Lammer Context Menu stands apart from the context menu-enhancing crowd with some pretty neat features to improve your Windows Explorer experience.

Lammer's tools can be fairly advanced, but that shouldn't scare off novice users. Selection by type, for highlighting files with the same extension, is one of the easiest-to-use power options in Lammer, and many of the others include additional options menus. Batch rename, for renaming multiple files at once, can add sequential numbers to files or insert text in the middle of a name. The search-and-replace feature is equally robust. Note that certain obscure functions, such as the File Operations option under the Search and Replace actions window, haven't yet been turned on.

The most robust tool in the Lammer box is the Path Operations tool. The window that opens from Path Operations lets you Move, Copy, Delete, List, and Change attributes on an impressive scale. You can target files and folders with content, or empty folders, keep relative paths, filter by attributes, and save templates for repetitive actions.

Other excellent features in Lammer include Copy Path, iPhone PNG for compressing and decompressing images for iPhones, opening a command prompt, digitally signing files, opening a file in Notepad, and calculating a file's checksum.

Lammer Context Menu works on XP, Vista, and Windows 7, and is compatible with 64-bit as well as 32-bit editions. If you've got a favorite context menu customizer for Windows Explorer, tell me in the comments below.

(Via Freeware Genius)

Pandora's largely undisputed reign on Palm WebOS-based phones may be over.

On Thursday, Slacker Radio released a version (.0.9.4) of its streaming radio app to the App Catalog in the U.S. and Canada. As with Slacker Radio for other mobile platforms, the free app gives you the run of more than 100 curated stations, or it lets you go into discovery mode a la Pandora and ilk by creating "custom" stations based on songs or artists you like.

Artist bios with photos are on Slacker's Palm menu, as are the buttons to rate songs as favorites and skip ahead. Slacker's premium subscription service is ad-free and lets you view song lyrics.

After logging into our Slacker account, the familiar app interface--which is now well standardized on Slacker apps across the BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone platforms--was easy to navigate and played stations as promised.

So far, one of Slacker's best features, caching music to listen to offline, is still only available for BlackBerry and is on its way to iPhone.

If you're a frequent user of Amazon.com and find its product image viewer a little clunky, it's worth checking out new Firefox add-on PictureFox. Once installed it grabs full-quality versions of each product shot, along with the photos provided by other customers, and puts them in a simple, Cover Flow-style image viewer.

Each image is scaled to be as large as possible--that is, compared to the size of your monitor. This means you don't have to use Amazon's zoom box viewer to see the tiny details. To hop between images users can simply click on the next shot, use the arrow buttons on their keyboard, or spin their mouse's scroll wheel. This can be especially cool when cruising through a big set of images, which the add-on seems to handle with ease.

Another nice thing about the add-on is that it leaves Amazon's own photo viewer untouched, which means you can still use it to access things PictureFox does not pick up, like user-added notes and profiles. It also automatically tweaks Amazon's long URLs to the much shorter ASIN URL ID system--something that usually requires another standalone add-on to achieve.

PictureFox is currently an experimental add-on, meaning it hasn't been vetted by Mozilla's extension testers. You can download it at your own risk over on Mozilla's add-ons site.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

In the grand tradition of the Ginsu Knife, App Genie is 27, 27, 27 apps in one! Even if you find only a handful of them useful, you're definitely getting your 99 cents' worth.

App Genie's one-screen interface displays 20 attractive icons, which unfortunately are arranged randomly rather than alphabetically. Thus, finding what you're after (like, say, the tip calculator) is more difficult than it should be.

A few of these apps (like Tool Case) have various sub-apps, bringing the total number of tools to 26. After running App Genie a couple times, you'll see a notification asking you to e-mail a recommendation to a friend. Doing so unlocks a 27th tool (a flashlight, which gets added to the aforementioned Tool Case).

App Genie's other assets include currency and unit converters, a GPS-powered Where Am I? app, a price-comparing bar-code scanner, and an "amazing facts" reader.

Device Stats shows graphs of your device's memory usage, while Battery Level reveals how much standby, talk, Internet, and other time is available based on the remaining battery power.

App Genie can also translate typed words and phrases between dozens of languages, turn typed words and phrases into speech, reveal encyclopedic facts about the countries of the world, and store a simple checklist.

And so on and so on. Not all the apps are gems (what exactly is the point of a camera tool that snaps a photo when you shake your iPhone?), but there's more than enough good stuff here to justify 99 cents.

What's more, App Genie can take the place of many standalone apps, thus reducing some icon clutter on your home screens. If only the developers would let me reorganize (or at least alphabetize) the tools, I'd have no more wishes for this Genie.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Just a few months after introducing its browser-based iTunes Preview pages for music, Apple has expanded the feature to include items from the App Store.

Now, when a user clicks an iTunes link for an iPhone or iPod Touch app, they're taken to a page with a similar layout to what they'd see when browsing the iTunes Store in Apple's iTunes software. But instead, it's in their browser. This allows users who don't have iTunes installed to see more information about an app without having the software installed. That said, preview pages attempt to launch iTunes each time you load them.

As mentioned in previous coverage, there are a few shortcomings to these preview pages compared to the sales pages in iTunes proper. These include only being able to see a handful of user reviews and other purchases by customers. Users are also unable to make a purchase, add the app to a wish list, and share it on Twitter or Facebook.

Despite these limitations, the iTunes Preview program is a strong hint that Apple is on its way towards taking its iTunes Store business outside of conventional software and onto the Web. Though Apple has not yet extended the preview program out to all its content, including movies, TV shows, podcasts, and audiobooks.

(via AppleInsider)

Download.com links for iTunes (Mac | Windows)

Originally posted at Web Crawler

The mobile operating system Symbian has been completely open-sourced, comfortably within the two-year time frame set for the migration project in 2008.

On Thursday, the Symbian Foundation--the not-for-profit industry group set up by Nokia and other manufacturers to open up and give away the OS--said all Symbian source code, comprising 108 packages, was now available for free under the Eclipse license and other open-source licenses.

According to the foundation, the transition of the Symbian code from proprietary to open source marks the largest such migration in software history.

Read more of "Symbian fully open-sourced ahead of schedule" at ZDNet UK.

Originally posted at News - Wireless

Microsoft said on Wednesday that it is investigating another flaw in Internet Explorer, this time a vulnerability that could result in an unauthorized disclosure of information for users running its browser on older operating systems.

The software maker said in a security advisory that, although it knows of no attacks based on the flaw, the vulnerability could lead to a Web-based attack from either a Web site designed to take advantage of the flaw or from a site that becomes compromised via user-generated text or a malicious ad. Either way, a user would have to actively go to the compromised Web site.

The flaw is separate from the one used to attack Google and other companies, which Microsoft addressed with an "out-of-band" security update last month.

The latest flaw could affect those running Windows XP and Internet Explorer on Windows XP. The software maker said those running the browser on a machine running Windows Vista or Windows 7 aren't vulnerable because the browser runs in a "protected mode" by default.

McAfee spokesman Joris Evers said that, although the latest issue doesn't allow the attacker to gain full control of a system, it nonetheless represents "a serious vulnerability that can expose personal information or system information that may be used in a follow up attack."

"Internet Explorer users should ensure they are protected against exploitation of this flaw and apply the patch when Microsoft releases it," Evers said.

Microsoft said it may take additional action when it finishes its inquiry, such as releasing an update as part of its monthly "Patch Tuesday" or as part of a special, out-of-band update. In the mean time, the software maker offered an automated "Fix It" that can turn on the protected mode for those running IE 6.

Originally posted at Beyond Binary