What's New

The introduction of cloud hosting services such as Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive have made it fairly easy for computer users to synchronize data between multiple devices.

All that is required is to install and run the sync client on these devices to do so, and even if no client is available, it is always possible to use a web service instead to access files.

While that is great for many purposes, it means that the data is stored on the Internet on servers of the selected company.

When Google released the Chrome browser for Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system it included a basic version of Chrome OS in the browser.

Whenever you would run Chrome in Windows 8 mode, it would display a Chrome OS-like bar at the bottom of the screen that acts as a taskbar in the operating system.

The developers at Google have added a similar option to Chrome for Windows 7 in the most recent Chrome Canary builds.

I noticed the change in build 39.0.2144.2 and while I did not have time to check, it is likely that Chrome Dev users can access the feature as well.

Keeping track of TV shows can be quite the daunting task if you like to watch several of them. While it may be easy to keep track of some air dates, you may have troubles remembering exact air times or networks the show airs on.

DuckieTV is a new Chrome extension that you can use to keep track of TV shows you are interested in. The extension is available in two versions with the first replacing the browser's new tab page with a calendar view while the second makes the calendar available after you click on a button that it adds to the browser's interface.

Firefox 32 will be released to the stable channel of the web browser later today. With it comes a change to the browser's main context menu that replaces some text labels with icons.

The commands back, forward, reload, bookmark and stop are no longer displayed as text when you right-click a page in the browser but as icons that are aligned horizontally.

Microsoft has not made any public statement up until now in regards to how the next version of Windows will be named. Most experts believe that Windows 9 is the most likely name for it for a variety of reasons including that its two direct predecessors were named Windows 7 and Windows 8.

What has been clear for some time is that Microsoft wants to get away from Windows 8 and everything that is associated with the operating system that did not perform as well as the company hoped it would.

Mozilla will release the Firefox 32 final to the stable channel in the coming 24 hour period. In addition to that, the organization will also move all other channels to the next major version in line.

This results in the release of Firefox 33 Beta, Firefox 34 Aurora and Firefox 35 Nightly in the same time period.

While the update has not been released yet officially, it is expected that the update announcement will be made in the next couple of hours.

As usual, it will be made available to the bulk of users via the browser's automatic update feature.

Whenever you start a Windows PC for the first time as a developer, you may need to make certain configuration changes to adjust certain settings of the system for development purposes.

Maybe you need to enable debugging options, configure crash dumps, or certain environment variables. While you can do all of this using standard Windows controls, tools like BellaVista may speed up things a lot.

Pixlr has been available as a web version and application for Android and iOS for quite some time. It is a popular application judging by the ratings that it has received by users that can be used to manipulate photos in several ways directly on the phone or web.

This includes among other things options to add effects to the photos or to create collages with just a few clicks.

Pixlr for desktop has been released a couple of days ago bringing the functionality to Windows and Mac desktop systems.

Microsoft abandoned Windows XP some months ago and while some users moved on to other operating systems, others are still running windows XP.

The main issue here is that Microsoft won't release official security patches for the operating system anymore which leaves it vulnerable to exploits discovered after end of support.

The integration of the Start Screen interface in Windows 8 introduced several new features that were not present in previous versions of Windows.

While it appears that Microsoft will remove some of the options in desktop versions of the upcoming Windows 9 operating system, it is likely that they will remain more or less the same for touch-based systems.

ModernUI Tuner is a free program for Windows by WinAero that gives you options to tweak those settings to your liking.

A bug was discovered back in mid 2012 that caused the Firefox browser window to lose focus under certain circumstances when Flash contents were played in it.

What this meant is that Firefox users had to click on the browser window to make it the active window on the system again even if it was the active window before.

The system the bug was encountered on was a x86 Windows 7 operating system with Flash 11.3 initially but other systems such as Windows 8.1 are also affected by it according to user reports.

The Windows Device Manager may have its uses but it is certainly not the best tool when it comes to displaying a quick overview of installed hardware devices or in this case USB devices.

While you can find some information there, especially if you click a lot to look at detailed information, it is simply not suitable when it comes to a quick assessment of connected or installed hardware.

USB Device Tree Viewer has been designed to provide Windows users with such an overview for all USB-related devices on the system.

My Android device, a Moto G, has been running slower than usual lately and one of the reasons why that has been the case is that it was about to run out of space.

Back then I purchased the 8 Gigabyte model and while sufficient in many ways, it became apparent quickly that free storage was running out quickly.

All-In-One-Toolbox is a free app for Android devices that brings along with it more than two dozen tools that you can run on it. One of its core tools can recover free space and RAM on the device.

Keeping track of all games that you play can be quite the burden. It is not if you only use a single platform to play games on, say Steam or Origin, but if you use several, install games on their own, play Flash games and maybe also emulates games, then you may be forced to use multiple means to manage them.

While you can add third-party games to some clients, Steam supports this for instance, it is not possible to add Flash games for example as you can only add executable files to these clients usually.

It is easy to connect external devices such as mobile phones, USB Flash drives or external DVD drives to a PC.

The devices get picked up automatically usually and are available for use afterwards.

All devices allow read and write operations by default which may not always be in the best interest of the owner of the system or a network administrator.

Considering that malicious software could spread through the use of these devices, it may be a good idea to limit access rights to read operations only or disable connections of specific device types altogether.