This week I am going to mention one site that I wrote about recently, Picnik. It allows you to make some basic to fairly advanced edits to your photos. Photos either stored on your local hard drive or online, say at Picasa (check the URL once there and see if you can figure out who owns this one?), Flickr or others.

I will not get into the details as the only reason I mention this good graphics site again so soon is that it has a competitor…from the big boys – Photo Shop. They are both capable online photo editors with, in my opinion, a slight advantage going to Photo Shop. Give them both a try with your photos and see what you think.

Next on the list is a site that you could find very useful especially if you have a rather large file you need to get to someone else. Occasionally computer users will have a large file, like the great American novel you just wrote, that you need to get to a friend to proof read. Email is out as most email accounts will not allow extremely large files to be sent online. It really bogs down speed. However, now you can use online programs like Wikisend or Drop. These two sites are very similar. They allow you to upload that large file(s), set a password to the file so that others, when armed with that password, can download your file to their own local system. So there are no large emails that won’t take an hour to download without the receiver knowing what is going on.

Finally, today a site that I do not go to that often, since you really only need the site to download the program once. This application does much better than the similar one that comes with Vista. It is called, “Desktop Sidebar” and works great in all the versions of windows I have ever tried. The application will place a bar on the side of your screen (hence the name) where you may add different panels. For instance, with mine I have a clock at the top of the screen, the local weather below that and it is then followed by all of the programs on my computer grouped by topics that I create. I can move around within Desktop Sidebar much more quickly and accurately than using the Start Menu in Windows. I don’t run any of my computers without this great free addition.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 5:28 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.