If you’re looking for some really slick apps for your mobile phone, look no further than PC Mag’s massive roundup of 100 awesome free apps for your mobile device, no matter what operating system it’s running. If you have an iPhone, you’ve got 40 great free apps in the list to choose from! Using a Motorola Droid (like me) or an Samsung Moment? There are 20 awesome apps in there for Android mobile phones to! Even if you’re all business and rocking a Blackberry Storm 2, you can find 20 apps in the list to help you pass the time on those long business flights. There are even some generic free games and 10 Windows Mobile apps for those of you with Windows Mobile devices!

Because the roundup is strictly free apps, you’ll miss out on some of the high-end apps that may require you to pay to download them, but the list is incredible comprehensive and has a ton of useful applications that can help you do everything from shop on the go to check your travel plans at the drop of a hat to compare prices on an item in the store to items online to stay in touch with your friends while you’re out and about town.

If you read the roundup and you’re itching for some more great apps for your mobile device, or if you’re a Symbian user and don’t see yourself represented here, head over to Popular Science and check out my roundup of Must Have Mobile Apps to help bolster your list!

[ PC Mag :: Top 100 Free Apps for Your Phone ]

MotionBox is well known as one of the leading video sharing sites that already has support for true HD streaming video, downloadable media, and the ability to control who sees your video. Whether you want to share your videos with the world or you want to keep some of them private to friends and family, MotionBox has plans and tools to help you do that. Additionally, if you’re looking for a way to add some flare and spice to your blog or business, MotionBox can host your video somewhere that isn’t YouTube, for example, or one of the other popular video hosting services, and you can re-post and embed your content anywhere you choose.

The beauty of MotionBox is that even though other video hosting services have their hooks into mobile devices and camcorders, they still manage to make it easy for you to upload, edit, and share your video with the world whenever you choose.

MotionBox previously had both free and premium accounts: the free accounts give you the option to give the service a whirl, store and upload a limited number of videos, edit them online, and create DVDs and eCards using your own video for an added cost. Premium accounts allow you to upload virtually as many videos as you choose, securely share the ones you want to keep private with only the people you want to see them, upload and stream movies in HD, and even allow certain people to download the videos you allow them to.

Last week, MotionBox announced a new account type: MotionBox Pro, which allows commercial and business users to sign up for the service, and offers them unique streaming and editing tools to make video sharing work for their organization. Pro users also get priority video encoding, so you don’t have to wait as long to upload your video and have it be available for people to see, and you get all of the benefits that the premium accounts provide as well!

To celebrate the announcement, MotionBox is giving away a few Roku digital set-top boxes to select users who sign up for MotionBox this month – all you have to do to enter the contest is sign up for an account and e-mail their contest address with the subject line “Roku Giveaway!” Yes, before you ask, the contest includes the free accounts – so whether you’re a business user or a personal user looking to post your videos to the Web without dealing with YouTube commenters, you can get in on the action as well!

For more information, head over to MotionBox to learn more, see how much the premium and new pro accounts cost, and sign up today!

[ MotionBox ]

Microsoft announced last week that they would be discontinuing their Mac-based e-mail application, Entourage, and instead shipping a full version of Outlook with the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac, due out in 2011, if previous trends hold.

Quoth the Microsoft:

Outlook for Mac releasing in the next version reflects the team’s commitment to further develop the Mac’s leading productivity suite. This new application will deliver significant changes — ultimately allowing for increased productivity across platforms, which continues to be the top request of enterprise customers. The MacBU today shared a few of the features that will be in Outlook for Mac, including these:

• Cocoa. Built from the ground up using Cocoa providing users with improved integration with the Mac OS

• New database. A high-speed file-based database with support for backing up files with Time Machine and Spotlight searching

• Information Rights Management. Helps prevent sensitive information from being distributed to or read by people who do not have permission to access the content

“Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server have been a cornerstone of communications and collaboration for our enterprise customers,” said Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of the Office product management group at Microsoft. “Today’s release of the Web Services Edition strengthens Exchange connectivity for Entourage customers and sets the stage for the move to the new application — Outlook for Mac. These updates continue Microsoft and the MacBU’s tradition of delivering the most complete solution to help customers manage their time, and better share their information and collaborate with others.”

I’m glad to hear that Microsoft will take the lessons that it learned from Entourage and apply them to what Mac users look for in a high-end e-mail client when buildling Outlook for the Mac. There hasn’t been an Outlook for Mac since Outlook 97, which only ran in OS 9 and in “Classic,” a feature that many new Mac users have probably never even heard of.

Quick primer: back when OS X was new, in order to ease the pain of moving to entirely new operating system and processing environment, Apple included “Classic” with OS X installations, which allowed users to essentially emulate (using Rosetta) Mac OS 9 under the hood and run apps that were only supported in versions of Mac OS prior to OS X. You essentially needed a full OS 9 installation under the hood to make this work, but it worked – and kept apps like Outlook 97 alive. Classic died forever when Apple made the shift to x86 hardware, away from IBM’s PowerPC architecture, and isn’t even supported in Mac OS 10.5, the current version of the OS.

Entourage is an excellent app, don’t get me wrong – it’s great at getting mail, helping you stay organized, and being an all around stellar personal information management tool – if you really dig into it and make it the hub of your contacts, your appointments, and your email, it works really well. The problem is that Entourage never really fully supported Exchange the way its users expected it to, and it was woefully lacking in advanced features that gave it a home in the enterprise, and that Microsoft Outlook users on the PC-side enjoyed (and in many cases, thought were critical.) I liked Entourage a lot, but always thought it was about 85% of what it really ought to be.

There are probably a number of reasons why Microsoft is making this move now – aside from the desire to improve the strength of the Office for Mac product line, and the wishes of its userbase and of IT departments around the world that are being inundated with Macs that their techs probably don’t know how to support, Microsoft has another major competitor to deal with: Mail.app.

Apple announced earlier this year that along with Snow Leopard and the iPhone 3.0 software upgrade would come an updated Mail.app that featured full and true Exchange support. What does that really mean? Well, if Mail.app, Address Book, and other embedded applications that come with Mac OS are not only integrated with each other, but can be seamlessly tied in with Exchange, there’s little reason for an IT department to be concerned with a Mac user’s lack of integration, and considering the strength of tools like iWork (Pages is a stellar word processor and desktop publishers, and there’s no debating Keynote’s superiority over PowerPoint) and the fact that iWork opens MS Office documents, you have to wonder why someone would use Office for Mac at all.

It’s likely that these improvements to Office for Mac are designed not only to strengthen their product, but to ensure that have a competitive product against Apple’s own bundled desktop apps and productivity suite – Mac users who use iWork and prefer the convenience of Mail.app and the other bundled core apps may very well decide not to purchase Office for Mac in the future unless there’s a real reason to – and Outlook for Mac very well may be that reason, if Microsoft does it right.

[ Microsoft :: Outlook for Mac to Ship With Next Version ]

Microsoft giveth, and Microsoft taketh away. Last week Microsoft announced that the shipping date of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 suite of productivity applications, including new versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, were going to be pushed back a few months from the October 2006 date that it announced in March to “end of the year 2006″ for volume licensees and retail versions should appear “early 2007.” Microsoft claims that the announcement is to give developers more time to respond to and encorporate feedback and suggestions from the Office 2007 Beta 2 release a few months ago, from which Microsoft reportedly attained a wealth of information from users who gave the office suite an official spin for their daily work. There are rumors that Microsoft is aiming at a joint Windows Vista, Office 2007 simultaneous launch, but those rumors go unconfirmed, and in fact a Vista spokesperson is quoted as saying that “The (Office 20007) announcement today does not impact Windows Vista timing.”

[ News.com :: Microsoft Delays Office 2007 Again ]

At the same time, however, Microsoft announced that you can “test drive” Office 2007 at their website; take it out for a spin on your own to explore the new “ribbon” menu and function system built into the interface, and try some of the other new integrated features in the office suite. Lifehacker took a screenshot tour of it here: [ Lifehacker :: Test Drive Office 2007 ]

They explain that the test drive is a little hard to get started and requires that you use Internet Explorer (of course) but once you’ve got it started, it’ll give you a good feel for how to get around the new applications, but most importantly gives you an opportunity to try out the “ribbon,” love it or hate it.

[ Microsoft :: 2007 Microsoft Office System Beta 2 Test Drive ]

I can attest to this article being fact. I don’t know if I’d say “traumatized,” since that’s a pretty harsh word, but I can definitely say there have been some days (like today) where I wonder if I’m not slowly losing my grip on sanity, and it looks like I’m not alone by any means. Turns out that a vast majority of technology professionals understand how I’m feeling, and I get what they’re thinking. The reasons for why technology professionals feel this way are multifold; partially because technology consultants, administrators, support staff, and workers are in many cases viewed as “white-collar janitors” by many people, and because they’re only called upon when something is either broken, wrong, or needed by people who can’t do it themselves, they’re often treated horribly by those who call on them. Additionally, technology is often tossed at the bottom of the corporate ladder, with the least in the way of resources and equipment, but having to deal with people who have the best equipment and resources but need their help to make it work; technology is percieved as a “service” industry, to be treated as such, often with little more respect than is commonly seen in retail or other service professions.

The article, however, has some good points as well, beyond my own personal experiences-including how our society has cultured a constant and neverending 24/7 marketplace, a workplace where hyperactivity and hyperproductivity are rewarded, and the scourge of impoliteness in our offices and workplaces. I agree with all of those points, but would definitely toss in my own; as long as technology workers are supposed to behave in a “customer focused” and not “task focused” mindset, and are expected to cowtow to those who call them and allow themselves to be walked on, then technology professionals will always feel downtrodden and ill respected. Until then, I can only support my colleagues and hope we can all find some measure of reprieve someday, either in the form of therapy, or a promotion away from the stressful positions that many of us find ourselves in.

[ St. Louis Today :: Many IT Professionals Feel Traumatized by the Daily Grind ]

Google quietly signed up several people for the beta for their Google Spreadsheets application today, providing a select few access to what will eventually most likely become Google’s newest web-based offering among its already-impressive suite of services. Admittedly after the successfuly launch of Google’s calendar application, a spreadsheet isn’t horribly far off, but the question does remain, who is this service for and what is its target audience?

With headlines like Google Takes Aim at Excel and so on, its obvious that many analysts believe that Google is moving progressively in the direction of creating and marketing an Ajax/Web 2.0-ish office suite of applications that are linked to its popular GMail and Google Calendar services; luring people away from the Microsoft Office suite of products. However, whether or not this is their real aim is still a matter up for debate. In the meantime, the story has hit news sources like the New York Times, which is taking an in depth look at the new Google Spreadsheets beta and puts it in context of developing a web-based set of applications and services that will take the need for desktop applications away.

[ New York Times :: Google Readies Google Spreadsheets ]

In the meantime, Google Blogoscoped [ http://blog.outer-court.com/ ] has a few demo videos of the new service and a preliminary review that overall, looks positively on the new service; saying that usability is quite good and many of the commonly used and best features of any spreadsheet application are right there in your browser when you use Google Spreadsheets.

[ Google Blogoscoped :: Inside Google Spreadsheets ]

One can only hope so! Many studies have shown that animal testing has only marginal effectiveness, and is not a reliable indicator of the behavior or effects of a drug or treatment when applied to humans. Articles posted in journals like Nature and in circulations like Scientific American have lent credibility to the notion that there may be a day when computer models will be far more accurate than animal testing, and can do more varied studies, simulations, and run multiple tests using hardware that can be purchased for a fraction of the cost of breeding, maintaining, and experimenting on animals, using significantly less space, and return better results that can lead to more aggressive and faster breakthroughs in areas like cancer research, vaccine research, immune studies, and new treatments and drugs for all of those conditions, other debilitating diseases, and more.

But before we say goodbye to our faithful lab rats that have given so many lives in the study of how to save human ones, computing technology has a ways to go before it can be proven to be both more cost effective and resource effective than animal study, and additionally, scientists will have to be retrained from the classical mentality of studying animal behavior and then dissecting them and retrained in essentially computer science. Between advances in computer modeling and tissue culturing however, we could very well soon see the end of scientific testing as we know it, speed up the saving of millions of human lives while saving millions of animal lives, and further press the progress of technology and technology in scientific research. The idea has wide support among the scientific community, but it has a ways to go. Today’s New Scientist has the scoop. No link to the full article without paying, but you get the idea from the abstract.

[ New Scientist :: Can Computer Models Replace Animal Testing? ]

Gearlog [ http://gearlog.com/ ] has a great hands-on look at one of the best Wacom tablets to come out yet; the Cintiq 21UX- a Wacom tablet that doubles as an LCD display that is touch and pressure sensitive, so you can take the stylus that comes with it and draw right on the screen! The review is thorough and complete, and Terry Sullivan, who writes the review for Gearlog, points out the Cintiq’s good and bad points. Wacom has been making pen tablets for years, with touch and pressure sensitive pads that respond to the included stylus that has a variety of buttons and functions on it, and their products have long been the favorites of many a graphic designer and professtional (and unprofessional!) artist.

Aside from the Cintiq being every graphic designer’s dream by combining a touch and pressure sensitive pad and stylus with the actual screen that one would be drawing on (a beautiful 21.3 inch LCD, at that!), the product provides new features like being able to tilt the pen in diferent directions for new effects, and intutitive preferences and menus that let you spend less time fiddling with the prefs to make sure its working right and more time immersing yourself in the function and feel of what I think will quickly become standard in design studios and graphic houses in the coming years.

Put down your credit card though, the Cintiq is about $2400 USD, and while it’s available now, it’s definitely not for the casual designer who can get away with spending a fraction for one of Wacom’s more standard tablet/pen packages. This tool is aimed at the serious designer or design professional, but for those folks who can afford it and use it, it’s definitely a must-have. Check out Sullivan’s review (along with more pretty pictures) linked below.

[ Gearlog :: Hands On: A Portrait of the Wacom Cintiq 21UX ]

Okay, so the article isn’t really called the “Zen” of dual monitors, but rather the “virtues” of a second screen. And having been someone who thought they were happy with a 15-inch CRT back in the day, only to move up to a 22-inch CRT, then a 20-inch LCD, and now finally a shiny pair of dual 20-inch LCDs on his desk (at home anyway) I can attest to how wonderful it is to be able to be writing about something in one screen while I have the thing I’m writing about open in the other. Or, as another example, to be chatting or teleconferencing with other people on one screen, while doing research or reading information (or typing information!) in the other. Or, perhaps my favorite example, to be playing World of Warcraft in one window, while looking up item sell prices and stats on the web in the other. Seriously, once you’ve done it, you won’t go back. I, for one, since recieving my new MacBook Pro, have rigged up even my office desk to support the MacBook on the left and my LCD on the right as a second monitor. It really does help to have the extra real estate.

That being said, people usually either absolutely love dual monitor setups, or they hate them-they love being able to do all of those things I mentioned, or they hate the extra lateral desk space it’ll take up and having to move their eyes from screen to screen-those people might prefer one of Dell’s shiny 24-inch or 30-inch LCD displays: [ Dell Monitors ] But for the rest of us who can definitely get down with more than one display will be pleased at this article in the New York Times this morning about how dual display setups can definitely impact your productivity, 20 to 30 percent, for that matter!

One reviewer leaves alt-tab land and enters dual display heaven, and recounts his story for the rest of us to see. Read on, and join us!

[ New York Times :: The Virtues of a Second Screen ]

Okay, before I get to that conclusion; I should at least share the story. Jacob Citrin, a former employee of International Airport Centers, was given a laptop by his employers to do company work with, managing the IAC’s real estate business. The trouble started when Cirtin decided to go into buisiness for himself and do a little work on the side that may or may not have had anything to do with his work at the IAC, and the notion that he even went into business on the side for personal gain is also alleged and not proven in any court. Even so, Citrin eventually quit the IAC and went off to do his own thing, but essentially in the same business. The IAC complained, saying that his personal venture violated his employment contract. Okay, a contract dispute; whatever.

But here’s the problem-when Cirtin returned his work laptop, IAC’s tried to inspect it for files and data that would incriminate Citrin and link him to the wrongdoing they were accusing him of. The problem is, he outsmarted them and used a secure-delete program to not only erase his data, but also to reformat, over-write, and in as many ways as he could, completely eradicate the data on the laptop so no one would be able to retrieve it. Sure enough, IAC couldn’t get the data they wanted. So what did they do? They hauled him into court, complaining to the judge that they’d been outsmarted-I mean that claiming that Citrin’s alleged secure deletion violated a federal computer crime law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Apparently, a judge, who likely has absolutely no knowledge of technology (but I’m sure understands the law, which leaves a problem when people who know the law but not technology are making judgements…or worse politicians who don’t understand technology make laws about technology) agreed with IAC, and claimed that his secure deletion of the files did indeed breach the Act.

What does this mean? Well, anyone who uses a secure deletion utility on their computers to protect their data, or eliminate data, that is, could face charges under federal law from a previous employer who was snooping around the system looking for something to incriminate them with. What’s far more frightening is that nothing even needed to be there in the first place; the trick is that the employer only has to claim that damage was done to the company and to it’s property (supposedly the computer) by erasing the data in a manner where it cannot be retrieved. The implications of this are enormous, and the old stand-by of keeping your personal data off of a work computer don’t even apply. Trying to keep your own data from the prying eyes of competiing colleagues, covering your tracks, or even cleaning up your system in the manner that your IT staff would probably have done for you anyway might land you in prison. It’s definitely a frightening prospect.

Read the whole story over at the ZD Net Police Blotter:

[ ZD Net : Police Blotter: Ex-employee Faces Suit Over File Deletion ]