Remember how we used to amuse ourselves by drawing pictures on MSPaint program when we bought our first computers? At first it was hard and we could barely control the mouse. Then slowly we learned to draw straight lines and learned to make ends of two lines meet at a point. Even today drawing with the mouse is tough. A part of the difficulties we face when drawing with the mouse lies with the drawing application itself. MSPaint is a crude application with too little functionality. The sketches that came out of MSPaint were crude too. Later programs like Paint.NET became more popular because it provided much more features and flexibility than MSPaint at absolutely no cost.

SmoothDraw NX isn't here to replace Paint.NET, but has unique features of it's own. One notable feature of this program is that it visibly smoothens curves you draw with the mouse. Now don't expect something like you see in Adobe Illustrator. SmoothDraw NX uses two parameters in brush strokes called "Ink Flow" and "Grain", apart from brush width. By adjusting the Ink flow and the Grain size we can produce fairly smooth curves even with the mouse. I have noticed that decreasing the grain size and increasing the ink flow produces the best results.

SmoothDraw NX also has various types of brushes - a normal pen, a leaky pen that leaves drops, wax crayons, felt pen, air brush, hard brush, water color etc. These tools can add artistic touch to your drawings. It also has a few filters like blur, sharpen, burn etc.

SmoothDraw NX is a freeware version of SmoothDraw that packs some additional features and comes at a price of $45.

Download SmoothDraw NX (freeware)

On yesterday, i.e. 12th May, Google rolled out yet another service called Friend Connect. Friend Connect is an application for website owners that allows any site owner to add social features to their website. Friend Connect offers site owners gadgets created by Google and OpenSocial developers using which any site can be turned into a social network, allowing visitors to interconnect with other users. This doesn't mean that visitors will have to sign up with yet another social network, because Friend Connect is a network of social networks, that interconnects users across several social networks like Orkut, Facebook, Hi5 etc.

Friend Connect integrates with contact lists for social networks like Facebook, orkut and Google Talk. This means that users who join a site are instantly connected with friends who are already members, and can invite friends from other networks to visit. They can opt in to broadcasting their activities to friends in their social networks. A post to a message board on one site, for example, can instantly be visible to people in multiple social networks. These instant networks, combined with the wealth of OpenSocial gadgets, can form potent new online communities, very quickly and very easily.

A website running social gadgets from Friend Connect will provide such features to the visitors as:

• sign-in with their existing Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account
• invite and show activity to existing friends from social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more
• browse member profiles across social networks
• connect with new friends on any site

For website owners, adding a snippet of code to their site is all it takes to join this new platform of social networking.

At present Google Friend Connect is just a preview release and is made available to only a limited number of site owners. Interested site owners can apply for an account.

Is your office computer without Winamp? Has they disabled Windows Media Player too? Are you unable to play any media files because it doesn't have the necessary codecs installed? Alright then, let's make our music and movie files independent of any media application.

So how are we going to make them independent? By converting them into self playing EXE files. Audio/Video To Exe is a free application that converts any audio and video file into self dependent and self playing EXE files. You don't require any media player or any codecs to play these files. It will run on any machine installed with Windows.

Audio/Video To Exe supports almost all audio/video formats like 3gp, aac, ac3, exe, flac, flv, gif, mp2, mp3, mp4, mpc, mpg, nut, ogg, ra, rm, swf, vob, voc, wav, wma, wmv, wv,..etc. This means that you can convert any of these formats into self playing EXE files. The program also allows you to convert media files into other formats, but advanced options like selecting bit rates etc or disabled in this free version.

Self playing EXE files can come very handy. You can:

- Play music and movies on your office/school computer where all multimedia applications are disabled
- Send them to others without worrying whether they have the necessary players and codecs to play them.
- Create data CDs that start playing music whenever you insert it into the CD drive. How? Ok here it is.

• Convert the music you want to autorun into an EXE file.
• Now open Notepad, add these line and save it as AUTORUN.INF. Replace music.exe with the correct file name.

  [autorun]
  open=music.exe

• Place both AUTORUN.INF and music.exe on the root of the CD, add other applications you want to burn on the CD as usual and then burn it. Now each time you pop the CD into the drive, the music will start playing automatically.

Download Audio/Video To Exe