You know, sometimes I really regret having bought a Dell laptop instead of an iBook simply because of some of the cool software available for the Mac. One such tool is Tickr for Flickr a free application which scrolls your favorite Flickr photos across your Mac desktop. With the latest release, you can customize where to place the scrolling slideshow (left, right, or bottom), as well as how large or small you’d like the slideshow to be. Additionally, you can set transparency levels, search for particular types of photographs, as well as sort them by a few different types of category including date taken, date posted, how interesting the photo is, etc. Tickr for Flickr requires Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later.

IE Snapshot is a cool little tool I happened upon today by mistake but which impressed me enough to want to write about it. IE Snapshot is a Windows application which lets you take screenshots of a webpage and save it into a PDF file, or an image format like JPG, BMP, or GIF. Sure, you could always hit the Print Screen on your keyboard and paste the image into your favorite image program (or just Paint), but with IE Snapshot, you can select a particular section of a page, and preview what you’re screenshot will look like as the application has a built in web browser (hence the IE part of the name). It’s totally free, though donations are accepted.

When most people think of photo-sharing services, they think of the Yahoo-owned Flickr (I, myself, like using 23 instead). BubbleShare provides some of the same features like being able to create albums, upload and tag photos, and share them with friends, but unlike similar services, there is no registration requires aside from a name and e-mail address. Images are stored on BubbleShare’s servers for a full year, and you can then renew your albums if you wish. One nice feature is a little downloadable plugin to sync your iPhoto collection to the service. I hope in the future, they’ll also include a Picasa plugin.

I first heard about Riya a few days ago amidst rumors that the company was being bought up by Google (do it!), though it has seemingly been around for a while. Enough with the chit-chat, though, what is Riya? Think of it as Flickr on steroids. You can upload photographs, share them with others, and of course, search for them. Each photograph gets tagged, but not by traditional methods. Riya has text and facial recognition technology built in, so you can train the service what a person looks like, and it will automatically tag photographs of that person, with their name if that is the tag you chose.

For those of you who don’t know, the Firefox throbber is the little icon you see on the upper right hand corner of your Firefox window (under the Close button on Windows). Basically, it sits there while a page is loading to let you know that Firefox is actually doing something. Not very useful nowadays with high-speed broadband connections, but if you’re still on dialup or ISDN, I guess it could provide some form of hypnotic entertainment while you wait for a page to finish loading. Did you know it is possible to make your own throbber? You probably already install new themes on Firefox anyway, so why not go ahead and customize it further! The whole process is very simple and is detailed in a post over at Zerosign.net. All you need is a tool to create graphics (like GIMP or Photoshop…Paint would work just as well) and a text editor to modify one file in your profile directory. Have fun with it!

Ever browse a website or found a particular image in a magazine or newspaper and thought the font used was cool and you wanted to use it on your own project? You used to have to search through lists of fonts in order to find the right one, but there is a pretty cool free service available called WhatTheFont which makes your search easy. Simply upload an image using the provided web form and using font recognition technology, WhatTheFont will analyze the image and tell you what the name of the font is, even giving you a download link and further information on the font! The service supports GIF, JPEG, BMP, and TIFF images up to 360 x 275 pixels wide. You can read the usage notes right here if you need to. Pretty cool!

Many people have digital cameras nowadays because they’re so convenient. Most people also think that it is actually cheaper to print out your photos from home, but this may not necessarily be the case. If you’re a big photography buff, you might be printing out dozens of photos every month which will quickly add up (ink isn’t cheap you know!). Fortunately, there are many services available online which will print out the photos you want (either individual prints or photo albums) and mail them to your home, usually much cheaper than you could do yourself. Want to find the best prices? Then check out PrintRates. PrintRates updates the prices for dozens of photo printing services pretty often so you’re always guaranteed to find the best prices. Be sure to check it out!