Where are the "killer apps" that promised to make us richer, happier and more productive? Two years ago, virtually every company was working with NASA-level secrecy on a piece of hardware or software that would change the world. Today we're more concerned with staying in the black, keeping auditors under control and preventing terrorists from using our nifty inventions against us.

Still I do miss the rush of excitement that accompanies news of the next must-have gadget or application. Sadly, in the past few months, the closest that I have come to that kind of rush is when I saw the movie Minority Report. And even their killer app of fifty years hence ends up flawed by fatal security gaps.

Certainly, not a lot is new, but some recent technological developments are worth mentioning. First, we can turn the tables on terrorists with a technology called data mining.

Credit card companies already use networked computer systems to follow cardholders as they rent cars, place long-distance calls, and use automated teller machines. These systems scan massive amounts of transaction data with data-mining software that flags suspicious users and dispatches real-time alerts to clerks or security guards when a suspected crook surfaces.

The al Qaeda cell that attacked on Sept. 11 threw off a string of red flags that likely would have been detected by a system that combined FBI watch-lists with transaction data-mining. Such a system would allow law-enforcement officials in a variety of locales to share leads and working hypotheses, an invaluable tool in fighting terror.

For the home user, even less is new, and most of it is from Microsoft. Their Tablet PC is only mildly interesting, since it appears to be a rehash of some older ideas with only a slightly newer approach: you can either write on the screen with a stylus or stand it up on a keyboard to transform it into notebook PC (Didn't Apple call this a Newton?). It features handwriting recognition that is less than perfect, so don't expect the machine to translate your scribbles into word-processor ready text. According to Alex Loeb, Microsoft VP in charge of Tablet PC development, many people prefer to keep their notes handwritten rather than converting them to computer text. Microsoft issued the prototype for the Tablet PC two years ago, with the "revolutionary" idea that now business people could take hand-written notes in a meeting. And to think that I begged, pleaded, cajoled a former employer for a laptop to keep notes in meetings since writing my notes longhand was too slow and made me miss too much of the meeting content.

If you want to take handwritten notes in a business meeting and store it on an electronic device why pay $2000 bucks for this feature? The Palm M105 offers an onscreen handwriting feature and it costs only $149. If you want to spend a couple hundred more, you can get the Palm M130 and have a crisp color version.  Either one saves your scribbles just as they are (great for those who like to sketch).

Microsoft also recently introduced of the TV Photo Viewer. (You'd think that Microsoft could afford to hire someone to come up with jazzier names for its products.) This device allows you to view your digital pictures and slides on your TV set. About the size of a thick paperback book, the viewer accepts standard 1.44 megabyte floppy disks that hold 20 to 40 pictures per disk (it recommends closer to 20, because they don't have to be quite as compressed and thus produce higher quality graphics). The viewer comes with a remote that lets you flip through the electronic photo album or slide show yourself, or you can set it to automatically show.

Because it uses standard floppy disks, you have to put your pictures on the disk using your PC (assuming that you have a floppy drive on your computer — not all of us do nowadays). Aside from the fact that I would love to force my guests to view photos of my grandchildren on our TV screen, this product caught my interest because I have boxes and boxes of floppy disks that I have no use for, and I hate to throw anything away. It would be much easier, however, if the TV Photo Viewer accepted CDs so its owner doesn't have to get up and change disks as often. CDs, because they do not incorporate magnetic media, also have a longer shelf life (For an excellent discussion of the pros and cons of using various media for long-term storage of important records, see Sue Ives' article My floppy died and I don't feel so good myself in the September, 2001 issue of PC Alamode).

Outside of Microsoft, is anyone creating anything new? Yes, a few are, and we may wish that they weren't. Some Internet sites have come up with their own "killer app." It takes over your browser by changing your start page, (the Web page that appears first whenever you launch Internet Explorer.) Certain sites install malicious code on your PC, some of which overrides your own start page selection. In some cases, this can be embarrassing, since this type of technology is often employed by pornographic websites. If this happens, all is not lost. You can download a free program that is effective in blocking such sabotage. StartPage Guard kills malicious code and allows you to restore your favorite start page. It can also automatically check to make sure your choice isn't overridden again. You can download StartPage Guard (search for "start page"). It might be prudent to install StartPage Guard before you taste any forbidden Internet fruit.

If you prefer another type of forbidden fruit (and I do admit to a weakness for Margaritas), one new dot-com may not be the answer to Amazon, but its product is certainly interesting. Check out BoatBlender. It offers a bottle that fits on the end of your cordless drill allowing you to make the perfect "drilled Margaritas while you entertain on your boat. I wonder if anyone has invented something that will allow me to make a pina colada while water skiing.

Another frivolous invention has actually been quite useful. You can log onto the Palm website and download a freeware utility for your color PDA called AK Mirror. This program is a first offering from Akeysoft and it does only two things: it turns your screen all black or all white. In all black mode, you can use your PDA as a mirror with good enough clarity to check your teeth for a stray piece of spinach, although it may not be much use when inserting your contact lenses. In all white mode, it becomes a flashlight. A single pull-down menu item allows you to invert the screen from one to the other. I have keyed one of my Palm's buttons to this program and keep the program itself on flashlight mode so that I can access the flashlight with one touch even in total darkness. The flashlight feature won't put EverReady out of business, but it will help find your house keys in a pinch.

While I'm enthralled with most new developments for handheld computers, I still reserve judgment for the Blackberry-style keyboards that appear to be replacing the full-travel keyboards that you could get for the last generation of PDAs. The blackberry type keyboards (those that are only about three inches across by two inches high and sport tiny keys that you operate with your thumbs) are much less expensive than the full-travel ones ($24 for one that attaches to the Palm M130 compared to $129 for the full travel model). However, aside from entering an occasional address or short memo, I don't know how much use they would be for a writer and touch typist like me.

If you are working for a company that is looking for ways to squeeze production out of every salary nickel, you had better hope that your CFO isn't aware that hardware maker Ingersoll-Rand and software maker Kronos have come up with a time clock that recognizes employees by scanning their hands. If you work for the government, it's already too late. You'll have to quit asking your office mate to clock you in when you're caught in traffic or slept too late. (I'm sure that retinal scans will soon follow, and with it, new types of criminal activity. The movie Minority Report features an ophthalmologist-cum-backstreet butcher who will swap out your eyeballs for a hefty fee.

And finally another good idea for the home user. Some printers now work even when not attached to a computer. If you want to print pictures from your digital camera, Hewlett-Packard and Epson make photo-oriented printers that can accept a memory card from a digital camera and make prints from the stored data. In the absence of a PC, you control these printers through a small built-in screen and printer buttons. A few high-end models even have a little color screen that shows you the picture before you print it.