Smart Desktop Organizes Your Info, Both Online and Off

Sarah Perez Says -

One of the software programs mentioned at this year's IORG conference (see our coverage here) was SmartDesktop. This program uses machine intelligence to automatically organize your information by project so you can quickly find what you need. In addition to organizing your emails and files created by desktop software, the beta version of this program also works with Google Docs and Zoho. These items appear in Smart Desktop as a "web resources," which allow you to quickly retrieve online documents without having to hunt through your browser bookmarks to find them.

About SmartDesktop

The SmartDesktop application is designed to be used by individuals who to assist with organization of emails and files by project. (A framework for developers is also available). The application only works on Windows machines and supports the following applications:

• Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Word 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Excel 2003, 2007
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Visio 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Project 2003, 2007
• Internet Explorer v6, v7
• Mozilla Firefox v1, v2, v3
• Adobe Acrobat v6, v7, v8
• Adobe Reader v7, v8
• AutoDesk AutoCAD 2007, 2008
• Compatible with Google Docs
• Compatible with Zoho Sheets

While traditionally a software program like this would stick to only supporting other desktop software, the company seems to have taken note of the online office trend and has decided to branch out from being solely tied to the machine to support some cloud apps as well. With support for both Google Docs and Zoho (only Zoho Sheets, unfortunately), there's a chance for SmartDesktop to succeed among the online crowd as well. That is, assuming they continue to add support for online services, including the rest of Zoho's suite.

To really benefit from a program like SmartDesktop, you need to have a lot of data stored in files across both the web and your machine and no time or inclination to organize it on your own. But you don't need to work on "projects" to use SmartDesktop; it is meant to organize anything that you're working on, whether personal events, managing clients, doing research, planning a budget, etc. In SmartDesktop, a "project" is just the container for the files, email, and web pages that are related to each other.

This structure takes SmartDesktop beyond being just another desktop search app. Instead of just scanning your hard drive for keywords, it starts with a project-oriented view of your information and doesn't even index the information you haven't touched. This way, search results are faster and contain much less noise.

Will SmartDesktop really help pePublish Postople deal with information overload? Those interested in finding out can can sign up to be alerted when the beta is made available for download: just click here.

GMAIL joins Paypal and Ebay for Detecting Phishing Emails

Web Tools & Tips Says -

Phishing email scams are increasing day by day. New tricks are being learnt by the phishers and email providers are after them to be more clever in detecting phishing emails.

Related: You can find 9 effective ways to detecting phishing emails on this blog.

In a recent development, GMAIL, arguably the most secured email provider, has started cooperating with Paypal and Ebay, for better protection against phishing. Paypal and Ebay are notably the most targeted domains by phishing email attempts.

In the details posted on the Official Gmail Blog, Brad Taylor, Software Engineer and Gmail Spam Czar, has stated…

Now any email that claims to come from “paypal.com” or “ebay.com” (and their international versions) is authenticated by Gmail and — here comes the important part — rejected if it fails to verify as actually coming from PayPal or eBay. That’s right: you won’t even see the phishing message in your spam folder. Gmail just won’t accept it at all. Conversely, if you get an message in Gmail where the “From” says “@paypal.com” or “@ebay.com,” then you’ll know it actually came from PayPal or eBay. It’s email the way it should be.

Google is understood to be working on the well known concepts of Sender ID and DomainKeys for validating the sender, and this is one step further in the attempt to provide complete protection against all phishing attempts.

However, phishing attempts seems to be an the rampage these days with phishers and spammers working on newer ways to improve their success rates.

Full details here.

Fontspace Offers Free Social Font Downloads

Lee Mathews Says-

We love free fonts, but sometimes the process of finding half-decent ones can be pretty annoying. Fontspace.com tries to smooth out the rough spots for free font junkies.

Instead of simply categorizing fonts, Fontspace uses the good ol' tagging system - which provides easier access to similar fonts. The broad categories on some other sites (sorry DaFont) often lead to large, tiresome lists that require a boatload of time to sift through.

Registered users can also add fonts to their favorites ; this can be extremely useful in the event that someone - your husband , for example - accidentally forgets to back up your fonts before a reformat.