Here is what’s under the hood in the upgraded suite, and other good cross-platform resources for those who want to carry useful applications on USB thumb drives.

The PortableApps.com Suite is a collection of pre-selected free, primarily open source applications that you can stick on a thumb drive (or a laptop) in one quick download. It includes ClamWin Portable (antivirus), Mozilla Firefox – Portable Edition (web browser), Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Sudoku Portable (puzzle game), Mozilla Sunbird – Portable Edition (calendar/task manager) and Mozilla Thunderbird – Portable Edition (email client) and runs comfortably from a USB thumb drive.

There are basic, lite, and standard versions of the PortableApps suite. If you try out the applications you automatically get, you’ll probably find several applications that you want to make use of on an ongoing basis. However, one of the most popular uses for the suite is just keeping it on a thumb drive so that you can use your favorite applications from any computer anywhere.

The new version 1.5 of the suite has a new, much better-looking theme than the old tabula rasa look, and it can be customized with different looks for various computers you may use it on. For example, you may prefer one look for a desktop computer, and another one for the small display on a netbook. You can also launch applications as an administrator, and keep application icons out of menus — security boosts that will be appreciated by those who use PortableApps on pocket thumb drives that go everywhere. These features alone are good reasons to upgrade. In addition, there are many new applications in version 1.5, and support for many more languages.

PortableApps is a Windows-only download, but there are similar offerings for both the Mac and Linux. I wrote about MacLibre here. This site offers a download that delivers free open source applications such as GIMP (graphics), Adium (IM), Firefox, Thunderbird (e-mail), Cyberduck (FTP), AbiWord (word processor), and ClamXav (anti-virus). It too, is a good, one-download solution for people who want to keep their favorite applications on a thumb drive.

Linux users, too, can find many resources for stocking a thumb drive or portable computer with free applications, at PendriveLinux. If you haven’t taken advantage of the benefits of a well-stocked USB thumb drive yet, you can get lots of capacity on them for free, and tons of good, free applications to keep on them in the links in this post.

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It’s great to see Om returning to non-writing venues and I think he had a good time. So much so, that he’s thinking of pulling in other GigaOM network editors for regular audio chats, which should be a treat. As I mentioned over on GigaOM, this first effort is plain and simple: no intro music and not too long, making it easy to digest. You can listen through the inline player above, or download the 9.9MB file directly here.

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One of the big wins for those who really want to fine-tune their blog entries is the addition of an HTML source view to the already-strong visual editor. Combined with the ability to download your blog’s actual template for previews, this makes it possible to have a very good idea of what posts will look like before they’re uploaded. If you’re a WordPress user, you’ll also be happy to see the support for the new comments API.

The built-in microblog viewer sports some polish, such as automatic posting of images to Twitpic and integration with Twitter search. It’s also integrated with ping.fm now, which means you can use Blogo to post to many more microblogs beyond Twitter.

All in all, the new version is a nice holiday upgrade. Purchase price remains $25 with a three-week free trial.

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Whether you’re new to the Mac or have been using one for some time, there’s usually always something new you can learn about it to make your workflow, personal projects, or fun time a little easier or more enjoyable. To that end, Apple makes plenty of resources available on their web site.

In part 1 of this I’ll look at what Apple makes available in the form of product tutorials and tips. In part 2 I’ll look at Apple’s resource listings and free online seminars.

Tutorials

Apple has a wealth of tutorials to make use of. Each tutorial is typically anywhere from a couple minutes to five minutes in length (longer for Pro apps), and presented in easily manageable snippets. 

First of all, you should check out Apple’s Find Out How page. By default you’ll be at the Mac Basics page; unless you’re a brand new Mac user this may of limited value. However, along the top you’ll see other categories that you can click on to see tutorials relating to Photos, Movies, the Web, etc. This page could be a “one-stop” site to find useful tutorials.

MobileMe users should check out tutorials here.  

There are also tutorials for almost all of Apple’s individual applications. For starters, check out those for the iLife suite that comes on all Macs. I found the ones for iMovie ’08 especially helpful when that product was introduced. 

Apple doesn’t restrict the product tutorials to the iLife suite. Their productivity suite is included as well, so if you’re an iWork user like me you should visit its tutorials page. 

And Apple doesn’t stop at their two product suites, either. Their professional apps have great tutorials, too. As an Aperture user I found its page of tutorials broad and useful. 

In addition, while not strictly tutorials, the Aperture In Action page has videos of professionals using the product that can provide great ideas for how you want to utilize it in your own workflow. 

You’ll also find a tutorial page for Final Cut Studio (and Final Cut Server). Each program in the suite has tutorials on the page. Don’t let the comparatively small number fool you. These tutorials are a bit longer than others. As with Aperture, there’s also a Final Cut Studio in Action page with quite a few usage tips from the Pros. 

Similar treatment is given to Logic Studio, and there’s a Logic in Action page as well. 

Finally, note that some of the tutorial pages also list text tutorials. These are written, step-by-step, instructions for specific tasks. I would encourage anyone to review these for any software package used regularly. 

For any of the above products you own, you may discover things about them you didn’t already know. If you don’t own any of them, but are considering its purchase and want to know more about it, you can get a good feel for how it works just by watching the tutorials. 

Tips

Apple has two primary tips sites. The Business Quick Tips page contains video tips updated weekly. Each is perhaps 30 seconds long, and I’ve found many useful ones there. Note that off to the right of that page you can find Quick Tours, which are pseudo-tutorial videos you may find useful. 

The Pro Tips page is a listing of dozens of quick tips in text format. Click a tip that interests you and see how it’s done. 

If you were to watch all of Apple’s available video tutorials, you’d be busy for many hours. The tips would keep you busy a long time, too. The point is that there’s likely something here for any Mac user, and it’s freely available 24/7. It’s worth taking advantage of.

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Nearly two months ago, we penned the sad news that Air-O-Matic’s “Pull My Finger” application was denied from entry to the App Store. Pull My Finger (if you couldn’t guess) was a fart noise machine for iPhone. It was one of those times in life when I realized I couldn’t have what I didn’t know I needed. Good news, fellow immature fart joke aficionados! Effector is in the App Store, and will fill that void in your life.

Effector is a sound machine. It comes loaded with noises like a machine gun, or car horn, or applause — you get the idea. It has a slider allowing you to play the sounds in a delayed loop. While it’s pretty basic on the surface, Effector has some neat tricks up its sleeve.

Clearly, the reason Effector excites me, is there’s potential to replace the functionality of the Pull My Finger iPhone application, so we’ll tackle that feature first. While the app doesn’t come loaded with noises you may hear being emitted from the body, it has functionality to allow you to upload any of your own sounds for it to play. The great part is that Effector brings this capability via the web browser, as long as your iPhone and computer are on the same Wi-Fi network. The interface is simple and effective, and getting it working requires no special magic on the part of the user. I did however find, that at least with a couple of wav files I uploaded, they didn’t play correctly, and prevented built-in sounds from playing as expected. A restart of the app fixed this.

So now you’ve got your own noises on the phone. That’s fun and all, but just playing them for yourself isn’t nearly as entertaining as using them on someone else. Enter Effector’s remote capability. Again, via a same Wi-Fi network attached browser window, you can control your iPhone (and Effector of course) from a distance away. Leave your iPhone on the couch next to your unsuspecting victim, and go to work on your computer, making everyone think your victim might need some Bean-O. (You are of course limited to the output volume of the iPhone itself, but when life gives you beans, make…oh, never mind.)

I’m so glad that this incredibly complex piece of technology that I take with me everywhere, and really could not live without, can finally be used as a high tech whoopie cushion. I believe my life is now complete! Effector is $0.99 in the App Store.

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I went behind the scenes last week to see how the site’s original video team works its magic, this time on its first — watch out Obama Girl! — political project: a mock trailer for the imagined “really bad Disney movie” to which actor Matt Damon compared Sarah Palin’s hockey-mom-to-vice president narrative.

The folks at CollegeHumor brought me along to their Palin shoot last week at a house in upstate New York that’s totally prepped for production and is often used as the set of the commercial parodies featured on Saturday Night Live. Liz Cackowski, the star of web series The Jeannie Tate Show and a former writer for SNL, was along to star as our ambitious hockey mom in her first CollegeHumor appearance. In the video above, I interview Cackowski and the CH team about the project and show a little of what it was like behind the scenes.

The shoot was large-scale by CollegeHumor standards, which has dramatically ramped up its production quality and team over the last two years, now with three different in-house production teams. Its budget was $8,000 — including $3,000 for the location and $1,000 for the steadicam — and didn’t account for the ten or so full-time CollegeHumor staffers who pitched in on everything from directing to picking up lunch.

Though CollegeHumor’s finished originals, including the “big budget” Palin video, never seem to include intrusive in-stream ads, the IAC-owned company recently became profitable. Why? CollegeHumor has managed to outrun the chicken-and-egg problem of funding good web content and attracting monetizable audiences. It can ride its momentum, keep upping the ante and regularly turn out hits: Four days after the Palin trailer was released, it has more than 600,000 views, 6,700 Diggs, and 273 comments.

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We did this month’s event a bit differently from our others, in that we didn’t solicit submissions but rather worked with video analytics firm Visible Measures to find ten ads that had viral qualities but weren’t so overexposed as to be redundant for people. The ads were from all sorts of now-familiar viral categories, like “Is it real?” and PSAs and musical parody. Our judges — Ian Schafer, the CEO and founder of Deep Focus; Kate Cohen, the creative director of TBWA; and Ben Relles, the founder of BarelyPolitical.com, home of Obama Girl — used their with extensive experience in virality and advertising to add great qualitative comments and additional context. And then Matt Cutler of Visible Measures gave us the hard numbers on how each ad was doing in a number of categories, including number of views, number of comments, and number of placements by fans across the web.

Dynamite Surfing – More bloopers are a click away

The night’s winner by audience vote ended up being a PSA called “Chemical Party” from Marie Curie Actions that was funny and hip and unexpected. In second was “Dynamite Surfing” from Quicksilver — an “Is it real?” that was actually covered on Mythbusters recently — and in third place was “It’s Called epMotion,” an over-the-top R&B music video for an automated pipetting system (a product we clearly all need to run out and buy!).

Thanks again to our co-hosts at the New York Video 2.0 group and our sponsors, ON2 Technologies, G-Technology, Volomedia, Move Networks and DF Splash — and our great partners Threadless, Eventbrite and Mozes.

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Unobserved by mainstream journalists, Skype quietly closed its popular Skypecast personal broadcasting service late last month. The decision is setting off howls of protest from loyal users, who are ready to bolt to competitive services.

In a brief missive on Aug. 26 entitled “Goodnight Skypecasts,” Skype announced it was closing the service as of Sept. 1. The program allowed anyone to broadcast to up 100 people, all of whom could join in and comment. While the service only supported audio, video — one of the most-requested features by users — was supposedly in the works as well. Skypecasts covered everything from lonely hearts to computer technology to stuff that’s inscrutable to me because it’s in Arabic.

Skypecasters have been frantically searching for a replacement, most with video, such as Paltalk, OoVoo, TokBox and EkkoTV. But the lion’s shares of them act as little more than video-conferencing services, don’t promote broadcasting, and don’t have Skype’s millions of users to whom they can market.

Skype, a unit of eBay, was vague about why it’s closing down the service.

“What we’ve learned by watching how the product is used and through user feedback is that Skypecasts is not quite measuring up to our high standards and expectations for connecting and delighting our users,” Skype-affiliated blogger Peter Parkes wrote, in announcing the impending demise. An outside spokesman for Skype said the company had no further comment.

Judging from the vitriolic comments to that blog, Skype users were delighted enough by the service to be enraged at its discontinuation. “Utterly dispicable and downright disgusting,” commented ifjadefalls. “This is worst Idea that Skype had,” wrote justinwilliamson3. And mobe3000 called upon Skype users to “join the boycott Skype movement. No Skypecasts, no Skype.”

Meanwhile, in a column about the decision, Andy Abramson of VoIP Watch speculated that eBay was shortsightedly paring Skype down to bare essentials.

In a followup to the angry chorus, Skype-affiliated blogger Parkes wrote that the reason for the shutdown “was simply because we want to focus on making Skype software for Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile phones truly great, and so unfortunately we have to be strict about what we concentrate our efforts on.”

Somehow, that doesn’t seem likely to mollify the critics.

Michael Stroud runs iHollywoodForum, a digital media event and media company in Los Angeles.

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The Labyrinth (O Labirinto) by Hugo Almeida is a gorgeous and dreamlike music video about lost love. It includes smooth and sumptuous camera work movingly merged to a Radiohead-esque single, performed by Portuguese musician Rui Gaio.

Noobility by Bettina Tizzy is an eerie montage of falling bodies and stone pyramids; you can just enjoy it as a surreal tableau, but it has an interesting back story as well. It’s actually an interactive art installation in Second Life designed to trigger copies of “noobs” (i.e. new avatars) to drop on the pyramids. (Disclosure: the Noobility installation happens to be hosted by a sponsor of my SL blog.)

SynaesthAsia by Osprey Therian is a vividly captured live concert video in Second Life (so the avatars not only dance, but fly amid dazzling particle effects.) The two musicians in the video are based in Taiwan and Japan, respectively. They separately stream the audio from their instruments into their computers, then into the shared SL performance space.

Image credit: Osprey Therian.

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The company also announced that it has raised $650,000 in angel funding by a group of angels that include Ron Conway, Steve Anderson, Paul Buchheit and Mike Maples.

Weebly got its start as an easy to use web publishing tool, targeting individuals and small business owners. Its drag-and-drop offering was dead simple and has helped the company attract over 25,000 users.

We met with David Rusenko, one of the three cofounders of Weebly, hours before he left for Pennsylvania for his graduation ceremony, and got a demo of the new service. The simplicity and the easy of use of their new blogging feature is stunning. While it is unlikely that any of our professional blogs are going to be using Weebly, but it will be particularly attractive to those who are looking to dabble in blogging.

The AJAX-based interface allows you to add (or subtract) different types of elements to the blog — text, pictures, videos, Google Maps, AdSense (currently in development, not live) — thanks to a widgetized architecture. You can get going in less than an hour, though it won’t allow you to set-up a personal domain just as yet. (That is coming soon.)

While the service is impressive, Weebly faces some considerable if not insurmountable challenges. Scaling the hosted blogging business is quite a challenge, as some of the more established players have learned. The company still has to figure out a viable business model. Rusenko thinks it can work on white-label versions for internet service providers, though that is easier said than done.

And the biggest challenge will be grabbing the mind share of mainstream users – who currently don’t read blogs, or perhaps don’t care much about all things Web 2.0, as Pew Internet recently reported. That said, the company does have an opportunity to carve itself a niche between WordPress and Tumblr, another tool that is currently gaining popularity because of its ease of use.

Disclosure: Automattic and GigaOmniMedia, the publisher of this blog, have both received funding from True Ventures.

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