UPDATE STAR keeps ur softwares up2date

There are plenty of ways to check to see if your software needs updating. You can manually visit the website for each program you run on a regular basis. Or if you'd rather use a method that doesn't take all day, you can install an application that will check for updates automatically.

While we like File Hippo Update Checker and AppSnap, UpdateStar might just take the blue ribbon when it comes to freeware software updaters. UpdateStar won't automatically download and install software like AppSnap, but it makes up for that deficiency by offering a huge library of programs. It catches all sorts of installed and updateable software that the other programs miss.

UpdateStar will automatically scan your PC and search for any of 8000 applications. When it detects those programs on your computer it will check to see if newer versions are available. When you click on an application you get a brief description and a link to download the newer version.

Odds are you'll still have a few applications on your PC that UpdateStar will miss, including any application that didn't have an installer file. But of the update checkers we've tried, UpdateStar appears to be the most powerful.

CD/DVD burner XP4 : freeware

Despite its name, CDBurnerXP is not just a CD burning application for Windows XP. It's actually one of the most full featured free CD and DVD burning utilities you're likely to find for Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

CDBurnerXP 4 was recently released, and it has some impressive new features:

• Support for burning Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and Double layer DVDs
• Support for FLAC audio files
• Disc to Disc copy for audio and data
  
• Save discs and compilations as ISO files
• Support for WPL playlists

While Windows XP and Vista include some basic CD and DVD authoring features, CDBurnerXP is about as full-featured as many commercial applications out there. And it's free. The program is donateware, so if you want to download the latest beta versions you'll need to make a contribution.

MS Office 2008 for MAC

Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac, due sometime after Macworld San Francisco this winter, has been the subject of much obsession among Mac folk ever since Apple started the Intel transition, mostly because the current incarnation of Mac Office, 2004, runs like a dog on Apple's Intel machines and hasn't seen a code change in over four years. While we're satisfied that at least Microsoft is consistent (they often go 4 years between Windows Office releases, too), we were really hoping Office 2008 would've been Office 2007 (or Office 2006).

Lest we digress. There's a new gallery of Office 2008 screengrabs here. We were given an opportunity to see the new software demonstrated, and the rumors about the speed increase are very true. This thing runs circles around its predecessor on Intel hardware, and we're especially geeked about the speed and zest of Microsoft Word. Paginating a 500+ page document on our 2 gHz Macbook Pro only took about 8 seconds. The other thing that's immediately obvious about this new Office is the addition of "object insertion bars" in all the apps, allowing you quick access to objects usually dealt with in other parts of the suite--for example, rapidly inserting a chart into a Word document. Entourage still has a case of the IMAP hiccups, sadly, but its interface has been improved as well. That immobile navigation bar that clogs up the top-left corner of the 2004 version is gone, gone, gone, and we couldn't be happier. All in all, this update appears to be coming along great.

i COPY : make ur printer and scanner a Xerox machine

Don't have one of those newfangled all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/time machines? Well, if you've got a printer and a scanner hooked up to you computer, you probably know that it's not that hard to use your PC as a copy machine. Just scan an image with the one and print it with the other.

The problem is that you might wind up having to use two or three separate programs to do the scanning and copying. iCopy makes the process a lot simpler.

You can either download an installer or a zip file. For some reason the installer didn't work on our test system, but the standalone .exe file in the zip version worked perfectly. The source code is also available.

The program will find your printer and scanner, and let you create copies by pressing the big button. You can also adjust your printer/scanner settings, choose the number of copies to make, and set brightness and contrast levels.

Firefox uploader addon

Uploading files to websites can easily become a chore if you do it enough. Heavy Flickr or YouTube users probably know this feeling as much as anyone else.

If you find yourself doing a lot of uploading, why not consider making the job easier on yourself? The Firefox Universal Uploader add-on for Firefox can ease your burden when uploading files, photos or videos to Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, Box.net, Facebook, Webshots or OmniDrive. Working just like most modern FTP clients, simply navigate to the folder containing the files you'd like to upload, and bounce them across to the destination.

Google Moon

Google has added updates imagery to Google Moon allowing you to see high resolution photos of a place you're unlikely ever to visit. Aside from high res pictures, there are also photos, articles, scientific charts, and links to videos from the Apollo moon missions.

There are even Google Street View style 360 degree closeup images of selected locations, and a text search box for finding specific spots on the moon's surface.

Google's had the moon on the brain this week. The company has also announced its sponsoring the Lunar X-PRIZE contest. Teams around the world are competing for a $30 million prize. All they have to do is land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon. Of course, it costs NASA a whole lot more than $30 million to send the shuttle into space and back without even stopping at the moon. So the odds of anyone designing and flying a ship to the moon for less money than $30 million is pretty slim. But hey, the prize would help recoup some of your costs, right?

PDF addon for firefox : usefull

When you click on a web link that takes you to a PDF document, you can either download it or view it in your browser if you have the right plugin installed. But you usually have to configure your browser settings to either always download a file or always open a file.

Sure, you can open a file with Firefox and then download it, but considering how long it takes for the Adobe Reader plugin to open a file, that just seems like a waste of time.

That's where PDF Download comes in handy. This Firefox add-on gives you more control over how you handle PDF files. Want to automatically download every PDF you see? You an do that. Want to open every file using Adobe Reader? No problem. How about opening every file as an HTML document? Yup, you can do that too.

But probably the most useful option is the default view. Once you install PDF Download, every time you click a link that takes you to a PDF file, a window will pop up asking what you'd like to do with that file.