Trying to get the right buttons for your website can be frustrating. Especially after you’ve spent hours trying to create them manually with a graphics editor, or browsing through a host of online libraries, none of which deliver quite what you need. Fortunately, Likno Web Button Maker makes the whole button design process as simple as it’s likely to get.

Launch the program and you will immediately be presented with an oval button. It has a realistic wood-like texture, while a light reflects off the left-hand side, and white text hovers above. If you like this, double-click the button, enter your own text, and export the results in JPEG, GIF or PNG formats.

If you’d like to see what else the program has on offer browse the Presets window for a range of color schemes. Double-click any that appeals, then click the tabs below for more options. You’re able to change the button shape, try a different material, tweak the lighting and customize the reflection. There’s also control over the button text, including 3D rotations.

You can customize your creation further by switching to a three-state button: this displays a normal, mouse-over and mouse-click image, each of which may be tweaked to suit your needs. And if you add links to a button the Export option will display a sample HTML page, explaining how they can be used on the web.

Link: www.likno.com

Tags: Application

Internet shops are the fastest growing area of retail right now, and there’s never been a better time to hip your toes in the waters of ecommerce. This can seem an intimidating prospect, especially if you know nothing about web design, scripting, shopping carts, or any of the other essential elements of online stores. But that doesn’t have to be a problem. Shop Factory V7 eTrader will walk you through just about every step involved in creating and managing your shop.

The program comes with a range of attractive site templates that ensure your site will look every bit as professional as the commercial competition. The template also includes default sections where you can enter your privacy policy, terms of trade, contact details and more handy if you’re a beginner and might otherwise not realize that you need a privacy policy at all.

You’ll want to enter product details at some point, and that’s easy too. One dialogue lets you enter a variety of short or detailed descriptions, as well as entering thumbnail and full-sized images; everything you need to attract the attention of potential customers.

There are lots of business issues to consider, too: shipping, taxes, currencies, payment methods and more, but they’re all covered in the Help file and a selection of wizards.

A Preview button lets you view the site at any time, in your default browser. If everything’s right, you can publish the page to your own site, or pay to use the author’s own hosting service, and your shop could be online within minutes.

Link: www.makemeashop.com

FTP clients don’t exactly make headlines any more, but they are still essential applications for just about everyone who needs to manage a website, and Wise-FTP is one of the best.

The program makes it easy to enter all the details of your FTP connection: host name, login details, connection type, proxy settings and more. You can enter the details for as many sites as you need via the built-in Site Manager, then organize them with your own folder structure.

Once connected, Wise-FTP has one pane for showing your hard drive, and another for the remote FTP server. File transfer is easy, just drag and drop the files from one pane to the other.

The program has lots of features to speed up your FTP operations. If you want to make a quick edit to a PHP file, you might normally download it to your hard drive, open the document, save it your hard drive and upload the file again. But here you can select a file, choose to open it with the internal Wise-FTP editor, and make changes right away.

You can also synchronize local and remote folders, where Wise-FTP will automatically ensure the files on your server match those on your hard drive. Or, if you’re working with a lot of files, set up the Scheduler and it’ll upload them all while you’re not around.

In a world filled with malicious programs, emails, and Web sites, protecting your system is important. Consequently, many of us yearn for a security suite that provides full protection with little or no input. AVG Internet Security 8.0 comes close, providing a robust, multi-layered defense against virtually all of the digital goons lurking in the shadows.

For a price slightly higher than many competitors, you enjoy protection against incoming and resident viruses, malware, spam, phishing sites, and drive-by downloads, plus a firewall and deep-level system protection against such threats as rootkits.

Installation of AVG 8.0 is easy, with the setup utility explaining its behavior as it goes. It gives you input on important decisions, such as selecting the working environment where you use the PC for example, standalone, network, or mobile. It thoughtfully allows you to select more than one, too; good of you have a notebook you use on the road and at home.

AVG 8.0 also lets you choose a scan schedule, whether or not to report questionable Web pages, and whether or not to install the AVG Security Toolbar. This toolbar, which includes a Yahoo! search interface, installs in your browser. It lets you turn the Active Surf-Shield and Search-Shield on or off: two utilities that examine and rate Web sites and search results for potential threats.

Whether or not you install the AVG Security Toolbar, AVG and the underlying LinkScanner technology will work in the background, examining links online, in emails, bookmarks, documents, and other sources
to see if they are safe.

The AVG interface is comprehensive but filled with large icons that don’t do much except indicate status. It would be nice if users could right-click the icons to enable and disable protection, configure the suite, and perform other tasks. Instead, you’ll find configuration options buried in various menus.

Minor annoyances aside, AVG 8.0 did a good job of getting us up and running quickly, and intrusions are minimal and well-managed. AVG 8.0 alerts you when potentially risky programs access the Internet, you choose between unrestricted or safe site and one-time or permanent access. The antispam filter comes with several configuration features yet did a decent job without any changes.

System requirements (1.2GHz processor, 256MB memory) are reasonable. Tested AVG on several systems, including one that didn’t quite meet system requirements, and it ran on them all. However, the resource drain during some operations is noticeable unless you more than meet requirements. One other minor quibble is that there is no easy way to temporarily disable protection. You must go in and disable components individually.

Several virus labs give AVG 8.0 high marks, and we found its online protection generally to be on target. Overall, this program is a well-rounded, hassle-free choice for novice or busy users with reasonably fast computers. Intermediate users who occasionally want to fly without a net will likely be frustrated. Tech support is minimal with online FAQ and email only.

Click more for details:AVG Internet Security 8.0

What’s worse than Apple not giving its users defragmentation support in OSX?

The support in Windows Vista, clearly the slowest defragmentation application ever. We’re talking since the Winchester hard drive was invented in 1956. It’s as though the sectors are ?rst squeezed through a quantum singularity and then beamed back and reassembled into a contiguous ?le by an angry shop of sector elves two steps away from a strike.

For those of you who are mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore, there’s Auslogics Disk Defrag. Install this free defragger on your Vista OS and your blood pressure will drop instead of rise every time you defrag. XP users can bene?t too, the app is also much faster than Window XP’s freebie tool.

Download free from www.auslogics.com

More than 100,000 people worldwide have signed a Save XP petition organized by the US magazine Infoworld. The operating system will no longer be available as a shrink-wrapped product after 30 June, though PC builders will be able to pre-install XP until January.

A starter edition of XP will be available until mid-2010 in emerging markets, according to Microsoft, which claims Vista sales are heading for 100 million.

However, most Vista installs are in machines sold to home users. Business have been slow to adopt, not unusual with a new operating system, and some are concerned about hardware and software compatibility and performance, particularly on older machines.

But not everyone responding to thee petition was against Vista. One wrote: I’ve had Vista on my laptop since launch and I haven’t had any major issues with it.

With digital scrapbooking programs and Web sites cluttering the landscape, it can be difficult to pick the one that fits your needs. MemoryMixer is a highly adaptable scrapbooking program flexible enough to suit just about everyone.

Memory Mixer will tax users with older systems, but if you can get past the system requirements, it is quite useful. The installation consumes nearly 700MB of storage on your drive. Install the extras and the installation will be about 3GB. It also needs a reasonably powerful system to run. Recommended is a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 or better processor and 1GB or more of memory, although it will run on less. Running on a system a bit faster than the recommendation, it seemed a little bit sluggish. After installation, Memory Mixer will lead you to its site for registration. You can also join the Memory Mixer family. Joining is not required but will give you access to more creative freebies.

When you open MemoryMixer, two sequential interfaces pop up, prompting you to start or open an album and then to build from scratch or use Quick-Mix. Choose to create a new album from scratch and MemoryMixer will prompt you to name your album and select the orientation (portrait, landscape, or square) and one of dozens of layouts. You can also start with a blank page.

Once you have the basics down, buttons on the left side of the display let you add photo frames, embellishments, titles, shapes, music, or video to your album. Using the Edit Photo button, you can perform basic photo edits (crop, remove red eye, etc.) and more.

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Tags: Application