Discoveries

PowerPoint is the standard presentation program for most of the business world, but PowerPoint files make very poor web presentations. AuthorPoint Lite is a freeware program that converts a PowerPoint presentation file (.ppt or .pps) to a Flash file (.swf) that can be uploaded to the web and viewed by almost everyone (as almost everyone has the Flash plugin already installed in their browser).

Flash Video has become very common on the Internet with popular sites like YouTube using for all their videos. Unfortunately, if you download a Flash Video, you will discover that they are very hard to play on your PC as most video players do not play Flash Video. This freeware program will convert Flash Video files to AVI, MPEG, or WMV video files which can be played in Windows Media Player and other video players.

I don't have an Ipod, but Tunstor looks like a great program for those who do. It lets you right click on an mp3 file download link on the web, select "Download Directly to iTunes" and Tunestor automates everything: "it automatically downloads the file to its music folder and adds it to the Tunestor playlist in iTunes. When you connect your iPod to your computer, all the music downloaded in this playlist will automatically get copied to your iPod!" This sounds like it would be a lot faster than manually downloading a file to a folder and then adding it to iTunes.

If you have ever used Add-Remove Programs on a computer well-stocked with software, you know that it can take forever and a day to load the list of installed software. Safarp loads blazingly fast and, according to the Safarp web site, has a number of extra features:

* Search function
* Obsolete list entries removal
* Export program list to a file (HTML, RTF, CSV...)
* New report templates can be written to export to other file formats
* Accessibility via the Control Panel (optional)
* Option to hide the Windows hotfixes

Apple has released a beta of their Safari browser for Windows. While consider a Mac browser for Windows? According to Apple there are a number of reasons, but this is the one that caught my eye:

Blazing performance. The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. And it executes JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.