Reviews

Hailo Is a Hellaciously Good Taxi-Hailing App
April 19, 2013

Chicagoans and Bostonians, you have a new way of hailing a cab. It's called "Hailo," and it lets you grab a taxi by app command, rather than an arm raise at the curb. Hailo is coming soon to New York and Washington, D.C., and already is available in Toronto and several European cities. Hailo is different from some other taxi apps in that its relationship is with the individual driver, not with an entire fleet.

Knoppix Pulls a Lot More Than Its Own Weight
April 17, 2013

Knoppix is a lightweight Linux distro that is anything but light in its features and functions. It equals or exceeds the performance of all the desktop varieties I run in Ubuntu and Linux Mint. It also could easily replace the portability on a stick I get with Puppy Linux. Knoppix, much like Puppy Linux, provides a fully functional Linux distro that boots from a DVD or USB drive.

Tripit Trips Up at the First Sign of Anything Tricky
April 12, 2013

Tripit is a frequent flier travel organizer. It claims to sculpt your mishmash of itineraries, dinner arrangements and meetings into a functioning, unified whole -- all accessible through your mobile device. The idea is that you email your airline, and other itineraries to it, and it then "does the rest." That's a big claim, and in my experience big claims in new technology concepts often don't deliver.

Need a Great Archive Utility? Give PeaZip a Chance
April 10, 2013

PeaZip is a handy utility for reducing the size of large files and archiving different files into one big container. Unlike most file compression tools for Linux, PeaZip's user interface makes it easy to manage. When it comes to zipping and unzipping files, simplicity counts for most everything. PeaZip is a cross platform file and archive manager available for Linux, BSD and Windows platforms.

News360: Getting to Know You at a Snail's Pace
April 05, 2013

News360, a learning news aggregator for Android, has recently been updated. I decided to take a look. Uniquely, this app uses a thumbs-up button style of interaction in combination with collected statistics to provide stories that are supposed to be customized for you.

Chakra: A Simple, Strong Energy Center for Your Desktop
April 03, 2013

Chakra is an unusual Linux distro that rethinks what the Linux desktop should be. It gives users the tools to do it their way. This interesting approach to learning what makes Linux tick, however, is not a good starting point for first-time Linux users. I was intrigued with Chakra's ground-up reconstruction and the notion that developers need to keep it simple, stupid (also known as the KISS Principle.)

Relax and Sleep: Whatever Floats Your Dream Boat
March 29, 2013

Relax and Sleep Plus lets you choose and play ambient sounds that might help you sleep. I tried this app during a grueling jet-lagged visit to London. The UK has a seven-hour time difference from Los Angeles, which is my home base, so my day started there just as I normally would be going to sleep. For me, the net result of the time change was sleeplessness in the dead of local night.

Speedy Synapse Fires Up Searches and Launches
March 27, 2013

Synapse is a desktop utility that adds speed and convenience to finding files and launching applications. It does not eliminate the Linux distro's menu, favorites bar or panel icons. Instead, it cuts down on how often you resort to using them. A semantic-based tool that makes use of the Zeitgeist engine, Synapse is a graphical launcher that pops up when you call it with the Control-Space key combination.

All Things Appy: 5 Best Android News Apps
March 27, 2013

With the unexpected news that Google's RSS feed reader, Google Reader, is being put out to pasture, many users are scrambling to find new tools for news consumption. There are still plenty of excellent free news apps out there, and here's a look at the top five available for the Android platform. Google Currents is a pretty, magazine-like aggregator with a true offline solution that works well in airplane mode.

Pie Control Pro Is a GUI Delight
March 22, 2013

The early-90s Windows 3.11 operating system offered a graphical user interface that was a breakthrough for me. It was, in fact, my first GUI. I'd been using command-line, error-prone MS-DOS for two or three years before that, and it was a delight to suddenly be able to maximize screens, switch programs, and point around with a mouse, after living with the syntactically regimented MS-DOS.

Sigil's E-Book Editor Is a Bestseller
March 20, 2013

If you package e-books in the EPUB format, one of the handiest editing tools available is Sigil. The growing interest in mobile apps and e-reader devices such as Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook is fueling the e-book business for both reading consumers and authors.

Slices Pro for Twitter Cuts Through the Chaos
March 15, 2013

We're seeing an entire genre of Twitter clients proliferating within the Android ecosystem -- each app with its own idea about the best way to interact with the monolithic, 500 million-strong social network. OneLouder's Slices Pro for Twitter is the latest client to grab my attention -- not least because it provides a way to browse Twitter directories by category to find the best Follows.

NEdit: With Great Power Comes Not-So-Hot Usability
March 13, 2013

The creators of Nirvana Editor, or NEdit for short, consider it paradise for writers. I found, however, that it's not yet the perfect text editor. NEdit is currently in version 5.5, so it is not a newcomer to the text editing scene. I tried it with the hope that it would bring a few new tricks to my aging collection of text editors

Storage Analyzer: A Must-Have App That Has No Business Being Free
March 08, 2013

I've been running into major headaches with file-storage memory on my Android tablet. If you too have been having problems getting files to fit on your device, it may not be that your device's memory or SD card is full, but that phantom files are hogging resources. I'm usually -- carefully -- buying cheap gear. In the device business, that usually means limited on-board memory.

Precise Puppy Is a Fast, Furious Distro
March 06, 2013

Puppy Linux is a distro I keep coming back to. No matter how entrenched I become with any flavor of Ubuntu -- sans the Unity desktop -- or Linux Mint's Cinnamon and KDE desktops, nothing can beat the speed, convenience and reliability of Puppy Linux on a stick.

'Blender Master Class' Gets A+ in 3D Graphics Instruction
March 05, 2013

Blender Master Class is a must-have for anyone who uses or even plans to use the Blender graphics tool. It is a learn-by-doing guidebook that takes all the frustration and guessing out of the Blender equation. Author Ben Simonds is a professional 3D artist and co-director of Gecko Animation Ltd.

OruxMaps Lets You Go as Far as Your Mapmaking Skill Takes You
March 01, 2013

Have you ever considered becoming a cartographer? It's not as hard as you might think. I've been trying out OruxMaps, a map viewer for Android that functions two ways. One mode is online with the usual suspects like Google maps, OpenStreetMap, and so on; the second and more intriguing method is offline with maps you've created yourself. Creating your own maps, while not hard, is a project.

Fuduntu: An Innovative Old Linux Revisited
February 27, 2013

If you subscribe to the view, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," perhaps Fuduntu is the Linux distro most ideal to your computing needs. Fuduntu was first released in 2010 as a Fedora-based Linux distribution. Its developers forked it the following year. The result is a Linux distro that has a user desktop experience somewhere between Fedora's functionality and Ubuntu's user-friendliness.

Slick Syncing May Sell You on Firefox for Android
February 22, 2013

I've taken to browsing the Web with a mobile device like a duck to water, despite the generally appalling user experience. I remember well the days of balancing hot and heavy Dell laptops on my middle, recumbent on a sofa -- peering awkwardly at an obscurely angled keyboard, lap getting hotter and hotter. Relief came when the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet debuted in the U.S. in November 2005.

Fedora 18: Nice Tweaks to the OS, but It's Haunted by a GNOME
February 20, 2013

Fedora 18, dubbed "the Spherical Cow," was finally released on Jan. 15 after seven postponements that stretched two months beyond its scheduled six-month release cycle. Despite some noteworthy improvements overall to the operating system, I found little about Fedora 18 to justify adopting it over other Linux distros or upgrading to it from an earlier version.