Ninite installs 59 free apps with one double-click

Moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 will be a whole lot easier if you use Ninite. The free online site lets you pick those extra apps you always need to hunt around the web for when you do a clean install.
Once you've checked off your choices among the 59 possibilities, you download an installer (sorry, Windows only) , double-click it and you can just walk away while it loads up all those apps on your fresh operating system. It's even smart enough to avoid installing crapware such as unnecessary toolbars.

We've been testing this routine in its beta phase, and we can tell you it works beautifully. We test a lot of operating systems here, and it's a pain to individually install apps such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader (or better yet, Foxit Reader), iTunes, Firefox, Winrar, and many others. Now, with our custom installer, everything is ready to go in minutes.

The company aims to please, asking you to suggest more apps that aren't yet included. It's hard to believe this is free.

[DVICE via Ninite]

Google Docs OCR

Google Docs API tests a new feature that lets you perform OCR (optical character recognition) on an image. There's a live demo that illustrates this feature: you can upload a high-resolution JPG, GIF, or PNG image that has less than 10 MB and Google Docs extracts the text and converts it into a new document. Google mentions that 'the operation can currently take up to 40 seconds' and a small test showed that the service is not yet reliable: it's slow and it frequently returns errors.


The results are far from perfect and you'll find many errors, but the service is free and it's constantly improving. Here's the result of the OCR for this scanned document:


There aren't many free OCR services available, so an OCR service provided by Google would be very popular. ABBYY FineReader Online is one of the best online OCR services, but the free version is limited to 10 pages a day.

Google sponsors the development of an open-source OCR software called OCRopus, but it's not clear if the online service provided by Google Docs uses OCRopus.

[Google Operating System (Unofficial Google Blog)]