information

Autotyping and autocorrecting applications can be a huge time-saver, sparing you from having to retype frequently used words and phrases (and even paragraphs and pictures), and they can instantly clean up your most common typos. Plus, if they work system-wide like Typinator does, they can provide you with functionality that might otherwise be limited to your word processor.

Typinator is a best-in-class example of this kind of app, with an easy-to-manage interface, above-average stability, exceptional speed (keeping up with even extremely fast typists using large abbreviation sets, even those whose keystrokes can overlap), and the ability to handle multiple languages (… Read more

Every computer, router, server, and other device that's connected to a computer network has an Internet Protocol (IP) address, a unique sequence of numbers used to distinguish network participants. Every now and then it's nice to know the name lurking behind the number, whether you're trying to identify the sender of a shady e-mail, a visitor to your Web site, or someone else. IPNetInfo is an easy-to-use tool that quickly delivers all available information about a given IP address. It's nothing fancy, but it's good at what it does.

Using IPNetInfo is quite simple. Users … Read more

We remember when checking the television listings was a matter of looking in the newspaper or picking up the latest issue of TV Guide with the week's groceries. Times have changed, and now people turn to their computers to see what's on TV. TV-Browser is one such option for this information, at least in theory; the program promises to provide up-to-date TV listings, but we found it to be severely lacking, especially for U.S. users.

TV-Browser starts with a setup wizard, allowing users to select their country and then choose the channels they want to include. There … Read more

We recently spent some time digging through boxes of old snapshots at our parents' house, and we thought it was kind of sad that so much information about the photos had been lost to the sands of time. Some of the photos had handwritten dates and locations on the back, but most of them were unlabeled. Fortunately for us, and the generations that will follow, digital images are capable of storing tons of information. RoboGEO allows users to easily attach latitude, longitude, and altitude information to images, ensuring that viewers will always know where the images came from.

The program'… Read more

If you've ever tried tracking down a process in Windows Task Manager, you know it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Process Explorer makes the job a lot easier. This freeware utility displays running processes in an intuitive tree format that includes not only process names, but also program icons and other data, such as description, image, and processor time.

It also can identify the process for a given application window or look up a process name in Google--a handy way to spot spyware. The latest version, more than three years in the making, introduces several … Read more

Emerging from a rough 2009, the technology industry has begun to recover, says a new report from Forrester.

The $741 billion U.S. IT market is now expected to see an 8.4 percent rise in spending this year, according to Forrester's latest "U.S. and Global IT Market Outlook: Q1 2010," released Thursday. The rebound will be more subdued but still solid for the global tech market, now forecast to grow 7.7 percent in U.S. dollars for 2010.

The latest estimate for growth in U.S. tech outshines Forrester's January forecast of 6.… Read more

A gritty video released by Wikileaks on Monday shows U.S. troops in Iraq destroying a vehicle that was preparing to rush a wounded Reuters journalist to the hospital.

The secret black-and-white video, recorded by at least one Apache helicopter that was shooting at a group of about a dozen people, appears to show the death of a Reuters photographer and his assistant, who were unarmed.

The U.S. Army had rejected Reuters' earlier requests, including ones made under the Freedom of Information Act, to disclose the July 2007 video. Government sources told both Reuters and the Associated Press on … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Author and New York University professor Clay Shirky thinks he's getting old, or in other words, "my average age has been going up at the alarming rate of about one year per year." Recently, he said, he had to explain Napster to a class of his students because they were too young to have known much about the groundbreaking music-sharing service in its heyday.

But that wasn't the point. Shirky's talk on Sunday morning at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival was called "Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data,&… Read more

ContactKeeper isn't the sleekest, most stylish contact manager we've seen, but as a basic, easy-to-use program for keeping contacts up to date and in one place, it certainly fills the bill.

ContactKeeper's interface is sparse, but in a functional way. Intuitive buttons run across the top of the window for adding, opening, editing, and removing new contacts. Adding a contact is as easy as clicking the Add button and entering the name, address, date of birth, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and important notes for each new contact. Each new entry's details display clearly on the right … Read more