Google Desktop, A Free Organizational Tool

Google Desktop is a free downloadable tool that makes searching your computer quick and easy. If you use Microsoft Outlook, it will also embed in your Outlook automatically to search your email folders.
Less time spent looking for documents, more time on finishing that article to be published in JTP! There are versions for PCs, Macs and Linux.

Dark Copy: A Place To Clear One's Mind

It happens to the best of us. While researching, we may realize our chosen topic is not sufficiently defined and/or supported by acceptable sources. This can be a discombobulating situation that may require a clean mental slate as we refocus.

Dark Copy is a text editor that can be used for such occasions.
Its beauty lies in its simplicity.
A dark page fills the computer screen thus allowing one to clear one's mind and type distraction-free. With the focus now on writing, it can assist in reformulating thoughts or refining a topic.
It is a simple yet powerful concept. Give it a try.

Dark Copy can be found at: http://darkcopy.com/.

Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens)

In search of images that will add visual interest to your work?
Interested in visual researching?
Cooliris can help.
This Firefox add-on is easy (and fun) to use. Once installed,
images are presented as a 3D wall that you can effortlessly zip along.
Just click on the image to bring it to the fore and zoom in.
Each picture has a small globe icon which you can click on to
jump to its corresponding website.You can easily share the images by clicking the envelope icon which allows you to email them to others. Cooliris is a great time saver as it taps into the image resources of many popular websites and search engines including Google, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, deviantArt, Photobucket, and Yahoo.

Firefox can be downloaded free from: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/.
The Cooliris add-on can then be installed from: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=cooliris&cat=all .

Research, not re-search with Zotero

There is a new software tool available to gather, organize, and cite your references.

Zotero is an extension that works only with the Firefox Web browser.
You can download Firefox for free: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Extremely user-friendly, Zotero goes beyond storing the author, title, and publication fields, and
exporting them into a bibliography. It has the ability to:

• Detect when you are viewing a book, article, or other object on the Web. Find and automatically save the full reference information in the correct fields.
• Annotate and/or archive entire Web pages.
• Save records and notes in a variety of languages.
• Tag and store information for easy retrieval.
• Easily export that information into MS Word or EndNote.
• Communicate with the software already installed on your computer (such as Microsoft Word).
• Be used offline.

Zotero has a myriad of additional features well worth investigating.

Best of all, it is completely free and available for download from http://www.zotero.org/.