONY PRS 500/505/700, Cybook Gen 3, Amazon Kindle (1 and 2) and the iPhone (with the stanza reader software).

You can also set up Calibre to fetch news from websites and RSS feeds and convert it into a compatible format, so you can load up your e-book reader with information from your favorite sites. There’s even a built-in web server so you can access your e-book collection remotely. Calibre is freeware and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Calibre [via gHacks]

Downloads:

Windows only: Email attachment searching utility OutlookAttachView has a killer feature: You can export or delete multiple attachments at once—so you can finally get your files out of your inbox.

Using the utility is extremely simple—just launch the executable and it will search through your Outlook profile for every attachment, though it might take a while if you have a large amount of mail. The Options -> Show Inline Attachments checkbox is probably a good idea if you get a lot of embedded pictures through email, as they aren’t stored as regular attachments in Outlook. Once you’ve selected the attachments you want to handle, use the File menu to copy the attachments to a folder, and then you can even delete the attachments in bulk to save a ton of space in your mailbox.

OutlookAttachView is a free, portable download from the always useful folks at Nirsoft, the same people that let you recover lost Outlook passwords, manage your Outlook auto-complete entries, and even edit your Explorer right-click menu.

OutlookAttachView [Nirsoft via Life Rocks 2.0]

Downloads: DisplayFusion 3.0 Manages Everything Across Multi-Monitor Setups

By Jason Fitzpatrick, 6:30 AM on Tue Mar 3 2009, 25,393 views

Windows only: If you’re looking to manage windows and wallpapers on multiple monitors, it’s tough to go wrong with the reasonably priced, and recently updated, DisplayFusion.

We’ve sung praises for the excellent multi-monitor tool DisplayFusion before, for it’s ability customize your dual monitors and help you make the most of your dual monitors. DisplayFusion has recently been revamped to include even more features including the ability to grab wallpapers from not only your computer and Flickr, but from the excellent wallpaper collection at Vladstudio—a popular wallpaper site based on responses to where you found your favorite multi-monitor wallpaper.

While the addition of new resources for new wallpaper is great, it isn’t nearly as newsworthy as the addition of multi-monitor windows management. Like previously reviewed UltraMon, DisplayFusion now has the ability to span your taskbar across all of your monitors. You can switch windows between your monitors using hotkeys or by clicking on the title bar of the window with the middle mouse button. There is one small hiccup with the window management tool, though: if you’re using multiple monitors, it doesn’t allow you to select which monitor the window will move to like UltraMon does. Using the hotkey or middle mouse button sends the window to the next monitor in the sequence as Windows sees them. As you can see in the screen shot up top, my monitors are arranged in a 2-1-3 pattern, so to move a window from the center monitor to the far right one requires two clicks. Not a deal breaker by any means, and not even an issue if you only have two monitors, but something to keep if you’re sporting three or more monitors.

Here’s a look at some of DisplayFusion 3.0’s features and abilities (click for larger images):

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If you can tolerate the loss of some of the tweaks available in UltraMon, like the multi-monitor screensaver tool, DisplayFusion costs less than half of UltraMon’s $40 price at $16—technically $15.53, based on today’s U.S./Canada currency exchange. I’ve used both over the last year with dual, and then triple, monitors and, dollar for dollar, DisplayFusion is a great value. The day DisplayFusion adds a handy titlebar button for tossing windows from one monitor to another, I’ll stop using the two applications side by side and use DisplayFusion exclusively.

DisplayFusion has a limited-functionality free edition, and you can request a 30-day trial license to test out the full package before purchase. DisplayFusion is $16 for a lifetime license and is Windows only.

DisplayFusion 3.0 [Binary Fortress]

Screedbot: Animated Scrolling Typewriter Text Generator

Screedbot lets you generate an animated GIF file with your own scrolling typewriter text. Just write some text into the field and press “Create Screed”. Modify image width, text colour, text font size and the background colour. When you are done, save it to your computer or share it on ImageShack or Flickr with one click.

Features:

• Scrolling text generator that lets you create GIF image file with your own scrolling typewriter text.
• Modify image width, text font size, text and background colours
• Save it to your computer or share it on ImageShack or Flickr with one click.

Check out Screedbot @ www.wigflip.com/screedbot

Video Demonstration:

By Adam Pash, 9:00 AM on Thu Mar 5 2009, 15,001 views

Web development and design site Nettuts goes in-depth with Texter, our very own text replacement application, detailing how Texter can streamline your email replies and coding to save bundles of time.

We’ve got a couple of quick video demos on the Texter homepage, but the Nettuts tutorial takes a great in-depth look at some advanced Texter usage and scripting, focusing on how Texter can save time with repetitive email and coding. Whether or not you’re a developer, the video above (and accompanying post) offer a great look at how you might be able to take advantage of Texter (or some other text replacement app) to save oodles of time at your keyboard. Got any advanced Texter tricks of your own? Share them in the comments.

How I Can Code Twice As Fast As You [Nettuts]

Gazaro: Hot Deal Comparison Site

Gazaro is a deal comparison site that helps you get the best deals on products you want. The site crawls deal offers across online retailers, sorts them by price histories and reviews allocating an individual score to each item from 1 to 10, with 10 being the hottest score. It also displays the product price history over recent months and tells you if its good time to buy or wait. Deal scores are updated every day against its own price and similar products.

When you submit items you want to buy, Gazaro will track them and If there is a really good new sale or deal, alert you via email, RSS, and Twitter. Currently, its mainly focused on Electronics deals, more product options are coming soon.

Features:

• Get the best deals on selected products from online retailers.
• Subscribe to get updates on email, RSS or Twitter.
• Price trending: tells you if its a good time to buy or wait
• Products are sorted by the Deal Score, from hottest (10) to coldest (1)
• LImit results by selecting your preferred brands, tech specs and online stores.
• Easy to use. Instant.
• See Gazaro’s Hot Pics to see best current deals on Electronics products.
• More sites to find deals: Combyo and BeatThat.

Check out Gazaro @ www.gazaro.com

Downloads:

Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): The free, multi-platform iTunes assaulter (if not quite killer) Songbird busts out great improvements for a 1.1 version, including a one-click album art grabber, performance improvements, and loads o’ little tweaks.

The killer new feature is a single menu option, under “Tools,” that scans your entire music collection and grabs the relevant album art from Last.fm’s web site. That alone makes the oft-improved, awesomely extensible music manager worth a look. But most of the big improvements in this release have been under the hood, so to speak:

We made some substantial gains this release:
* Reduced memory use with a large library by 40%
* Cut CPU usage during playback by half
* Fixed playback memory leaks
* Made library caching configurable
* Added batching to the media importer, reducing memory use by 60%
* Reduced Mac download size 45%
* Fewer Crashes: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix ten of the most common crashes in Songbird.

Songbird certainly doesn’t suffer from a little tighter operation—it’s competing, after all, with the 800-lb. gorilla named iTunes, so having a clearly distinct profile is a good stance.

Check out Songbird’s more visible improvements by clicking through our short gallery:

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Songbird 1.1 is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

Songbird 1.1 is here [Songbird Blog]