portable

The volunteer developers of The GIMP have been working hard to develop a polished, user-friendly, and freely distributed image editor. Available for Windows and Mac users, and in a portable edition for the PC, the separated palette windows may disturb those users who are used to more traditional layouts. Still, your comfort level should grow exponentially as you discover how pain-free the program is.

One of the most powerful general-purpose image editors around, the GNU Image Manipulation Program is eminently comparable to Photoshop. Older features include channels, layers and masks, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, and color … Read more

Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with "Friend Connect" on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites."

Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter … Read more

This post was updated at 10:34 a.m. PDT.

News Corp.-owned social-networking site MySpace has announced a new initiative called Data Availability, a way for members to share profile data with other social and community sites across the Web.

Co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe, Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur, and vice president of technology Jim Benedetto announced the new development in a press call Thursday. DeWolfe called it "an innovative offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile content and data to Web sites of choice throughout the Internet."

Inaugural partners in … Read more

If LaCie is trying to lock up the fashionista market by hiring European designers to tart up their storage devices, Iomega seems to be sending an entirely different message with its "eGo" line of portable drives.

To wit: A few months back it released a version that bore a striking resemblance to a hip flask, and now it's come out with a model dressed in full camouflage fatigues. The 250GB "Camo eGo" is also outfitted with a black "Iomega Power Grip," adding "a style of adventure and intrigue to the eGo color … Read more

Creative is clearing out a mess of refurbished gear, including 1GB Zen Stone MP3 players for $13.99, 2GB Zen Stone Plus players for $21.99, and my personal favorite: the 4GB Zen for $64.99. All prices include shipping!

In case you're unfamiliar with it, the Zen is Creative's answer to the 3rd-gen iPod nano. It offers a 2.5-inch screen, an FM tuner, an SDHC slot (for adding up to 16GB of extra storage via cheapo memory cards), a voice recorder, and support for music-subscription services. You can also stock it with TV shows and movies … Read more

The competition for multimedia HD hard drives gets more intense by the day, but few can compete with this item when it comes to portability. The Mvix MV-2500U may be the only device we've seen in its category that's touted as being "pocket-friendly."

But that's exactly what it is, according to its dimensions of 5 by 3 inches and--get this--only a half-inch thick. Even at that diminutive size it manages to cram in a 2.5-inch hard drive and compatibility with practically every video and audio format imaginable, with capacities of 80GB, 160GB, or 250GB, … Read more

I have at least a good half decade--maybe more--until I become a stadium-chair-toting soccer mom.

And I hope that when I get there, these nice people, or someone, is making this into a real product by then. OhGizmo has a link to this designer briefcase-cum-folding-chair, which is a great way to disguise the fact that you're carrying a chair with you.

It's a regular hard-shell briefcase with nylon straps that make it attachable to something sturdy enough to hold your own weight. Then you can sit and enjoy. I should also mention it's an art project (from … Read more

Soon drivers manuals made out of paper will be a thing of the past. At least that's what DreamCatcher Games and JoWooD Productions are hoping with the upcoming Nintendo DS title Drivers Ed Portable.

DS owners who purchase the title will get a complete training system for the written portion of their state's driving exam, along with three smaller gaming elements that have been designed to put those skills to use in a safe, virtual environment. The game isn't limited to the U.S. either--there are also training modes for Canada and most of Europe with localized … Read more

Taking an old-school tack to an ages-old computer problem, the PortableApps Suite approach to mobile computing feels more Web 0.5 than 2.0. Instead of hosting programs online, PortableApps is a comprehensive application suite that fits onto and runs from almost any thumbdrive with at least 512MB of space, and can be shrunk down even further if need be.

The suite's flexibility is impressive. It manages some of the best freeware applications from a taskbar menu that runs instantly when clicked on. User-favorites Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are here, as well as the entire OpenOffice.org office suite, … Read more