Archive

Darhon Finance is a comprehensive personal finance program packed with features to manage finances and bank accounts, track credit cards and investments and plan for expenses. It goes far beyond serving as a typical electronic check or bank book register. That leap to being full financial package pu...

The tide of software piracy in China may be ebbing. With the clear support of the Chinese government, several software organizations and computer firms based in Europe and the U.S. are conducting events focusing on growing open source in China. The push toward China's active participation in the ope...

Consider how far we have come as a communications-driven society since the days of the messenger pigeon and telegraph. It's about 150 years since the Pony Express rode in the West. From horses to microwave, one of life's mysteries is that battery technology is still dead-ending us. Portable power c...

Freeplane is an application for creating mind maps. A mind map is the doodling you draw with shapes and other symbols around words connected with lines to make charts representing your thoughts and ideas on a particular topic or project. It's not often that productivity software makes the task at ha...

Google on Monday made its new Android developer console available to devs everywhere on Google Play. The console was announced at Google I/O in July, and devs were invited to test out a beta version. "The developer tools and portal are key areas of enablement for any application platform," said Al H...

Privileged control of your smartphone is one of the killer features of the Android operating system. This control, known as "root access," allows users to remove manufacturer and mobile operator hardware and software limits to takeover the device. I've written about competitor ClockworkMod's ROM M...

NoteCase Pro is a note-taking and outliner application with a hefty list of features if you venture beyond the free version and buy into the shareware license. Even if you settle for the unregistered lite version, NoteCase Pro is an impressive tool for cataloging your notes and collected information...

If you've ever been frustrated by the inaccuracy of a television weather report, in particular the graphics, there's always been a way out -- you could go to the National Weather Service website and look at the online radar images pulled straight off the actual radar. If you're fishing, hiking or wo...

The Calligra Suite is an unusual compilation of office tools with much potential -- but it has a good deal of maturing to do before it can advance beyond its mediocre performance following a debut almost three years ago. Calligra is a fork of KDE's KOffice that grew out of unresolved disputes among ...

Oracle's proprietary posture may have soiled the welcome mat and vilified its good standing in the FOSS community as CEO Larry Ellison has pushed the balance point between servicing his customers and nickel-and-diming them to turn a higher profit. Clearly, since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems -- a...

Some of my earliest memories of smartphones are of the hassles involved with getting bookmarks loaded across devices. Why was it that Web properties thought -- and some still think -- you needed different information at your desk from what you wanted on the road? The issue has never been properly a...

If you fancy game playing, the latest release of the Mageia Linux OS will be a fun experience. Even if you never open a game, Mageia 2 is a solid distribution well suited to newcomers and seasoned Linux users alike. Mageia is a fork of the now defunct Mandriva distro. It was developed by a team of f...

Ubuntu is one of the most popular and user-friendly Linux operating systems you will find. That said, Ubuntu can be intimidating and frustrating to computer users just stepping out of the World of Windows. Nothing beats learning how to use the Linux operating system like hands-on discovery. Having s...

Want to launch a music app when you plug in your headphones, or wake up to a specific app? You can do things like this with sets of automated routines that you program via the Tasker app. Crafty's Tasker app automates settings on Android devices and lets you micro-manage them. Does this level of in-...

Zorin Linux 6.0 is a very capable replacement operating system for Microsoft Windows. It is also a bother-free alternative to other Linux distros that suffer from the usability issues of the Gnome 3 or Ubuntu Unity desktop interfaces. The Zorin Linux distro is an offshoot of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux...