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Now that Apple has released the much anticipated iPad, and we know that all the applications in the iPhone App store can now run on iPad in regular size or in double size to fill the screen. There are certain applications that I think if they are developed for the iPad that will make the iPad an even more amazing device.

1. Dropbox with Editing

This would be great, although you can buy iWork of the iPad, this would work much better because you can edit documents and then synchronize them to all your computers.

2. Newspaper and Magazine Readers

During the Keynote, the New York Times showed an application to read their articles one the iPad in a full screen application. It would be really nice if there was an application that would allow you to subscribe to several Newspapers and Magazines and have them delivered to your iPad once they are released. The 10 inch screen, is a great size to carry and read newspapers and magazines especially for travel

3. Note taking Application

A Onenote-style notetaking application would be a great application for the iPad because users could either use the keyboard dock or a Bluetooth keyboard to take notes whether it is for class or for a business meeting.

There are so many pieces of software available for personal computers and there are so many useful pieces of software with so many features it is hard to learn. I am currently learning how to use Final Cut Express and although I have taught myself how to basically use it, as I have done for many pieces of software before, I decided it was such an important program for me to learn that, I should fully learn it and learn everything so I can get the most use out of it! Here are some tips on how to master software.

1. Buy a Book

Books are probably the best way of learning so you have a tool that is organized in a logical fashion and make sense to learn from. It also gives you a reference to look back at if  you have any questions later on . One of my favorite series of these books is the Visual Quickstart Guides however, if you want to learn any Apple Software, then your best bet is the Apple Training Series because they are approved by Apple and have consulted with Apple when they were writing the books.

2. Get Online Video Tutorials

Search around for tutorials on the web, some may be free while others require you to pay for them. However when learning something visual, video tutorials are very helpful. I know that when I found these great, free Final Cut Express tutorials, they helped me tremendously in learning Final Cut because I can watch them do the work in real time and see the techniques so I can learn them better.
Podcasts/li>
Similar to Video tutorials, podcasts both audio and video will also enhance your learning of the software and will help you better learn the software.

3. Forums and Community Sites

The final resources are just forums and other community sites where users can help each other as well as list problems that they may experience. Many software creators like Apple have offical forums on their website so theirusers can help each other and report problesm they experience.

Now that computers are standard in business and are used for presentations, in schools and other settings as well. However, there are certain things that should be thoguht of and certain things that should be avoided during a  presentation because they look bad and cause people to be uninterested in what you are presenting. These apply to both Microsoft Office’s Powerpoint as well as iWork’s Keynote software, and any other presentation software, it is just theories for computer slide shows.

1. Don’t Over Use Transitions/Effect
   

Although there are plenty of slide transitions and special effects that you could put into your slideshow, they should be used sparingly because they look extremely unprofessional and get annoying after a while. Only use them when you need to emphasize a point and make sure you do not use an effect each slide or item.

2. Limit your Words

When you use a slideshow, it is meant to accompany your presentation and not to have every word you plan to say. Just write key points or words on the slide and say everything else.

3. Make sure you have a Good Color Scheme

When giving a presentation, you need to make sure that you the background colors of the slide and the font text don’t clash with each other and that the words are easily read. Also, make sure you keep your colr theme consistent.

4. Never use Pictures as backgrounds

Pictures are great and should be used in any good presentation, but never have words over pictures because it is near impossible to read and looks horrible. Backgrounds are best left to either a solid color or a slight gradient, as long as it works with the text color.

5. Don’t open your presentation From Your Email

Never, ever open your presentation file from an email, that makes you appear to be unprepared and wastes time that should be spent giving your presentation. Use a thumb drive so you can just insert the drive into the USB port and open it up.

6. Make Sure Elements don’t overlap

Unless you are going for a collage appearance, the elements in you slide show should never overlap and instead or the presentation will look sloppy and will distract the viewers from the point of the presentation.

7. Never use a Plain White Background

Good Powerpoint presentations should have some kind of a background color but, never make it plain white because it will cause the viewers to loose interest in the topic.

8. Never end on content

When you are about to end make sure you don’t go from your final content side to the black end of show screen. You should either have a summary slide to wrap up your presentation or you could simpily have a  slide that says “The End” so it doesn’t just cut out to black.

For those who are sick of Microsoft Office for Mac, which is extremely bulky and slow, iWork is a great alternatives for Mac users. The current version of iWork, iWork 09 only costs $79 for one license and $99 for a family pack that you can install on five computers, which in my opinion is totally worth while if you only have more than one Mac. While Microsoft Office has Word, Excel and Powerpoint, iWork has: Pages, Numbers and Keynote which are the respective alternatives to their MS Office counterparts. Pages is a very well designed and well made Word Processor and does everything that I would need a word processor to do, including opening Microsoft Word documents. Numbers, the newest addition to iWork is a great spreadsheet tool and although it may not have many of the advanced features of Excel, for most people it is more than you need! Finally, is Keynote which I and many others believe is the killer app for iWork it is an amazing presentation tool that surpasses the standard Powerpoint. All three applications have a stunning  template gallery with many templates which helps make documents much easier.

For the price, which is a lot less than what you would pay for MS Office, I highly recommend iWork over Office for the Mac. That said there are a few disadvantages to iWork. First, and probably the most important disadvantage is that you can not automatically save to Office formats making it a little annoying to use Office formats because they are standards many people would like to continue using them. There is however, a modification that you can do to make pages save to .Doc automatically and makes at least one application easier to use. The other disadvantage is that unlike Office, iWork does not have a full email client, like Entourage. However, OSX’s built-in mail client is extremly good and could fill in.

All-in-all, iWork is a great, easy to use office suite for the Mac and is definitely a great replacement for the slow Office for the Mac. I have made the switch out of frustration with Office and I recommend making the switch to this great suite.

Mike Gdovin gives a review and tour of the great Cloud software, Evernote

I have had an on and off experience with Ubuntu and for most of my usage have been very dissappointed in what many people considered to be the best linux distribution and has failed in many aspects. However, when I installed the newest version of Ubuntu on my old Dell Inspiron 6000 I was happily surprised in how much better this version is! First I would like to make a shout-out to Wubi, Ubuntu Installer for Linux,which is probably the best way to install Ubuntu if you are unsure if you want to make it your primary operating system, because all you have to do is download and run a .exe file and install it like a regular Windows program, but then when you reboot, you get a prompt to boot into either Ubuntu or Windows so, it is just like duel-booting without the work of partitioning Ubuntu is a great Linux distro and is definitly worth trying via Wubi because it is no risk!

The first part I was extremely impressed with is the sleek new user-interface, because with older versions of Ubuntu look bad and not nearly as leek as I would have liked. Now, with this new user-interface, Ubuntu rivals Windows 7 and Mac OSX in design. Ubuntu 9.04, also fixed one of the biggest problems that I had which was hardware support, while in prior versons I had problems with sound and wireless, in this version, I did not have to do anything to make my hardware work, everything worked out of the box! I am very impressed by that and I think that will truley help more people try it out if they don’t need to install any extra drivers and hopefully letting Ubuntu work immedietly on installation! Jaunty Jackalope also has a lot of other built-in features that used to need to be done with hacks and complicated processes! This new features are things such as: dual monitor support, built-in disk burning, and many other much need functions.

Now that Ubuntu is so much improved and there are so many great applications for it I think that their installation-base will become much larger and more people will become more aware of Ubuntu. Another contributor to the growth of Ubuntu, I think will be the growth of Netbooks and cloud computing because with netbooks you do not need to have the most elaborate operating system because you are just using an office suite, checking email and surfing the web. I suggest that everyone gives the  new Ubuntu a try and I am planning on trying to cover more linux and Ubuntu on my blog and videos in the near feature.

Apple’s app store was a brilliant move on their part because it is a one stop shop for every iPhone application and because they developed a great payment program, where developers take 70% of revenue and Apple keeps 30% to maintain and host the store. This is great for developers and Apple and if the developer wants to make the application free, then they do not have to pay to host the app. This makes buying and installing applicatioons so simple because instead of going on Google and searching the whole web for a program, you can search a all inclusive store and find every app that meets that criteria. Linux has a very similar model with their Add/Remove Program installer where users can simply check boxes to install linux applications and not need to go onto the internet to get programs although there are more applications online. I think every major operating system should add this function to their operating system and partner with major and minor software developers and try to get as many applications availible.I am not saying the iphone model is going to work for everyone I think they should leave software installation the same as it has always been but develop this “store” to make applications easier to find and buy for the users and less expensive to distribute for the producers and just makes getting software so easy!

What if I told you for the next four days that you could get over $1,000 of software for only $40 and give 25% of that to charity. Well it is true! Macheist lets mac users buy some of the best shareware applciations for a limited time and only for $40! This bundle provides a lot of great apps like: KineMac, a easy to  use Mottion graphics program, Sous Chief , a great cooking application that suggests recipies based on supplies you have, iSale, a program that simplifies selling stuff on E-Bay, Picturesque, a easy image editor, World of  Goo, a great game, PhoneView, an app that lets users view the contents of their iPhone or iPod Touch, Little Snapper, A powerful screenshot utillity, Acorn, a simplified photo editor, and Wiretap Studio, a powerful audio recording utillity. Also, as MacHeist raises more money for charity they will “Unlock” more applications. When they raise a total of $400,000 they will unlock the “killer app” for me Boinx TV because it turns your computer into a video mixer without any  extra equipment. Also when even more money is raised, they will “Unlock”  Espresso, a very powerful web editor and Hit List a great productivity application.

If one application I described peaked your interest, then you should buy it, not only do you get a bunch of great applications but you also give money to charity and help people in need. I suggest that all Mac users invest the $40 and get a great collection of applications  but make sure you do it before time runs out!

It has become the general consensus of technology analists and consumers alike that Windows Visa was an utter flop. Microsoft realized that and decided to ship a new operating system that is significantly better than Vista. It is called Windows 7 and it is a major improvement over Vista!

First of all, it does not demand nearly as high system requirements, unlike and because of that, the operating system is much more snappy! That is very likely the most important improvement because Vista was so slow and did not work on netbooks because they have very low system specs. This also allows the netbooks that people carry everywhere with them to have the newest operating system which makes compadibility much easier.  Secondly, the User Accout cotrols have eliminated the “Cancel or Allow” prompt which made changing system preferences extremly annoying! The final major improvement is the taskbar because, Microsoft has adopted a lot of the ideas behind the Apple dock which lets users find their programs much easier.

I do still have a few issues with Windows 7, the first is the versions there are still six versions of Windows 7, which is an improvement over the numerous versions of Vista but, would much prefer having only two versions, like in Windows XP, a Professional edition for business users and a home edition obviously for Home users. One step better is Apple’s model where they ship only one edition of  the operating system and have all the features availible to all users for the same price. But, Microsoft would probably much rather make money off of  people paying for upgrades. The final issue I have is the upgrade price, they are charging at least $100 to upgrade to  Windows 7. I say Microsoft owes all those people who have been stuck with Vista for the past few years and they are forcing them to pay another $100 to improve. I know Microsoft won’t give a free  upgrade but a $30 upgrade to Vista users would be a nice appology to Vista users and would make people more likley to do the upgrade. They should also, take another hint from their friends in Cupertino and have family packs so that users can buy licences for all the computers in their house and get a small discount.

All-in-all,  Windows 7 is much, much better than Vista and I reccomend trying out the beta version, it is a very stable snappy beta and I believe that it is very close to being a finished product. Although Microsoft has yet to confirm a release date speculation is that it will be released in Augest or September. Vista users should definity invest in the upgrade and XP users should definitly consider it at the very least.

As I mention is Why Firefox Is the Best Browser, one of my favorite parts of using Firefox is because, there are thousands of extentions and add-ons that allow users to add features they want to the Firefox browsing expirence.I use a bunch of add-ons in my installation of Firefox and would like to share them because I think they are the best and want to help everyone get the most out of using Firefox.

1. Bookmark Duplicate Detector- Prevents saving already saved bookmarks and provides an easy way to reduce your bookmarks for no reason.
2. Bugmenot- Saves the trouble of having to sign up for an account with a service when you are only going to use it one time. This site allows people to submit accounts to share with everyone and save the trouble of getting an account for every website.
3. Delicious Bookmarks- Integrates Delicious Social bookmarks into web browsing and helps me add all the best sites I find on my Delicious Account with one click of the mouse.
4. Download Toolbar- Download toolbar allows you to track downloads without having to open another window and saves a lot of screen Real Estate.
5. Foxmarks- Is a must-have for anyone who has multiple computers because it synchronizes both bookmarks and account passwords between all installations and keeps all computers up-to-date!
6. Google Gears- Gears allows people who use Google web services like: Google Docs, Gmail and Google Reader to access therse services even when they are unable to connect to the internet. This is very useful to anyone who is dependant on Google Web Services like I am.
7. Google Reader Watcher- This add-on is a very simple couter to alert Google Reader users of how many unread stories are in their GoogleReader Feeds.
8. Password Exporter- Very simly exports passwords and allows users to modify their password list in Firefox.
9. Picnik- Alows users to simly right click an image in a website and edit it in the online image editor, Picknik.
10. Screengrab- An extremly powerful screenshot add-on that give the user the ability to take screenshots of website and use them how they like.
11. Tab Counter-  It does exactly what it’s name suggests, , it counts how many tabs are open in a Firefox window.
12. Tab History- When you open a link in a new tab it usually does not retain it’s history but, this add-on allows you to go back into the history of the tab.
13. Twitterfox- This is my only Twitter client and the onlky way I update and check Twitter!
14. URL Fixer- Fixes misspellings in domain ending so if you make mistakes like I do typing in domains quickly, then this is a must have.

If you are not already using these add-ons I reccommend giving them a try because they make me more productive and they will help you as well!