40Tech

40Tech’s Big Kahuna, Evan Kline, fell in love with Sparrow a while back. It was — and is — the ultimate Gmail client for him, and his post on it left me jealous that it wasn’t available for Windows (yeah, yeah, Apple Fanboys, I see your lips moving, but no sound is coming out). Thankfully, the keen developers on the Sparrow team have seen fit to bring the Ultimate Gmail/Email Experience over to the iPhone.

Today is the deadline for most NCAA March Madness brackets – the first game of the second round. If you’ve been invited to participate in a pool or some other sort of friendly competition, you need to get your college basketball stats together in a hurry. It’s a bit of a bear of a project though, isn’t it? Especially if you’re busy, don’t follow basketball like it’s your religion, or statistics make your eyes roll into the back of your head.

Not to worry , though… PickMyBracket.com has come to your rescue! It’s bracket generator algorithm will create a full bracket for you in seconds — and you might even win a “Brand New iPad,” to boot.

Do you ever have to upload a file to share with someone? You could do this with Dropbox, which is one of our favorite apps, but then you need to make sure that your recipient has a Dropbox account. If you want a dead simple way to share a file, take a look at Dockdrop. When properly configured, Dockdrop allows you to drag a file to the Dockdrop icon on your Mac’s dock, which will trigger an upload to your preset destination, and then copy the file’s location to your clipboard. From there, it is simply a matter of pasting your clipboard contents (such as into an email message) to retrieve the file location.

I hate responding to email from my phone. As much as Swype has made using the phone keyboard much easier, it still doesn’t compare to the speed of a computer keyboard. Normally, I wait until I’m back at my desk to answer email. Still, I find that there are some responses that I enter over and over on my phone. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a text expansion app on Android so that I could take care of those messages on the go? There aren’t text expansion apps for Android, at least in the same sense that are text expansion apps for the PC and Mac that allow you to type shortcuts to expand text. There are apps, however, that let you insert previously created snippets into documents. Clipper is one such app.

There are any number of reasons why you might want to send yourself an email message. You may want to email yourself a reminder, or send yourself a link from a website. Perhaps you frequently send items into Evernote via your Evernote email address, or maybe you send tasks into your task manager via a dedicated email address. If you want to streamline the process of sending messages to yourself, or to any frequent recipient, check out Email Me Pro, or its free version, Email Me.

Every once in a while you try to download or install something, only to be told by your impertinent machine that you don’t have enough space. You try and try to resolve the issue, but, for the life of you, can’t find the files that are hogging up your hard drive. Everything seems accounted for. You’ve even emptied your Recycle Bin and cleared your temp folder, but all you get from your computer is some digitized, maniacal laughter — or maybe that’s just me.

Potential crazy aside, there is an easy and very handy free tool that you can use to smack some sense into your Windows PC. It’s called SpaceSniffer, and it will help you find and destroy what’s eating your computer’s storage space. You’ll probably be surprised by what you find.

Both the iOS App Store and the Android Market offer an abundance of camera apps. There are so many, that it takes either great functionality or a unique twist for an app to stand out. One that does so is Paper Camera, available as an Android and an iPhone/iPad app. Paper Camera lets you use your camera to output real time cartoon and painting effects that have to be seen to appreciated.

Regardless of some cool input tools, like Swype, entering text and controlling your mobile phone can still be cumbersome. On Android at least, you have the option of controlling your phone right from your computer, using AirDroid. AirDroid won’t let you do access all of your phone’s functions, but the list of available features is pretty impressive.

I stumbled across this completely by accident. I was looking at some very cool ideas for creating furniture from shipping pallets (my lovely wife’s new obsession), and I saw that one person had done a mock-up of what she wanted her living room to look like. Then I saw the little “Autodesk Homestyler” branding on the bottom of the image and gave an audible “Heyyyyyyyyyy!”

What followed wasn’t pretty. Picture me — or yourself, if you don’t happen to know what I look like — wandering about my house with a tape measure, measuring every wall, window, doorframe, article of furniture, you name it. I was approximating angles, imagining what changes I might like, and constantly running back to my laptop so I could re-create — and then improve upon — my living space. It was obsessive, it was zen-like, and it was surprisingly effective.

Java is a bit tricky. A lot of applications use it, and many of them come bundled with their own version of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) — which they happily and oh-so-helpfully install on your system. This leads to multiple and redundant installs of Java on your computer, each of which may contain potential security threats, and may well leave you scratching your head as to whether you can or should delete them. Wonder no more… JavaRa is a free, light-weight utility that will clean up the redundant versions of the Java runtime, as well as update you to the latest version — and it has a few other tricks up its sleeves, besides.