We’re already living in the future, so why is it we still need silly things like cash and credit cards? Google Wallet (Free) is aiming to get rid of those relics from a bygone era by connecting your credit card — Citi MasterCards or Google Prepaid cards only, to start — with your NFC-capable Android phone to let you pay at any PayPass-capable terminal, and also letting you take advantage of exclusive Google Offers to help you save money at the same time. Next up? The flying car.

Our thanks to Gillette for sponsoring our mobile articles this month.

Clean Up and Revive Your Bloated, Sluggish Mac

Packing in a whopping 250 new features, Mac OS X Lion ($30) looks to be a worthy upgrade to Apple’s awesome operating system. Available in July as a download from the Mac app Store, it’ll bring new features including iOS-style full screen apps, new Multi-Touch gestures, Mission Control and Launchpad (new things for seeing all your apps at once and for finding and launching apps quicker), a redesigned Mail app, Auto Save for everything, and AirDrop (easy file sharing).

[Nice write up Uncrate.com]

iPhoto is a good thing. Pre-installed on every new computer cranked out by Cupertino, millions of Mac users have come to rely upon the application’s user-friendly functionality to collect, edit and share their photos, as these are all tasks that iPhoto does very well.

That said, I think we can agree that the software flounders in a sea of fail when it comes to finding and deleting duplicate photos that–by way of editing or import–have found their way into your photo collection. Sure, you could root through your iPhoto collection and delete each and everyone of the duplicates you stumble across manually, but if you’re anything like us, you’ve got so many photos crammed into your Mac that the thought of doing is daunting, to say the least. Fortunately, there’s a far easier way to rid your iPhoto collection of those darned duplicates.

Step One: Download and Install Duplicate Annihilator

Yep, it’s just that easy. This is a Monday morning how-to, and as such, no black magic of quantum physics are involved. Bratoo Propaganda Software‘s Duplicate Annihilator is a one stop shop of a plug-in that will bring almost instant sanity to your iPhoto collection. In fact, depending on the size of your iPhoto gallery, it could very well take you longer to type the developer’s name than it does for Duplicate Annihilatorto track down and destroy all of your photographic duplicates.

Once the program’s .DMG file is safely nestled away in your download folder, open it and drag the Duplicate Annihilator to the Application Folder shortcut built into the installation window.

Step Two: Lock and Load

Locate the program in your Applications folder and open it. For your efforts, you’ll be rewarded with a bare bones user interface that will let you get right down to business. By default, the interface opens to a tab named Find duplicates, which is good, because that’s what this tutorial is all about.

Make sure that the options on this tab are set to move duplicates to trash–which will ensure that the program cloisters off your duplicates to the Trash folder–and Classic mode: a setting that forces the program to abide by your choices you make in the applications other tabs.

Speaking of which, click on the tab marked Preferences. Make sure that the options “MD5 checksum” and “Set duplicates’ comments to duplicate” are selected. Doing so will ensure that Duplicate Annihilator will spot the duplicates in your iPhoto collection based upon their content, and mark any suspected duplicates as–you guessed it–duplicate.

Step Three: Hunt ‘Em Down

Return to the Find duplicates tab and click “Find and annihilate duplicates”. If you downloaded the free version of the application, it will scan a maximum of 500 images in your iPhoto gallery. Let the application do its thing.

While you wait for your duplicates to be hunted out, be sure not to open up iPhoto for any reason. Doing so could at worst, damage your library and at least mess with Duplicate Annihilator’s cleaning of said library.Once the program has completed its work, it will inform you of how many duplicates it found. As soon as you recieve that message, you can open up iPhoto and finish cleaning up your library.

Step Four: Enjoy Your Handiwork

Open up your Mac’s Trash folder. You’ll find that Duplicate Annihilator has moved all of the image files it believes to be duplicates there. You can choose to either chuck them out or, alternately, send them back to iPhoto if you want to keep it. We’re sure that you’ll agree that the trial edition of Duplicate Annihilator makes locating and nuking duplicates in your iPhoto gallery so easy that it’s easy to justfy paying $7.99 to score the full version.

Follow this article’s author, Seamus Bellamy on Twitter

by Lee Mathews

Our regular readers can probably rattle off a list of their 20 favorite Apps without breaking a sweat — as the comments on this post will no doubt prove. But for our less in-the-know friends, family, and co-workers, it can be challenging to figure out where to download high quality programs that actually do what they need them to do.

We’ve put together an assortment that will help you hit the ground running with your new Windows PC. If you’ve got your own suggestions to add, feel free to post them in the comments.

Now let’s take the jump and check out the apps!

Antivirus and antimalware

It’s always best to get your protection in place before you do anything else. Microsoft’s Security Essentials is an exceptionally good program and provides excellent, always-on defense against all kinds of malicious software. Version 2.0 is even better than the original, and it’s ready for download onto your shiny new system.

For added protection, we also like to keep Malwarebytes on hand. It’s a dependable program for times when we want to perform a more intensive checkup on our system and has proven itself to be a malware-removing powerhouse.

Download Microsoft Security Essentials
Download Malwarebytes (from Filehippo)

Backup and sync

With security out of the way, it’s time to look at protecting your future data. By setting up a good quality backup or sync app (or both), you can ensure that you’re never going to lose those precious photos or important scholarly articles you saved in your Documents folder. SugarSync gets the nod for sync services, thanks to its 5GB of free space (more than double what most providers give for free) — and mobile apps for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry.

For straight-up backup duties, Mozy is tough to beat. A free account gets you 2GB of backup space, and a paid account will only run you $4.95 per month for unlimited storage. Mozy can also simultaneously backup to an external hard drive, giving you a second layer of disaster preparedness.

Download Sugarsync
Download Mozy

Web browsing

We certainly recommend installing an alternative Web browser, but because Google Chrome, Firefox, and Opera all have unique features, it’s very hard to pick a ‘best’ browser. All three browsers are fast, secure, customizable, and offer synchronization — which is very useful if you browse on more than one computer. Spend some time seeing what makes each one special, or download ‘em all and go for a few test drives. You can always uninstall them later!

If you’re the adventurous type and you like Internet Explorer just fine, you may even want to download the Internet Explorer 9 beta version. It’s not fully complete, but it’s a big improvement over its predecessors.

Download Firefox
Download Google Chrome
Download Opera

Watching, converting, and burning videos

For viewing just about any kind of video file, VLC is ready to rock. From MP4 to AVI to VOB, it plays them all — and without making you hunt for codecs (which is especially handy if you’re not sure what a codec is in the first place). When it comes time to burn those videos to a disc or make them play nice with your new smartphone, Freemake Video Converter is up to the task. It’ll even burn your videos to a DVD or Blu-ray disc.

Download VLC
Download Freemake Video Converter

Listening to, transferring, and buying music

Just about everyone who’s touched a keyboard knows about iTunes. It’s a good enough program, but you have other options available. DoubleTwist is a very good alternative, and it can even synchronize songs to your iPhone, iPod, or iPad — something most other apps can’t do. It’s also got built-in access to the Amazon MP3 Store, which offers very good pricing on music downloads — as long as you’re in the U.S. and U.K.

If you don’t own an Apple device, Songbird is another nice choice. One big reason to consider Songbird is that it integrates 7digital for music purchases — and 7digital is available darn near everywhere.

Download Doubletwist
Download Songbird

Communication and instant messaging/chat

Skype now handles a mind-boggling number of voice and video calls every single day, and it’s one of the best programs around at adapting to your Internet connection’s speed. That’s important when you’re trying to make sure the person on the other end isn’t seeing a pixelated version of you which stutters and freezes constantly.

As for instant messaging, we’ve got two picks. Windows Live Messenger is a good way to go if you’re primarily going to chat with Windows Live contacts (obviously) and Facebook friends. For those of you who really need to chat with friends on ICQ, Yahoo, Google, Live, and ICQ all at once, do yourself a favor and check out Pidgin. It’s a much better idea than installing three or four different chat apps.

Download Skype
Download Windows Live Messenger 2011
Download Pidgin

photo management, editing, and sharing

Both Microsoft and Google make terrific photo apps for home users. Picasa and Live Photo Gallery offer plenty of quick-fix tools for adjusting colors, removing redeye, cropping, and otherwise tweaking your pics. Both programs make it easy to generate slideshows for sharing online or on disc. Photo Gallery also works well with Facebook and Flickr — so it’s a better choice if you plan on posting a lot of photos to either site. It also comes bundled with Movie Maker, which is a nice way to bundle your pictures and videos.

Download Picasa
Download Windows Live Photo Gallery / Movie Maker 2011

Games

At this stage in the game, Steam is a must-have application (or at least very, very nearly one). There are so many good games available in their extensive catalog that everyone can find something enjoyable to purchase and play. From first person shooters to racing sims to addictive (and typically cheap!) casual games, Steam has become a bit like the iTunes for games.

Download Steam

Office and student work

If you plan on getting productive with your new computer — and you probably will at some point in the new year — you may as well install the apps you’ll need now. For general note-taking and research, Evernote is a champion and it’s made even better by the availability of mobile apps for virtually all smartphones.

For straight-up word processing and spreadsheet chores, both OpenOffice and Lotus Symphony offer Microsoft Office-like functionality for free. They’re not 100% Office compatible, though, so if you’re worried about documents formatting properly you may want to check into Microsoft’s free Office Web Apps. They run in your browser, so you won’t even need to install anything extra — all you need is a Facebook account!

Download Evernote
Download Lotus Symphony (from Softpedia)
Download OpenOffice
Visit Microsoft Office Web Apps

Password management

The more Web sites you sign up for, the more important a good password manager becomes. KeePass is easy to learn, can store everything you throw at it, and it will even generate hard-to-crack passwords which you can use to replace your current ones. All you’ve got to do is remember the master password to open your KeePass vault, and you’re good to go!

Download KeePass

Unzipping, extracting and managing file archives

7-Zip is the name to know. Unlike the more well-known WinZip and WinRAR, 7-Zip is completely free and will never nag you about how many files you’ve opened with it or why you should buy a copy. Using 7-Zip is dead simple: just click any compressed file you download and choose the 7-Zip menu from the pop-up, and then extract your files.

Download 7-Zip for 64-bit or 32-bit Windows

Tune-ups and Maintenance

Windows 7 doesn’t really need to be defragmented, and any new system you buy at this point will be running the OS. A ‘tidy up’ tool like CCleaner is a better choice. It provides an easy way to remove temporary files that are eating up valuable drive space, and cleans your registry. Run it regularly to keep your system spic-and-span, and don’t forget to add CCleaner Enhancer to clean out files from more than 200 additional programs.

Download CCleaner

Present photo by flickr user paulidin

You’d think that being crowned Apple’s iPad app of the Year (not to mention one of TIME magazine’s top 50 innovations of 2010) might make the cats at Flipboard lazy, but that’s not the case — they’ve just rolled out a major 1.1 update which adds Google Reader, Flickr and a host of user-requested features.

Flipboard, Inc. snuck out an update to Flipboard late Wednesday, bringing the “social media in a magazine format” app to version 1.1. Among the new goodies are Google Reader sync, Flickr photo feeds and more full content from The Washington Post, Bon Appetit and more.

Perhaps the feature most anticipated by Flipboard lovers is syncing with Google Reader accounts, which has become the most popular way to read RSS feeds. Now the dream is a reality — simply tap Add a Section, select Google Reader, type in your username and password and you’re off and running. From a top menu bar in the Google Reader section, you can select any or all feeds to read, including starred and shared items (and you’ll be able to star, share or comment on additional stories right from within Flipboard).

Flickr is another Flipboard 1.1 addition that will make users flip with joy. Browse all Flickr has to offer, including photostream, favorites, groups, contacts’ photos and interesting photos of the day, all within Flipboard’s luxurious interface.

There’s also even more full content available to read right away, including new Flipboard Pages from The Washington Post, Bon Appetit and a special Sports Illustrated Swimsuit All-Access preview that goes behind the scenes during the making of the magazine’s popular Swimsuit Edition.

Flipboard hasn’t forgotten its roots, and now you can flip through Facebook groups, fan pages and photos right from your feed as well as browsing Twitter favorites, tweets, @mentions and lists. You can now post photos, status updates and Flipboard pages across Twitter, Facebook and even Google Reader, all with faster performance across the entire app.

Flipboard 1.1 is a 3MB free download from the App Store; it’s only compatible with the iPad and requires iOS 3.2 or later. Flip out and get downloading!

Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter

Here at Mac|Life, we really do love free apps. We love loading up our iOS devices with seriously utilitarian apps that live in the cloud, too. Here’s a look at some of our favorite cloud applications that work across ALL platforms–Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Dropbox

If you’re not a part of drop box, you are seriously missing out on one of the most helpful services we’ve ever used. The service plants a folder on your hard drive that syncs across all computers using the service. The mobile app lets you view your documents and even play a song on the go.

MobileMe iDisk
If you’ve got MobileMe, there’s no reason not to access it on your iOS device. iDisk lets you view and share your MobileMe files, as well as view iWork, Office, Quicktime and PDF files. You can also access other Public folders from this particular app.
Box.net

Box.net lets you store up to 5GB Free of files in the cloud. You can view all your files–Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDFs, audio, and more–on your iPhone and iPad through this nifty free app. You can also add comments on files and folders to differentiate between versions and get a detailed list of what has been uploaded, downloaded and updated.

Evernote

I use Evernote for organizing my entirely scattered brain. It’s great for pictures, simple URL saving and snippets. The app is wonderful because I can access my shopping list whenever I’m lost inside a department store, or show friends the ridiculous internet memes I’ve clipped for a later date.
Friendly for Facebook

Um, social networking is in the *cloud*, alright? Pictures of last Friday’s party, notes you share between your friends and messages of love and betrayal all reside on those thousands of servers Facebook’s got camped out somewhere in the US. And since there’s no native Facebook app currently available to the massed, this one will have to do.