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We've seen numbers that show that no matter how many web pages there out there, and no matter how much social networking stuff is available, the most-used facility on the Internet is plain old email. Even if you factor out all the spam and junk flying around, that's a lot of email.

Zimbra Desktop is a free email client with a lot of added goodies. It does all the email stuff you'd expect, allowing you read and write messages, and work with both POP and IMAP servers. It's also smart enough to work with web-based mail services like Gmail, Yahoo, and the lot. But along with email, it's also got contact management, calendaring, and more. Think of it as being like Outlook but without Outlook's hefty price tag. And since there are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, you're going to have to work pretty hard to find a machine you can't use it on.

You can download Zimbra Desktop for free. In addition, they've got big deal enterprise-size network email solutions (not free), although you don't need them to run the free app.

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You run tons of software every day, but how much of it actually lives on your machine? If you use Gmail instead of Eudora or Google Docs instead of Word Perfect, you've heard about "software as service" and "cloud computing". Rather than having a copy of somebody's shrink-wrapped software application running on your desktop machine or even a box back in the server room, you're accessing those types of tools via your web browser or otherwise making things happen across the 'Net.

Firing up a full-blown web browser every time you want to check the mail or edit a document can get to be a bit of a pain. You don't need all of the browser's functionality—or all of its distractions—to get your job done. That's where a tool like Prism comes in.

Running as a standalone desktop app or as a plugin to your web browser, Prism basically creates a single-purpose instance of your web browser. Rather than surfing all around, or getting sucked into Facebook, if you're running Google Docs through Prism, you get Google Docs and nothing else. It's kind of like running Word, inasmuch as you've now got a single-purpose tool that helps you get your work done, and doesn't get in the way in the mean time.

Prism is compatible with systems running Linux, OS X, and Windows as a desktop app, or you can run it as an add-on in Firefox. Either way it's free.

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There are all kinds of Web browsers out there. We're all familiar with the big guys: IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari. There's even the next level, including such contenders as SeaMonkey and Camino. There's a whole world out there beyond those, but many of them come in under the label "best kept secret." One of those is OmniWeb.

Like most browsers worth their salt, you can use this app to visit web pages and all that. The difference comes in how they implement the various bits and pieces of what you see. Their version of tabs, for instance, doesn't involve real individual tabs; instead, when you open a page in a new tab, it actually loads a thumbnail version of the target page in a pop-out drawer. To view that page, just click on the thumbnail and your current page—which is also shown in that drawer as a thumbnail—goes away and the new one is swapped in. If you've got combinations of pages that you usually access together—maybe Google News, your Gmail screen, and so forth—you can save them all into a Workspace. This makes it easy to restore your various favorites and keep your surroundings familiar. It's also easy to block pop-ups and ads, and even to block Flash content from the pages you view, and that can be a great time and bandwidth saver.

OmniWeb is a Mac program. It runs under OS X 10.4.8 and later.

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For much of the modern world, all that stands between you and utter disaster is a password. Lots of online accounts depend on an email address as a user name, so if somebody's after your stuff, they're halfway there just by virtue of knowing that address. That means that choosing a good password is even more important.

The best password is the password that has the least meaning in the real world. Your pet's name, dictionary words, the word "password"? Not such good choices. Passwords that include both upper- and lower-case alphabetic characters, numbers, and even punctuation marks are better. And you get bonus points for making them extra long as well. So how do you know if your password is a good one?

Check out The Password Meter. This free online service takes a look at your password and lets you know how it measures up. Sure, there are no "password police" out there to really say that you've made good choices or bad, but these guys will point out places where you could improve things (no repeated characters) and where you've made good choices (including at least three of the four character types listed above). One drawback to this tool is that it caps you at a max of 16 characters for passwords that it tests. The security of your passwords will increase dramatically as the number of characters increases.

If you're a little squeamish about checking real passwords on a non-secure site like this, you can download the tool and run it on your local system. The heavy lifting and analysis is done by a chunk of JavaScript, so it's not really talking to the server.

The Password Meter is a free service. If you've got a browser and care about security, you should be good to go.

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When you write in Word, OpenOffice Writer, or any other high-powered word processor, you've got built-in spell checking, grammar checking, and more. But any more, lots of your writing doesn't take place in one of these desktop apps. Writing blog posts, creating Tweets in Twitter, and lots of other places have you composing directly in your web browser, where these types of tools aren't necessarily available to you.

You can add the ability to check spelling, grammar, and usage with After The Deadline. This tool is available as an Add-on for Firefox. Click in a text field on your online form, hit the After The Deadline hotkey, and it'll take a look a things and let you know what it thinks might need attention, highlighting spelling errors in red, problems with grammar in green, and even style suggestions in blue.

And if you don't happen to have Firefox, they've made the core functionality of this tool available as a bookmarklet that you can use with Safari and Internet Explorer.

After The Deadline is free for personal use. All you'll need to use it is a recent copy of Firefox and a dedication to making (and fixing) spelling errors.

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Back in the day there were web browsers. You used them to visit sites and, umm, browse the web. Then came Firefox. Sure, you can still use it to look at web pages, but with the advent of Add-ons, now you can do all kinds of extra stuff, from analyzing the structure of web pages to setting-up to-do lists, and more.

FireFTP is a full-blown FTP client that comes as a Firefox Add-on. Once you go through the install process, you've got a fully functioning FTP tool to use for file transfers to- and from your system. It supports both plain vanilla FTP transfers, as well as encrypted SFTP uploads and downloads. Even though the browser and Add-on are platform independent, you will need to go through some extra machinations to get SFTP to work on your Mac or Linux system. It's got enough options to let you customize its behavior in ways that make the most sense to how you work, including saving login info, default directories, and such.

FireFTP is a free download. Since it's a Firefox Add-on, you'll need the Firefox web browser (version 3 or later) to use it.

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There's no doubt that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the wave of the future for web page layout and formatting. Gone are the days when everything was a table and <FONT> tags ruled the day. Stylesheets give you much greater flexibility and accuracy in your text formatting and page layout. Unfortunately it's not always easy to figure out just which commands to use to get the job done.

Simple CSS tries to help make the whole stylesheet thing easier. A desktop app, you can use a series of dropdown lists to build your style rules. It's almost always easier to pick stuff from a list that to pull them up from memory, and this seems to be no exception. Text formatting, page layout, borders, and more are available to you. Use it to create new stylesheets, or import existing ones and use it to tweak them and get them just right.

Available in both Windows and Mac versions, Simple CSS is a free download. The Windows version runs under Win98 and later; for Mac it's a Universal Binary and runs under OS X and should do fine with Tiger (10.4).

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As you browse the web, you're (hopefully) going to run across things that interest you. Some stuff, like news stories, are read-once encounters; you look at it, read and understand, and go on your way. Other stuff you may want to revisit. If you're looking at a page that's really important to you, then you'll want to bookmark it. Use your browser, or tag it for del.icio.us, and you'll always be able to come back to it. And then there's the stuff in between.

Quiet Read lets you bookmark pages on a more temporary basis. When you've seen content you want to come back to, but you don't need to remember it forever, all you need to do is drag it to the menubar. The Quiet Read icon sits there unobtrusively waiting for you to drag and drop the link. When you've got time to revisit the site, just click the icon, and you'll get a list of the pages you've saved. Double-click the link, and you're back. It's easy to delete links as well, so you don't have to worry about having dozens—or hundreds—of "it seemed important at the time" entries, like with your regular bookmarks.

Quiet Read is a free download for your Mac. You'll need to be running OS X and update to Snow Leopard (10.6) to use it.

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Lots of systems now ship with a webcam as standard equipment. It's pretty handy to be able to video conference from the convenience of your desktop. For that matter, there are lots of uses for that technology. Unfortunately, if you're using more than one of them at a time, you may be out of luck as far as your camera is concerned.

ManyCam lets you use your webcam with multiple applications at the same time. Whether you're chatting or streaming live, your single camera handles it all. In addition, ManyCam includes several fun features you can use, including adding text, including local date and time, to your video feed, and background effects. It's almost like having your own green screen backgrounds, but without all that tedious painting.

ManyCam is a free download. It's available for Windows (requires Win2k or later) and Mac (OS X 10.5+, Intel machines only).

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If you run a blog or have a website, you know all about FTP—File Transfer Protocol. These three simple letters can mean several different things: the language that computers use when talking to one another about moving files around; the tool you use to do that moving; and even as a verb, in describing what you're doing, as in "I'm going to FTP those files up to the server." The use of FTP is almost as complicated as talking about it.

If you FTP from the command prompt, then you're probably already confused. Between all the PUTs and the GETs, it's a wonder anything gets done. A graphical FTP tool can be a real time saver, as well as doing wonders for your sanity.

Classic FTP is a pretty straightforward GUI FTP client. It features drag-and-drop uploads and downloads between your local machine and the server. Add default local and remote directories, and you'll save even more time, since you don't have to manually reposition yourself every time you connect.

Classic FTP is a free download. It's available for Windows (Win 2000 and later), PocketPC, and Macs running OS X (10.2+).

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