4 great tiny applications
Sometimes we come across little applications that improve day to day PC life in small but excellent ways. Here are a few recent ones you might like to try:
Jonathan Riggall
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Save Game
A few months back, a National Videogame Archive was launched in Britain, aiming to preserve videogames that might otherwise be lost. I’ve been playing games of one sort or another since I was a little kid, and I have no idea what’s happened to most of them. Games are an important part of our social fabric, and it would be a great loss if elements of gaming history disappeared.
Time Waster (for when you’re alone in the dark): Closure
While winter still has some legs, Closure is a fantastic way to while away dark evenings. This browser-based black and white puzzle game cleverly utilizes the movement of light sources to help guide your silent character to the exit of each level. Control is from the keyboard, and the start of the game is a comprehensive tutorial, so you’ll have no problem picking it up. You can only stand on what you can see, so for example if the ground you are on loses its light source, you’ll fall to your doom (and begin the level again).
Free point and click action!
Telltale Games are currently the biggest proponent of the once almost dead ‘point and click adventure’ genre. During the 1990s, when computers got powerful enough to handle good 3D graphics, all of a sudden the genre went in a spiral of decline, leaving a generation of gamers pining for the likes of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure (as James mentioned recently) and Broken Sword.
IBM’s new fastest ever super computer
IBM is building a super computer, Sequoia, for the US government that is expected to break current processing speed records by a huge margin. It won’t be ready until 2012, but should run at 20 Petaflops. I know, it doesn’t mean much to me either, but that’s 20 quadrillion calculations a second. Yeah, I wasn’t sure what a quadrillion was either (it’s 1,000,000,000,000,000, if that helps). Most news sites are saying it’s equivalent to over 2million laptops.
Webmail never stops
With Yahoo Mail and Hotmail having been revamped recently, and while Gmail continues to develop, I thought it might be a good moment to step back and look at their relative benefits. I’ve had active Yahoo and Hotmail accounts for a decade, but over the past couple of years Gmail has become my emailing home – so if anyone wants to accuse me of a Gmail bias, it’s true, I have one!
No connection? Here’s Gmail Offline.
New this week from Gmail Labs is “Offline”. As the name suggests, this allows you to access your Gmail when you can’t get connected to the web. It requires installation of Gears, which is a Google plug-in for Firefox and IE that allows them to store certain information so it can be accessed offline.
CintaNotes: Help for cluttered desktops
Spending much of my day at a computer, my daily routine leaves my desktop in a mess: A ton of browser tabs open, various documents and more. It’s like a chaotic to do list – it’s easier to leave a tab open than find it again later, I say to myself. It’s probably not great for my terminal’s performance.
Puzzle Quest Sequel to drain your free-time
Back in 2007 I got dangerously hooked on Puzzle Quest, then on my DS. Despite being a mix of two things I wasn’t that keen on – puzzles and fantasy RPGs – I found I couldn’t put it down. The story was pretty basic, but gaining abilities and the feeling of relief at beating the generic fantasy opponents was palpable, while defeat was crushing.
30 Years of spreadsheets
You probably didn’t experience them till much later, but 2009 is the 30th anniversary of the beloved spreadsheet. Developed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, it was said to be the first application that turned computers into serious business tools.
Enter the world of indie gaming
The rise of game download portals such as XBLA, Virtual Console and PlayStation has presented a flurry of retro games and weirdly innovative titles. PC users needn’t feel left though because there’s a thriving indie scene producing tons of games, many which are free. While these are not the 3D, high production value epics we pay for, they do provide some unique experiences. They represent great time wasters with some fiendishly hard and addictive gaming – perfect for these difficult economic times. Here are a few of my recent stand-out indie experiences:
Limewire makes sharing sociable
Sharing music is something I’ve always done, but I have to admit that the internet has made the experience a bit cold. It’s easy, sure, but not as personal as in the past when it was all about giving each other cassettes. P2P file sharing is impersonal at best, and obviously has legal “issues” when it comes to copyrighted stuff.