Yes, the one and only Trillian. An all-in-one instant messenger that logs into your Yahoo Messenger, MSN, ICQ, IRC, and AIM accounts simultaneously (it is only missing the Gmail messenger which is buggy at best). The interface is pretty and it can be skinned.

There are many useful security settings, including selecting only certain IMs to login and others not, blocking, invisible mode, and logging. There's tabbed chatting, file transfers, and most of all the nitty gritty IM stuff the other programs offer.

The best thing is it is free and autoinstalls updates.

I have been using it for years now with nary a glitch. The loading time may be slower than a stand-alone but it sure is better than opening 5 different IMs.

Forget about single stand-alone IMs. Get Trillian today.

At a glance:

The good: Integrated, email notification, attractive interface, notifications, tabbed browsing. security, autoupdates.

The bad: Slow loading of program.

Technorati: trillian, instant messenger, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, IRC, integrated messenger

Did I already tell you how much I love widgets? If you haven't heard it, here it is again. This from a girl who 5 years ago would have told you that having more than 2 Javascripts in your webpage is a huge usability no-no. But with connection and computer speeds exponentially faster now, it would almost be a bad user experience if you didn't have a useful widget or two on your blog.

The keyword here is useful.

A weather widget is useful, especially if you pore through your visitor logs to see where most of them (repeat visitors in particular) come from regularly and then provide useful and relevant weather information for them. For this blog, most visitors to date come from Washington DC.

Currently providing weather data on the US and Canada only, the iBegin weather widget is lightweight (script-wise) and elegant in design, customisable, and fundamentally useful. 10 points for usability.

Here it is in action:


Get one for yourself here.

Technorati: widget, weather widget, cool widgets, useful widgets

Test Scenario: Securely wipe old laptop before giving away.

AbsoluteShield File Shredder

Everyone's favourite shredder. However it cannot shred free space and hung while trying to delete my 1GB files.

So I turned to:

Zilla Data Nuker

This snazzy freeware offers several shred options. It shredded my free space pretty well and did not hang when cleaning up the large files. It seemed to ignore my right-click shred request but then I realised it had already started by the blinking indicator on my taskbar. A notification would have improved the user experience.

When I returned to the CNET download page, there were some user reviews that there was spyware in it. I hadn't seen any and at this point I had disconnected the laptop to the Internet and uninstalled the spyware removal programs. I looked for a third option then to finish up the rest of the files.

Simple File Shredder

Probably the best option. You can either right-click to shred or drag and drop folders and files into its interface to be shredded either 35x or a standard 7x. It also shreds free space, ideal for an extra wipe, and has password protection to prevent unauthorised wipes.

Great usability in its interface: drag and drop, and request for wipe method prior to wipe, plus a list of files deleted as it progresses and a neat green tick when done. The elapsed time also helps you estimate how long it will take. It deleted 1GB files with no hanging. Highly recommended as a stand-alone for a clean wipe.

Download:
Simple File Shredder
Zilla Data Nuker
AbsoluteShield File Shredder

Technorati: file shredder, shredder, eraser, technology, software review, shredder review, AbsoluteShield File Shredder, Zilla Data Nuker, Simple File Shredder