tracker

Anyone who has tried to lose weight knows that two things work: diet and exercise. Hiring a personal trainer might help motivate you to exercise, but studies show that keeping a journal actually helps dieters stick to the plan. That's where Calorie Balance Diet comes in. It's a free utility that makes it entirely too easy to figure out just how many calories you need to achieve your dietary goal, and what foods you should and shouldn't eat to help you stay on track. It also helps you keep useful schedules and records.

A simple wizard lets … Read more

QuoteTracker streams real-time stock prices, news, and other critical information directly to the investor's desktop. It enables direct trading with major online stockbrokers and services; provides dynamic historical charts, real-time intraday charts, and streaming Level II quotes; and supports major subscription data feeds and email alerts. It has a few extras, too, like multiple portfolio management.

Like most programs designed to pack as much financial information as possible in a defined space as quickly as it can, QuoteTracker's main interface is a busy affair, but it's similar to financial news and reports, and you can customize many … Read more

Timeless Time and Expense provides a simple tool for managing the complicated world of client billing. With helpful tools to help you organize and calculate expenses, this is a fantastic tool for those who make their living on billable hours.

The program's interface was impressively simple, considering the complex work it handled. We didn't need to visit the Help file's instructions because the onscreen direction was intuitive enough to keep us on track and quickly billing. We were able to divide our time between clients and projects by creating a simple file tree display. Beginning and ending … Read more

Smart WorkTime Tracker provides a unique twist on the traditional billable hours tracking software. Its simplicity and accuracy make this a great tool for those who need to track the time spent on a project.

The program's interface was surprisingly simple to operate. We were able to easily navigate through its few intuitive commands without having to divert to the Help file's tutorial. This kept our interaction with the program to a minimum so we could focus on work. The program really set itself apart from other time-tracking software because it could be set to automatically track time … Read more

Given its name, Perfect Diet Tracker had a lot to live up to. We've seen a lot of programs of this sort that were mediocre at best, so we admit that we were a bit skeptical at first. However, Perfect Diet Tracker may actually be deserving of its name; it's among the best we've seen.

The program's interface is outstanding, with a sleek and entirely professional-looking design. Everything about it is easy to navigate and understand. The program contains the typical features that you would expect from such a program; users enter their current and goal … Read more

Small Business Tracker Deluxe provides a wide array of tools for managing a small business. However, its cluttered design leaves a lot to be desired.

We were initially excited that the program opens with a tutorial. While informative, this also worried us because we discovered how cluttered and amateurish the interface was. We were eventually able to operate each tool successfully, but we never felt comfortable because this random collection of commands left us wondering if we'd missed any options. The program offers a ton of seemingly helpful small business tools, from invoice creators and trackers to billing tools, … Read more

About a month ago, we revealed CNET TechTracker beta, a new, free application for Windows computers that helps you make certain your installed apps are up-to-date. After receiving feedback from an army of volunteer testers, CNET now introduces the first general release of CNET TechTracker 1.0.

Here's a crash course on how it works. You download CNET TechTracker to your PC, where it spends a few minutes scanning your hard drive for all your software. After that, every time a new update arrives, you'll see an alert message pop up from the TechTracker icon in the task … Read more

Finding the hot conversation keeps getting easier, but predicting what the next big trend will be continues to be a crapshoot. Palm and Federated Media have teamed up to create a new tool called Trend Tracker that does its best to figure out, what in fact the next top trend will be by analyzing items that are gathering buzz.

The system is a mix of tools that can help spot popular URLs and trending topics before they hit it big. But it's more about organizing that data in a simple-to-parse format.

Included are the current top 30 trending topics on Twitter, which can be stacked up against each other to see what's pulling in the highest percentage of tweets. Each trend is represented over a 24-hour time line, where you can see how each particular trend has gone up or down in popularity.

But 24 hours doesn't tell the full story, which is why the tool will soon expand to keep an archive that covers the last 10 or 30 days.

Along with the top 30 trends, Trend Tracker includes a "Pre Trend Watch" (emphasis mine) which tracks five up-and-coming trends that are about to break into the top 10 based on their velocity--the speed in which tweets on that particular topic are gaining in popularity. These are also marked in the trend archive with a little blue flag.

When I was looking at the tool last week, one of the most interesting things this picked up on was… Read more

Back in the old days of CNET, we had a product I loved called CNET Catchup. It scanned your computer and told you which software on it had updates available. I'm happy to report that we've brought the function back, in a completely new product called TechTracker.

It's a free app. It will scan your PC (at regular intervals if you like) and tell you what you have that's old or out of date. It gives you links to updates as well as user reviews of the apps. Updates come to you from our Download.com … Read more