You may not always have a Wi-Fi connection, but still want to be able to access your Gmail messages and attachments. This is where Gmail Offline comes into play. Google Gears lets Google cache your messages on your hard drive. You can simply launch your browser to www.gmail.com and view your messages in your inbox. Not only this, you can even write replies to these messages even without an internet connection. Gmail will sync as soon as a web connection is established and you can send and receive messages.
Learn more about it by taking a look at this video.
Dropbox
Since a netbook usually has limited storage capacity, it is a good idea to store data online. Dropbox lets you upload up to 2GB of files to the cloud and then access them through a web portal or from your desktop anywhere as long as there is an internet connection available. You can download this application to your netbook and create a folder where you can drag and drop files you want to store online. To access files in this folder from anywhere, you need to simply type in your username and password. Dropbox is available for Windows, Mac and Linux at www.dropbox.com.
Paint.NET
Due to the limited processing capabilities of a netbook, a heavy photo-editing application such as Adobe Photoshop cannot run satisfactorily. Paint.NET is a free application that can serve as a replacement for Photoshop for quite a few of the normal tasks that most of us use. And Paint.NET is quite light on resources and it also takes just about 10 Mb of hard disk space. It has an intuitive interface and supports features such as layers, noise removal and several editing tools. Resizing and adjusting image attributes can be done easily. This application is also suitable for netbooks because it handles multiple files in a single window rather than using multiple windows, which is not suitable for the small screen of a netbook. You can download Paint.NET from www.paint.net.
With a paltry resolution of just 1024 x 600, netbooks simply do not have adequate screen real estate to be able to use multiple windows at the same time. Desktop 360 is an application that lets you overcome this hindrance. Using this program, you can keep windows open side by side and scroll through them sideways 360 degrees as if your desktop is on an axis. A small widget at the top of your screen shows you a translucent map of your desktop and lets you go to any of the open windows you wish to go to. Also, the background image is replaced by a suitable wide panoramic image. 360 Desktop is available only for Windows and you can get it at www.360desktop.com.
As we mentioned before, the low resolution screen of the netbook may not be adequate for handling multiple open windows. This puts restrictions on not just application windows, but even instant messaging programs. You may not want to use 360 Desktop as a solution in this case, as you would wish to be alerted to all the different instant messaging clients, so they all need to be visible at the same time.
Using unified instant messaging client Digsby, you can login and chat via Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Facebook Chat, ICQ and Jabber through one centralized interface in a single Window. The different IM networks appear in the form of different tabs, which you can cycle through easily by pressing Ctrl+Tab. You can also view your recent email messages associated with these IM services and social networking updated associated with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter through Digsby. You can get it from www.digsby.com.
Learn more about Digsby in the video below.
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