One thing about laptops that drives a lot of my customers nuts is the touchpad. If I had a nickel for every time someone brought a laptop in complaining that their mouse pointer suddenly jumped somewhere else on the screen and messed up their typing, I'd have at least $10.15.

Hey, I'm in a small town - that would nearly count as an epidemic.

TouchFreeze is a tiny, open source program designed to fix this problem once and for all. Once you install it, TouchFreeze sits your in your system tray and waits for you to begin typing. When you do, it temporarily disables input from your touchpad.

Be forewarned: TouchFreeze may not work with your laptop's touchpad. It worked on my two Acer test systems just fine, but certain brands may be a bit less cooperative.

You can download TouchFreeze over at Google Code.

[via Addictive Tips]

There's little to add to my glowing review of the Livescribe Pulse smartpen I wrote for TUAW last year. This is one of those gadgets that you show people and it looks like magic. It kinda is magic, I think. But this year's model introduces an app store for the pen (plus some nifty paper products), making it a desirable platform for anyone who takes their notes seriously.

Read my review for the hardware scoop; the newer models now have an improved cradle. You can now charge and keep your computer asleep, for example. The desktop software, which allows you to sort and annotate your notes (plus many other tricks covered in that earlier review for the Mac version of the software) is similarly the same but slightly upgraded. What matters is what's in the pen, since that's what you'll be using every day.

The pen runs Java applications specifically made *for* the Pulse smartpen. Now, earlier there had been some tech demos for 3D audio (the pen records in 3D, and it is very cool) and what amounted to built-in utility apps. Stuff like calculators and a simple piano that you draw and tap to play. Like Apple launching the iPhone with a limited set of pre-built applications, the Pulse had only a few "apps" but that was fine. The app store for the pen opens the doors to a huge variety of other applications, much like Apple's store does for its mobile platform.

The Livescribe Store also looks and feels nearly identical to Apple's -- at first. There's more than just apps here; there are paper products (you use special paper with the pen) and pens themselves. When you go to check out, you notice the lack of polish. Every purchase, even the free stuff, requires about three times as many clicks at it takes to buy something on the iTunes App Store. I'm not sure why people don't understand this seemingly obvious notion that consumers want to consume quickly. Especially for a pen, you know? But the entire store is a website, really, so perhaps app purchasing can be streamlined later. For now, it is catering to the physical side of the store by requiring shipping info with your orders.

Keeping notes, todo lists, or just anything you are writing synchronized between computers can be a hassle. Some solutions, like using DropBox, require you to install software on computers that you regularly use. If your needs aren't that heavy, but you'd like a free way to keep your text available wherever you are, check out SimpleText.ws.

SimpleText.ws is an open-source, very light text editing environment that allows you to create and manage documents in a web service, and access them anywhere. It uses Google for authentication, so if you already have a Google account, signing in is as simple as clicking the Sign In link.

The fact that SimpleText.ws is open source means that if you're not comfortable hosting your text on someone else's server, you can grab the server code and host it yourself.

There is also a public API available for SimpleText.ws, which means that developers can write applications that synchronize with it. Currently there is only one, but it's a good one: Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom for iPhone.

How do you keep your text files available no matter what computer you're working on?

Who doesn't love a superficial pop-psychology tool? Analyze Words purports to reveal the personality of Twitter users by analyzing their recent toots tweets. The resulting analysis is broken down into three main categories: Emotional Style, Social Style, and Thinking Style.

Each main category consists of three or four ratings; for example, Emotional Style consists of Upbeat, Worried, Angry, and Depressed. Social Style's ratings are Plugged in, Personable, Arrogant/Distant, and Spacey/Valley girl, and Thinking Style's ratings are Analytic, Sensory, and In-the-moment.

Unfortunately, Analyze Words doesn't do any intelligent filtering - for example, retweets are analyzed along with regular tweets, so if you happen to retweet a lot of other people's content, the analysis won't really reflect your own words. But maybe I'm just being touchy because Analyze Words told me I'm a worried, arrogant / distant sensory thinker. Or something like that.

As expected, Amazon has launched a version of its Kindle eBook reader for Windows. The software is available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7, with a Mac version "coming soon."

As an eBook reader, Kindle for the PC is pretty no-frills. It lets you adjust fonts, read books, and create bookmarks. And that's about it. But the software can also synchronize with other devices. So if you have Amazon's physical Kindle eBook reader or the iPhone version and you've created annotations on it, you'll be able to access them on the PC client. No, I have no idea why you can't create annotations on the PC version.

In order to download books, you'll need to connect to the Amazon Kindle store via a web browser. When you select a title, it will be downloaded to your PC and available for viewing in the Kindle software.

The Windows 7 version of the software also includes multitouch capabilities that allow you to zoom in and out by pinching your fingers if your PC has a touchscreen. A future version is expected to add support for page turning with a swipe of your finger.

The biggest problem with Kindle for PC? It's geographically restricted and won't work in most countries outside of the US. I haven't seen any official statement on this, but a colleague in Canada tells me that the software won't work in his country.

[via Engadget]

Have you ever received a PDF file in an email that contained information you need in text form, but the PDF doesn't let you select the text? Sometimes this is due to access restrictions on the document, but more often it's because the person creating the PDF did so by simply scanning the document. This creates an image of the document, but does not embed the text information.

To extract the text, you need to use optical character recognition (OCR) software. Most scanners come with OCR software, but if you don't have ready access to it, you might consider using the Online OCR service.

Online OCR lets you upload a PDF file and it returns plain text that can then be copied directly into the word processing tool of your choice.

Obviously there are security concerns with uploading and storing copies of your documents on a 3rd party's site, but if that's not a concern to you, Online OCR might be just the trick to solve your OCR needs.

[via Lifehacker]

Mac users that have been spoiled by text editors like TextMate often find themselves frustrated when moving to a Windows machine. While there are lots of text editors for the Windows platform, it's hard to find one with the clean design sensibilities that TextMate offers.

Well, there's a new editor in town, and its name is Sublime Text. I don't mean to equate it too much to TextMate since they are very definitely different products; it's more the feel of using the products that drives the comparison.

Sublime Text prioritizes a slick user interface and features under the hood that make it a power-user's tool. For example, it sports the ability to give you a Minimap, which for developers gives you a 10,000 foot view of your code.

The best text editing tools seem to be powerful enough for programmers to use, yet incredibly useful for writers of prose. Sublime Text is no exception.

Unfortunately, Sublime Text is a commercial app - you have to pay for the quality, and it doesn't come cheap. A single user license will run you $59US. An evaluation version is also available.

I've written before about the Readability bookmarklet, a handy way to make cluttered sites more easily readable (and printable). Well, TUAW blogger and talented designer Brett Terpstra has made some improvements that result in an even more minimal page. Print/email links and logos are cut out, and only essential images are included. For most sites, that means you'll be left with some nicely-formatted text, and nothing more. This new-and-improved version is aptly called Readability 2.

If you need to copy-paste an entire article without grabbing images or accidentally copying weird formatting tags, Readability 2 is just the ticket. Code and pre tags are also preserved, so Readability 2 won't destroy the formatting of code snippets on a webpage. Mr. Terpstra points out that it's also great for getting text ready to be grabbed with capture tools like Evernote.

(and yes, the image above is a screenshot of this post, after using Readability 2.)

Do you remember learning what an anagram was in school, then spending countless hours trying to figure out what your name could be an anagram for? And if I do, does that make me an incredible nerd?

Okay, so now that confession time is over, I have one more thing to confess. I was never able to come up with anagrams that were any good for my name, and it turns out that there's a pretty fantastic one. How did I find it? Best Name Anagram is a simple web app that takes text input of any kind, and determines what the best anagram is that can be created using those letters. It seems to favor resulting anagrams comprised of longer words, but some names, like Download Squad, don't really have a great resulting anagram.

I probably had a little too much fun punching in my family's names, and then friends and co-worker's names. They say simple things amuse simple minds, and I can't really argue that fact.

Oh, and what does my name come out as? The not-at-all-embarrassing-I'm-totally-cool-with-it-no-really CARNAL JOKES. Nice eh?

It seems like I can't walk down the hall in my house without tripping over note-taking apps. It's the first thing that new programmers tackle when they decide to make an actual program, and as such there are thousands of options available when looking for a note taking app.

It's a bit harsh to say so, but the honest truth is that the vast majority of note-taking apps out there are utter crap. Most don't even do a reasonable job of differentiating themselves from what comes preinstalled on your computer. The Mac app Notational Velocity, on the other hand, is very useful.

A couple of caveats here: Notational Velocity is for people that need to take notes on their computer, but don't require access to them on a mobile device. It's not web based, doesn't sync with the cloud, and doesn't have a companion iPhone app.

Notational Velocity also isn't for people that need a complicated categorization or tagging structure to organize their notes. Simplicity and speed are what NV is all about.

If I haven't turned you off, there's a good chance that you'll find a lot to like in Notational Velocity. The app is cleverly designed to make adding and finding notes incredibly quick. The app has a single search field at the top of the app's window that allows you to search for content, or instantly add a new note simply by pressing Enter. Searching filters down your list of notes based on content and title with title taking precedence, and the filtering happens instantaneously even with thousands of notes stored in the app.

The app's makers suggest using Notational Velocity to create many very specific (and therefore shorter) notes instead of a few long-form ones. That allows you to more quickly find what you are looking for later on.

Here's hoping that cloud syncing and an iPhone version are just around the corner.

[via Daring Fireball]

URL shorteners, while convenient, are bad for the web. They hide the true destination that they are pointing to, giving bad guys yet another tool in their arsenal, while conditioning web users to blindly trust the links they are clicking on. Further, as the debacle with tr.im showed us, URL shortening services aren't necessarily permanent.

It's no coincidence that the rise in popularity of URL shorteners closely mirrors the rise in popularity of Twitter; Twitter's 140 character limit is the special ingredient that makes Twitter so compelling, but it's also what made short URLs valuable. Some of you will say that short URLs are useful for other reasons - for example, in print. True, but Twitter is by far the place they are used most.

So, with a 140 character limit, how could Twitter eliminate URL shorteners? Well, first, let's look at the reason for the 140 character limit in the first place. It was chosen because Twitter expected SMS messages to be the primary way that users would interact with the service. While there are many users using it that way, their numbers are far eclipsed by the number of users using Twitter on its native web site, or using one of the plentiful Twitter client apps that are available for both desktop computers and mobile phones.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired a spiffy spellchecker called After The Deadline. It's now available on Wordpress blogs, and you can enable it in the Wordpress visual editor by clicking the ABC button with the green checkmark (If you're using a WordPress.org install, get the plugin). After the Deadline is smarter than the spellcheckers we're used to in desktop apps, because it analyzes the millions of posts on Wordpress.com to create context and get things like proper names right.

After the Deadline finds a lot of mistakes that other spellcheckers won't. If you use "new" instead of "knew," for example, ATD will know whether you've got the right one in context. It can also check for clichés, double-negatives, passive voice, and other problems that generally weaken your writing. ATD also gives you fine-tuned control over those stylistic elements: you can have it stop checking for certain problems, or teach it to ignore your intentional, but technically incorrect, word choices. ATD only works with English right now, but other languages are in the works.

[via TechCrunch]

If you want a bit of text to be human-readable, but not read or indexed by bots, TxtNinja has got you covered. It converts your text to a GIF, with customizable size, font and color. Potential uses include concealing your email address from spammers, sending sensitive information over IM, and getting around text filters on forums.

The downside of TxtNinja is that the choices of fonts and colors are very limited, and they aren't common web fonts, either. Your TxtNinja GIF, unlike a real ninja, is unlikely to blend in with its surroundings. This isn't a particularly big deal, though, and you can use it to your advantage if you happen to want your text to stand out.

Email is a convenient way to communicate, but some correspondence requires the extra effort of a printed letter. With Snailmailr, though, printed letters don't actually take a whole lot of effort. Just enter an address, type up to four pages, and pay $1, and your letter will be printed and mailed for you. Does it still count as more personal than email when you don't have to leave your computer to do it?

Snailmailr costs a little bit more than a stamp, but saves you the time of picking up stamps or printing them yourself. Including the cost of envelope and paper, $1 is a pretty reasonable price to pay. There's a little bit of an extra cost, though, if you don't want to be tacky: you can remove the Snailmailr logo from your envelope for an extra 15 cents. Everything else about Snailmailr looks good: they allow color images in letters, and they address environmental concerns by using recycled paper and buying carbon offsets.