Cinch Manages Windows for Mac

Cinch: for Mac users who want to steal a really neat Windows function. It's so nice.

So, I primarily blog on my MacBook pro. But I do have the eeePC that Microsoft kindly lent me, and I must admit: the snap feature on Windows 7 makes me a little bit jealous. For those who don't know, if you grab the title bar of a window in Windows and drag it to the left or right of the screen, it will lock there and fill exactly half the width of the screen. It's nice when you need to keep a source on one side and your office program on the other--but in the Mac OS you have to manually drag windows into shape. It's a pain.

The people at Irradiated Software have felt my pain, and have released Cinch. It painlessly gives the same snap functionality to Macs. You can download it for free, but it will nag you. If you want to pay up, it's $7 and the nagging goes away. If you're a Mac user who often needs to consult one window while working in another (like if you often write papers), it's definitely a nice thing to have.

How to Survive with a Lost Phone

Unfortunately you can't use this guy to make calls or text. Photo courtesy of Flickr user KB35. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.So there was that one crazy night - you lost count of Jell-O shots, games of beer pong, and perhaps even where you were. You wake up in the morning, the grogginess sets in, and you feel your wallet, your keys, and -- that's it. Your phone is AWOL, and in the new era of technology you're up a creek without a paddle as a college student.

Or are you? Modern technology might have wiped out our previous lifelines and made cellular telephones a necessity, but they've also provided for ways to survive without them.

Here are some tips for surviving without your cell phone in college.

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The Web is Your Easel with MarkUp

MarkUp lets you annotate any website in an instant, and share the results.HackCollege has seen (and even created) its fair share of bookmarklets, but we've never seen anything quite like this.  MarkUp allows you to annotate any web page with one click of a button.  No need to download the page as a PDF to scribble on it with desktop application; everything takes place in the browser and is lightning-quick.

You get your choice of marker colors and thickness, and also a few semi-transparent options for highlighting.  A textbox tool also allows you to type up notes in the margins of a site.  Once you're done drawing all over the internet, Markup will generate a permanent URL to access a static image of your finished page.  Except it isn't really an image. To be honest I don't know what exactly it is. I just know I can't right click to save it anywhere, which is more than a tad annoying.

MarkUp is definitely a good start, and considering it's free, a no-brainer to try out. Hopefully the developers add some more exporting options (I'd love to send these to Evernote) and the ability to highlight text by selecting it, rather than struggling to drag your cursor over the pertinent information with a trackpad.  

HackCollege Interview: Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. Image courtesy of Flickr user JD Lasica. Licensed under CC 2.0 BY-NC.

FTC Disclosure: Microsoft paid for my trip to New York, my hotel, and my food. Blogging is awesome!

It's a weird thing to sit down with $14.5 billion, but on Monday I did just that. As part of the Windows Phone 7 launch at the Microsoft Open House, I had the chance to sit down with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, and ask him about the future of Microsoft's relationship with students--especially in light of their release of Windows Phone 7--the future of technology, and what students should be doing to break into tech fields.

We started off the interview talking about Windows Phone 7, as the press conference about the new phones had happened just a few hours earlier. Ballmer was, unsurprisingly, adamant that he thinks Windows Phone 7 phones are the best choice for college students. He said that user experience with Android phones is patchy--it's hard to know an Android phone is an Android phone when you pick it up--and iPhones only offer one model, ignoring that some people might want a QWERTY keyboard or different speakers. He's of the opinion that giving students a "consistently delightful" (yes, that's really the slogan) user experience over a variety of phones will draw them back from competing smartphone options. Whether that's true or not remains to be seen, but for middle-of-the-road users (people who don't want to root their Android phone and who want something more rugged than an iPhone), he may have steered Microsoft towards a winning strategy.

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Five Things College Students Take For Granted

You'll miss the free newspapers when they're gone, especially if it's The Onion. Image courtesy of Flickr user ariel design and licensed under CC by SA 2.0.This guest post is courtesy of our good friends at College Candy.  

College students are notoriously strapped for cash, and everyone on campus knows this.  Maybe administrators only do it because they feel guilty for sucking thousands of dollars out of our bank accounts, but the truth is, they actually provide plenty of awesome things for students to utilize – but we never seem to take these opportunities.  Why is it that the turnout for dollar beer night is always SO much greater than the number of students who show up for on-campus lectures?

There are so many chances that college students simply fail to take advantage of.  Here’s a little bucket list, College Candy style.  Make sure you take advantage of each of these things at least once before graduation.  Trust us – these opportunities are painfully rare once you get out into the real world.

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NY Times, The Wi-Fi Alliance, and the No Shit Study of the Day

Brace yourselves.  Apparently most millennials would rather go a week without coffee than a week without Wi-Fi. Truly Earth-shattering stuff.

So how about you guys? Would you rather tough it out without your morning brew for a week, or struggle through life without Wi-Fi?  Let us know in the comments.

[Coffee, TV, or Wi-Fi via Lifehacker]

Anthologize Heads the Next Generation of Self Publishing

Anthologize is decked out in the soothing orange and cream color scheme of progress.If you’ve got a blog running Wordpress (the self-hosted .org variety), Anthologize is a plugin which will allow you to publish your posts as a PDF, ePub, or TEI (a scholarly file format). There’s also an RTF option, but the creators point out that it’s still buggy. There is not currently an option to export files as DocX or ODT, but the program’s creators say it’s a feature to look for in future builds, along with the ability to export comments left on the original posts.

Anthologize is targeted at academics--for instance, professors who kept a class blog, or someone who wants to distribute their notes about a conference, or someone who wants to publish field notes as part of a research notebook. The academic focus is a result of the plugin’s origin at the One Week, One Tool program, in which 12 humanities scholars come together and conceive of and build a useful open source digital tool within a week. The program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, sees itself as sort of a digital barn raising: a group of people coming together to make something useful for the wider community.

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Friday Fun: Zuckerberg Talks Education

For a slightly more serious discussion about dropping out to start a company, check out Episode 6 of our podcast.