Virtual Box - Free Desktop Virtualistaion

You may have heard of desktop virtualization if you own a Mac and have looked at products such as Parallels or VMware Fusion. These products help you install and run another operating system within your existing one. For example I run a Windows XP virtual machine from my OS X Mac. Although this is similar to using Apple's boot camp, it enables both operating systems to be active at the same time. You can switch seamlessly form one to the other, or use both at the same time as well as having access to a whole hoast of other features.

Some of the things I use it for are:
-Streaming Windows Media DRM content
DRM content is not currently supported under OS X so it is useful for streaming videos such 4OD catch-up content.
-Platform specific applications
There are many applications written just for Windows and now Mac users can have access to these too. One big use is testing websites in Internet Explorer as this is still the most popular browser.
-Testing cross platform applications
If you develop applications and wish to make them cross platform you can now easily develop under one plaform and test in many. This obsiously has some restrictions but one possible use is for testing audio plug-ins such as VST's.

While I have never used VMware Fusion and not pushed Virtual Box to the limits yet, the initial performance is very good. Video streaming is much better than in Parallels and it seems to be less memory and CPU hungry providing a smoother experience even with my 2.0 GHz Intel processor. It also supports a wider range of both host and guest platforms than Parallels.

The application is not perfect yet and lacks a few useful fetures which rival products already incorporate such as dragging and dropping files from one OS to another and super smart keyboard controls such as using expose and spaces shortcuts when a guest window is active. However, these are all minor niggles and I'm sure they will be worked out soon.
You can work around these issues by mapping host folders as network drives (or even the whole disk if you wish) and relasing keyboard focus by pressing the command key once (in OS X).

The best thing about Virtual Box is the price, it is completely free, no trials, no restrictions, nothing. This means if you have an old Windows disk lying around or are interested in trying out some Linux distributions but don't want to reformat your hard drive now you can free of charge. You don't even have to worry about the VM's taking up massive ammounts of disk space with dynamic virtual disks.

I'm so glad there is now a free (and in my opinion better) alternative to Parallels and Fusion that I've already installed it on two of my friends computers (having only discovered it yesturday). Thanks a lot to Sun Microsystems who developed the product.

Virtual Box

Color Oracle - Colour Impairment Screen Filter

This is a very cool tool that I have been using for a while now which simulates colour blindness on your screen. According to the website 8% of males have some degree of colour visual impairment so this is something well worth considering if you intend to reach a wide audience with graphical content.

The application is available for Mac, Windows and Linux although I have only used the Mac version. It sits in the menu bar where you can change the current filter (there are three types) and also save a screen shot with the current filter applied. It is has a very low CPU and RAM usage so there's no need to worry about it if you have large Photoshop projects open.

Although this has many applications I mainly use it when designing colour schemes for web sites. Content needs to look different enough to be distinguished by the user (such as links etc.) whilst maintaining an aesthetically pleasing design.

The website has some great tips on designing for the visually impaired and explains colour blindness in a little more detail.

If you don't do any form of graphic design it's still worth checking out to see the effects of different types of colour blindness. It's a tiny download and easily removed.
You will be amazed at how different the world can look, try looking at some landscape or animal photos with the filter on.

Color Oracle

Adblock Plus - Ad Content Blocker for Firefox

As the title may suggest this is a great content blocker add-on for Firefox. The add-on sits silently in the corner of your browser and unobtrusively filters ad content from all pages visited. The content removed is based upon a compiled list you select when installing it.

At any time you turn it off, view the filtered content and add unfiltered content to your blocked list such as images and flash elements. The best thing about this add-on is that it works really well and simplifies a lot of ad heavy pages.

I have tried a few ad-blockers but this is the easiest to install, set-up and use and works the best.

Adblock Plus

Sage-Too - Lightweight RSS Reader for Firefox

I have searched for a while now to find a light-weight, neat and simple RSS reader and have tried many that didn't suit my needs. Then I found Sage-Too.
This is a great add-in for Firefox that sits in a sidebar, not taking up too much space. You can set the update frequency of the feeds, the feed folder and how feeds open when clicked on.

What I like about this RSS reader over others is its simplicity and unobtrusiveness. It's automatically there when I open my browser (Firefox naturally) and will discretely notify me if new atricles have been published by a change in the feed's title icon. When clicking on a feed title I can see a list of atricle titles, unread ones in bold, and hovering over them will give me a longer description of the content so I can easily decide whether to view it or not.

You can organise your feeds using Firefox's bookmark manager if you prefer and even create custom subfolders to group similar feeds.

Check it out, it may be just the RSS solution you have been searching for.

Sage-Too