Tag Archives | Windows 7

Get Angry Birds on Your Windows PC

By Matthew Guay on February 22, 2011 in Featured, Techinch

Want to get the most popular mobile game on your PC? Angry Birds has taken the iPhone and Android world by storm, and it was recently released on the new Mac App Store. Windows doesn’t include an App Store by default, so for the most part you have to manually find, purchase, and install new programs you want. That is now changing with Intel’s AppUp Store. The AppUp store is designed to bring new applications to Windows XP and 7 based netbook, but it works fine on normal Windows desktops and laptops as well. Best of all, Angry Birds is now available for $4.99 on the AppUp Store and runs great on any Windows computer.

Angry Birds is now avilable for all Windows Computers directly from Rovio, so you can now get it without the Intel AppUp store. Just go to http://download.angrybirds.com/, and you can download trial and paid versions of all the editions of Angry Birds!

Install the AppUp Store

First, though, you’ll need to install the Intel AppUp application on your PC. Download and install it as normal on your computer. This should only take a few minutes, and once it’s installed, you’ll have quick access to tons of great, new free and premium apps for your Windows PC.

Note: While the AppUp Center works great on both Windows 7 and Windows XP computers, it is not working at all on Windows Vista in our tests. If you try it on Vista and get it to work, please let us know in the comments below!

In the mean time, you’ll need to register for an AppUp account. Head over to the AppUp registration site, and enter your personal and credit card info so you’ll be ready to purchase new apps like Angry Birds.

As soon as the install is finished, the AppUp Center should automatically open. If it doesn’t, you’ll find it in your Start menu or on your desktop. You can now browse the store and see the different games and apps that are included. Apps are organized into categories, with featured apps front and center similar to the way the iOS App Store looks in iTunes. Only difference is, this time, the programs are designed for your PC.

Getting Angry Birds

Ok, enough talk. Let’s get the game everyone wants: Angry Birds. It’s currently a featured app, so you could just click Buy App right from the front page. Alternately, click its link or search for it via the top search bar to see more info. Once you’re sure you want to buy it, click Buy App.

When prompted, sign in with the account you made previously, then confirm that you want to purchase the app. The AppUp Center gives you a 24 hour free trial, so you can return the app within 24 hours if you decide you don’t want it.

Angry Birds will now start downloading, and will automatically install once its downloaded. It still uses a standard Windows Installer, and you may have to click an UAC prompt during the installation, but overall it’s quicker and easier than traditional Windows program installs. It’s not as easy as installing apps from the Mac App Store, but it’s not that bad either. And, if you have multiple PCs, you can install the same app on up to 4 computers with the same account for no additional charge!

Smash Those Pigs!

Once its installed, you can launch the game straight from the AppUp center, or from the Angry Birds link in your Start menu. Seconds later, you’ll be playing the world’s favorite touch screen game … on your PC with a mouse! I’d say it’d be rather fun on an HP Touchsmart or other PC with a touchscreen, though I don’t have a touchscreen PC to try it on. If you’ve got a touchscreen PC, let us know how it works on it!

Angry Birds worked great on my main PC, which is a Windows 7 desktop with an AMD Athlon 64 x2 processor … definitely not a netbook! It also works great on netbooks, of course. The only computer I couldn’t get it to work on was a Vista desktop with an Intel processor; hopefully they’ll support Vista in the near future, but for now, the App Center only runs on Windows 7 and XP.

Angry Birds for PC includes everything you love about Angry Birds, including all of the standard levels. The only problem is, you can’t import your score from your iPhone or Android phone, so you’ll have to go beat all the levels all over again! Or, if you haven’t gotten to experience Angry Birds because you don’t have a modern smartphone, it’ll be all new to you.

Since most PCs don’t have touchscreens, you’ll have to drag the screens with your mouse to pan and see the whole level. Then, just click and drag your bird back, aim, and release your mouse to set your bird sailing through the air to the birds.

Oddly, the only major problem I had with Angry Birds for PC was with taking screenshots. It interferes with almost every screenshot program, so the only way I could get shots is to press Alt-tab and then hover over the Angry Birds icon in my taskbar. Camtasia Studio couldn’t take a video screencast of it, either; it just recorded my desktop with my mouse going back and forth and the Angry Birds sounds in the background. But hey, you don’t usually need to take screenshots while playing a game, so this shouldn’t be a problem!

Returning AppUp Center Apps

Of course, Angry Birds isn’t the only interesting app in the AppUp center, so feel free to check out other apps in the store. There’s plenty of free and for-pay options, and you just might find a fun, new app that you’ve never come across before. Best of all, you can try out any app, even paid ones, for free for 24 hours. If you decide you don’t want the app, just open the AppUp Center and click the My Apps tab on the left. Select Transaction History, then click the Options button on the app you want to return. Click Cancel Purchase before your 24 hour timeframe is up to return it. You’ll be asked to tell why you’re returning the app, and then it will automatically uninstall from your computer. That’s tons easier than most ways of trying out new programs!

Conclusion

It’s exciting as a Windows PC user to see new apps coming out for PCs again. Recently it’s seemed like all the developer focus is on mobile and Mac apps, but Intel’s AppUp Center just might turn things around again. In fact, some developers are finding it easier to get their new apps out for PCs than on Apple’s App Stores. TinyGrab, a great freemium screenshot utility for Macs, Windows, and iOS, has recently found Apple’s restrictions on the App Store too restrictive for their app, while at the same time they’ve found it easy to work with Intel on getting their app on the AppUp Center.

Hopefully Intel will continue to improve the AppUp Center and make it fully supported on computers other than netbooks. And, of course, hopefully Microsoft will make their own App Store for Windows and make it easier to get apps on all modern versions of Windows. For now, though, all the apps I tried work great on Windows 7 and XP. And hey, who would have thought that Angry Birds would finally be available for PCs?

Download Intel AppUp

Angry Birds Info Page on the AppUp Store

The Angry Birds Official Site

New! Download directly from Rovio Without the Intel AppUp Store

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Make Sure Chrome Will Keep Playing h.264 Video

By Matthew Guay on February 3, 2011 in Quick Tips

Last year, it looked like the HTML5 video codec war was over. All major browsers other than Firefox had announced or added support for h.264/MPEG video playback. This was a great win for users, and many websites began switching from Flash powered videos to h.264 videos with the HTML5 <video> tag. Whether you’re using Safari on a Mac, Chrome on a Windows computer or Chrome netbook, or an Apple iPhone or iPad, h.264 videos would playback the same without requiring frustrating, CPU intensive plugins like Adobe Flash Player.

That’s all changed now, as Google announced that they will be dropping support for h.264 encoded videos in favor of their own WebM format. The problem is, WebM formatted videos would only playback right now in Firefox 4 beta and Chrome. Google has announced that they will make WebM plugins for Safari and Internet Explorer, but the facts remain that many sites already are either using h.264 videos in HTML5 or are simply using Flash Player to decode the videos.

So, what can you do if you want to playback h.264 encoded videos in your browser, but still want to use Chrome? If you’re using Windows 7, Microsoft’s already got a solution for you. Media Player in Windows 7 already includes a licensed h.264 playback codec, so they made a Chrome extension that will let you playback h.264 videos in webpages using the codec already on your computer.

To make sure you’ll always be able to playback h.264 videos in Chrome, just head to the Microsoft Interoperability Bridges site to download the free Windows Media Player HTML5 Extension for Chrome. Install the extension as usual. Now, once Google actually drops h.264 support from Chrome, you’ll never notice the difference!

Then, when Google releases the WebM extension for IE and Safari, you could install it in those browsers to make sure you’ll be able to see any video on any site. Flash is being used less and less, though unfortunately, that doesn’t mean you’ll quit having to install extensions and plugins to view everything online. Maybe someday…

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Speed up Evernote on Windows

By Matthew Guay on January 14, 2011 in Featured, Techinch

Have you ever fired up Evernote for Windows to find something you’ve jotted down only to find that it’s running glacially and takes forever just to open a note? Even with the new and improved Evernote 4, sometimes it still is one of the slowest apps on my PC. So much so, in fact, that I’d nearly switched to using Evernote web instead of the desktop interface.

Today, thanks to an Evernote forum thread, I found a couple tricks that can help speed up Evernote. Follow along, and we’ll see if you can get Evernote feeling snappy again.

Activate Detective Mode

Ok, it’s not quite that dramatic, but Evernote does have some hidden developer tools that can help improve Evernote for Windows’ performance. First, if you have Evernote running, exit it from your system tray.

Now, open the Run command by pressing your Windows key and R at the same time (Win+R). Enter the following in the box, the press Enter or click Ok:

Evernote.exe /DebugMenu

When Evernote opens, you’ll notice a new [Debug] menu on your toolbar. This includes two options that really seemed to speed up Evernote on my computer: Optimize Database and Recreate Note Images. Optimizing your database is likely to help Evernote’s performance the most, though if you have some notes that have odd thumbnails (or no thumbnails), then you might try recreating the note images as well.

Both of these options will take several minutes to run, during which time you’ll see the status updated in a progress bar. If you’d like to give both options a shot, just run one, then the other.

Once it’s finished, you can continue to use Evernote as normal, or restart it to get rid of the [Debug] menu. Evernote still isn’t the fastest app, but it’s much improved after optimizing my database. I’ve got tons of notes in Evernote, and love the Evernote apps on iOS, so would really hate to quit using it. I really hope Evernote works to optimize Evernote for Windows and make it run faster, but in the mean time, this at least provided a bit of help for me. Hopefully you’ll find this helpful too … let us know in the comments!

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Window Clippings 3 | Aero Screenshots the Way They’re Meant to be

By Matthew Guay on November 29, 2010 in Featured, PC Software

So you want to show off the latest app on your blog or help your sibling figure out what menu they’re supposed to be opening on a program. The handy Prt Scr key should be your answer, but unfortunately, it doesn’t take very good shots of the Aero interface in Windows 7 or Vista. Today let’s look at the latest version of Window Clippings that was just released today and see how easy it can be to make your screenshots look professional and modern.

Window Clippings was one of the first screenshot apps that was designed to capture the full Aero glass and shadows interface in screenshots. You can use it to capture shots of windows, menus, or even a free-form selection quickly and easily.

Getting Started

Window Clippings is simple to install and use. Just run the installer and accept the license as normal.

Launch Window Clippings after it’s installed, select the About tab, then enter your license key. If you don’t have a license yet, you can run it as a trial but all of your shots will include a watermark on the bottom.

Now you can tweak your settings to make Window Clippings work just like you like. The UI has been fully updated in Window Clippings 3, so if you’ve already used a previous version you’ll be pleased how nice and easy to use the new settings dialog is. From the Actions window, you can choose what you want Window Clippings to do after you take a screenshot. It can automatically save shots to disk, copy them to the clipboard, send them to OneNote or Paint.NET or more.

You can also choose from capture options that let you include your mouse pointer, remove font smoothing, and more.

Taking Great Screenshots

To take a screenshot with Window Clippings, just press your Prt Scr key or click the Create Screenshot button in the Window Clippings window. Your desktop will fade out similar to the way it did when opening the Shutdown dialog in XP. Now click on the windows you want to capture, or just click and drag to draw a rectangle selection. To capture multiple windows, hold down the Ctrl key while selecting windows.

Or, if you want to capture a free-form area, hold down the Alt key while drawing with your mouse. Once you’ve satisfied with your selection, press Enter to save your capture.

If you already know which window you need to capture, you can simply select its name from the Window Clippings app and snap it directly.

For the truly geeky, you can even capture screenshots directly from the command prompt with a variety of parameters. Check out the Window Clippings blog post on Command line capture for more info.

The Results:

No matter what you need to capture, Window Clippings makes your shots look just like they did on your screen when you shot them. This shot was taken with a background image set and windows right against the taskbar, but Window Clippings still captured the full transparency and shadows of the aero preview and tooltip.

Just to demonstrate how flexible these screenshots are, here’s the same shot on top of two background images in Paint.NET. Notice the beautiful transparency makes it look like the preview was running on this background!

No need to layer your screenshots in an image editor afterwards, though; Window Clippings can capture all the windows you select at once if you wish.

It works great for freeform screenshot too. Notice that freeform and rectangle clips won’t include drop shadows, as Window Clippings only includes the Aero shadows on windows and menus. No matter what shape you capture, it’ll look great with PNG transparency and smoothing on the curved areas.

Window Clippings works great for capturing menus; just hold the Ctrl key down while selecting all the elements you want to appear in your shots. However, we did have some trouble with menus closing after pressing Enter but before the shot was saved. To alleviate this problem, you may want to enable delayed capture. Then, if your menu closes, re-open it before the time’s up and your screenshot is fully captured.

If you ever need to change your settings again, just right-click the tray icon and select Open Window Clippings. Alternately, double-click on the tray icon to take a quick screenshot.

Conclusion

Window Clippings runs on Windows 7 and Vista, and is available for download for $35 per user. If you still need to take screenshots in XP, you’ll also receive a license for Window Clippings 2.1 which works similar but will also run on Windows XP. Also, if you’ve bought a Window Clippings 2 license previously, you’ll be receiving a free upgrade key for Window Clippings 3 soon.

This app is cheaper than many competing screenshot tools such as SnagIt, and captures screenshots of modern apps better than most other apps we’ve tried. I did experience a few issues in testing, such as screenshots that included the edge of another app on the bottom, but in general it did this less than most alternate screenshot tools. It’s also extremely lightweight, using less than 2Mb of ram when running in the taskbar, so you won’t need to worry about keeping it running.

Window Clippings 3 is definitely one of the best screenshot tools in my opinion, and the only thing that SnagIt still does better is that you can edit and catalog your screenshots directly in the app. But when you can auto-save and directly edit screenshots in Paint.NET with Window Clippings, there’s not much to miss. Give the trial a shot, and then get a license if you’re needing a great way to take high quality Aero screenshots.

Our Rating: 9/10

Download and Purchase Window Clippings 3

Get Started with Window Clippings 3 Tutorials

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Use Droplr on Your PC with windroplr

By Matthew Guay on November 4, 2010 in PC Software, Techinch

If you’re a PC users but have friends or collegues that use Macs, you may have envied Droplr, the cool Mac file sharing service. Thanks to a new app, windroplr, PCs can now get in on the action. Let’s take a look at windroplr and the Droplr service, and see you can use it to quickly share files, links, and text with anyone.

What is Droplr?

Droplr is a dead simple way to share files, images, notes, code, or almost anything you can think of on the internet. Simply drag your content to the Droplr icon, and it’ll be uploaded and ready for you to share in seconds, no second step required. Until now it was only available on Mac OS X and iOS devices via Droplr for iPhone. Today PC users can get the same great service thanks to the brand new app windroplr, which gives you all of Droplr’s features on your Windows PC.

Getting Started

Head over to the windroplr site and download the installer, then install it as normal. Windroplr requires .NET 4.0, so if you’re still using XP you’ll need to install it first. Once it’s done installing, run windroplr and click Next to start setting it up. Droplr uses your Twitter account, so enter your username and password, then click Go!.

windroplr will verify your settings, then within seconds you’ll be ready to start sharing files and more. Once it’s done, you’ll see a Droplr drop target on the bottom right corner of your screen, as well as a new windroplr icon in your tray. You can press Win+Shift+W to show or hide the Droplr drop target.

Using windroplr

To start sharing files, just drag and drop any file you’d like to the drop target in the corner of your screen.

If the file you’ve selected is large, you’ll notice the windroplr tray icon filling up with purple to show the upload progress. Do note that you cannot upload any over 32Mb, so this works best for sharing smaller images and documents.

Seconds later, you’ll see a link for your file. Click the notification bubble to copy the link to your clipboard so you can share it in a tweet, email, or any way you want.

Here’s how our image looks online once it’s been uploaded. Droplr’s web interface gives you a very stylish way to share content.

Droplr also makes it easy to send a screenshot to someone. Right-click the tray icon and select Grab screenshot or press Win+Shift+S to capture and upload a screenshot automatically.

When capturing a screenshot, your screen will darken and you’ll be able to select any area to capture and upload.

You can also upload plain text in a drop. Simply right-click the tray icon and select Compose Note, and you’ll see a small text editor open. Alternately, just select some text in any application you’re currently using, and drag it to the drop and it’ll automatically open the text editor with the text you’re uploading. Now, type or paste any text and edit it as you want in the box, select whether it’s plain text, formatted with Markdown markup, or code, and click Upload.

Here’s how a text Drop looks:

Update: After using Droplr for a while, I discovered you can upload more than one file at a time, too. Simply select all the files you want, or a whole folder, and drag it to the windroplr drop button. Your files will be uploaded as a zip archive, ready to share just like any other files. This is a great way to send everything you need from a project to your coworkers or friends quickly and easily.

Viewing your Droplr Files Online

Once you’ve got some files uploaded to Droplr, you may want to manage them online. Simply head to the Droplr site and click Sign in in the top right corner to get started.

You’ll need to verify your account with your Twitter account before you’ll be able to see your files.

Once this is done, you’ll see your online Droplr dashboard with all of your uploads. You can view all of your uploads by type from the buttons on the top, or select a file to delete it. You can even see the number of times each file has been viewed and get its link again, or search for a certain file from the top bar. This gives you a great way to manage all the files you’ve shared as easily as you’d manage files on your computer.

Select the Gear icon to view the Droplr preferences. You can even add your own custom domain to Droplr if you redirect it to Droplr!

Conclusion

Droplr is a Mac app we’ve envied for a long time, and we’re excited to get to use it in Windows 7. Droplr is truly an easy way to share small files, and makes a great alternative to simply adding shared Dropbox folders will everyone you need to share files with. Since Drop.io is closing down this year, Droplr is a great alternate service that works similarly but looks much nicer. Plus, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can get the Droplr app to add files to your account and view your old drops on the go. Give it a try and let us know your thoughts on Droplr below!

Download windroplr and get started sharing today! – Update: http://windroplr.com/ now works as well

Check out Droplr’s site