Archive

Kona, an innovative social networking platform for businesses and organizations, was launched in late 2012. It grew out of a vision developer Scott DeFusco had for a way to solve communications issues shared in peoples' business and social lives. DeFusco and Kona cofounder Jeff Eckerle developed the...

Relax and Sleep Plus lets you choose and play ambient sounds that might help you sleep. I tried this app during a grueling jet-lagged visit to London. The UK has a seven-hour time difference from Los Angeles, which is my home base, so my day started there just as I normally would be going to sleep....

Synapse is a desktop utility that adds speed and convenience to finding files and launching applications. It does not eliminate the Linux distro's menu, favorites bar or panel icons. Instead, it cuts down on how often you resort to using them. A semantic-based tool that makes use of the Zeitgeist en...

Founded in 2010 by trading technology experts, OpenFin is growing on the heels of HTML5 standards edging out ill-fitting older Web solutions. Built onto an open source platform, OpenFin Desktop helps financial institutions to bridge the security gaps in their outdated Web-browser technology. OpenFin...

The early-90s Windows 3.11 operating system offered a graphical user interface that was a breakthrough for me. It was, in fact, my first GUI. I'd been using command-line, error-prone MS-DOS for two or three years before that, and it was a delight to suddenly be able to maximize screens, switch progr...

If you package e-books in the EPUB format, one of the handiest editing tools available is Sigil. The growing interest in mobile apps and e-reader devices such as Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook is fueling the e-book business for both reading consumers and authors. Without a dedicated edi...

Mentioning open source to a typical consumer will no doubt result in puzzled looks or a reference to that "free stuff." Even in some business circles, the open source concept may only be synonymous with an alternative computer operating system known as Linux. On the software development side of the ...

We're seeing an entire genre of Twitter clients proliferating within the Android ecosystem -- each app with its own idea about the best way to interact with the monolithic, 500 million-strong social network. OneLouder's Slices Pro for Twitter is the latest client to grab my attention -- not least ...

The cretors of Nirvana Editor, or NEdit for short, consider it paradise for writers. I found, however, that it's not yet the perfect text editor. NEdit is currently in version 5.5, so it is not a newcomer to the text editing scene. I tried it with the hope that it would bring a few new tricks to my ...

The Fedora Project is perhaps one of the hallmark Linux distributions. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, the commercial developer of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's investment in the Fedora community is collaborative. As such, Fedora Linux releases often provide RHEL developers with a field...

I've been running into major headaches with file-storage memory on my Android tablet. If you too have been having problems getting files to fit on your device, it may not be that your device's memory or SD card is full, but that phantom files are hogging resources. I'm usually -- carefully -- buy...

DevOps represents a dramatic change from the old siloed developers and script-heavy system administrators of yesterday. Any tools that can provide some common ground for developers and IT operations professionals can help, and it seems Chef and Puppet often do.

Puppy Linux is a distro I keep coming back to. No matter how entrenched I become with any flavor of Ubuntu -- sans the Unity desktop -- or Linux Mint's Cinnamon and KDE desktops, nothing can beat the speed, convenience and reliability of Puppy Linux on a stick. Boot it directly from a hard drive or ...

Blender Master Class is a must-have for anyone who uses or even plans to use the Blender graphics tool. It is a learn-by-doing guidebook that takes all the frustration and guessing out of the Blender equation. Author Ben Simonds does a marvelous job of taking the wonder out of using the powerful Ble...

Have you ever considered becoming a cartographer? It's not as hard as you might think. I've been trying out OruxMaps, a map viewer for Android that functions two ways. One mode is online with the usual suspects like Google maps, OpenStreetMap, and so on; the second and more intriguing method is offl...