Animoto, Create Cuztomized Videos for Free

Animoto is a free web application that lets you create animations online using your images and music. Even though, there are hundreds of software that allow you to create a video, Animoto stands out because it puts a “feel” in your video.

Here is what Animoto does:

• It analyzes your images
• It inspects your music and theme
• It adds customization to a video

Creating a video with Animoto is very simple. Here’s how you do it:

Step 1. Chose the type of video you want to create. You can create a short video (30 seconds) for free or a commercial video for $3 per video.

Step 2. Upload the images you want to use. You can upload them from your hard drive or get them from your account at flickr, facebook, picasa e.t.c.

Step 3. After you have all the images you want, drag and drop to set the order of their appearence. You can also choose to “spot light” certain images. This would make them more prominent in your video.

Step 4. Upload the music. You can also chose from their library (they have some pretty decent ones in there).

Step 5. Chose an image as your cover, and click on “create video”.

Your video is ready! You can now email it or share it on all the major social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

I think animoto has a very intelligent algorithm in place that figures out when and how to use the visual effects based on the images and the music, creating a customized and terrific video.

© 2008 Sizlopedia All Rights Reserved

Create Free Holiday E-Cards for Christmas

The holiday season has finally arrived and much like everyone, I was searching the web for a service to create free e-cards for Christmas and that’s when I came across CardFunk.

CardFunk is a relatively new site that lets you create your own personalized greeting cards. What makes CardFunk unique is that it allows you to create really funny and animated e-cards based on a seasonal theme and allows you to add or remove elements of your choice to the card.

As its all about Chirstmas these days, CardFunk gives you a special card creating option that lets you make your own personalized Christmas greeting cards by adding your photo to a dancing Santa or Jester.

Also you can choose a custom background, add a personalized greeting audio theme and even enter your personalized greeting message.

Try it out and have fun!

CardFunk Creator

© 2008 Sizlopedia All Rights Reserved

Import/Export Favorite Bookmarks between Browsers

If you work with different browsers, your bookmarks are all spread in between them and are looking to convert them between each other, check out Transmute. It’s a great utility that lets you convert your bookmarks between different formats in no time. You can try out your favorite websites in different web browsers, synchronize bookmarks between systems, organize and convert them in bookmark managers etc.

Transmute works great with Google Chrome , Mozilla Firefox 3, Internet Explorer, Opera, Apple Safari, Chromium and Flock. It’s interface is very simple and gives you the ability to convert bookmarks in one click. Another good feature is that it lets you merge existing bookmarks together instead of overwriting your old bookmarks file and gives you an option to backup your existing bookmarks before any changes are made.

Their team also claims to be the first and only bookmark converter service to export bookmarks between all of the major web browsers.

Download Transmute

© 2008 Sizlopedia All Rights Reserved

Find Out How Your Computer Crashed?

This is a very useful utility, I must admit. Normally, whenever you’re doing something on your computer and it suddenly reboots without any notice or you confront the blue screen of death, you have no idea what went wrong. Assumptions come in place that it might be a hardware failure or something related to a driver which malfunctioned but you don’t know the problem exactly so finding a solution becomes hard.

WhoCrashed is a great application that comes in play here. It detects and shows the drivers installed on your computer which have been crashing your computer by doing a analysis and shows all the information so you know what to do. Experts call this analysis “Post-Mortem Crash Dump Analysis” and they need to have those debugging skills and list of software to do it but it’s not the case here. Just run WhoCrashed and it will take care of it.

On a note, it might not detect the problem for sure since all kernel modules run in the same address space and it is able to corrupt another. Also, a driver may be able to cause problems to another driver which runs in the same device stack.

Download WhoCrashed

© 2008 Sizlopedia All Rights Reserved

Modify/Focus Searches on Google with Search Cloudlet

FireFox has got itself a new extension that gives users a cloud of tags to help modify and focus searches on Google and Yahoo known as Search Cloudlet.

This Firefox Add-on inserts context-aware tag clouds into a traditional Google and Yahoo search interface to help you navigate more efficiently through search results. After the installation, you will get tag-clouds, server-clouds, author-clouds, country-clouds and other powerful navigation tools smoothly integrated into your search. In simple words it provides a neat way to tweak the original query by offering up keywords pulled from the results.

Tag Cloud

With it’s “Tag cloud” there is no need to look through your search results list to understand what it’s all about. Tag Cloud will show all the keywords relevant to your search results and allow you to easily narrow down your search by clicking keywords on the cloud and adding them to your query.

Site cloud

Site cloud will display websites that contain the most relevant information about your search keyword. Just like any ordinary website tag cloud it will show the most important links with bigger font.

News and Blogs search

News and Blogs search helps you determine country, region or state of the found news and their publishers. You can use these context-aware clouds to narrow your search the same way you would with tag clouds.

Off mode

It offers “Off mode” so that you can work with the classical Google results list without these clouds. You can always bring back these clouds anytime you like with a click of a button.

Better clouds

To optimize Seach Cloulet, you can set numbers of search results to 100 on Google preferences page with Better clouds.

Note : Search Cloudlet is an experimental add-on and does not yet work on the latest beta of Firefox 3.1.

Download Search Cloudlet

© 2008 Sizlopedia All Rights Reserved

Quintessential Player 4.51

Quintessential is a multi format audio player with lots of extra features. With its new extended freeform skinning engine and plethora of feature extending plugins Quintessential Player can be whatever you want it to be.

This new version brings you closer to your music then ever before. Stop letting your media player push you around, take control with Quintessential's new and improved arsenal of features.

Most importantly you can take control of your listening experience for FREE. How is this possible you ask? It just is. Don't let the price fool you, there are no Pro versions, cripples, nags or spyware. Quintessential is here to be enjoyed without any catches.

Features of Quintessential Player 4.51

• Rip CDs or convert music into your favourite format
• Keep your music files clean with the track editor
• More control with Skin Layouts
• Play the track you want with a click of the mouse
• Organize the songs you'll hear with the Playlist Editor
• Save your desktop space when using the Remote

Technical specification of Quintessential Player 4.51

• Title: Quintessential Player 4.51
• Filename: qcd451.exe
• File size: 2.21MB (2,320,501 bytes)
• Requirements: Windows 2000/XP/2003/XP64
• License: Freeware
• Author: Quinnware

Gmail gets a proper PDF viewer

Gmail's integrated software-free PDF viewer has received a nice upgrade courtesy of Google Docs. Now opening up a PDF in Gmail won't fire up your native PDF viewer (like the slow-to-load Adobe Acrobat), and instead will send you to the document reader built into Google Docs.

There are two other benefits to this, the first being the updated page view which lets you hop around the document a whole lot faster. The other is the built-in zoom, which scales the text to fit your monitor with a higher degree of detail than the text resizer found in your browser.

Gone with the transition is the option to open up PDFs as HTML pages straight from the message, which still remains as a viewing option once you're in the new PDF view and in search results from Google.com. Presumably Google.com results will get the updated viewer next. This would be a huge benefit to Google Search users without access to a PDF viewer (like on public or shared computers) as Google's current HTML conversion wipes out much of the formatting that can keep fonts and image placement intact, which can make things like brochures and newsletters unreadable.

The updated PDF viewer in Gmail is now powered by Google Docs.

(Credit: CNET Networks)