Where do you go when you need to install new applications on your Windows systems? Most guys I know prefer to go to filehippo to do the downloading of regular softwares. You name it and you have it on Filehippo. I have started to use Ubuntu for quite some time now and I have used an application of Ubuntu called Ubuntu Tweak which makes downloading quite a breeze and apart from that it has a helpful list of apps which gives me enough soup to kickstart or to motivate me.

Today I came across similar application like Ubuntu Tweak for Windows. It is called Basefield App Store and quite apparently it seems like the season of applications stores. This application makes downloading third-party software quite easy. When you download applications through Basefield, it creates a sandbox around the installed app to keep your system safe from any kind of malware.

If I think about a normal computer user then this kins of app store is certainly very helpful. Users can download new applications safely in one click and they can remove them as well equal ease. There are currently very few applications on the store yet there are some popular ones like Abiword, Audacity and Irfanview etc.

I believe there is definitely a space left wide open to conquer and Basefield could be the one but it will will need lot more support from third party software developers in order to do that.

The popular Outlook Extension Xobni is now hooking on to additional data sources . It is the outlook plug-in that saves you time finding e-mail conversations, contacts and attachments. For a few day ago Xobni integrates with Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoovers.

Data from all of these services appears in the Xobni sidebar in Outlook. And it is already added with Linkedln.

Now when a users is viewing a person records in addition to showing the user the Outlook history, it will also look up communications with that same person on Yahoo Mail, and let you connect with them on Skype.

More interesting, I think, is its expanding hooks into social networks In addition to its previous Linkedln support, it will now troll through Facebook and return information about a highlighted user, such as their recent status message and picture. Nice stuff!

Hoovers, has also its own tab in Xobni’s contact information panel as well, which displays information about a sender’s company based on their e-mail domain. Company size, stock symbol and basic contact information is culled from the Hoovers website.

With all these new features, Xobni has become an even more useful tool for building an informational web between one’s Outlook e-mail and existing social networks.

VoxOx is the first unified communications client which has been launched by San Diego based startup TelCentris.

It is the first universal communicator providing free VoIP, IM, video conferencing alongwith SMS, fax, e-mail, and content sharing. All of that is possible with just one client which is currently compatible with Windows Operating Systems and Mac OS.

We have seen applications like Pidgin and Adium which allow you to communicate across different email providers. But VoxOx is the first to combine this service with free voice calling which pits it against the likes of Skype. It does provide all the services that Skype offers to its customers.

There are other interesting features such as call management, call forwarding capabilities, SMS triggered call connecting for cheaper international rates, the ability to upload your own hold music and integrated soundboards for prank calling.

It’s currently supported on Windows and Mac with Linux support coming soon. You can also send free text messages and make free voice or video calls to anyone using VoxOx. You happen to get 120 minutes of free calls to telephones. You can purchase credit for additional calls, or pay a monthly fee for an unlimited calling internationally. VoxOx will soon add the Video Ads which will allow users to win some free points which they can redeem. It seems like we might see some more activity in this space.

Bfilter is an ads filtering HTTP web proxy which completely removes the ads which hinder in your browsing experience. Unlike Adblocker on Firefox which can only work on Firefox or Flock, Bfilter puts the trap on your complete system which means no matter what browser you use, you won’t see tose ads. It can remove banner ads, Java script, flash and many other types of advertisements. It has a built in java script engine which detects pop ups and javascript generated ads. It is free for download and it works on Windows, Mac and Linux systems.Additional features include:

• Persistent connections and HTTP compression.
• Altering HTML code using regular expressions.
• Forwarding to other proxies, including Tor.
• Whitelists, Blacklists and hints list.
• Forwarding to another proxy.

Unlike many other ads block tools but Bfilter relies on analyzing and filtering web code, rather than a blacklist or whitelist, although you can edit the filter to add individual sites or servers to be blocked.

Okay I stumbled into a very cool application today which I believe has a great potential but needs some serious work on the development side to make it happen. The concerned application is called bNews and it has been created by Sobees.

I currently use Google Reader and I am pretty contented with it but I have always fantasized about a RSS reader with newspaper like layout. Of course there are some RSS readers which come with that kind of layout but the look and feel of bNews comes closest to my desires.

bNews look like this:

and I have highlighted the keywords in yellow at the top which are being searched and thus shown by bNews. Actually, I was under the impression that bNews would be an application where I could read all the news feeds in one place but later it turned out that it will only search for the keywords you want to know about. bNews finds the data from across the web regarding (and the web here means google, flickr, wikio and twitter) the searched keyword.

Everything is okay with it, I mean the guys have done the foundation quite well but the whole thing still leaves a lot to desire. You can see in the image above that I have subscribed news for three keywords ( EA fifa 2008, Twitter, geek) and the reason behind this is that you can not subscribe for more keywords than that. I personally don’t like this kind of limit and it is reason enough for many to deprive themselves from using this desktop application.

Further installation was not the smoothest because it requires .Net 3.5 and it was not available on my PC. I also feel that there are some changes that could be brought about to make this application more useful. The limit of maximum three alerts must go, it should also give me complete article on the bNews page instead of the link of the story or image.

I would also appreciate integration of RSS feeder into it so that I can read NY Times or Techcrunch directly in here. I don’t think that guys behind it would like to do so but it would be great to have my news and other feeds in such a layout. I have tried and later discarded some RSS readers which have that newspaper like feel but nothing comes close to bNews.

Scobees actually has an application which is a dedicated RSS reader; along with some other desktop applications but they are not open to public beta so I am yet to try it, but whatever I have read about it, one thing is sure that it doesn’t look like bNews.

One more thing that bugs me about this application is that users can not read the same news or story twice. I would have liked to write about the videos but you gotta watch them before you say about them. For some reason the videos opened in a separate window but there was nothing like media player in that window. I checked the internet connectivity and it was actually buffering the video but how would I know unless they have some media player which says “buffering…” or something like “your video is being downloaded.” All I got was an open window with nothing inside.

I really like this application and I think it’s like some “geek love at first sight” for what it looks like but then there are more reasons to keep me away from using it. It is half baked product right now and it needs some more work into it. May be you would like to try this and see if it does nice job for you.

IBM released its free productivity suite titled Lotus Symphony in June and we decided to give it a try for readers of Realgeek. Lotus Symphony is a very neat suite which consists of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications. It is based on an earlier version of Open Office but it’s interface seems very much inspired by Microsoft Office.

Symphony has utilized the tab function of web browsers which makes it a very worthy competitor of Open Office. The new word documents open in a new tab in the same window which gives you an impression of web browsing. No matter which document type you want to create it will only open in tab. This tab functionality certainly makes things simple for the user and also saves system resources.

Since it is based on Open Office so it can also open and edit files of ODF format. It can not do the same with the newer 2007  version of Open Office. The files of supported applications can be saved as Open Office 1.1 or Microsoft 97/2000/xp file type.

Symphony also incorporates a web browser which allows you to open the web links in a file. The browser doesn’t fancy anything extraordinary but it does simple tasks quite well which is web browsing.

Symphony is a simple application suite which addresses the simple (and frequent) needs of businesses and individuals. Its competition was never with Microsoft Office and it doesn’t do that either frankly but it scores well against Open Office with its simple and better interface.

It definitely deserves one try because of its leap over its beta versions and the fact that it is free.

I bet you have to convert files for your personal purposes from time to time. There are some softwares in the market which can do the same for you but very few of them are free of cost. Today I would like to tell you guys about two ways both Offline and Online methods to convert your files.

Offline method:

Super Media Converter is the best file conversion tool you can ever imagine and the best part is that it’s completely free. Super can encode most file types but its strength lies in encoding .

The fact that it is freeware means that you can encode files of any size. I suggest that if you want to download one file conversion tool then it should be this one. The downloading link is bit tricky to find on the Super website so it would be better if you go by the directions on this page.

Online method:

Zamzar does online file conversion and it supports many file types. You can create a free account which has some limitations like encoding files up to 100 Mb but Ithink you should use Super for bigger files. Zamzar is nice utility to convert small files of various formats.

There are very few media players which strike the chord from the utility as well as design perspective. Kantaris Media Player happens to be the one which has got cool looks as well as tremendous usability.

Kantaris is based on VLC Media Player so it can pretty much play any file type you can imagine. The best thing about Kantaris is that it is suave for playing both videos and audio files. The inbuilt last.fm plug in will appeal to all the music lovers who already obsessed with this great website. Kantaris has almost all the features that you find in VLC Media Player while it tries to give a hard battle to iTunes in audio department.

There are visualizations and equalizer (windows media player style) and the most bizarre thing about it has to be its looks. The user interface of Kantaris is pretty unconventional and it also allows users to view apple movie trailers in the player itself.The media player is absolutely free and it can be downloaded from Kantaris site.

The VLC player is the swiss knife of media players. You can throw any file towards it and rest assure that it will play. Okay, it wont play real media files but still there is hardly anything of the same league. I use it daily and I never felt the need to use any other media player. It plays almost every video or audio file type you can imagine and its ability to play video as a wallpaper is just awesome. In spite of all this many users tend not to use it because it lacks style. The user interface is pretty simple and not many users particularly like it. But the fact remains that it cover ups its lackluster styling with enough muscle it has to play videos and audio files.

SM Player is a nice alternative for those who have not adopted VLC Player as of yet because of its too classic interface. SM Player has a nice interface derived from that of windows media player. It has all the features that you see in VLC player but lacks the “wallpaper feature.” The media player also sports some additional buttons which allow you to fast forward by 10 seconds to one minute. Overall it has everything to make your movie viewing experience hassle free. It should definitely be in your computer if you don’t have VLC player. I missed the wallpaper feature though which it lacks. Still I would say, go for it.

Windows Task Manager does not give you complete information about the internet usage. It only sums up all the bytes of data sent and received on your PC which is not what we would like to know in case a particular application is sucking bandwidth without our knowledge. Its important to have an idea about what application on your PC uses more bandwidth and why to keep your systems secure from online threats. Hackers might be using your bandwidth to get crucial data from your PC without you knowing what application they are exploiting.

You can get information about every single application and the amount of data it is downloading or uploading through a smart application called Net Limiter. It allows you to keep a watch on your internet usage completely while you can also allocate the broadband to particular application as per your need or want. A personal firewall functionality gives you the freedom to allow or deny application that connect to web.

The feature of remote administration will help you monitor traffic on your network of computers. I used the top end version which can be evaluated for 28 days at most while the freeware version lacs lot of its features. The free version only comes with network monitor and traffic statistics which is definitely not bad for a general user.