Filed under: Business, OS Updates, News, Microsoft

You probably knew that a lot of dissatisfied WIndows Vista users had downgraded — some might say “upgraded” — to Windows XP. It was never clear exactly how many people took that step, but it was enough that Microsoft extended the shelf life for XP for a while. Now we’ve a number, thanks to a survey by Devil Mountain Software: nearly 35% of new Vista machines are being downgraded.

The survey used data from Computers that have been shipped in the last 6 months, and included machines that were downgraded by vendors before delivery or by users after the fact. The Register seems to think that Microsoft is shifting focus away from Vista, and instead increasing the marketing effort for its next major OS release, Windows 7. I hardly think these numbers spell doom for Microsoft, but they hopefully provide some incentive to look at why customers are ditching Vista and address their concerns.

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Filed under: Business, Finance, Utilities, Office

Invotrak is a simple to use, online invoicing tool for small businesses or freelancers produced by Draconis Software. While we have covered it before some new additions make it worth another mention.

Basically this is a simple invoice app that you can use to create and track invoices and time sheets for yourself or your small business. You can use limited services for free or pay for three levels of account depending on how many invoices you plan to send.

Updates features include: the capability to upload invoices you’ve created yourself, add line items from time sheets to the invoice and adding reports to your invoices. You can also save your invoices as PDF or TXT files.

You can also read the Invotrak blog to get tips on using the new features and general small business tips - like how to get paid on time.

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Filed under: Business, Utilities, News, Productivity

We’re willing to bet radiologists in Shanghai like to listen to music — who doesn’t? — but that’s not how they’re using iTunes. At Renji Hospital and Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, they’re using it to organize PDFs of important medical research and images that they say are more useful than many textbooks.

You can drop a PDF into iTunes and sort it just like you would with music. That means that the medical documents in Shanghai are searchable, ratable, and can be given multiple different tags. Before iTunes, they were keeping redundant copies of PDFs in directories by category. Now, they only need to keep one of each. So, if you’ve been looking for software that can organize your PDFs, consider an app you likely already have: iTunes!

[via Dr. Dobb’s]

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Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Security, Commercial, Open Source

Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager for the open-source Open Office project, says software piracy also hurts the open-source community, and though it can be argued that open-source is bad for innovation, most of us love the open source community. So does the occasional pirated piece of software really injured our beloved open source projects?

Suarez-Potts thinks it’s bad for everyone including the open source community since pirated software theoretically takes “customers” away from open source projects. For example, a college student might never end up downloading Open Office since he copied Microsoft Office from a friend, but that’s not to say it hurts the money-makers like Microsoft at all. A little bit of piracy helps to establish big company’s products as “the standard”, hurting open source projects even more and making it harder for them to get their foot into a user’s door.

Now we’d like to pose a question: Like the college student used in the example above, does pirating software generally prevent you from trying Open Source software or would you’ve put the cash down anyway even if you couldn’t get it for free?

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Filed under: Business, Developer, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

The clock just turned 5pm, and if you’re like us, everything you have worked on all day has instantly evaporated from your mind (yes, this just happens, we don’t need alcohol). Luckily, we left all those papers on our desk, the scribbled whiteboard, and a monitor-o-sticky notes to help us figure out where we left off.

5pm by QG | Software is a web-based project management suite that provides us the tools needed to get back on track at 8am.

The underlying features of 5pm are fairly standard in the project management world. You create projects and assign them to one or more users or groups. The project can have a deadline, a client, and a priority level. Once you’ve created a project you can add items such as tasks and files. Tasks can be assigned to individual team members and emails can be sent to the group when tasks are finished. etc…

To help visualize your project over the course of its life, there’s a timeline feature that shows your projects and tasks in a “Gantt” style chart. In addition, there is a reporting section that can help determine who is completing their projects on time and who isn’t.

Continue reading 5pm - Project management on time (so you don’t have to be)

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Filed under: Business, Design, World wide web, Office, Productivity, Google

A lot of desktop word processing and text editing apps feature templates you can use to jazz up your documents — or make them look terrible, depending on your opinion. Now Google Docs gives you the same option, with a new template gallery. There are over 300 templates, featuring everything from resum

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Filed under: Business, Security, Utilities, Features, Windows, Productivity, Freeware, Open Source

I’m always on the lookout for apps that can ease my workload or free up some room in my budget, and open source applications are an excellent way for me to accomplish both.

If you’re in the same boat as me, hopefully you’re already utilizing some open source options. If not, I’ve put together this list of two dozen great applications that I have the ability to depend on to keep things running smoothly on my office LAN and customer systems as well.

Some of these you’ll recognize, but I hope that there are some that are new to you as well.

1. PING - I may be beating a dead horse here with my love of PING, but it’s just a great piece of open source. Drive imaging with network and spanning support, password blanking, it’s just an excellent app.
2. NTRegEdit - The Windows Registry editor hasn’t seen many changes over the years. NTRegEdit offers some great additional features like recursive export, color coding, improved searching, and swift edit window below the values list.
3. Safarp - A portable alternative to appwiz.cpl (add/remove programs), it provides a few extra useful features - like silent uninstalls and repairs of Windows Installer-based apps. It also opens in a flash, unlike the clunky appwiz.
4. WPKG - Maintaining software installs on personal in a small business environment can be a tiny frustrating sometimes. WPKG gives you push/pull installs and it can run as a service, so silent installs run transparently with no user ineteraction.

Continue reading 24 Great Open Source Apps for Admins & Technicians

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Filed under: Business, World wide web, Text, Blogging, Web services, Commercial

As if most of the content on the internet isn’t crappy enough, now you can use a web service called Datapresser to automatically generate content for your blogs. I have the ability to only envision the sort of repetitive nonsense that would come out of a program intended to generate text.

Billed as a one-of-a-kind content creation and network management system, really all I see is one massive blog spam engine. While that might be a bit harsh, let’s look at what’s going on here. Datapresser takes some minimal amount of input, like a few links or a Flickr feed, and automatically generates text around it. From what I can see, it then ensures to cross link to your other properties to try to drive up the page rank of linked pages.

When one of the large selling features is “Datapresser can create content that can fool a human reader”, it’s not hard to guess that the point isn’t so much about fooling human readers as it is about fooling Google. And when the lowest-priced plan includes 500 generated blog posts per day, can this be intended for anything but blog spam?

This product is probably legal, and it probably works. But that certainly doesn’t mean that I’ve to enjoy it, or think it is moral. I’m certain that the use of Datapresser to generate web content lowers the overall value of the internet for everyone else, by filling it with mindless, thoughtless crap. What do you think?

[via thenextweb.org]

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Filed under: Business, World wide web, Web services

There’s no question that PayPal is one of the easiest ways to send and receive payments for items purchased on eBay. But since the on the internet auction site was founded, users were able to send checks or arrange payments via other methods if they were more convenient. Now all that’s about to change.

Starting in about a month, eBay will stop allowing users to send checks or money orders as payment for items bought on the US version of the site. You’ll only be able to pay using PayPal, ProPay, credit or debit cards (if the seller has an internet merchant account), or pay for the item upon pickup.

In January, eBay will make sure all of these options are easily available in the checkout section. For example, you’ll be able to enter your credit card information to complete a purchase if a seller is authorized to accept credit cards.

eBay tried to issue a PayPal-only stipulation in Australia earlier this year, but regulators ruled that the move would be anti-competitive.

[via Ars Technica]

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Filed under: Business, Windows, Macintosh, Office, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

Thanks Microsoft. No seriously, thanks. As far as I have the ability to tell, the new .docx default document format in MS Word 2007 and 2008 (for Mac) does nothing to make my life easier, but has certainly made it more of a pain. Even though my office predominantly uses Office 2003, our users are starting to receive documents saved in the newer .docx format, and are unable to open or edit them. Since I happen to be running Office 2007 and 2008 on my machine (it’s a Mac with VMWare Fusion for running Windows), I get to play the role of “mister file converter”.

Well, no longer.

Thanks to our pals over at TUAW, I have the ability to now redirect my office mates to Zamzar’s free on the web file converter. We’ve written about Zamzar before, but this is the first I had heard that it supports Office file formats.

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