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Where would we be without RSS readers? As we all get more plugged-in, we've all got more and more places we want to keep track of, and more information to digest. News sites, blogs, the list goes on.

NewsFire is a newsreader that lets you set things up the way that makes the most sense to you. While you can use it for plain vanilla subscriptions to your favorite feeds, you'll want to use its "Smart Groups" to filter and organize the constant flow of information coming across your desk. It has a minimal interface, so it's not all up in your face, demanding your constant attention.

NewsFire is a true Mac application, so it looks like and behaves like you'd expect it to. We've all been disappointed with Mac apps that really just look like Mac, but don't behave that way.

NewsFire is a free application for your Macintosh. It requires OS X version 10.4 or later.

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Probably the quickest and easiest way to share files with your friends or co-workers is to email them. Just attach a picture or a document to an email message and push the button. Unless you've got a large file.

Many email systems have limits on the size or number of attachments that they'll support. And of course if your recipient has a slower connection, it means that the day you send the big attachment is the day that they'll remember taking way too long to download their email. You could use an FTP server, but that can be a pain in the neck.

DropShare is an easy way to share your files: there's no configuration necessary. Install the app, drag and drop the file you want to share onto the icon, grab the resulting URL, and email or IM that web address to your recipient. Instant download. You can move individual files, or even whole folders. And you can even see when your recipient has downloaded the files.

DropShare is a Mac app, and requires OS X 10.4 or later. The publisher promises a Windows version soon.

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Transmission is a free BitTorrent client with a difference. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, it just has what you need and none of what you don't. Its clean interface lets you work the way you want to. You're in control, with the ability to speed your torrents up or down, depending on bandwidth availability.

It supports Growl notifications, so you can do what you need to do, knowing that when Transmission is done, you'll be the first to know about it.

Transmission is available as a Universal Binary for Mac OS X (10.4 or later), or you can grab a tarball and roll your own for Linux, FreeBSD, and others.

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Virtual Private Networks (VPN) allow you to use a public network as if it were a private one. Imagine being able to send your sensitive data across the Internet, for example, without fear that your privacy will be compromised.

While there are a number of VPN applications available, Hamachi is different in that it allows you to create a tunnel even between hosts that are behind firewalls or NAT routers. Unlike other VPN setups, Hamachi's servers help to facilitate communication between machines that use non-routable private IP addresses. Once the connection is made, the server steps out of the way, so none of your data actually flows through their network, guaranteeing you the privacy and security you're looking for.

With the ability to create up to 64 networks with 16 nodes each (or 256 networks with 256 hosts each on the paid version), you can connect a sizable number of machines even though they're spread all over the world.

Hamachi is available for Windows systems running Win 2000 or later. A console version (no bells and whistles) for Mac OS X and Linux can be downloaded also.

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Get up, run through the shower, and then it's off to your favorite caffeinated beverage dispensary for a cup of Joe and a quick read of the morning's news. Hey, with any luck, maybe your system isn't being compromised, losing passwords, credit card numbers, and important company information. But why count on luck?

Hotspot Shield is a free Wi-Fi security app that you can load onto your laptop that will keep the uninvited out of your system. It creates a virtual private network (VPN) between your machine and the Wi-Fi router, making your communications—a least the portion between your machine and that local gateway—as secure as can be.

Hotspot Shield is available for both Windows (Win2k or later) and Mac (OS X 10.4 or later).

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Did you ever want—or need—to be in two places at once? Hey, you could get twice as much work done, or at least only be half as far behind. But seriously, multitasking is rapidly becoming a way of life: so much to do, so little time.

We can't promise to give you the secret behind bi-location, but we can suggest the next best thing: LogMeIn Free. A "remote control" tool, LogMeIn Free allows you to run one computer from another one. Need to check email at work, but you're at home? No problem. Need grandma's email address from your home system, but you're at work? It's done.

Installation is simple; you just install the software on the machine you want to control from afar, and leave that box running. Now you can access it from anywhere in the world. On a business trip and need that file you left at the office? Just go grab it.

LogMeIn Free is available for both Windows and Mac systems.

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KompoZer is a high-end WYSIWYG web authoring system that just happens to be free. With power like Dreamweaver and a price of $0, how can you go wrong?

Built on the Gecko rendering engine, the same one used by the Firefox web browser, KompoZer is fast and reliable. It doesn't require that you know any HTML in order to create killer web pages. It builds good HTML, not like some word processors, so you don't have to go in and fix what the tool created. With built-in validation, you can verify that you're putting clean code out there. Making extensive use of stylesheets, your code will be rendered more accurately by most web browsers. With tabbed documents, you can have multiple files open at once, and each one can be viewed in normal WYSIWYG mode, as well as HTML Tags mode, to see where the important tags are located, and even in source mode, so can see the underlying code, though you don't have to. And finally, with built in FTP support, you can use the same tool to create your pages and then publish them.

KompoZer is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

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Glide is pretty close to an entire operating system's worth of applications and tools, available online. With nothing to download or install, just about anybody with a modern web browser can take advantage of its capabilities.

Along with email, instant messaging, and a calendar app, Glide also has tools for website creation, a presentation tool (like PowerPoint), a text editor, photo editor tool, and a bunch more. There are applications that support sharing media, whether it be photos, music, videos, or documents. There is also a spreadsheet app that runs in conjunction with the Glide Sync tool.

You can also use Glide's Sync tool synchronize files living on multiple machines. This tool must be downloaded and installed and requires Windows 2000 or later, or Mac OS X 10.4+, or Linux (kernel 2.6).

With Glide Mobile, you can harness the power of Glide through your web-enabled phone or PDA. The publishers recommend it as the perfect accompaniment for the iPhone.

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Over the past several years, there has been a rapid increase in the amount of online course material available. Many colleges have dramatically increased the number of classes provided online as a way to stretch resources, as well as allowing more independently paced study. Re-entry students who have full-time jobs, for example, can "attend" class during evenings and weekends, whereas they might not be able to come to a physical classroom during the day in the middle of a work week.

There are many challenges that come up in making online classes informative and relevant for the needs of their students. One way to try to make the online learning experience better for students is through tools like Moodle.

Moodle calls itself a "course management system." It provides a framework for creating Internet-based courses of instruction and the supporting web sites. Based on a philosophy called "social constructionist pedagogy", which takes advantage of interactions among the community as well as content provided by the instructor, Moodle allows instructors to create opportunity for rich interaction, including elements such as wikis, forums, and blogs, as well as quizzes, surveys, and other activities.

There is extensive documentation available on the Moodle website. If you are responsible for the design or execution of online instruction, it may be worth your while to take a look and examine in depth the types of resources that Moodle can make available for you.

Moodle is available both for Windows and Mac systems running OS X, as well as systems running various flavors of Linux–basically any system that can support PHP, and requires a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.

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Is peer-to-peer file sharing not for you? It's too complicated to set up, and how about all those security issues. Does FTP scare you? What do all those arcane command line arguments mean anyway? You've got a file that needs to get from Point A to Point B. How do you do it?

Enter PipeBytes, a slick file-exchange service that only requires two users–the sender and the receiver–with a web browser each. Rather than sitting on somebody's server out there on the Internet, your file is actually copied directly from your machine to the target system.

To use the service, the users at each end simply go to the PipeBytes website.
The sender clicks on the Send File button, browses to and selects the file to be sent, optionally adds a text message, and clicks on the Start Upload button. The service returns a Pickup Code and a Pickup URL. The recipient then either clicks the Pickup File button on the PipeBytes website, or enters the Pickup URL into their browser, sees your message and a description of the file (filename, size, and MIME type), and clicks on the Start Download button.

Only at this point is the file actually uploaded from the senders machine. It never sits on a server anywhere, since it's immediately transmitted from the source to the destination machine. That means it's more secure, because it never sits anywhere waiting to be broken into. Encrypt your file, and you're using what has to be one of the safer file transfer methods out there.

PipeBytes is an online service, so it will work with just about any system out there that supports a web browser.

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