USB drives are cool — they are small in size, can contain lots of stuff, and they are not costly at all. But in case you are using USB drives to only transfer files from your home to office, you are not tapping all its potentiality. USB drives can be used to carry your entire office (ok, only the softwares I am talking about.) And instead of downloading hundreds of portable applications you can just use some of the available portable application suites that has it all. Here are 8 popular application bundles.

Tiny USB Office

Tiny USB Office is an application bundle which is only 2.5 MiB in size. The applications it contains are mostly productivity applications. The applications include:

• Database Creation - with CSVed
• Data Encryption - with DScrypt
• Email Client Software - with NPopUK
• File Compression - with 100 Zipper
• File Sharing - with HFS
• File Transfer - with FTP Wanderer
• Flowchart Creation - with EVE Vector Editor
• MSN Messenger Client - with PixaMSN
• Tree-Style Outliner Software - with Mempad
• PDF Creation - with PDF Producer
• Password Recovery - with XPass
• Secure Deletion - with DSdel
• Spreadsheet Creation - with Spread32
• Text Editing - with TedNotepad
• Word Processing - with Kpad
• Program Launching - with Qsel

It also includes text encryption program, a secure file shredder, a password revealer, and a tiny vector editor. This is a good choice if you have very little space to allocate.

SSuite Office

SSuite Office bundle contains basic office editing applications including a word-pad, a spreadsheet editor, a basic photo editing application, an application launcher among other applications. All this in 14MiB. This is a good choice if you want to play safe with office suite, just in case you need them.

Portable Apps Suite

This is probably Internet's most popular portable app suite. Portable Apps Suite comes in three variants — platform only, light suite and standard suite. The lightest version starts at only 1mb download size and the standard suite is 355MiB in size, when installed. For average users, the light suite is recommended. The light suite offers a bunch of useful applications including Firefox, Thunderbird (email client), Sunbird, ClamWin Portable (anti-virus), Pidgin (IM Client), Keepass Portable (password manager). The standard suite has OpenOffice included. All these versions come with a sleek Windows-XP style menu that gives access to all the portable applications available. After you install it on your USB thumb-drive, it creates folders like "Documents", "Pictures", "My Music", "Videos". This is pretty neat and lets you organize your files easily.

Lupo Pen Suite

Lupo Pen Suite is another application bundle which has a lot of things in common with Portable Apps — it has menu which resembles that of Portable Apps; it creates folders like Portable Apps and so on. The applications included are, however, different from those included in Portable Apps. The email client in Lupo Pen Suite is POP Peeper, the IM client is Miranda IM. It comes with VLC Player, FastStone Image Capture, System explorer among many other useful softwares. If you are looking for a full-featured application suite, Lupo Pen Suite is just for you. Way better than Portable Apps suite.

LiberKey

Liberkey is probably the most under-rated yet the best of all portable application bundles. It comes in 3 flavours — basic, standard and ultimate. It packs a huge number of applications. The interface is pretty intuitive. Since it offers so many applications. it comes with a search utility which searches the 'installed' applications.

MojoPac

MojoPac is a sophisticated application suite that turns any removable drive into a PC (kind of). You can install various applications on MojoPac, including Midrosoft Office. If you are a gamer, MojoPac can carry your game with it. This application suite is different in one perspective too — it is password protected. That means you don't have to worry about the security of your data in case your drive is lost (or stolen). [Related Password Protect Your Files with TrueCrypt]

Google's free photo-editing software, Picasa just got better — it can now recognize people's faces. The latest version (v3.5) lets you add name-tags to people's faces for easy grouping and searching. This version also integrates with Google Maps for geo-tagging.

Whenever a photo is collected via Picasa with 'unknown' (i.e. not yet tagged) faces, it creates an album — Unnamed Faces — to which you can add tags later on. You can even search for photos with two people in it (i.e. having two tags). For ease of use, name-tags offer auto-complete so that you can easily select the tags you have already created.

This version is a great step forward enabling desktop apps behave like human minds. It would be great if Picasa can integrate Facebook's facial recognition for the Picasa Facebook Uploader. That would be a lethal combo!
[Via Official Google Blog]

Google has acquired reCaptcha, an open-source application developed by the computer science department of Carnegie Mellon University, to protect pages from spams. The details of the deal are not available although some people are irked about the fact that the project was originally funded by government and the founders are making money out of this.

The official announcement says,

(...) we're excited to welcome the reCAPTCHA team to Google, and we're committed to delivering the same high level of performance that websites using reCAPTCHA have come to expect. Improving the availability and accessibility of all the information on the Internet is really important to us, so we're looking forward to advancing this technology with the reCAPTCHA team.

The acquisition move will certainly improve the way reCaptcha works as we have seen in past that services (like Feedburner, Blogger) got better once they were acquired by Google. It's just a matter of days (or weeks) before reCaptcha gets integrated with Google's platforms.

[Via Official Google blog]

Facebook is a great place to share stuff — from links and videos to photos and status updates. The Facebook 'Pages' are useful if you are a blogger and want to share your posts in Facebook through a completely personalized page. You can also import your blog to your profile through the 'Notes' application but a separate page for your blog is better since it makes your blog separate identity from yourself which has a brand value. Besides, a Facebook page offers widgets and more.

To add a page in Facebook, visit this page and fill the fields given their. Here are the settings for AbhiTech page on Facebook .

Once the page is created visit this page. Among the applications listed there, choose the 'Notes' application and click 'Edit'.

On the settings page, click on 'Import Blog' at the right side. Here you have to enter the feed-URL of your blog.
Now, you can enter the feed URL of your blog for full content of the posts. But this will significantly decrease the page-views of your blog since most Facebook users will read your posts right from Facebook. How about showing only part of your posts?
Blogger offers a summary feed containing only a part of your posts. Just use this URL for importing feeds:

http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary

(Change YOURBLOG with the name of your blog.)
That's it!

As a celebration of its 10th birthday, Blogger has introduced long-awaited jumpbreak feature — something native in Wordpress for a long time. Jumpbreak allows bloggers to let their readers to jump to 'item' pages for the full content of post. "Read More" and "Continue Reading" are two of the most popular jumpbreak texts.
Read more »

Google has changed the size of the the input field of the search-box to symbolize Google's "focus on search and because it makes our (Google's) clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use." The text-size of the auto-suggest entries has also increased for a more clear vision.

Yet, it's interesting that Google ranks Bing ahead itself in terms of search results. Just make a search with "search" and see it yourself. In case Google has changed it, you can see a screenshot on AbhiTech's Facebook album.

The default Windows 'Save As...' or 'Open' dialog box has five different shortcuts on the left hand side — History, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer and My Network Places. As a matter of fact these are not shortcuts at all — you have to browse to some other folder of your choice. What if you can customize these links, much like Linux desktops?

Enter Places Utility. It's a nifty application that does this job with ease. It offers a very intuitive options dialog, which lets you configure the shortcuts.

Once you set up these options, it changes the Open or Save As... dialog with the custom settings.

If you are download-heavy user or if save a lot of web-contents to your machine, this utility is just for you. Even for average users, this application is useful as it gives quick access to the places you most likely to save files.

Places Utility is available for free at Simpli Software. It's 622KiB is size.

Seven Remix XP is a transformation pack for Windows XP which turns the default XP interface into one that resembles Windows 7. It changes almost all visual styles in XP — from icons to wallpapers to login screen. The core remains the same but just a visual makeover, in case you are tired of looking at the same old Windows XP interface.

The package contains an executable file which changes the core visual styles of XP. All you have to do is to install it and reboot. In case, you mess it up, the installer automatically creates a system restore point. This way you can easily go back to your previous XP interface.

The installer is developed by NirwadSoft while the visual styles it offers are designed by Vishal Gupta. The biggest problem with this Windows7 transformation pack is that it doesn't support 64bit versions of WindowsXP.

You can download it from DeviantArt page.

Yahoo! has recently launched Meme, "where you share everything you find that's interesting". Meme is, in simple English, a micro-blogging service with some more features that Twitter lacks, at least as of now. The service is in alpha stage. You can leave your email address at the homepage for an invite. Alternately, you can send me your email address (or leave a comment with your email) in case you don't want to wait.

The idea is simple: you follow other Meme users, repost their posts, share your own links, videos — much like Tumblr.

I got an invite yesterday. But just after clicking the link that came in the email, I found this page, and the page says it all why it's in alpha stage.

The interface is dead-simple. Once you login, a tabbed interface along with recommended users greets you. The tabbed interface may remind one of Facebook.

The settings provided by Meme are very basic. This might be because Meme is at a very basic stage.

Unlike Twitter which allows users to select the backgrounds of their profile-pages, Meme offers only 6 themes. Typical of Yahoo products. (Remember Yahoo 360?)

In short, Yahoo Meme is yet another microblogging service with few more things to offer. It's Twitter plus Tumblr plus a little bit of Facebook. A bookmarklet to share links would have been better. Also, a chat bot would find many takers. Maybe all these will come in a few days. Keep your fingers crossed.

It's official: Firefox 4.0 will sport a brand new UI. But you have to wait until the last quarter of 2010 to experience it. The mockups for the new interface have been posted, and they have not much difference from Firefox 3.7 mockups. It is evident that Firefox is going the Chrome way.

Version 4.0 will have a faster Javascript engine called Tracemonkey. The new version will also make use of Windows7 graphics features. So you can expect more animations, and probably slower performance.

Firefox is a browser. All it needs is speed and an uncluttered interface, not animations or high-def graphics. Also, this new UI may be different for various platforms. This might irk some people. The mockups heavily flout the guidelines provided by Microsoft (see this), just as Google chrome does.

gTranslate is a firefox add-on that offers super-simple translation, from Google Translate. It offers translation from any of the 25 languages available with Google Translate. All you have to do is to select some text (which you want to translate and right click, go to "Translate". No more copy paste.

gTranslate makes use of Google translate API and sends the selected text to google translate. Google translate sends back the translated text. All this happens in a blink of an eye. You can choose the language pair by going to the "Change language" option.

When you click on the translated text, a new tab (or window, depending on your Firefox preferences) opens up with Google translate page so that we can see all the translated text.