This is the video tour

TeraCopy is from Code Sector who make a whole bunch of Windows applications, most of which are available free for home/personal use.

TeraCopy features:

TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user a lot of features:

• Copy files faster. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
• Pause and resume file transfers. Pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and continue with a single click.
• Error recovery. In case of copy error, TeraCopy will try several times and in the worse case just skips the file, not terminating the entire transfer.
• Interactive file list. TeraCopy shows failed file transfers and lets you fix the problem and recopy only problem files.
• Shell integration. TeraCopy can completely replace Explorer copy and move functions, allowing you work with files as usual.
• Full Unicode support.

It integrates seamlessly into Windows and just appears whenever you copy files and it’s defiantly faster than the built in file copy utility.

What I really love is that if it has a problem with a batch copy it will skip the problem file and continue on so that you don’t need to watch it transfer 5000 files for fear of the 50th hanging up the process. If you copy large numbers of files around your system or network then you should defiantly check this out, the paid version is only 15Euros and well worth the money if you need it for a corporate environment.

Yesterday, September 2nd, 2008, Google Inc. launched their own web browser called Chrome. The release itself was rather unique because the day before the browser was available for download Google released a comic book that explained what it was and what made it better than the other browsers in the market today.

So you say, “big deal another browser, how many of these things do I need?” Well as far as I am concerned you only need one, unless you do web development and then you need them all. Is Chrome the one?… not yet, but it has major potential. It’s design is totally different from the other browsers which evolved with the web, it benefits from being built for the web we deal with now.

Key Features:

• Tabs are “sandboxed” each tab runs as an independent process, if something in a tab crashes you don’t have to restart the whole browser and sacrifice the other tabs that were open and running.
• It’s fast, because it’s lean (and there are no add-ons for it yet) and because of the new V8 javascript engine.
• Better memory management as a result of the independent tab processes. When a tab is closed that memory is immediately freed to do something else, unlike Firefox or IE.
• The Omni-Bar, like Firefoxes “Awesome” Bar it auto-fills as you type, the benefit here is that it does not suggest every url you have ever visted, just the ones you have typed in. It also serves as your window to search engines.
• Google Gears is built right in which makes interfacing with Google Docs, Gmail and Wordpress even speedier.
• It’s built on Apple’s WebKit. (Which of course begs the question why no Mac support yet?)

What it lacks right now are the plugins we all know and love from Firefox and I was slightly dissapointed that there is no Mac or Linux version yet and no release date either.

So far I am really happy withe the performance and have not seen any problems with rendering web pages. I love the tear off tabs, which lets me group them into different windows based on content. The Omni -bar seach is really great too, type the letter g and hit tab and it turns into Google Search. It’s had the benefit of being tested against the Google database of websites before it’s release which has allowed them to release a fairly stable beta.

Google needs to get into gear and get the Mac and Linux versions out and get the plugin developers moving if it want’s to survive. I really miss CoolIris and Scribefire.

I found this plugin while browsing TechTreak.com’s list of 35 Most Popular Wordpress plugins, it’s a great list!

My favorite feature of digsby by far is the little balloon that pops up on your main screen with the info you have asked digsby to provide, the best part of this is that if someone sends you an IM you can type your response right into the balloon, no switching to the IM client window, this is really handy if you just need to send a quick reply back to someone and is much less disruptive. The other most excellent feature is the ability to combine multiple contacts into one, if you have friends on more than one network you can group them into one contact on Digsby and they show up with whichever service they logged in under but you only have one contact entry. It also has a great chat widget for Facebook or that you can embed in a blog. What makes that cool is that when someone hits your page you see a guest show up under digsby chat in the Buddy List.

There is also a Mac OSX and a Linux client in the works. I am hoping that they will add other social networking sites in the future as well as a mobile client that way I could use digsby everywhere!

Features

• View your mobile screen on your desktop.
• Control your mobile by using desktop keyboard and mouse.
• Copy/Cut/Paste text between mobile and desktop.
• Capture mobile screen.(Still or Video)
• Drag and drop files to your mobile.
• Support ActiveSync / IP Connection
• Support Mobile Explorer (File Browse)

The drag and drop files to and from will be really useful, and I can sit the phone off to the side with my headset on and answer calls right from my keyboard.

Dropbox in simple terms is a folder sync utility. What makes it unique is that it cross platform, Mac OS and Windows, with Linux support close behind. It has some very slick features that you don’t find in ordinary folder sync utilities. It allows you to share folders across the internet, it keeps backups of changes, allows for resurrecting of deleted files and it provides direct links to folders or individual files that you can email or IM quickly. It uses some smart technology to transfer only the parts of the files that have been changed or updated thus saving bandwidth and making the syncing process faster. It also has a super simple photo sharing, you can put pictures in the Photos folder and share out individual pictures or entire folders and it creates a gallery that is viewable in a web browser. So far I am really happy with the performance and at 2GB the storage is adequate for documents and images. I am willing to bet when they go public this will be the free version and that you will be able to purchase more space and possibly some other collaboration features.

The one thing that is not mentioned in the Dropbox video is what happens if two people have opened the same file and are editing it at the same time. I had to try it to see what would happen, and just to cause even more confusion I saved the files from each computer at the same time ( or as close to the same time as possible ). To my surprise the system didn’t even blink, it saved the version I updated on my Mac and it saved the version I updated on my PC, the system did tag the PC version as a conflicted copy so that I could see the difference. I would guess that this is not going to be a major issue for most people as they would each do their revisions one at a time.

Edit (July 08, 2008) I have 5 Dropbox Invites for the 1st 5 people who leave me a comment telling me why they would like to use Dropbox.

Edit (July 09, 2008) You must also leave me an email address to send your invite to.

Passwordy is a fast and clean password generator that can generate up to 9999 passwords with up to 9999 characters.

It took less than a 2 minutes to generate all 9999, 9999 character passwords. A useful tool if you need to create random passwords for a large group or if you can’t be bothered to come up with a password on your own.

Their next offering is Folderflop This utility is a disk usage viewer. Point it at a drive or folder and it will tell you how much space it is taking up. You can drill down through the folders to see what is taking up the most space. Again there is no installer for it which I like because that means if I decide that I don’t want to use the software I can just chuck it in the trash instead of having to worry about the registry changes and leftover install directories. It’s pretty fast, it took 2.5 minutes to get the listing for my full 500GB media drive.

They claim there is more to come including web services but since they have been working so hard toward the launch of the site, I guess they are taking a bit of a break. They are based in Norway so there is a bit of a time difference as well. So far I like their first two offerings and I am curious to see what else is coming.