Microsoft has released a free Accounting software on the lines of Intuit Quickbooks and it is called Microsoft^® Office Accounting Express 2007. It is a successor to the Office Small Business Accounting 2006 (SBA). It can be downloaded from here.

Microsoft^® Office Accounting Express 2007, financial management software is designed for millions of starting businesses and home based businesses that currently use pen & paper or spreadsheets to run their business. It provides a single place to manage the company’s business finances with the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Office system programs.

It is a desktop based application and is designed to be used on a single desktop. It is currently supported on Windows XP (SP2) and Windows Server 2003 (SP1). It  uses SQL Server Express database as its backend (is installed as part of the application install).

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You come across a web page or an application and you like some of the colors on it. It is a painful process to go about figuring the exact color code for that color. You press the Print Screen key to copy a screenshot to the clipboard, load a graphics-editing program, create a new file, paste the screenshot from the clipboard, zoom in on the object, use the “Pick Color” tool, and finally copy the HTML code of the color to the clipboard. All this is very time consuming particularly for webmasters who might have to do this very often.

Instant Eyedropper is a free software tool that will identify and automatically paste to the clipboard the color code of any pixel on the screen with just a single mouse click. It can be downloaded from here.

Here is how it works:

• When you run Instant Eyedropper, it sits as a icon in the task bar.

• Move the mouse pointer to the Instant Eyedropper icon in the system tray. Press and hold the left mouse button and move the mouse pointer to the pixel whose color you want to identify.

• Release the mouse. That’s it. The clipboard now contains the color code - in HTML format (or any other format that you have previously specified). It can be pasted and used in any text or HTML editor or the Color Picker tool of Photoshop.

Instant eyedropper can capture the color in any of the following formats:

• HTML
• Hex
• Delphi Hex
• VB Hex
• RGB

Instant Eyedropper is a freeware and is available for install on Windows NT, 2000, 2003, XP.

I have used it many a times and is a very handy tool.

What do you do to capture the color you like?

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Now you have the ability to carry your favorite computer programs along with your bookmarks, settings, email and much more with you on a USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive etc. It can be used on any Windows (and many Linux) PCs.

PortableApps.com is an open platform that works with all the hardware mentioned above. It’s open source built around an open format format that any hardware vendor or software developer can use.

They provide a rich suite of applications in their PortableApps Suite^TM . The suite is spyware free and there are no advertisements. The suite can be downloaded from here.

I installed the standard version of their application suite (there is a Lite version also) on a USB drive and it occupied around 250 MB of space. The installation was also very easy as all you have to do is download the installer and run it. Point the install directory to the root of your USB drive or whatever other media you are using and that is it. After install a PortableApps icon sits in your tray bar, clicking on which opens the PortableApps menu. Here is a snapshot of the PortableApps menu with the standard suite installed: (click on the image to enlarge)

The advantage of using portable apps is that all the data which you enter in the program (email, appointments, documents, configurations, bookmarks etc.) are stored on the hardware media on which portable apps is installed. So, when you take your USB stick and plug it into another machine at your friends house or at work, you get all your data.

Some prominent applications that are supported are:

• Firefox
• Gaim
• OpenOffice
• AbiWord
• Mozilla Sunbird
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• VLC Media Player
• FileZilla
• Nvu
• FireFTP
• GIMP
• XAMPP - Apache, mySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin and more in an integrated package
• ClamWin - antivirus program

Here is a snapshot of Sudoku game portable:

PortableApps has a page dedicated to the developers, wherein they explain how to develop new portable applications or adapt an existing one.

Source: PortableApps

Technorati Tags: PortableApps, - Portable-Applications, - Applications-On-USB, - Applications, - Portable, - PortableApps-Suite, - Firefox-Portable

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Blogging as a means of sharing information, knowledge and insight has grown a lot in recent years. While some blog purely as hobby, others make their living out of it. Unfortunately, bloggers have to work with rudimentary tools to compose their blog posts and there are not many tools which easily integrated with their blogging platform to provide them a means of creating rich posts.

Microsoft has come up with Windows Live Writer, a windows based desktop application that allows you to compose rich blog posts using your own blog service (WordPress, Blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal etc.). Although still in beta, the tool is very robust and boasts of lot of out-of-the-box features.

(Click on the images to enlarge)

Windows Live Writer

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