Project and task managers have always been needed as a part of a work process. Today we have lots of available as desktop and web applications. Some of them are paid services and some of them are free for anyone to use and track their work. Task Coach is one of the free solutions and it is available for quite some time.

Task Coach is primarily focused on things that people expect from one task manager to have. Therefore it has a simple interface we have seen so many times in various applications which is formed of a single menu line, button bar, and two panels below with shortcuts to common operations presented with icons. Beside standard operations related to tasks like adding, editing, deleting, viewing, categorizing them, and some others we will mention some interesting ones too. For instance in Task Coach every task can have a budget, which enables you to track the money spent on individual projects or tasks directly. It can be tracked through hourly fee or fixed fee respectively. Tasks can be created by simply dragging an email message from Outlook or Thunderbird mail clients directly onto the task viewer and they can be exported to html or csv formats while efforts can be exported to iCalendar/ICS format as well. Output file format from Task Coach with tsk extension is a plain xml file which is one more good thing and you can easily process it.

Task Coach is a great tool for tracking efforts of your employees for instance or tracking your own efforts while working on projects. It is still marked as alpha but it is very stable and we had no problems with usage. It is also regularly updated and maintained so watch out for new versions.

The world of modern browsers is changing every day and companies are always racing to offer something new and innovative. We have already explored some of the innovative approaches, which mostly had specific usage, and now we are taking a look at SpaceTime browser which throws in a third dimension instead of conventional and known tabbed browsing.

SpaceTime browser main window contains only menu line with standard options, address line, and search field. If you type in some search words into that search field and press enter, you will see a third dimension in action right away. The first page will show search results while behind first window you will see some already opened pages from search results. If you click on one of those, first page will disappear and selected page will fly right in. Double click will maximize selected page so you can fully interact with it. This approach is also implemented when you manually enter the address in the address bar on top of the window. Newly entered address will slide in instead of one already being there which will slide out. Of course previously entered pages wont disappear and will be available all the time for you to slide to them. SpaceTime also directly supports Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Flickr, YouTube, and RSS Feeds.

This tool and its innovative and interesting concepts definitely is worth trying. If nothing else, just to play around with third dimension and see how interesting it can be. It has potential but it also has some flaws mainly related to application optimisation and stability but they are rarely noticed. For those who don’t want to download and install the application there is also a web version of it and it can be found on this location.

Usage of GPS systems in the world is in constant growth and it is becoming easily available for average users also through portable devices. Maps are still expensive and they are usually static, with few information, and a little interactivity depending on the device. New trends are coming and considering the fact that some people like to do things on their own we think that Waze is a great tool which you might want to check out if you are behind the wheel most of the time.

Waze is all about maps, locations, and road information and that becomes clear when you look at its main phrase which is stating that Waze is a way to go. It is one enclosed application which includes and depends strongly on community and sharing real time road conditions and events with other users. You can do that by putting them on the map, which is based on United States Census Bureau TIGER map in order to speed up the process of map creation, and it will be constantly updated and expanded by users themselves. Those conditions and events include traffic, road constructions, accidents, police traps and speed cams, available parking spaces, and everything else you think it might help other drivers and all those things are placed on the map which you can interactively use. Although it seems that Waze is yet another navigation application it is not quite true, because it is not designed to guide through unknown places and it will only help you facilitate your driving through known routes.

Waze is currently available in San Francisco Bay area, Chicago, and Boston and on GPS enabled phones with Android. Luckily for everybody other phone platforms are being developed as we speak and they will soon  be available. It is free, opened to the community, and can be very helpful to everybody on the road. If you want to contribute you can do it easily by joining and you can also benefit from its usage.

There are loads of tools available for ripping audio CDs and making MP3, WAV, OGG, and other types of files out of it. Some are well known and widely spread, some are not, but all of them usually do the job nicely. Differences are often small and it really depends on user preference which tool will he or she use. FreeRIP is one of the tools you can use for the task.

FreeRIP comes in small package and has a simple user interface. It supports MP3, WAV, WMA, FLAC, and OGG Vorbis types into which you can rip your audio tracks. What is interesting is that it offers you to convert multiple audio tracks into one single audio file which, for instance, you can use to make compilations. Other features include typical things for this kind of application which is track volume adjusting, ID3 v1 and v2 MP3 tagging, play list generator, etc. All that is nicely packed and easily available even for not so experienced users. The ripping process itself is pretty straightforward and is done through few simple steps. Check the tracks that you want converted and check the corresponding button. It really can’t be more simple. After that you will get converted files and you can process them further or do whatever you want with them.

Beside this free basic version you have also a pro version of this tool which is of course a paid one. The only difference between the two is in little speed, multiple instances, and the fact that pro version has exclusive support forum. We think that basic version is really enough for daily conversion needs and it has all that is needed.

We all know how things get messy and how our computer get slower with new applications, files, and registry entries and when things become unbearable we usually have two choices. One is a fresh and new systeminstallation and for other one we can choose an application like CCleaner which can clean up a mess and refresh the system.

CCleaner is basically an optimization tool which combines a system cleaner that removes unused and temporary files along with fully featured registry cleaner. Directly supported windows components include almost all modern web browsers like Internet Explorer (temporary file cache, url history, cookies, etc.), Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari, along with recycle bin, clipboard, temporary files, log files, recent documents, run history, memory dumps after crashes, chkdsk file fragments, etc. Beside windows components this tool will also take care of some third party applications including Nero, WinRAR, WinZip, Adobe Acrobat Reader, etc. As for registry cleaner, it offers a rich set of options to check like file extensions, activex controls, uninstallers, shared dlls, fonts, invalid shortcuts, etc.

It was also built to be safe and secure so therefore it has multiple checks in place in order to ensure it does not delete any piece of information that you might still need. On top of that it also offers secure file erasing thus making it impossible for someone to recover such data. It also comes in a variety of languages to choose from and current count is thirty five languages in total.

It certainly is not the only tool for this type of jobs out there, but It is free, does the job, and is a very useful tool to have in your collection. Take it for a spin and clean the mess in your computer.

There are a lot of specific applications out there which you can use to chat, send files to other people, or just send quick messages. What would happen if we were to combine all them into one single application which can run on our phone or even personal computer? People from Nimbuzz thought just that and made it available to all of you who want it.

As we said Nimbuzz combines several applications like ICQ, Skype, Google Talk, and Yahoo into one mega package. It is available for phones and can run on Symbian, Java, or Windows Mobile platform. However this application is not only available for phones only, which means you can run Nimbuzz PC on your computer also. This packed application lets you swap files, chat, call, and all other things you could expect from similar applications. For instance if you are at home, using your computer, you can send a Buzz to a friend and it will start Nimbuzz Mobile application on his or hers mobile phone. Of course he or she has to install it first in order for that to work. Same goes for phone to phone Buzz. Although it is all in one place, sometimes can be hard to navigate as phones are limited in that way, while computer version is without that problem.

In order to use Nimbuzz you have to register your account like for any other service out there. It integrates most popular services into one and basically acts as a manager. If nothing else at least you can give it a shot and see how it looks to have all those things in one place.