Completely Customize Windows 7 Logon Screen With Logon Workshop

Most of us don’t really like sticking to one thing for a long period of time; it gets boring gradually. Similarly, watching the same logon screen every time your PC starts up can get monotonous. Unfortunately, Windows does not provide any native tool for customizing the logon screen, but there is a wide range of third-party applications for this purpose, with different customization options like changing the logon screen background, logon button set, text and branding. However, not all of these tools come packed with every one of these options. Logon Workshop is a logon screen customizer for Windows that sets itself apart from other logon screen customization utilities with its comprehensiveness. The tool lets you fully customize your logon screen from the wallpaper to the placement and appearance of each screen element. It provides a few sample logon screen design templates that you can use to quickly create your own custom screens. Read More

Merge Email Newsletter Subscriptions Or Unsubscribe In Bulk With Swizzle

We surf around the internet, and every now and then, subscribe to newsletters of different websites, which results in a flooded inbox. At times, all these emails cause important messages to get lost in the mix, or at least, make it extremely hard to filter them out. Getting rid of all newsletter subscriptions isn't the only solution in this case. Introducing Swizzle, a web app that helps solving the unwanted subscription problem. It scans our email account for all subscriptions, and lists them for us. From this list, we get to choose the subscriptions we want to keep and those we want to get rid of. In case you decide to keep a few subscriptions, Swizzle allows you to group some or all of the subscriptions and receive their newsletters in one single email in the form of an all-in-one digest, allowing you to choose the days and time of the day you would like to receive it.  Read More

Batch-Rename Files By Custom Rules & Add Media Metadata To Names With FiRE

When trying to rename files in Windows, we only have two options - we can either rename files one by one, or select all required files and rename them at once. Howwever, renaming in bulk will give all the files the same name with serial numbers at the end, which is why most users take help from third-party tools for batch-renaming purposes. FiRE is a portable file renaming Windows application that allows users to set file renaming rules and patterns to rename groups of files in one go. Like other renaming tools, it offers modes that append a specific keyword to existing file names, change its position in the file name and insert blank spaces. Additionally, you can use the metadata file rename mode to append metadata such as artist, year of release and album name to the names of multimedia files. Read More

Preview Links, Photos & YouTube Videos Within Selective Websites With SwiftPreview For Chrome

Have you ever opened a link from a list and later forgot which one you clicked? In such cases, you have no choice but to go through every link on the list one by one. SwiftPreview is an extension for Chrome that shows a preview of any picture or link in a customizable window when you hover the mouse pointer over it. You don’t need to open a link to see what it is about; you can use this extension to take a peek at its contents without leaving the current page. This can be particularly useful for twitter users, as it also supports shortened URLs. However, that's not all the extension has to offer. With SwiftPreview, you can disable previews for selective sites, pin previews to the browser window and play YouTube videos right within pinned previews. Needless to say, it is one of the best quick-preview extensions out there and a must-have extension for people who don't like to navigate back and forth between web pages. Read More

Clipomatic: Quickly Access & Save Clipboard Text As Permanent Snippets

Have you ever copied an important link or block of text, and before pasting it, copied something else over it accidentally? Due to the limitation of Windows' native clipboard manager, which holds only one item at a time, most users rely on third-party clipboard managers to extend its functionality. If you've been looking for an application that can show you all copied text items, and let you choose the ones you need, we recommend giving Clipomatic a whirl. It's a simple clipboard manager for Windows that offers both hotkey and context menu support, allowing users to quickly paste the text into required applications. What makes it unique from other clipboard tools is its context menu, which gives one-click access to all the text items that you copy to the clipboard. Sadly, the tool doesn't support image and rich text format, though, you could could turn lack of support for the latter to your advantage by using the tool to remove formatting applied to copied text. Another noteworthy feature is its ability to save most frequently used text snippets as Permanent Text Items, so that you can easily access them from its context menu. Read More

EaseUS CleanGenius Offers 20+ System Maintenance, Optimization & Other Utilities

System cleanup and optimizer software come in handy when your PC starts experiencing performance issues. Most users download and install multiple cleanup and optimization utilities to enhance the overall system performance and carry out regular system cleanup operations. Users looking for an all-in-one system maintenance package, need not look beyond EaseUS CleanGenius, an application for Windows that offers a comprehensive solution for almost all types of system cleanup, optimization and performance issues and maintenance tasks. The major features other than cleanup and optimization include file splitter/joiner, driver backup, uninstall manager, file encryption/decryption, empty folder finder, file shredder, shutdown scheduler and more. Read More

Launchbar: A Powerful Application Launcher With Multi-Monitor Support

Looking for an application launcher with multi-monitor support for launching programs from both primary and secondary display monitors? Launchbar is a freshly-baked open source application launcher that hosts a number of features with an option to specify command arguments to customize the functional behavior of your most frequently used applications. What makes it unique from other application launchers available out there, is that it supports multi-monitor setup; using the Configuration console, you can specify the display monitor from where you want to open the menu for accessing the specified applications. Just like any other app launcher, it allows creating submenus for organizing applications into different groups. Apart from menu-specific customizations, it comes packed with options to set the opacity of the launch bar and set the size of the launch bar as well as the options menu. Sadly, it doesn't support launching multiple applications at a time, but you can create a batch script file containing the location of your apps, and add it to the menu. It also contains an option to set application's process priority, which is applied to the application every time you launch it from the launch bar. Read More

RecThing Is A Social Network For Personalized Entertainment Recommendations [Web]

Have you already seen more than your share of films and TV series? Can’t find any thing good you haven’t watched yet? Try using the RecThing entertainment recommendation engine. RecThing asks you to like, dislike or recommend a few books, films, games, music and TV series, and then, depending on the gathered data, it finds other users with similar tastes for you to follow. Later, you see recommendations from these users in your feeds. Read More

Voxeet Redefines Conference Calling With ‘Natural’ 3D Voice Perception

Have you ever been in a conference call online? So, you do know how it usually is; the voice quality is all muffled and choppy, there is a lot of background noise, you can't tell the voice of one person from the other, and if, for any reason, you have to leave your computer and want to continue from your smartphone, you’ll have to end the call and call everyone from your phone again. Voxeet makes sure that you don’t have to experience any of this ever again. Voxeet provides high quality voice transfer, better participant voice perception using 3D technology and high mobility using your smartphone. Read More

Search & Summarize Articles From Major News Sites, Twitter & Wikipedia With Skimzee [Web]

At times, an attractive title leads one to a long article with little to spark one's interest. It would be helpful if we could just read the salient points or highlights of the article, and then decide whether to read the rest or not. Skimzee is an online service that is designed exactly to do that for you. It lets you search, summarize and read articles off of Twitter, major news websites and Wikipedia. It provides a slider that can be used to define the length, or rather, the detail of a summarized article. If you read a summary and find it interesting, just move the slider to the extreme right to show the complete article. Read More

LearnBoost: Free Online Class Reports & Management For Teachers, Students & Parents [Web]

LearnBoost is a completely free online class management system that consists of a group of apps to manage a single classroom or a whole school. The apps can help manage grade books, lesson plans, class roster, seating plan, schedules and attendance.  LearnBoost is primarily designed for teachers, but the grades and attendance part of the system can also be used by students and parents, which is a great way for students to evaluate themselves, and parents to keep an eye on their children’s performance on a daily basis. LearnBoost’s interface is easy to use and provides complete control over every option there is. The web application has much to offer, so we will briefly go through its salient features. Read More

Digital Pigeon: Send Large Files Through Email From Web, Desktop & Mobile

Email services like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo do not allow attaching large files, let's say, 300 MB in size. The maximum combined size allowed for files attached to an email is 25 MB. Digital Pigeon is a comprehensive solution for sharing large files via email, particularly for businesses. It allows you to send files up to 5 GB in size and tracks them for you, i.e., it notifies you if your sent files have been accessed by the recipient. The latter is one of quite a few accompanying features meant for businesses, such as security for private emails and file download page customization for, say, press releases or newsletters. Digital Pigeon claims to provide "fastest uploading and downloading" through Amazon's secure file hosting network. In addition to speed and security, the service comes supports instant previews for media (video, audio or image) files. Read More

Flutter Ported To Windows, Lets You Use Hand Gestures To Resume/Pause Media Playback

Plugins and third party support for media players comes out almost every other day to enhance the overall media experience. Some plugins add better library options, some provide hotkeys, while others bring support for a wide range of audio and video codecs etc. Most advance users rely on third party extensions to extend the native functionality of the media player. For instance, lyrics plugin for Windows Media Player and Winamp lets users automatically download lyrics of the songs and embed them into tracks' ID3 tags. Similarly, tag organization add-ins are programmed to download the album art and other missing tag information, like year of release, artist name, original track number, album name etc. A few months ago, we covered Flutter for Mac, an application that allows users to control iTunes and Spotify using hand gestures. It has recently been ported to Windows, with support for additional media players, including Windows Media Player and Winamp. As of now, it can only play and pause the media file, but the developer will add more gestures for track navigation and changing playlist shuffle mode in the next iterations. Flutter requires nothing except a webcam to detect and read the hand gestures. When it reads the pre-defined (play/pause) hand gesture, it immediately plays/pauses the current track and displays an on-screen indicator. Read More

Get A Lag-Free PC Gaming Experience With Wise Game Booster

When we mention electronic entertainment, the things that instantly come to mind are games, movies and music. Being an avid gamer myself, I know what it feels like when a game lags. There are many tools available out there that can help you optimize your PC for gaming. We recently came across a fairly new PC optimization utility called Wise Game Booster. It assists you in resolving performance issues in games by optimizing your system processes and services. It lists down all the processes, threads and services that can be suspended or turned off in order to reserve maximum system resources for your games. Upon launch, it analyzes both user and system-initiated processes and services, and marks all those services and processes that may interfere with games. You can choose to suspend the processes and services or force-stop them with a click. Read More

Privacy Manager Is A Control Panel For Chrome Security Settings & Junk Data Cleaning

Having too many extensions installed in Google Chrome can be very messy. Personally, I prefer to keep only those extensions that can perform two or more functions for me, instead of using multiple single-feature extensions, just to keep things tidy. Recently, I came across a feature-rich extension for Google Chrome called Privacy Manager, which allows users to manage privacy settings, manipulate security options, and perform browser temp data & history deletion operations from a single window. In addition, it also lets you quickly open any active page in incognito mode (private browsing mode). Read More

Bananatag Tracks Sent Emails & Provides Detailed Statistics For Them [Web]

Particularly useful for users looking to get feedback for email-based advertising or awareness campaigns, Bananatag is a web application that not only lets you track your emails, but also shows detailed analytics including click, open and detailed location stats. With Banatag, you no longer need to keep wondering whether the recipient has read your email or not. The service notifies you via email whenever a recipient opens a tracked email or clicks a link within it. You can sign up for free, but the free account is only for a single user and is restricted to tracking only five emails per day, using all available metrics. Read More

Wise Program Uninstaller: Powerful Third-Party Application Remover

Microsoft works hard on improving their operating system, which can be noticed by comparing Windows Vista and Windows 7, but they always overlook the add remove program tool. Uninstalling a huge application software suite from Windows, using Window's native tool, can be very irritating at times, as it might not be on the uninstallable programs list of the add remove program tool, and even if its there, upon uninstallation, it might leave behind its residues of registry and system files. To deal with this problem, most users opt in for third-party tools like Geek Uninstaller, Revo Uninstaller etc. Today, we came across a similar utility called Wise Program Uninstaller, which lets you easily remove software and their left over data and registry entries. Read More

Payhip Lets You Sell Your Ebooks Online For Free Through Paypal [Web]

Writing a book can take days or even months and then to find a publisher for it is no picnic, but have you ever tried selling your ebooks online? If not, then try it using Payhip. Payhip is an online platform that lets you sell your ebooks online for free, without having to go through all the trouble of finding a publisher , using the secured services of Paypal. Signup is absolutely free and the best part is,  Payhip does not charge any thing for their services. All your profits are yours to keep. Read More