Tool

Most of the time our Macs run smoothly due to the well-designed Mac OS X (choose your big cat) operating system. But over time, as you download more applications, visit more Web sites, and begin to use up space on your hard drive, your Mac won't run as quickly and smoothly as it did out of the box. Some users reason that it must be a RAM or hard-drive issue, but more often than not it's a question of maintenance rather than inadequate hardware.

I've talked about programs for uninstalling old or unused apps in an earlier post, … Read more

REDMOND, Wash.--Amid its analyst meeting, Microsoft on Thursday announced a small acquisition, scooping up Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Datallegro, a data warehousing firm. Financial details were not disclosed.

Speaking at the meeting, server and tools unit head Bob Muglia said that the acquisition will help the company reach the highest-end enterprise data stores, even reaching higher than Oracle can get today.

"We've never been able to do that before," Muglia said.

In a blog about the acquisition, Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus said: "This deal sets the stage for what will surely be a period … Read more

Blogging platform WordPress updated to version 2.6 late last night. It's the latest major release since 2.5, which debuted back in late March and adds nearly as many new features as it does bug and security fixes.

The video above outlines some of the major new features. The most useful of the bunch is aimed at bloggers on the go who can now take advantage of the same Google Gears integration introduced to WordPress.com earlier this month. This "turbo" mode downloads some of the files and scripts from your blog to your Gears cache, … Read more

If you're at work and your co-workers won't stop chatting, there are two options: either tell them to go talk elsewhere or get a good pair of earplugs and/or headphones. If you've gone for the latter and can't seem to get over the concentration hump of focusing with music blaring, there's SimplyNoise, a white noise generator that runs right in your browser.

I've had a white noise loop kicking around on my iPod for years, and it doubles as a great way to get in the zone for napping. In SimplyNoise's case, … Read more

Studyrails is a relatively new tool for students who want to get their class schedule and study time synced up. It's mainly a calendaring tool, but thrown in is a mobile reminder service, and a forceful lock-out system that will keep you from slacking off on your computer when you're supposed to be studying.

The core calendar product is one of the more interesting efforts I've seen. After you've plugged in your class schedule, you have the option to schedule in study time. You guesstimate how much time you'll need for each discipline or project … Read more

One of the key concerns for any fledgling start-up is overload. Too many users trying to get at your data is one thing, but dealing with the onslaught of notifications and data pings from connecting services can be quite another.

A new start-up called Gnip is trying to solve this problem by acting as the middleman. Got a service like Twitter that's getting attacked in a thousand different directions by services trying to get at that data? Sending any new bits of information to Gnip will keep that attack coming on their end instead of yours, which will hopefully … Read more

Hot on the heels of Monday's look at Apture, competitor Zemanta has pushed out an update to include several new publishing platforms--one of them being MySpace, a site with over 100 million registered users. It's a good bet a chunk of those active users are taking advantage of the service's built-in blogging tool instead of going to another service like WordPress or LiveJournal.

Once installed, writing a blog post on the popular social network can be sped up if you take advantage of its auto-linking, tagging, and image finding capabilities.

The core service still remains largely the … Read more

Apture is a new tool for bloggers to add a little more context to their posts. Like Yahoo's Shortcuts it will go over what you've written and add little pop-ups in places where you link to other sites or media items from around the Web. The big difference is that Apture can either do all this automatically or let you to do the legwork.

It's set up to work with popular sites like Flickr, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Scribd. Any link to one of those sites will simply enable whoever clicks on it to see the entire entry … Read more

Google is expected to unveil on Tuesday a tool that measures Internet use to help advertisers identify the best places to buy ads that will reach their target audiences, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The measurement tool, which will be offered free to advertisers and their agencies, will compete with services offered by established leaders Nielsen and ComScore. While those services base their estimations on selective surveys or customer panels, the newspaper said, Google's results will be based on data collected from Web servers, providing a deeper and broader picture of Internet behavior. By giving away the … Read more