New Era In Mobile Commerce
The Age
Tuesday November 23, 1999
Watch and learn COMPUTER text books are good to a certain extent, but there's nothing quite like seeing somebody demonstrate how to perform a task to learn how to do it yourself. Enter PC Show and Tell, a site that features more than 6,000 video demonstrations covering 40 software packages and Web sites. Included are AltaVista, Microsoft Word, HotMail and Netscape. You need special software to view the videos, but it's free, as are the demonstrations themselves. www.pcshowandtell.com Follow the leader THANKS to DejaNews it's never been easier to follow message threads on Usenet. Using the DejaTracker service you can automatically monitor newsgroup conversations. Simple select the message that interests you and then choose the track thread option and you'll receive e-mail notifications of new postings on that topic for as long as the thread continues. www.deja.com/mydn_tracker.xp Services with a smile IT'S amazing what Web sites can do these days. Take PC Support Centre, for instance. It provides a range of services that would previously have required expensive software to be installed on your system. The Disk Maintenance feature will free up extra real estate on your hard drive by deleting temporary files and then defragging the empty space, while the Software Update feature scans your PC to make sure you've got all the latest versions of all your applications. It also offers 25Mb of space online to back up your data, but you can pay for more. A number of other services will be added by the end of the year, including virus scanning. www.pcsupport.com Keep those viruses at bay - online IN the meantime, if you need to scan your PC for viruses, pop over to the McAffee site. The developer of VirusScan and First Aid has launched an online virus scanner. One of the main advantages of this approach is that you don't have to remember to download virus definitions because the online service has all the latest. A free 14-day trial is available, but after that you'll have to pay $US29.95 a year. www.mcaffee.com Click away your money woes IF fnCentral is any indication, it isn't simply utilities software that's making the move online, but also applications. FnCentral is a free Web-based finance management tool that offers much of the functionality of packages such as Quicken and Microsoft Money. Among the tasks it can be used to perform are expense tracking, budget projections and portfolio monitoring. It supports synchronisation with Quicken and Money, and there's even a special Palm interface, so you can use it when you're out and about. www.fncentral.com Keep your hand in STAY up-to-date with the latest news about Palm devices, the Handspring Visor and other handheld PCs at O'Grady's Palm Lounge. The site brings together reports and rumours from a range of sites and message boards. www.palmlounge.com Guide to Windows 2000 WITH Windows 2000 just around the corner (if it does, indeed, manage to be shipped on schedule), it may be time to start making regular visits to some of the better sites dedicated to the operating system. ZDNet's Windows Guide contains a review of the final beta of the operating system. There's also content relating to other flavours of the OS, stretching right back to Windows 3.1. www.zdnet.com/windows/ Watch this DESKTOP Watch is an excellent site that features comprehensive reviews of the freshest software releases, complete with screenshots, feature listings, pricing and numerical ratings. It's also worth visiting for its collection of links to a range of Windows customisation resources. www.desktopwatch.com Refreshing screensavers MOST screensavers get boring fairly quickly, regardless of how many bells and whistles they come with. Not Webshots, which displays a slideshow of images of your choice. With more than 2,000 spectacular photographs, organised by subject matter, to choose from it'll be a while before you tire of it. New photographs are added every day and you can even add your own snaps. The software is free, as are the images. www.webshots.com Net Resources archive Selected back issues of Net Resources can be found at the Fairfax I.T. sites section. www.it.fairfax.com.au/columns/sites/index.html JED BOWTELL jbowtell@ozemail.com.au Jed Bowtell is an editor (computers and Internet) at Looksmart International.
© 1999 The Age
