Jash’s Blog

Automation is one of the several features that makes a Mac special and more useful. However, I came across a software called VisualCron that gets automation to Windows. Not just basic task scheduling, but advanced automation like setting a list of tasks and mentioning the occurrence, exception and processes of the task. This can bu done just with a few clicks using the user-friendly ribbon UI of the application.

I gave VisualCron a try and was impressed. It allows you to do the most basic tasks like sending a mail or restarting your computer to advanced tasks like taking a backup of your blog using FTP and e-mailing you when its done. You can also set time intervals such as every month and add exceptions to adviod the task to occur at a particular time/month, etc.

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Windows 7 has been there for quite some time now and due to the public betas and RCs, many have moved to Windows 7, even as their primary OS. With Windows 7 tweaks and customizations poping up everyday from Windows 7 users, I have come across Mac OS X’s Stacks implemented onto Windows 7. And with the new taskbar, the Stacks look even more appealing and useful. In this post, I will be covering 2 different Stack applications: StandaloneStack and 7stacks.

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Are you an iCal user? If yes, this app will make you a power-user. FlexCal is a simple Preference Pane for Mac that allows you to set a hotkey for adding Events and Tasks to iCal. Just install the Preference Pane, select you Hotkey and you’re ready! When you press the hotkey, a small window will pop-up where you can enter details like name of Task/Event, Priority, Date/Duration, Alarm, etc. Just fill them in and hit the return key to return to your work.

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Google Chrome is one of the most preferred browsers today. Thought it was launched accidentally while the build was pre-mature, Chrome has gained a significant amount of users and is also preferred over Firefox to some users.

Chrome has only been for Windows as of now and the Mac and Linux versions were under development. However, Google has just released a beta version (which is rather a Pre-beta) of Chrome for Mac and Linux. This build is not very stable yet and Google has warned “DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM!” in their blog post here. But if you are really enthusiastic and don’t mind the little bugs, you can give it a try.

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Mac version
Linux (32 bit)
Linux (64 bit)

MacRabbit, the creators of award-winning CSSEdit have launched version 1.0 of Espresso. Espresso is a text editor with support for HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. More languages are supported via plug-ins. It also enables users to synchronize with FTP, SFTP or Amazon S3, as well as manually browse using the built-in FTP client.The Live Preview feature of CSSEdit is also supported.

Espresso helps you with Coding, Organizing, Previewing, Publishing and Updating your work. It has a really slick interface with great features like Code Sense, Code folding, Smart Snippets, etc. that makes coding easy and clean. Basically, Espresso is the app every developer wants.

Espresso is priced at a whooping 59.95€ (about $80 US). This is one reason that would make a developer think once again before buying. However, you can try before you buy. Espresso has a 15 day trial available. So it would be worth taking a look first.

Need to stay updated with all your TV shows and don’t have the time to hunt for them ?  Here’s the simplest solution to staying updated with the latest episodes of all your favorite TV shows. Its Ted (Torrent Episode Downloader). Ted is a simple cross-platform application that allows you to select the TV shows you watch, it has a complete list with a search feature. After you set your list of shows, it will wait till the air date and then check for the episode on all torrent sites and download the torrent. You can also tell it to start the download automatically in your default BitTorrent client. That’s it! Once it is configured, it will take care of the rest. All you have to do is grab some snacks and watch your TV shows!

Ted is a freeware and is available for Download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

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Mozilla has released the alpha version of its mobile browser called Fennec. Its available for download for all Windows Mobile phones (currently running at 480×640 resolution). As this is just the Alpha release, Mozilla has disabled soft keyboard input, program or add-on updating, and a few other features.

If you want to try out the Fennec alpha, its worth it.

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Postbox is a new E-mail client that was just released as public beta yesterday. It delivers E-Mails, RSS Feeds and Newsletters. I played with Postbox yesterday and found it to be “a beautiful and feature enhanced Thunderbird”. It feels like Mozilla Thunderbird but has more features like ToDo lists and tagging. The interface also looks a bit different with hooded transparent windows and pop-up menus.

So, lets run down through the features of Postbox.

More after the break.

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Tired of having multiple browsers on your computer?  If you are a web programmer, you would need to test a web page on multiple browser platforms, or you might need a specific browser to access specific web apps or services due to incompability or restrictions. Well, here is the solution - Lunarscape. It handles all three of the rendering engines at once - IE (Trident), Firefox (Gecko) and Safari/Chrome (WebKit). When you open a new tab or click on a link in Lunascape, you can tell the browser which engine you want to use. You can also set up certain sites to open using a particular engine.

Developers claim the browser is faster than all others, thanks to its optimized implementation of Gecko. Besides supporting multiple engines, it is full-featured. It has native support for RSS feeds, Podcasts, Password Manager, Form filler, support for mouse gestures for navigation and tons of other tweaks. Lunascape supports its own plug-ins and themes, as well as the add-ons for Internet Explorer. However it does not support Firefox add-ons, which is its greatest weakness.

Lunascape is in all a great browser and everyone should defifitely try it out!

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Gizmo Drive is a free software that mounts almost any virtual hard drive you have, right from ISO, BIN, CUE, MDS, MDF, NRG to the new virtual hard drive (VHD) images supported in Windows 7. Besides mounting the disks, it can also create images from the disks you insert or even burn images to writable media. And that’s not it, it can even set up a ram drive and create password-protected, encrypted virtual hard drives for storing sensitive data. Like most virtualization apps, you can either pre-allocate the virtual drive’s full capacity or allow it to expand on-the-fly !

There are other alternaives like DAEMON Tools, ISODisk, Virtual CD-ROM, and Pismo File Mount, but Gizmo Drive may be the first we’ve seen that’s added VHD support, as well as providint the two features of setting up a RAM drive and protected drives.

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