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Amateur stargazers rejoice! Google's state-of-the-art mapping service has taken pictures of the entire night sky for you to view on your smartphone or tablet. Google Sky Map is an awesome learning tool for anyone who wants to learn about constellations, stars, or any of the wonders that are hiding in our night sky.

To make the most of this app, you'll need to let it access your phone's GPS. It plots your data on a map so it can transmit the exact view of the stars you'll see when you hold your phone or tablet skywards. … Read more

For those users who have multiple disks with hundreds of files, organizing them may be a challenge. DiskCatalogMaker for Mac works well to organize these files, but most users will not find the limited features useful.

DiskCatalogMaker is available as a free trial version; the full purchase price is $29.99. Download and installation completed quickly, despite the lack of a native installer. Unfortunately, there were no obvious instructions to DiskCatalogMaker, but there are updates available. The program started quickly, but the interface was poorly designed. Instructions would have been helpful for all but the most sophisticated users. There are … Read more

If you'd like an alternative to Windows Media Player that plays just about every kind of audio and video file and is widely customizable and flexible enough to serve many roles, including DVD and Blu-Ray player, you really only have a few choices, and one of them is Media Player Classic, aka MPC. Actually, several others might be MPC too since this open-source freeware serves as the basis of more than one media player for Windows. The latest version is Media Player Classic-Home Cinema. MPC-HC is available in separate downloads for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. We tried the 64-bit … Read more

Media Player Classic-Home Cinema (MPC-HC for short) is a true classic among media players. It can play nearly every media file format, both audio and video, and also plays DVD content. With its old-school interface and widespread customizability, it may not be the best choice if you're looking for a click-and-forget player for video and audio files. But those who require more control over their media playback will appreciate the extra options MPC-HC offers. Since this program is lightweight, it's compatible with nearly every Windows edition since 98 (which it still supports). Moving forward in time, MPC-HC is … Read more

Media Player Classic Home Cinema is a free utility that provides video playback. Since there are a lot of video players on the market, this is a tough area for apps to really stand out from the competition. With a few performance issues and some operational quirks, Media Player Classic Home Cinema didn't come out at the top of the long list of similar programs.

The installation process is simple enough, although there's about a half dozen screens to step through. Once installed, Media Player Classic Home Cinema launches quickly, although there's no modification to the pop-up … Read more

PhotoOnWeb is a simple, free program for creating photo albums and publishing them online. It creates your album, builds the Web site, and publishes it all for you, either via the built-in FTP Client using your own online space or via a subscription to sites such as the one the developer makes available. It creates easy-to-use albums with a full-screen Flash slideshow feature.

PhotoOnWeb's user interface opens with a Start tab displayed in the main view. The right-hand panel's three headings describe the program's basic operations, too: Project, Parameters, and Publish. We started by creating and naming … Read more

Chrome users are all a-twitter over Chromed Bird, the free Google Chrome extension that brings Twitter to your toolbar. It's a safe bet that most people think mobile when they tweet--smartphones, PDAs and such--but most users also access and manage their Twitter accounts from their desktops or laptops. Chrome fans will find that Chromed Bird makes Twitter even easier to use.

We downloaded and installed Chromed Bird, which placed the small Twitter-like Chromed Bird icon on our Chrome toolbar and opened its setup interface in a new tab. We signed in to our Twitter account, and Chromed Bird authorized … Read more

Some users are experiencing an issue with iTunes 10, generally after restoring from a Time Machine backup or upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6, where their music library is not viewable in the iTunes window. Though the music is not viewable, the files are still located on their drive.… Read more

Need to make icons on the go? Look no further than IcoFX Portable. This lightweight program packs a well-designed interface and plenty of features into a package that will fit on your USB drive. This program would be pretty great even if it weren't small enough to carry around with us, but its portability makes it a real stand-out.

IcoFX Portable has an attractive, intuitive appearance that will be easy to navigate for anyone who's used a graphics program of any sort, even Microsoft Paint. When users create a new icon, the program has them set the dimensions … Read more