PaltalkScene’s integration of video, audio, and text chatting unified into one window makes for a strong chatware program that includes a wealth of features.

Parental controls employ a password to change settings or block groups; adult content is hidden by default and all rooms are moderated. Add in the room ratings of G, R, and A, and safe chatting is a cinch. Right-clicking a person’s name gives a user-defined amount of personal information, with private room invite and file sending options. Sessions can be printed and saved, and buddy lists from other chat accounts can be automatically imported. Latest updates include screening rooms to share online videos, music feeds from Rhapsody, and multiplayer games in case you get bored talking.

However, the abundance of pop-up ads, which strike even while you’re in the middle of joining a room, might motivate users to pay for a subscription or look elsewhere. Free accounts only can open Webcams for a few seconds, while paid users can open multiple video windows. The application crashed when closing, and the system slowdowns were disappointing. Uninstalling Paltalk left an icon on the desktop. Still, the thousands of rooms for politics, karaoke, tech advice, and porn mean that anybody can find a connection on Paltalk.

Quiz time: What do
CustomizeGoogle, GooglePreview, and
McAfee SiteAdvisor have in common?

Answer: The ability to improve on Google search in the Firefox browser. For example, does this scenario sound familiar: You accidentally click on a sponsored link and have to return to the main results page to try again?

How about this one: You wasted 10 minutes clicking through search results because you can’t remember the link by name, but think you can identify it by sight (so you check them all)? Or worst yet: You stumble on a dangerous link and get bogged down with malware that takes hours or days to fix. Terrible!

Yep, that trio of plug-ins we mentioned helps you avoid the common pitfalls that add up to a lot of wasted time. The best part about the extensions–other than their being free–is that they’re compatible with each other, so you won’t see any crashes if you choose to install all three. Watch this Insider Secrets video to see how they work.

The Lightning add-on for the open-source e-mail client Thunderbird (for Windows and Mac) updates officially to Version 0.9, and Mozilla promises that it will be the last one before it’s rolled into Thunderbird 3.0.

Lightning provides Thunderbird with calendaring and e-mail-invitation abilities.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

This update doesn’t introduce quite as many new features as the last one did, but there are still plenty of major changes. Interface enhancements include a visual indicator for events that span multiple days, an overhaul of both the “minimonth” calendar in the upper left and the main day/week/multiweek/month calendar views, a progress indicator for when remote calendars are loading, and support for the Today pane in both calendar mode and task mode.

The guts of Lightning have been strengthened, too. CalDAV support and interoperability with CalDAV servers–the bits of the extension that send your calendar data back and forth–have been improved. Support for e-mail invitations, the iMip and iTip, has been improved, too. Although many of the major bugs that afflicted this feature were overcome in v0.8, 0.9 is even better. Also, memory consumption has been reduced, while various leaks have been plugged. Overall, the extension works better than it ever has at calendaring, and is more suitable as an Outlook replacement than it used to be .

For those who use the Lightning nightly builds, these changes are old hat. Except for one glitch that I experienced in August, the nightly builds have been impressively stable–at least for my needs.

You can read the Lightning release notes, and check out Sunbird for Windows and Mac, the stand-alone Mozilla calendar (if you don’t use Thunderbird). It sports nearly identical features, except for e-mailing invites.

The open-source firmware for portable music players, Rockbox, just updated to version 3.0. Along with the upgrade, three years in the making, comes the RockboxUtility. This makes it even easier than before to install the firmware on your MP3 player, and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

RockboxUtility is meant to start off with an error.

(Credit: The Rockbox Crew)

The first time I looked at Rockbox, its appeal was obvious–especially to iPod users who were less than impressed with Apple’s laissez-faire approach to iPod firmware improvements. Who wouldn’t like the capability to customize their space-age MP3 player with an old skool retro cassette skin, the capability to enlarge the font size, or having a the device read to you what you were scrolling over? Audiophiles were sure to love the in-depth equalizer, too.

However, the biggest problem was making sure that you configured it properly. The process was complicated and time-intensive, and the old auto-installer was buggy and unreliable. The new RockboxUtility transforms the installation process from a confusing session of manually loading files onto your PMP and then praying that they work into a graphic user interface-based experience, greatly simplified.

The new RockboxUtility simplifies a formerly complicated and buggy installation process.

(Credit: The Rockbox Crew)

According to the instructions on the Rockbox Web site, once the Graphic Install has been installed, the process starts off with an error message that warns you that you’re starting a new installation. There is the possibility that your MP3 has not been mounted as a drive, in which case you’ll need to assign it one. For most people, though, this won’t occur. The utility then guides you through choosing the correct MP3 player, and installing the appropriate version of the firmware.

When finished, you’ll need to safely disconnect your player and then reboot it. Even though the RockboxUtility streamlines the process, I strongly advise reading the manual before playing around with your new firmware.

Image resizing should be a simple problem to solve, except that it seems like everybody and their dog–sorry, cat-lovers–has a lightweight, freeware image editor out there. For example, there’s Image Resizer. The name is simple, the installer weighs in at a rail-thin 357 KB, and it’s free. Can’t argue with that, right?

Image Resizer

Except that it barely works, at least when I tested it. The interface would be fine, back when Windows 3.1 was new. It’s nothing less than a giant pain now that we have such cutting-edge improvements as long filenames. My attempts to convert JPEGs en masse and one at a time were met with errors. If it can’t handle the most popular image format around, it’s not really going to be worth downloading.

Instead, I’d recommend going with a tried-and-true favorite such as the free FastStone Photo Resizer. Able to handle far more than JPEGs, I’ve used FastStone regularly for batch resizings and image conversion. In fact, one of the best things about it is that it can handle both on the fly and simultaneously. The interface is a little bit cluttered and a departure from boilerplate offerings that look like descendants of Windows Explorer, but it doesn’t take long to figure out.

Output formats include TIFF, GIF, JPEG, and BMP. Besides batch-conversion, the application also can batch-rename pictures. Users can even make basic tweaks, including cropping, rotating, resizing, and simple color adjustments. You’ll even find a tool for stamping shots with a watermark.

FastStone Photo Resizer

Mozilla pushed out an update to its e-mail client Thunderbird today. The 2.0.0.17 update, for both Windows and Mac versions, corrects two potential exploits. Centered around Newsgroup functionality and an obscure UTF-8 hyperlink spoof, they could’ve allowed an attacker to execute arbitrary code.

A spate of bug fixes, memory leaks, and other less severe tweaks were addressed, too. The full changelog can be read here.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I was on the bus yesterday during my commute home and I decided to check out one of my latest iPhone apps to see if it worked as advertised. There was a loud-talking person yammering away on his cell phone (why must people do this?) and to get away from the racket, I stuck in my ear buds and launched WhiteNoise.

Simply touch the sound you want, adjust the volume, and relax

(Credit: CNET Networks)

WhiteNoise offers several neutral sounds which are perfect for blocking out annoying sounds and also can be quite relaxing. The interface offers eight buttons of soothing sounds you can start up immediately with a timer if you’d like to listen while you nod off to sleep. A small arrow in the lower-right corner of the screen lets you choose from 22 different sounds which you can move into your top eight for easy access. There are a few variations of rain and thunder storms, droning noises like fans and hair dryers, ticking grandfather clocks and wind chimes, and some sounds that offer ambiance like Amazon jungle sounds and deep city sounds. Almost all of the sounds are fairly good representations of what they’re trying to emulate and the rainstorm sounds are excellent. If you want to block the sounds of the outside world to help you concentrate or drown out those annoying bus passengers, this affordable iPhone App is a great choice ($0.99).

Choose your club, press the hit button, and perform your swing

(Credit: CNET Networks)

iGolf is another recent download for me. When I first saw this free game I was hoping for a real golf game in which I could play a course, but the actual game is pretty fun–if a bit limited. iGolf lets you use the iPhone’s accelerometer to hit golf balls for distance like a portable driving range. Choose from three different clubs, get into your stance, touch the Hit button, and start your swing. It takes some getting used to with the timing of your swing (I heard the club hit the ball on my back swing more than a few times), but once you get the hang of it, you’ll get some good hits. After the initial contact, you get to watch your ball travel past yardage markers like a driving range and iGolf will save your best distances. I like iGolf, but it would be even better if you could actually play through a course using the same system (maybe we can all hope for an iGolf 2). Until then, it’s fun knowing that I can bring a driving range anywhere on my iPhone.

Got a favorite new iPhone app? Let me know about your latest finds in the comments!

A pre-release alpha version of a Mac version of uTorrent, the popular BitTorrent client for Windows, has been leaked to the public.

The details window of uTorrent's Mac client, now confirmed to be in alpha.

(Credit: TorrentFreak)

Available from the Swedish torrent Web site The Pirate Bay, the Cocoa-based client has been expected since 2006 when BitTorrent bought uTorrent and promised to develop a Mac version. There was little said since then, until this past August when uTorrent developer Greg Hazel announced that a Mac version would be ready ”in a few weeks,” according to the torrent news Web site TorrentFreak.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s vice president of product evelopment, responded to the leak by saying that the version currently in the wild was not supposed to get out and is not recommended for use, although he hopes that people now believe him when he says that there is a Mac uTorrent client in the works. There is an official notification list for eager users available at the uTorrent site.
http://mac.utorrent.com/

Certain key features don’t work yet, such as searching. Comments about the app on The Pirate Bay confirm its bugginess. So far it only seems to work on Intel-based Macs, and only those running OS X 10.5 or higher. Because this is an extremely early build of the client, it’s not clear at this point how it will stand up to established Mac torrent clients such as Transmission, how it compares to its Windows sibling, or even if this means that a BitTorrent-branded Mac client is in the works.

Ironically, you’ll need a torrent client to download this torrent client, since it’s only available from a torrent Web site.

[Via TorrentFreak]

If you’ve ever wasted time scouring a long document for every place a specific phrase appears, or worse, have had to look for that phrase in more than one document, you need Rider 8 Tools ($19.95), a slim but powerful search application that finds multiple terms in multiple files within any set of parameters you throw at it.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

For instance, if you need to see every time the term “business plan” shows up within three words of “market growth” in a 50-page document, you would use Rider 8 Tools to quickly peruse it. You could also use it to unearth the combination of terms in a certain folder, or to find those phrases everywhere they appear on your hard drive. (Note: that could take some time.) You can even search among multiple file types–Rider 8 Tools can scour Word and text documents, for example, but not PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, or Excel docs (we hope that changes.)

After searching, Rider 8 Tools gives you a few ways to find the text selections and interact with them. The program’s bottom-right quadrant displays the text with the found terms highlighted. You can use buttons to scroll through selections or can use the tree view in the adjacent pane to pick selections from a numbered list. You can print and copy certain selections, or can right-click and choose to view the selection in the context of the document. Opening the selection in Rider 8 Tools gives you a read-only view; opening it in Microsoft Word also lets you edit.

The DefFind tool lets you quickly identify defined terms for referencing or editing.

(Credit: Rider 8 Software)

You can also use Rider 8 Tools to find words you’ve specifically defined, or a group of capitalized terms that could be phrases you’d like to define. The definition look-up is a major selling point for the legal and academic crowd, for whom defining terms is part art, part science, and wholly crucial to shaping the argument at hand. Even if you don’t regularly compose definitions, the benefits of quickly and thoroughly searching through long or technical documents apply to business and marketing professionals, researchers, and so on.

The application is more intuitive and less complicated than it actually looks, but there is a (limited) help file for each of the three search functions if you get stuck. Spending a little time working with Rider 8 Tools will still be the best way to learn it–start in the top left with one of the three ‘Find’ tabs and work your way clockwise.

Digital music is all well and good, but who wants to type in album and artist information for each track? With TagScanner, you don’t have to. This efficient and powerful tag editor lets you edit metadata automatically as well as by hand, both for individual files and file batches.

The automatic tagging feature is most impressive. Although it can hit up online databases such as FreeDB, Discogs, and Amazon like many other auto-tagging apps, it can also generate tags from file and folder names–that’s something many similar apps can’t do. It works in the opposite direction, too, generating file names from tags. The app supports ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis comments, APEv2, WindowsMedia, and MP4/iTunes tags.

TagScanner has an elegant and orderly interface, and lets you preview file names before applying changes. The only catch is that you’ll need to spend some time learning the program’s file- and tag-naming language. However, if you have thousands of music tracks crying out for organization, that’s a small price to pay.

One of my buddies just tipped me off to a must-have tab management add-on for Firefox. It’s called FoxTab, and it’s a cross between Mac OS X’s Expose, Windows Vista’s Flip 3D, and the thumbnail view in Google Chrome. When you’ve got a lot of tabs open in Firefox, this offers a quick way to jump to the page you want without having to eyeball the name of each one.

To toggle it on you just hit a small keyboard shortcut and it zooms out all the tabs into a giant wall. You can also summon it with a small button that sits next to the address bar, or by choosing it from the right click menu. Once opened, you simply pick which tab you want to see by clicking it, or simply scrolling with your mouse wheel. It’s not nearly as smooth as Tab Effect, an eye candy tab switching add-on Rafe wrote about back in September of last year, but it’s neat nonetheless.

There are five different styles in all, and each one offers a different way to view the thumbnails you have open. My personal favorite is the standard grid view, which can be tweaked to include as many rows as you’d like. Windows Vista users are more likely to choose the stack view, which is identical to Vista’s Flip 3D. No matter what you choose, it’s a pretty svelte alternative to hunting down the page you want by favicon and text alone.

Note: This is an “experimental” add-on in Mozilla’s directory, so you must be registered there to download it.

Related: Surf your bookmarks by thumbnail with Bookmark Previews

FoxTab lets you see all of your open tabs as thumbnails. You can maneuver them with your scroll wheel, or swap what type of view you'd like on the fly. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Me.dium is a free social networking tool for Firefox and Internet Explorer with a twist. It lets you browse the Internet alongside your friends, and even make new ones.

The interface is modern without being obnoxious. A sidebar and a toolbar appear in your browser window. The top panel of the sidebar is a map that lets you view what sites your friends are visiting. The bottom panel of the sidebar lets you view your friends profiles and send messages. Me.dium will definitely appeal to Facebook users because you can send messages directly to your Facebook friends from the toolbar. There’s practically no lag time between creating a profile and when your icon appears on the map. Avatars of friends that you’ve invited also appear quickly, indicating smooth work on Me.dium’s backend. Visibility settings can be changed with a quick click of our mouse. Safe browsing is ensured when visiting secured Web site because the program self-suspends sharing until you leave the site.

If you’re into the social networking, we recommend you give this fun, free application a shot.