As we reported today, Wikipedia will be shutting down its English version on Wednesday in protest of SOPA and PIPA. It hopes to educate its users on the two proposed acts and ask them to contact their local congress members to stop them from passing.

Wikipedia is a huge resource of information and many rely on it for homework or just for personal browsing purposes. It’s such an important resource that most of its pages surface as a top Google search result for a prominent figure or event. Having said that, there are ways that you can keep a copy of Wikipedia for yourself. Yes, the entire thing.

There are extremely geeky ways to do this, such as mirroring the entire site, but this will take a lot of technical knowledge, know-how, setup. Instead of downloading the entire Wikipedia database, here are a few ways that will cost you a few bucks, but are infinitely simpler.

The apps below don’t require you to be online to view the pages, and you’ll be able to reference Wikipedia no matter where you are, even when it goes dark on Wednesday.

All of Wikipedia

All of Wikipedia is a brilliant and feature-rich app for your iOS device. It will even prompt you to download a dump of the latest Wikipedia pages in a way that requires no technical knowledge whatsoever. All you have to do is give it some time. And by “some time”, I mean generally between 3 and 4 hours depending on the speed of your connection.

➤ All of Wikipedia / $8.99

WikiPock

WikiPock also brings Wikipedia to your mobile device no matter where you are. It’s available for Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices. In a nifty spin, if you don’t have the space on your device for Wikipedia, they will ship you a pre-loaded memory card with Wikipedia on it. Of course that won’t help you when it goes dark on Wednesday, but it’s definitely good to know. While not as pretty as All of Wikipedia, WikiPock gets the job done.

➤ WikiPock / $9.99

Offline Wiki

Offline Wiki is an extension for the Chrome browser that lets you grab a copy of Wikipedia for your computer. The extension does all of the downloading and decompressing of the massively huge files so you don’t have to. The other great thing is that you can read Wikipedia in your browser as you’d normally do.

➤ Offline Wiki / Free

Kiwix

Kiwix is an offline reader that you can download for Windows, Linux, and Mac. It’s a project supported by Wikipedia itself, so it definitely has a thriving community behind it. This software requires you to download a copy of Wikipedia yourself, which you can do here. Once you’ve downloaded the gigantic file and decompress it, Kiwix will take it from there.

➤ Kiwix / Free

Wiki Offline

Wiki Offline is a Mac app that works extremely well on your desktop. It includes features like full-screen reading and image galleries. Like most of the apps listed above, it prompts you to download Wikipedia and takes care of all of the heavy lifting for you. Since it’s for the desktop, you can customize things like the fonts and theme of the application.

➤ Wiki Offline / $9.99

So there you have it, five ways to get your own copy of Wikipedia in English before it shuts down on Wednesday in protest of SOPA. So far, the foundation is getting quite a bit of support in its efforts to raise awareness about acts that could endanger free enterprise on the Internet, as well as call politicians out on their failures at communicating why an act like SOPA is necessary. Even though it will be down, Wikipedia is a resource a lot of us rely on, so it’s best to be prepared.

Spindler was ousted in 1996 to make way for Gil Amelio, who of course only lasted one year before Steve Jobs returned. He’s credited with ruining the Newton project, and his employees decided to poke some fun at his decision to license Mac OS 7 in 1995, which was reversed by Jobs.

Enjoy “I think we’re a clone now”, sung to the tune of (you guessed it) “I think we’re alone now”, an internal video created by Apple employees on its main campus in Cupertino:

This is more entertaining than Apple’s 80s music album.

If you’ve been using Picasa on your desktop, you’ve noticed that there haven’t been any updates that involve Google+. That all changes today with Picasa 3.9.

The desktop app boasts a few new features, with Google+ sharing front and center. Here’s what the Google Photos team had to say about the features in its latest client:

Share with people in your Google+ circles: Picasa 3.9 makes it easy to share the right photos with the right people with just a few clicks. To share an album, just click on the green “Share on Google+” button and add the specific circles you want to share your photos with. Find out more here.

Tag people in your circles: When you click a photo to tag a friend, the dropdown menu now includes people in your Google+ circles in addition to your Gmail contacts. If you tag friends from Google+, Picasa will automatically suggest that you share your pictures with them when you upload your album. Learn more about tagging.

Tagging people and sharing to circles on Google+ is drop-dead simple with the latest version of Picasa, which you can download here.

Along with the new social features, the team has also included 24 new photo editing effects as well as side-by-side mode for comparing two images. This is super helpful when you’re editing your pictures and want to match colors and effects perfectly.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that Google is integrating social into all of its products one by one. The only downside of this new update, is that they’re still calling the product “Picasa”. Dearest Google, can’t we just rename it to Google Photos and call it a day already?

➤ Picasa for Mac and PC

While we may think of notifications as something that is primarily for mobile apps, they’re also incredibly useful on full-fledged computers as well. One of the most popular solutions is Growl, a notifications protocol that takes all of the various status updates you get from apps running on your Mac and presents them to you in an attractive way.

New emails, IM conversations or Twitter updates; if an app is trying to get your attention, Growl is its conduit.

Now Growl has taken it to a new level with version 1.3 and for the first time, it’s only available on the Mac App Store, and it’s $1.99. Up until now, Growl has been free.

The Growl team had to update the app for the latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X, Lion. Up until now, the free version of the software has tucked itself away in your System Preferences. Growl now has its own application and preferences window to easily customize all of your system notifications.

New in Growl 1.3

• History

There is now a history for all notifications you’ve gotten from apps. This is stored on your machine, but you can disable it if you like.

• Notification Rollup

Much like iOS notifications, Growl “rolls up” notifications while you’re away from your computer for easy viewing when you get back.

Other notable updates

• Speech display for hearing your notifications.
• Send Growl notifications from Cocoa or Applescript
• Networking two or more Macs to forward notifications to each other
• Works with the iPhone and iPad via Prowl

Even if you’ve never used Growl before, if you’re an Apple diehard this is a must purchase and essential utility. The $1.99 isn’t a bad pricetag, considering the team is dedicating itself to staying up to date on all of Apple’s OS changes.

Only the best Web, mobile and desktop apps get reviewed at TNW Apps.

Adding filters and effects to your photos is a popular trend on the web right now, and Instagram is leading the charge. Path also lets you do similar things on its super small social networking app. But what about when you’re on your actual laptop or desktop computer?

There are a lot of desktop apps to edit photos, like Photoshop, but they’re more for professionals. That’s where Analog by Realmac Software steps in. It only works like Instagram, but isn’t currently sharing to Instagram.

The main features of the app are very specific, Filters and Borders. This is what I’d expect from an Instagram desktop app. The app is available on the Mac App Store for $7.99 (for a limited time), so if you’re an Instagram fan and a Mac user, this could be worth it for you.

The features of Analog are simple:

Crop and Rotate
Stunning Filters
Stylish Borders
Sharing

I’m running Lion, and if you are too, the latest OSX Full Screen and Restore features are put to work here.

Using Analog is fairly simple, just drag any size photo into the app and then start changing the filters. You can toggle over to the borders and change them too, to find the right combination. Once you’re done, export it and share it if you like.

One of the limitations that jumped out immediately was that there is no share to Twitter functionality. Twitter has its own photo sharing and hosting now, so this is something I would expect from an app like Analog. You can currently share to the CloudApp, Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa. Also, it would make sense for the company to use Instagram’s API to upload directly to Instagram.

The other thing that we have to keep an eye on is whether the Analog developers will update the app with new Filters and Borders. That’s the real draw of apps like Instagram, the company listens to its community and add new things quickly.

Otherwise, if you’re looking to make the photos sitting on your desktop look cooler or retro, then Analog is a nice app to do so.

Getting screenshots and images from your iPhone or iPad to your computer, or the reverse for that matter, is an exercise in time wasting frustration. A combination of two already great apps for your Mac and iPhone can take that process from frustration to freedom in no time flat.

There are several built-in choices for getting images from your iDevice to your computer but they generally involve other web services or email and add slow, unnecessary steps. By using the iPhone app Pastebot and it’s accompanying Mac app Pastebot Sync in conjunction with the great image editor Skitch, we can streamline the process, allowing you to transfer, edit and annotate images in seconds.

What You Need

To set up your workflow you’ll need a couple of items. First of all, you’ll need the Pastebot app [$2.99 App Store] for your iPhone. You’ll also want to grab Pastebot Sync, the app for your Mac that will let you sync things to and from your iPhone. Last you’ll need the image editor Skitch, a simple image editor that allows you to resize, adjust and annotate images with blazing speed. You can get Skitch for free here with the option to upgrade to the pro version for more features. Get all of those installed, I’ll wait.

Make Pastebot Work

Now that we have all of the items installed, lets get them set up to work together. Note that in order to share images between your Mac and iPhone they need to be on the same WiFi network.

On your Mac, run Pastebot Sync. You’ll see an icon appear in the upper right corner of your toolbar that looks like a tiny clipboard. This app will communicate with the iPhone version of Pastebot to transfer copied items back and forth. This connection is two-way. That means that anything you copy on your iPhone will transfer to your Mac and anything you copy on your Mac will show up in Pastebot on your iPhone or iPad.

To set up the connection on your iPhone, open Pastebot on your iPhone. Tap on Settings and Sync, then tap on the Add New button at the bottom of the list. Pastebot will display a 4-digit passcode. Now, lets hop back over to the Mac and punch in that passcode.

To do this we’ll need to click on the Pastebot Sync icon in the toolbar and click on Pastebot Preferences. In the Prefs pane for Pastebot type in the 4 digit code that your iPhone is displaying. The Pastebot icon in your toolbar should now turn blue, indicating that it’s linked to a device and your iPhone should automatically see the connection and display the computer as a device in your sync list. Note that you can link your device to multiple computers and multiple devices to your computer. This should enable you to freely move URLs, copied text and images back and forth between all of your devices with blazing speed.

It’s worth noting something about the way that Pastebot works here. Because of the way that Apple has designed multitasking to work on the iPhone, Pastebot can only stay open in the background for 10 minutes. This means that before you start a copy/paste session, you should fire up Pastebot and then put it into the background by hitting your home button. For the next 10 minutes it should capture anything that you copy on your iPhone, whether it be text or images.

Make it All Work Together

Now that you have Pastebot syncing up and running, lets see how it works together with Skitch.

First, make sure Skitch is running on your Mac, for best results you’ll want to ensure that the Skitch windows has focus by clicking anywhere on the app. This will ensure that your pasted image goes into Skitch and not somewhere else.

Now, launch Pastebot on your iPhone, then background it by tapping the home button. Pop open your Photos app on the iPhone and hold down your finger on an image until the Copy dialog pops up and tap it. You should hear an audible signal if Pastebot grabbed the image.

Then, switch back to Pastebot and tap+hold the image that you’d like to send to Skitch. It will audible again and your image will pop up right in Skitch on your Mac. This will allow you to use Skitch to resize your image, add arrows, text or other annotations and then export your image simply by dragging it out to your desktop in ready-to-use form.

There are so many ways to use Skitch itself that I can’t get into them all here, but getting your images directly from your iPhone to Skitch should save you a lot of time emailing the images to yourself or uploading them to Dropbox then re-downloading them. Remember that you can also use this method to paste text into text editors and websites right into the URL bar of your browser.

If you try out this workflow tip please let me know how it worked for you in the comments and yes, I did use the method above for the images in this article!