Intype is a new project that seems to be picking up a lot of steam recently. It is a Window multi-purpose text editor that is very similar to Textmate for the Mac. Although still in alpha, it is a project that definitely worth a look.

Mac’s have some of the simplest and most effective software applications available for any platform. Case in point is a free application by Freeverse called Think. It task is simple, hide all of the OS and any open application except for one. The app you choose to focus on is presented on top of a black background and all other open apps are hidden behind the black background. This hides all the distractions of web browsers, IM and email clients, etc. Think makes it easy to switch between active applications and even to temporarily peek into another open app. And the UI is terribly simple! Check it out!

Ophcrack is an interesting tool for your IT toolbox. It is a live CD that will crack your Windows password. Of course I trust people would only use this for good!

Adium, my favorite IM client on the Mac has just gone gold with version 1.0. This update features over 600 new features/bug fixes. Most notable though is the great new look and better contact status notifications.

So you like to manage your photos in Windows Explorer? Try out Microsoft Photo Info. It’s a new Window Explorer add-in that allows you to add, change and delete common “metadata” properties for digital photographs. The add-in integrates nicely within Windows Explorer and also provides enhanced tooltips and additional sort properties for your images in Explorer.

Imran Nazar got tired of dual booting his Gentoo Linux with Windows XP, so he figured out a cleaver way to Run a Windows Partition in VMware using an existing Window installation on a native disk partition.

Tag this one as cool - Data Generator is a simple web-based tool that lets you create large volumes of random, custom data for use in testing software. You can have your data formatted in HTML tables, CSV or SQL statements. They also offer a free desktop application that will generate larger sets of data. Check it out next time your in need of sample data.

A couple of weeks ago, two web based services launched that allow any web designer to add a commenting and rating system to any page they create. Both of these systems can be incorporated into your pages by adding a very simple snippet of JavaScript code to your page.

• Star It! is a star rating system that allows visitors to rate your content using a 5 star system.
• JS Kit if a fully featured threaded comment system.

Of course the upside of these tools are that they are simple to use. The downside is that your data is stored in somebody else’s database so you need to have some trust that these services will be around for a while.

DOM Tool is a cleaver web-based tool that gives you a text area to enter structured HTML, then creates the appropriate JavaScript to create the same HTML content using the DOM. I could have used this a few months ago while I was working on a DOM-based project.

VideoLAN Player has just been updated to version 0.8.6. A couple of very cool features have been added like codec support for Windows Media Video 9 and Flash Video, a Fullscreen controller and if your a Mac user, it now supports the Apple Remote. VLC is the only video player I use. It pretty much plays anything I can throw at it and it is free and open source!