Extensoft is a new software company which launched a few months back. They describe themselves as “˜the unofficial Windows upgrade’ and have a growing set of tools and extensions designed to bring a whole lot of extra features to Windows. The reason they were not initially featured here on MakeUseOf is due to the fact [...]

I’m using Flock as my main browser. However for most of you, Firefox will be your choice. The reason I would recommend using Flock over Firefox to create the ultimate student research browser is the number of built in functionalities which really is quite useful for a student. By using Flock you get stacks of [...]

Everyone has their favourite service, software or developers who they would like to support and promote as much as they can. You can perhaps think of a few off the top of your head ““ Firefox is the obvious example from the last couple years, Digsby is becoming a favourite amongst the online community and [...]

RSS Feeds have become an essential way to keep up-to-date with many different online sources of information ““ in fact without it, tracking blog updates would be next to impossible. To those of you with a feed addiction, it may come as some surprise to learn that RSS adoption is still surprisingly low across web [...]

I know our usual topics include free software, webware and useful hacks, tips and guides.  However considering the importance of the Windows OS to all of the above, I thought perhaps you would be interested in a small preview of what Windows 7 has to offer. Quick look at Windows 7 features and screenshots. As [...]

Digsby is a messaging client which has become popular with many of the Make Use Of writers in the short time it’s been around. In fact ever since the private beta release in January followed by a public beta a few months later it’s been making quite a splash across the blogosphere. It even managed [...]

What I’m not going to do in this review is mention the word ‘iPod-killer’ because in the past that has seemed to be pretty bad for business! I will say this though”¦before the Zune 3.0 update, the choice between a Zune or an iPod was essentially being made by those who would avoid an iPod [...]

It sounds like a coffee mug; “You don’t have to be a student to get great software deals but it helps”. A lot of high-end software companies provide extremely good value packages for students often involving completely free giveaway editions, stripped-down versions or huge discounts on the off-the-shelf price. Maybe you hate Microsoft for charging [...]

We’ve previously covered Songbird on Make Use Of when Mark wrote about it as an iTunes killer back in January. I then wrote my own article six months later presenting my own favourite Songbird extensions. Since then I’ve been following the development of Songbird with a great deal of interest and was excited when Songbird [...]

In no way do we wish to encourage you to infringe copyright. On an unrelated note we’d like to share some tools for the purpose of ripping, converting, downloading and backing up videos. Since we’re starting from scratch the first thing I suggest you download is a Windows codec pack. Codecs are necessary to play [...]

Webcomics are perhaps a more unusual subject for you to see on Make Use Of, but I thought it’d be a nice change of pace. With the rise of the internet came the ability for everyone and anyone to self-publish. ‘Webcomics’ is a term that came to refer to any cartoon published on websites and [...]

The rise of blogs and easily publishable content created a need for the ability to track it, hence the creation of Really Simple Syndicate Feeds or RSS for short. “RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. [...]

Facebook have been experimenting with their new design since the beginning of the year, but only this week was it released to general users. Trying it out before required manually adding ‘new’ in front of your Facebook profile URL. However the official Facebook blog has now announced: “Starting this morning, more and more users started [...]

What can I say? Here I am declaring my love for Opera one week, and the next I’m talking about how great Flock is. Well, as I said in my last browser review, I use both Opera and Flock about equally – for no real reason apart from my inability to choose one over the [...]

It’s been nearly two years since Windows Vista was released to the masses back in November of 2007. Throughout this somewhat painful couple of years Microsoft managed to turn around just about all of the major issues facing the new operating system (compatibility, performance and bugginess) and they’ve even, believe it or not, had considerable [...]