I have been using Windows for about 7 years now am over that time, I have used many different apps. Some I’ve only been using for a couple of years, some I have been using for many more. I have seen the evolution of my most favourite pieces of software for Windows right from when they first arrived on Windows up until now where they’ve really matured and become feature rich. These are the applications I use on Windows, my favourite applications, my must have applications.

To start off this list, if I was to only have one application on my computer and I couldn’t have anything else, what would it be. The answer is pretty simple and it would be the same for a lot of people. That application is the best web browser, Mozilla Firefox. I spend about 90% of my computer time inside the Firefox browser which is why it is the most important app on my computer. There are many other browsers to choose from but none is as great, fast, extensible and feature rich as this browser. I have been using this browser since 1.0 and with ever version it just keeps getting better and better and its huge database of extensions allow this browser to do pretty much anything.

Sometimes it can be hard to shuffle through the news on the web and keep up with everyone’s websites and blogs. This is where Feedreader helps out. This is a good RSS reader where you can just import or add your feeds into the app and then it will update so you can quickly go through and read the news from your favourite sites without having to continually visiting websites seeing if they’ve updated yet. Unfortunately this RSS reader is far from perfect with it’s unusual “smart” updating of feeds and its freezing up when loading it with 300 or so different feeds. What makes this my favourite RSS reader is the interface. It’s not trying to do anything different, it’s pretty generic actually, but that is what I like. This application is an important one as it allows me to be updated very quickly.

When it comes to media, the included software in Windows is not that great. This is why I use iTunes for my music and VLC Media Player for my videos. I like the way iTunes displays the music in my library and gives me lost of ways to sort them. It also has good playlist support and now Genius which makes a playlist of related music to one of choosing. It also has a nice album grid way of displaying albums which I find very appealing to browse through. Also it does have iPod and iPhone syncing if that’s not reason enough to use iTunes, although I used it way before I got either of those devices. If you want a player that is like a swiss army knife for media, VLC is it. It plays a massive variety of media codecs, pretty much anything you throw at it. It is also very lightweight and does exactly what you would expect it to do. It is my player of choice for all my movies and TV shows.

Another thing I use my computer for is communication. For instant messaging I use Windows Live Messenger with Messenger Plus! Live. I have been using WLM ever since it was called MSN Messenger and I have always loves getting my hands on future versions of this client to see what features are coming in the future. Unfortunately in most cases, your IM client of choice can either be the official client of the service your friends use or a multi-messaging client, but I feel that most of those aren’t as nice looking or sometimes lack features of the official clients, especially for WLM. The MP!L add-on for WLM brings a lot of extra features to the client. Some of the bigger ones are better chat logs, polygamy mode for multiple clients open and tabbed conversations. There are plenty of other features but those are the I take advantage of.

Another way I communicate with people online is with IRC. There is a large variety of clients for Windows, but my most preferred one would have to be mIRC. The main reason why I choose this one is because it is the one I am most use to. I haven’t really used many of the other ones for an extended period of time but none of them had anything that would make me even consider switching. I like the tree view of the servers and channels and the basicness of the text chat. I also think that having windows inside the main IRC window is pretty cool as not many applications that I’ve used do that.

The last one of my must have apps for Windows is Internet Download Manager, or IDM for short. This is a lightweight download manager that has many features such as queues and synchronization. It also has a really good download accelerator which makes download files so much faster than with the download manager that comes with your browser. This app has definitely saved me many hours where I could quickly watch my TV shows instead of waiting for them to download. I have used a few different ones in the past and this by far is the best and easiest one of them to use.

There are two more that are not essential apps that you need but I do think they deserve a mention. The first one is a paint replacement, Paint.Net. This is pretty much paint advanced with extra features that makes quickly cropping or editing pictures and photos easy. It’s no where near as powerful as a proper photo editor such like Photoshop but it is definitely a must have alternative to paint. The second app is Ashampoo Burning Suite. There is a lot of disc burning software for Windows. Some free and some you have to pay for. This is unfortunately one you have to pay for, but I do think it is worth it. It’s basic interface makes burning any type of media very simple and it can burn all sorts. It is much lighter than Nero and overall a better disc burning software.

Those were all of the software I use daily on Windows. Some of them I use a lot more than others but those are the first pieces of software I install on a new Windows installation. That is not all the software I use those. There are some I just download when I first need them and other I just have installed for fun. These are apps like Chrome, Flickr Uploadr, Last.fm, Skype, Twhirl, uTorrent, Wakoopa, WinRAR, WinSCP, and Whatpulse. I do recommend you try any of the software I’ve mentioned in this post, if you don’t already, and maybe you too will be able to add some new software to your must haves or even find a nifty app that blows you away and changes how you do certain tasks on Windows.

This morning when i was digging through the internet, I found a link on Digg to a Lifehacker post. The post was about there being a way to turn your PlayStation Portable into a monitor for your Windows PC. They also had a video of this in action. Not only can it mirror your computer onto the PSP, it can also use your computer as a display for your PSP in mirror mode. You may wonder why would would want to do this. Because we can. This was fun to play with but I personally wouldn’t use it on a regular basis but its nice to know I can do it and it gave me something to play with.

The requirements for PSPdisp are a PSP with Custom Firmware which allows it to run homebrew, and a Windows PC. To get this going, you first download an installer from the website. It is very small weighing in at about 700kb. Then it’s as simple as clicking the installer and letting it install all the software and drivers or this. You will also be prompted to plug in your PSP so it can transfer a program which allows you to view the screen. After it’s done, you’re all ready to go. Down in the notification taskbar will be the program icon. This allows you to access the setting for the PSP display.

To launch it, you navigate to the Memory Stick icon under game and launch PSPdisp. You will be greeted with a screen asking you if you want to do it over USB or Wifi. I would recommend USB. If this is the first time launching it, it will install the right drivers but after that it will work pretty much straight away. You will see part of your monitor on the PSP screen. By default the quality is medium but you can adjust it to a higher quality, but this will result in a little bit of lag, but its not too bad. You can also change how much of the screen is viewed, fit to screen will show the whole computer screen on the PSP and 2 follow mouse modes which show the resolution up to 4 times that of the PSP’s native resolution.

I haven’t played with any of the other things and I probably won’t. It is a cool thing to play around with for an hour or so. I had it working in on Windows XP in VMware Fusion and on Windows 7 Beta. Both worked perfectly fine as a monitor. I myself couldn’t think of a useful application to use this in but if you wanted it to be static on a stats screen or something in a game, I could see where this would be useful there. If you have a PSP, you should definitely check this out. It’s really cool.

Not all of us are as fortunate as I am to start the new year with a brand new computer. If your current system is anything like my old computer, which I happened to have left behind in 2008, it is probably a little messy and in need for a good clean up. What better a time to do that than at the start of this brand new year. Here are some things that I recommend you do if you haven’t done so already.

One thing that I know many people don’t do is backup their computer. Whether this is just your important documents, or all your user files or ever single thing on your hard drive, having a back up copy of your files is very important. If something was to go wrong and you lost everything, you’re probably going to wish you had a backup of your files, but were either too busy or too lazy (or both) to do that task. It could be as simple as dragging you files over to a few blank DVD’s and burning them, or copying your files to an external hard drive. Make sure you backup as soon as possible, and if you can, have a regular backup schedule for 09. Most modern OS have this functionality built in but there is also software available to make this much easier and somewhat automated.

Everyone has software installed on their computer that they don’t use anymore. This would be a good time to uninstall and delete any programs you don’t use anymore. Along with uninstalling software you don’t need, this would also be a good time to delete files on your hard drive you never use anymore. You don’t necessarily have to delete them for good. You can always burn these “junk” files to a disc for if you ever needed them again. Both of these things should make your system run a bit better and also free up some hard drive space. No doubt that in 12 month time, you’ll have more junk on your computer that needs uninstalling and deleting.

Your computer is not the only thing that get messy and frequently bombarded with more junk that gets pushed aside to deal with later. If your email inbox is anything like mine, it is hit with bacn (“emails that are subscribed to and are therefore not unsolicited but are often unread by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all.”) This includes emails from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg or any email subscriptions you had subscribed to in the past. I recommend that this would be a good time to start taking action against it and whenever one of these messages come, instead of deleting it, archiving it or just ignoring it, go and unsubscribe to stop these notifications. Not only will this help stop your inbox from getting bogged up, it will also be one less thing to think about when checking your email in the morning.

These are just a few things that I think everyone should do as soon as possible. A clean computer is a better performing computer and makes you a more productive person. All of these may not apply to everyone but there must be something that I have said that does apply to you which you can do something about today!

…for now.

Not too long after PDC 08 (Professional Developers Conference) where they showed Windows 7 for the first time, a pre-beta build of Windows 7 leaked onto the internet. I decided to snap it up to play around with for a bit. I did use a little hack so I could get the fancy new taskbar working in this build as it is disabled and hidden away by default. I am so glad I did get this because it has made me excited for this operating system. There are many reasons why, and below are just a few of them from the 6801 build.

I’ll start off with the most apparent new feature in Windows 7, one that I had mentioned above, the redesigned taskbar. The taskbar is now a bit taller than the previous one, and it shows icons by default instead of names of the windows. It works similar to the dock in Mac OS X with your running programs/windows and quick launch all together in the same area. you are free to pin programs to the taskbar by either dragging or assigning them to the taskbar. To differentiate from a quick launch icons and open windows is a orange glass behind the icon. Multiple windows of the same program are grouped together and can be accessed by hovering or clicking over the icon which brings up a preview bar with showing all the open windows. They have also changed the behaviour of the notification area. By default, there are your 3 or 4 main items such as sound, network, windows defender and battery. When you have programs that use the notification area, by default they are hidden. You can however change the options to show there all the time. I think this is interesting as it make the taskbar less cluttered, especially for those of us with heaps of notifications taking up a reasonable percentage of out taskbars. The whole taskbar is a little weird to start off with. i was a bit worried I wouldn’t like it, but it is something you do eventually become accustomed to.

While explorer stayed pretty much the same, the significant improvement was the the sidebar. In Vista, it use to show favourite locations. While it still has that, they have added so much more, including Libraries, Homeshare, Network and Computer and everything underneath them. This makes accessing specific locations much easier in Windows 7 compared to previous versions. Libraries is a great addition to explorer. A library is a virtual folder which hold the contents of multiple folders including you user folders and network shared folders. There are all put together in a virtual folder, with the same categories we’ve been used to such as documents, music, video and such. You are free to add different locations to the library, for example folders from an external source such as USB hard drives. They have also introduced federated search into Windows 7 which allows you to search from external sources. One good example for this that I have used was a Flickr search. This allowed me to search Flickr for picture from explorer, and all tags and information were viewable from explorer, just as if they were local images. One last thing I did notice in Computer was now external flash drives and media cards show the used space bar, similar to hard drives to there. This is a small thing but I wonder why it wasn’t included in Vista.

They have done a bit with the networking in Windows 7. Seeing and selecting wireless networks is easier now. You only have to click on the notification to get the list of networks and connect to them. Also the network stuff in explorer has added a bit. First off, in the sidebar in explorer, you can launch a Remote Desktop Connection to a computer on your local network just by right clicking on the computer name. Also in 7, you now have the ability to make shared folders from other computers made available to you offline, with synchronization as well. The would be great for sharing media over a network and store it on multiple computers without having to copy every time the host machine adds to it. You can store the files offline for you to access and synchronize any changes to the folder on the machine. The last thing they’ve added in Windows 7 is Homegroup. Unfortunately I don’t have another Windows 7 machine to actually play with this feature but by the sounds of things, it is going to be an interesting part of Windows 7.

Dragging a window up to one of the edges of the screen does something very useful. If you drag a window to the top of the screen, it goes fullscreen. If you drag it to either the left or right sides, the window takes up half the screen space on that side. One way this could be utilized is in a copy and paste or dragging situation. You can have 2 windows on either side of the screen at the same time and move stuff from one window to the other. You could also put  2 programs up and use say a chat client at the same time as browsing the web and be using the maximum amount of screen real estate with no overlap between windows.

One major annoyance in Windows Vista was the User Account Control. This lead to people getting very frustrated when doing tasks such as running and installing software with the UAC cutting in with the black screen until the prompt was dealt with. This lead to people disabling it so it wouldn’t be annoying and in turn, it reduced security of the OS. They did a much better job with fixing it so you aren’t tempted to disable it. The prompt is now non intrusive and you can deal with it at your leisure so you can continue on doing your computer tasks without being disturbed by these UAC prompts. They’ve managed to change how this works to make it much more user friendly and give people no reason to want to disable this. Thank you so much for this!

After having a not to pleasant experience with Windows Vista and trying to get it to install drivers for a Intel Webcam, I decided to take it to Windows 7 to see how it handled it. In Vista, I plugged it in and spent about 3 to 5 minutes waiting for it to identify the device, search for drivers, download the drivers and then install them. It does pretty much the same thing in 7, just much faster (just over 1 minute, which for most was the downloading of the driver) and it gives a better indication of what it is actually doing, including download percentages for the driver. It is such a small thing and I am happy it works right in this version.

This is just an introduction of a small selection of some major features coming in the next version of Windows. There is still more to come in terms of features, but nothing that major. Most of the stuff is under the hood which improves performance and reliability. This became very apparent to me when testing this operating system on an older machine, one that would slug with Vista on it. Windows 7 performed pretty well on this older hardware, better than expected to be honest. I really enjoyed using it and if the public beta, release candidates and release versions of Windows 7 are as great as this, Windows 7 is going to be a phenomenal operating system when it come out next year. I can’t wait!

Screenshots of Windows 7 can be seen here. A picture is worth a thousand words so there are an extra fifteen thousand.

Windows 7 was used on an Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz CPU with integrated ATI graphics and 512mb of DDR2 RAM. Experience may differ depending on system.

When the App Store for the iPhone was launched about half a year ago, us Geocachers have been waiting to see how the technologies in the iPhone can be use for Geocaching and enhance that experience. After a lengthy wait with a few third party apps, finally Groundspeak, the people behind Geocaching.com, launched their official Geocaching App. This popped up in the store for a small price of $13.99 NZD ($9.99 USD). I didn’t hesitate to buy it because I thought it would be a worthwhile investment. After a few updates with bug fixes and a couple of extra features slotted in, here is where the Geocaching App currently stands.

When you launch the app for the first time, you are greeted with a terms notice which you have to accept. After this, everytime you will launch the app, it will search for your current location. For a lot of people, this is where your first issues with this app will show up. If you don’t have location services enabled, you will have 3 different popups get thrown at you to “okay” to. This happens everytime you launch the app, unless you enable location services. Otherwise, it will find your location and give you a search page where you can either manually enter a Postal Code, Address or GC code. This will show you the caches that meet the criteria, same as the results on the Geocaching.com website. You can also select search for nearby Geocaches. This takes your GPS co-ordinates and shows you the caches around where you are. If you don’t have an iPhone 3G, this feature is pretty useless to iPhone 2G and iPod Touch users. In the first version of the app, there was an issue with the search coming up with caches you’ve already found. They managed to get it to not show them in an update by entering your Geocaching.com login details into the app. The search is pretty solid and works great when looking for caches. The location services stuff is pretty useless on a non-iPhone 3G device, which is expected.

When you search for a cache, you are given a list of the caches that it finds (unless you enter the GC code.) In this page, it shows you the type of cache it is (traditional, multi etc.) and the direction and distance it is. It also shows the difficulty and terrain info as well as the cache size. When you select a cache, it shows all the same info as on the search results page along with the co-ordinates to the location. From here you can choose to save the cache info into a database, navigate to the place using the built in GPS of the iPhone 3G, or map it which launches Maps.app to pinpoint the location on Google Maps. On this page, you can get the description of the cache, 5 most recent logs, any travel bugs with the cache and the hint. This is all the information you would get from the Geocaching website for the cache, all accessible on the iPhone. If you do choose to save them, you see all the same information but without having to have a connection to the internet. This is very handy if you are going to a place without good mobile reception or you want to store all the cache information so you can access it easily.

Do I think it is worth the $13.99 I payed for it? To be honest, not really. The app isn’t very stable and crashes at random times and when trying to load some saved caches. This can be very frustrating when you are in the middle of nowhere and relying on the Geocaching app to give you all the information on the cache you are trying to acquire. Also if you don’t have an iPhone 3G, a lot of the features of this app are lost. The only useful feature for non-iPhone 3G devices is the ability to save caches onto the device, even then, this isn’t the most reliable app. Only get this app if you are a Geocacher with an iPhone 3G and willing to lay down $13.99 NZD (or $9.99 USD) on this app. It will definitely be a much better experience for you as the 3G was the device this app was mainly developed for. Maybe one day I will get to take this app out for a run with an iPhone 3G and the whole experience with this app will be much much better. Until then, I’d say this app is average at best.

Last week, Apple released iPhone Software 2.2. This update had many new features including Google street view, emoji‘s for Japan, improved performance and podcast downloading. Podcast downloading has been on the list of features people want on the iPhone ever since Apple rejected the Podcaster app. Fortunately I was able to get it onto my jailbroken iPhone and had been using it up until IPSW 2.2. Since I have now had a good chance of playing with them both, I can have give my opinion on these two different ways of getting podcasts into your device.

Podcaster is an application available on Cydia and it does pretty much what you expect, lets you download podcasts right on your iPhone. When you open the app for the first time, you will want to subscribe to podcasts. This is a very simple thing to do where you enter the address of the RSS feed and it will look for podcasts. Then you can select the episode you want, go into it and press the download button, and it goes into the download queue. At anytime, you can press the refresh button and it will look for any new podcasts in any of the feeds you’re subscribed to, and shows you that there is a new podcast available to download.

Unfortunately this app isn’t at well built as I’d like. The program crashes randomly or when you try and give it something to do. This is especially bad when it is downloading a podcast, because you lose what you have downloaded up until the last time you paused or quit the application. Another issue I had was when download, it didn’t hold the Wifi connection. Whenever the iPhone turned the screen off, the Wifi connection would drop shortly after, which would cause the program to crash when you woke the device back up again. To get around this, you ould have to stop your iPhone from going to sleep, which would reduce battery life significantly. The last little grip with it that I had was the slow and somewhat unresponsive playback of podcasts. When you push the play button to continue playing a podcast, you would have to wait a while for it to start playing. Sometimes you would have to tap some of the icons multiple times to get it to respond. These gripes are frustrating!!!

One the other side, we have the new Podcast downloading support that iPhone Software 2.2 brought to the device. For iPhone podcast downloading, you go into the iTunes Store, search for the podcast you want and then tap the download button beside the episode or episodes you want. You do this for all the podcasts you want. This puts them in the download queue and they go and download in the background and go to the iPod app when they are done for you to play. The podcasts pretty much behave in the same way as they do if you synced them over from iTunes. From each of the podcast pages in the iPod app, there is a button which takes you to their page in the iTunes Store so you can download any new episodes when they come.

There are limitations to this app, all of which Podcaster doesn’t have. These include the lack of any RSS feed downloads. You are limited to the selection of Podcasts they have in the iTunes Store. Although they have the majority of podcasts and for most people, have all the ones they would want, but it would be nice if that restriction wasn’t there. Another issue is that you can’t subscribe to podcasts. If you want to download podcasts, you have to manually navigate through the iTunes store to their page and tap the download button. There is no notification of new episodes, no notification of podcasts currently on your device, nothing. It is all manual, no automated downloading or anything. This is something they really missed the ball on because it would make it close to perfect. The last problem I had was with iTunes syncing. In the iTunes application, I have it set that it won’t sync podcasts. You would expect this to mean leave podcasts on iTunes and the iPhone alone, do not do anything. Well what it turns out to mean it sync all the downloaded podcasts on the iPhone and delete them from the device. This is not what I want. I want to keep them separate and I want them to stay on my iPhone and out of my iTunes library. This is by far the most frustrating feature/bug with the podcast downloading and hope it is fixed in the next iTunes/iPhone update.

Both of these app have their ups and downs. For Podcaster, I like having my podcasts separate from iTunes and my music library. I also like being able to subscribe to podcasts and check for updates. For iPhone podcast downloading, I like having the experience the same as when I listen to music and the better integration with the iPhone features and functions. I also like the stability of the whole process and the background downloading. What I dislike about Podcaster is the crashing, instability and unresponsiveness of the app at times. I also wish it could hold the Wifi connection and make the downloading process smoother. It would be nice to also have better integration with the media player already on the iPhone. What I dislike about the iPhone podcast downloading is the whole manual process of downloading podcasts and the lack of subscription and automatic downloading. I also hope they fix the iTunes syncing issues I have because they are just a huge pain in the arse.

As you can see, I am very torn between the two apps. They both have very strong good points, but they also are weak in others. If only each of them could take the strengths of each of the applications and fix all the problems, we would be left with two amazing apps. For someone who manages their podcasts in iTunes and only wants to be able to download podcasts on the road, the podcast downloading in 2.2 is perfect. For someone who keeps their podcasts separate from their music and enjoys a less messy way of getting their media, Podcaster is a great app for that. I hope that they can both sort things out so they can both be used by any podcast consumer.