Open Source Review

Gaming Dice

2005-08-20T21:50:00.000+01:00

Yes, I'm back again. I stumbled on this one in a sort of random way, the details of which you can read about in my livejournal if you're interested.

Anyway, the idea behind the program is pretty basic - it's a dice simulator! :-) LOL. The thing that makes it cool though is that you can set up very complex dice rolls with HUGE impossible dice. The makers don't say how where the limit lies, although through some experimentation my guess is somewhere at about 75 sides. You can also set up complex roles of multiple dice...so for example, entering the command "2d8" will roll two eight sided dice and add the total together. The command "d6" will role a single, standard die. That's about it really.

Gaming Dice Version 0.1.5

Phew!

2005-08-18T00:38:00.000+01:00

Not been updating this over the last few days. My life is a bit insane right now - I'm looking for a new job, about to move house...so everything's a bit hectic, hence the sporadic posting. I don't really have anything to review right now, so I'd thought I'd leave you with some of the sources I've used to find stuff over the last few months.

Sourceforge - THE place to start when looking for open-source stuff for any platform. The search they have there is really comprehensive, and the projects cover more the vast majority of platforms. The problem is - there's so much there, that it's difficult to find something unless you know what you're looking for.

BBC OpenSource - I mentioned this a few months ago when it was launched. There's not much to interest the average desktop user there right now, the projects they have up are probably only of interest to developers.

Linspire have a good directory of software up - obviously, their website is geared towards Linux and in particular, Linspire...but a lot of open source stuff is cross-platform - so, I've looked through there before now, found a program that looks interesting and then used Google or Sourceforge to find the project's homepage and versions of the software for other platforms.

Freshmeat - again this geared towards Linux really, but there's cross platform stuff there too that's worth checking out.

Opensourcelist.org - this one is targetted at Windows users. Not hugely comprehensive, but it's well presented in categories with a small description and comments on each program.

The OSSwin project - absolutely HUGE list of categorised open-source stuff for windows. It's just a list of links though, so it's a good one to check out if you've got time to surf around and investigate stuff yourself.

The Open CD project - this is a suite of open source programs put together in a single ISO (a CD image). The software they've chosen represents some of the best open source programs out there right now, so it's worth checking out what they've included....whether you download and burn the ISO or trackdown the individual software you're looking for yourself.

Noscript (firefox extension)

2005-08-15T01:37:00.000+01:00

This one's a bit of a cop-out on my part, but I've been using it over the last few days and I think it's fantastic. Anyway, what noscript is is a firefox extension that blocks all scripts and plugins from the sites you visit - unless you specifically whitelist them.

Why would you want to do that?

Well, security for a start. While Firefox is much more secure than Internet Explorer - why even let a script run unless you want it's functionality? It blocks those new Flash based pop-ups that can sneak around Firefox's pop-up blocker (see here for another way to kill those). It also stops those autoplaying music videos that some idiots insist on having on their sites (please don't do that - it's annoying and frankly, tacky). So, it kills potentially dangerous and annoying things on the net.

What about if you come across a site where you want plugins and scripts to run?

Well, you click on it's icon in the bottom right corner of the browser where you can whitelist the site permently, or just for this session. Once you do that, everything will be re-enabled for that site and the page will be refreshed. If the page is loading content from multiple servers, then you can selectively allow and disallow them (for example, if the page is loading a flash movie from it's own server and a flash based ad from an ad-server - you can just selectively allow the original server, leaving the ad-server blocked).

Noscript Homepage

Complete 1.0.3

2005-08-12T18:23:00.000+01:00

Complete is a really cool, simple idea. It's a small open-source application that sits on top of all your windows and monitors the words you type, storing each one in a dictionary. If you start to type the same word you've already typed once before, it'll pop in the list of "current completions" in the program...if you then press both shift keys at the same time, that word is automatically typed in for you.

It works really, really well (the only place it doesn't work is in MS-DOS boxes). There are plenty of options in there to define what keyboard shortcut completes a remembered word, the number of words to remember, the minimum length of remembered words...that sort of thing.

I'm sure someone will find this useful, but personally I wouldn't use it. Not that I don't like it, it works quite well and it's a cool idea...but I've been using a keyboard virtually before I could walk so it's easier for me to just type. Plus, it can distract from your flow when writing (which is something that the auto-complete-ness of MS-Office products suffer from too), but like I said, I'm sure it has plenty of uses for some people...just not me.

Complete Homepage

jMemorize 0.9.1

2005-08-10T13:49:00.000+01:00

This is sort of unusual for piece of software but simple in concept. Basically, it's computerised flash cards for learning facts.

You define a side of a card that's shown to you, maybe a question or an English word if you're trying to learn foreign vocabulary. You then define the answer to that card. Set up a series of cards, then you can get the software to play back the "question side" of the card and you give the answer.

You can't answer a card on the computer though - it shows the "question" and then it's up to you to try to think of the answer. You can then click a button to reveal the other side and choose whether you got the answer right or wrong. The program keeps track of all your right and wrong answers and will show you which cards you've learnt - it's all down to your own honesty though. If you check the box that says you got the right answer when you didn't, you're obviously not going to get anywhere with it. :-)

There are loads of options for arranging cards into categories and trees, as well as options to choose how long a "learning session" will last and whether the program will retest you on the cards you got wrong. It's written in java and supplied as a .jar file - so it should run on pretty much any OS as long as you have Java set up properly. It's also reasonably quick for something written in Java (for a change! :-) )

jMemorize Homepage

KeePass Password Safe Version 1.0

2005-08-09T18:37:00.000+01:00

KeePass Password Safe is, well, an open-source password safe - a secure place for you to note down all those passwords that you constantly forget. :-)

Let me start off by saying that, no matter how well protected it might seem to be - I think using things like this is a bad idea. Someone cracks your email account password and they have your email...a problem, but that's all they have (assuming you're not using the same passwords in multiple places). Someone gets hold of your database from something like this and they have EVERYTHING. No matter how unlikely, or well protected it may seem...this is pretty much a universal bad idea. If you struggle to remember passwords - come up with a scheme. There's plenty of advice online about picking strong, easy to remember passwords.

However, if you're going to use one of these things then you could do worse than this. Obviously, your passwords are password protected behind a single password - and the program visually advises you how good (i.e. - how hard to crack) the password you've chosen is. Another cool feature is the ability to use a key on a floppy disk or USB drive. So, instead of having to enter a password to open your database of passwords - you have to insert the floppy or USB drive for verification.

Another useful feature is the password generator. After all, if you're using something like this - you don't have to remember the passwords you're using, so you may as well use random, impossible to guess passwords, right? The password generator saves you the effort of thinking them up yourself.

You can also do the typical boring stuff. Importing and exporting to various formats (HTML, XML, CSV and plain text). You sort your stored passwords (and usernames) into folders. You can also set expiration times for various passwords to make sure you change them regularly. There are also a handful of plugins to allow you to import and export data to and from other password-safe type programs.

It also minimizes down into the system tray, which is always useful in something like this.

KeePass Password Safe Homepage

LBreakout2

2005-08-08T02:05:00.000+01:00

Thought I'd look at something a bit different today - a game, LBreakout2. It's based on the old, original breakout game from the 80's. You have a little bat at the bottom of the screen that scrolls from left to right. The idea is you use the bat to hit a ball up into the upper portion of the screen to destroy bricks. Once they're all gone, you're onto the next level. You've probably played this before somewhere. The cool thing about this version though is that you can play multiplayer games with it across the internet or a network. It runs shockingly quick on my computer, extracted straight from a zip file (so it doesn't need to be installed - although there is an installer based version available on the website if you want it)...in fact it runs a bit too quick for me with the default settings (or maybe it's just that I suck). There are options to slow things down though if you're as inept at it as I am. Control is either through ye-olde cursor keys or by mouse - although, if you try to play this with a mouse I think you're a sadist. :-)

LBreakout2 Homepage

SystemRescueCd

2005-08-06T20:52:00.000+01:00

I can't really try this one out at the minute because I'm CD-writer-less, but I thought it might be worth pointing out to people.

Basically, it's a custom build of Linux that runs entirely off a single CD (i.e. - there's nothing to install) and contains lots of tools designed to help recover your system.

It contains things like hard-disk partitioning tools, as well as things like zipping and CD-writing tools, Freedos (which allows you to run any old MS-DOS diagnostic stuff you might have lying around), Aida (a hardware diagnostic system) anti-virus and a couple of basic web-browsers.

The idea is to provide a basic system, entirely contained on a bootable CD-ROM that you can then use to diagnose and fix your computer - or at the very least get the files (that you should have already backed up!) off there so you can flatten it and start again without losing data.

Although it's running Linux, it's not just for Linux systems. It can read and write Windows drives (as well as many others) so it has a use for anyone. Although the tools provided seem to be quite well done - and many of them are point and click graphical programs rather than command-line stuff - I think you do still need to have a basic idea of what you're doing to be able to use something like this.

SystemRescueCd homepage

Open Clip Art Library

2005-08-05T01:50:00.000+01:00

This is quite a cool idea, an open-source clip art library. You can browse the library through the website and download images individually, or, if you prefer - download the whole thing to your computer (they offer monthly update downloads too, so you don't have to download the whole thing every month if you want to keep up to date with new additions).

The quality of the images in the library seem to be average to very good. Some of them are pretty basic, but there seems to be very little junk filler images like you get in those CD clip art libraries.

The biggest problem I forsee with it is that most of the images are stored in svg format - a relatively new vector format. Office 2000, for example, can't natively handle this format (although openoffice can! :-) ). I suspect later versions of Office (and newer software in general) will support the format as it begins to become more popular. On the site, there are places for you to upload your own clip art (own as in "you created" not own as "you downloaded from somewhere"!) if you want to contribute to the project. There's also a place where you can put in a request for someone to create a particular piece of clip art for you.

Open Clip Art Library Homepage

Open source desktop publishing

2005-08-04T19:22:00.000+01:00

I'm still on the lookout for open-source desktop publishing stuff. Scribus looks really good and polished, but it's only for Linux at the minute (apparently it'll run under Windows using cygwin - but that looks like being very complicated). This program seems to be drawing a lot of attention, so I wouldn't be surprised if it gets ported to Windows some time over the next few months...especially as there's very little open-source DTP stuff out there right now (I've looked and looked over the last few weeks and found surprisingly little).

Virtual Moon Atlas 2.1

2005-08-03T22:52:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure this needs much of an explanation, it's a moon atlas. :-) I'm not sure what I think about it really. If you have a requirement for something like this then I'm sure you'd find it useful, but for the everyday person just curious...it's not so great...it's fairly technical and pretty slow on my computer (minimum specs state 300mhz with 16mb - I'm running 750mhz with 384mb and it was barely usuable for me). If you just have a casual interest in astronomy and the moon then I'm sure there's probably more user-friendly, general purpose stuff available that'd be more suited to your uses...but if the moon is your thing in a serious way, then this seems to have everything you'd need (at least - my guess is it does - I have no idea what half of the terms in there mean! :-) ).

Virtual Moon Atlas 2.1 Homepage

Rainlender and Rainmeter

2005-08-02T19:38:00.000+01:00

I'm going to do these two together, because, well, they're by the same author and do similar functions. Rainlender is a desktop calender/reminder system. Rainmeter is a desktop system monitoring tool (although it can do much more than just monitor CPU usage etc). The main selling point of these two programs are their visuals really. If you've seen the widgets in Mac OSX then that's basically what you're getting with this sort of thing. A nice looking mini-program that sits on your desktop and provides simple functionality. For example, in rainmeter you might have a small widget that grabs the weather reports from the net and displays the temperature and weather conditions in a nicely formatted graphical way.

They're both very customisable, and in my experience, reasonably light on resource usage...but I found both very difficult to customise. They're very, very customisable - but you're going to need to put some work into getting to know the way they work. This is no point and click task unless you're happy using other people's skins.

Personally, I think Konfabulator is a much easier program to use and replicates the functionality of Mac OSX's widgets more accurately (it also seems to have a bigger community centered around it - so more widgets are being developed by other people for this). Yahoo bought the company out a few weeks ago and are now offering the software for free (you had to pay for it previously). Although it isn't open-source, Konfabulator seemed to be much more useful in a practical sense - but far less customisable visually. I guess it comes down to what you want.

If you've never seen either of these before, then I suggest you take a look around the sites linked below. There's some very, very nice looking stuff being developed for them.

Rainy's (Rainmeter and Rainlendar) Homepage
Konfabulator Homepage (free but NOT open-source)

Hide In Picture version 2.1

2005-08-01T06:18:00.000+01:00

Hide In Picture is a steganography program - it allows you to "hide" another file inside a standard bitmap image. So, for example - you could "hide" a text file inside an image of a cat and send that to your friend. As long as your friend knew that the text file was in there (and the password if you set one), he could use the software to find it. Anyone looking at the picture without knowing something was hidden inside would never know it was there - the changes made to the image are too subtle to be seen by the human eye.

There's not much to say about the program itself - choose an image, choose a file to hide in it...enter a password if you want to and off it goes. That's all there is to it. It's not the greatest interface in the world, but it doesn't need to be.

Hide in picture homepage

Celestia 1.3.2

2005-07-30T06:53:00.000+01:00

This is the sort of thing I would've loved to have played with as a kid. A bit tough to explain if you've never seen anything like it before though. Basically, it's a space browser. You can move around in space - visiting stars, planets, comets and a few man made objects in orbit. These can be rendered in real time, so the position in space that you're seeing an object on screen is the actual position it is in real life.

Navigation is reasonably easy. Clicking and dragging with the left button moves your view of the object - as if you were moving a camera looking at the object. Clicking and dragging with the right button moves your actual position about the object. You can choose the number of stars and types of objects you see so things don't get too crowded (or sparse - depending where you are). You can also choose to plot on extra data, like labels, constellations and orbits. Something I think is missing is a reset option. I really screwed up the view by just messing around too much, it'd be nice to have an option to just click that'd bring things back to their default view.

Although moving around is fairly easy the interface can be very confusing at times. For example, the "tour guide" dialogue box has a drop down box with a list of predefined destinations and two buttons - OK and Goto. The natural thing to do is to choose your destination from the list then click OK - because this is how most software works - make your choice, click OK. This doesn't get you what you want though, it merely clears the dialogue box. What you're supposed to do is choose from the list, then click goto - the dialogue box then stays on screen while your view changes, displaying a small paragraph of text about your choice. Pressing OK merely clears the dialogue box out of the way. Unfortunately, the "tour guide" feature isn't the only place in the program that this non-standard sort of behaviour occurs.

I quite like, although it isn't the easiest thing to use - which is a bit of shame really, because I'm sure a lot of kids would like to play with something like this. Surprisingly, it works OK on my laptop...although it crashes if I try to run it full screen and I had to turn anti-aliasing off to get it to run at a reasonable speed.

There's a pretty big community centred around this program. For example, there's a website called The Celestia Motherlode which is dedicated to various add-ons for the program - from the factual, for example - the space shuttle to the not so factual - such as the DS9 space station from Star Trek. :-)

Celestia Homepage

OpenOffice and MS-Office cross compatibility

2005-07-30T05:27:00.000+01:00

I'm going to look at Celestia later on today (it's a space simulation thing). Anyway, I came across this very thorough document on sharing files between OpenOffice and MS-Office and I thought it might be useful to link to from here.

CDex 1.51 (and another thing)

2005-07-29T17:30:00.000+01:00

CDex is a piece of software to rip music from your CDs and create MP3s/OGGs/whatevers from the tracks.

The first thing I have to say about it is no reflection on how good or bad the software is. It's this, a quote from the official website...

CDex 1.51 has been released

By: knogle
On: 2003-09-09

Yeah...it's not been updated in nearly two years. Never a good thing, but it's quite a well-known and respected program so I think it's still worth me looking at.

Installation is well, standard windows fair pretty much. They also offer a zipped version that doesn't require installation, just unzip the contents to a folder of your choice and off you go. I prefer it this way, though I'm sure the average user would rather go for the automated installer.

It seems to work quite well - even without an ASPI layer present (don't worry if you don't know what that is - it's far too complicated and boring to go into). It rips and encodes in a single stage process, which I found a bit unusual...but that's perhaps only because I'm so used to using EAC.

I only did some limited tests, but I didn't get any jumps or problems with the files this program created. Something that I would say though is that the encoders that it's supplied with are now really old and have been surpassed by better quality versions. The later versions of LAME and Ogg Vorbis in particular had a blip a few years ago when they both jumped up in quality significantly. I'm not sure whether this program includes the pre or post-blip codecs...but I'm sure it'd be worth digging out the latest versions of codecs if you're going to use this rather than relying on the versions included.

It's easier enough to use and there's nothing to set up if you don't want to dig around in the settings - the defaults will get you a reasonably good quality MP3 encoded with LAME. CD track names and other details can be looked up in a variety of places - locally from a database or CD-player.ini (if you've ever entered tracklistings in the windows standard CD player, this is where they're stored), from CD-text data stored on the CD (if your drive supports it and the CD has text data on it - most don't) and, of course, it can look up the tracklistings online too.

Overall, it works fine...but then, the vast majority of media players can rip tracks now anyway - so, even if you don't realise it - you probably already have the ability to do this without the need of additional software. Having said that, I've always had better results by using a specialist ripping. I usually use EAC, which while free, isn't open source. EAC is very very technical and probably overwhelming for an average person. CDex seems to give results that are just as good EAC for the average person. EAC has far more options, and the potential for better results - but you need to know what you're doing.

CDex Homepage.

...and now for the other thing...I'm thinking about giving Linux another go. I tried it out a few years ago with Mandrake 8, but it was just a total nightmare and I abandoned the idea pretty quickly. However, that was a good 3 or 4 years ago and software moves on dramatically in that sort of time period so I'm thinking maybe it's time to give it another go. Of course, if and when I do, then I'll write about it in here. The only question is what distribution do I use? My current pick looks like being a newcomer called Ubuntu which is based on Debian. There seem to be a lot of claims of "finally Linux has arrived on the desktop" type quotes floating around it...but if anyone has any other suggestions on a distribution for me to play with, then I'd be happy to hear about it.

SpamPal 1.591

2005-07-28T04:51:00.000+01:00

I'd completely forgotten about this one. In fact, it wasn't until I was installing for someone at work a few days ago that I even realised it was open-source.

It's quite a simple little program that basically sits between your email client and your email. When you check your email, your email program connects to SpamPal, which in turn then downloads your email. As it downloads your mail, it checks to see if it thinks any are spam...if they are then it tags the subject line with "**SPAM**".

That's all it does.

The idea is that you set up your email software to then filter on any messages with the word "**SPAM**" in the subject - whether you trash them, move them to a specific folder, colour them red...whatever...is down to personal taste and the capabilities of your email client. Because of the way it works, it's compatible with pretty much any email client. To get the most out of it you need to obviously have a client that can filter messages by subject (which is pretty much most of them).

I have to say that it used to be quite complicated to set up, but they recently added a setup wizard that works with Outlook and Outlook Express which makes it much easier. The wizard doesn't configure a filter for you though, you still have to do it manually (would've been nice if that'd been included in the setup wizard if you ask me). If you're not using Outlook or Outlook Express, then you need to set it up manually. Basically, what you do is change the details in the account setup of your email client. You change the username to "username@mail.server" and the server to "127.0.0.1" (if you're curious as to why that address this wikipedia entry on loopback). In simple terms, this is telling your computer that your mail server is now on your computer. Instead of connecting to a mail-server like it thinks it's doing, your computer now connects to SpamPal...which then does the business of checking and tagging your emails before passing them on to your email client.

I've used this for a long time, and it's definitely one of my favourites for anti-spam. It can get a bit overzealous with it's tagging at first, so keep an eye on it and whitelist any addresses that get wrongly tagged as spam. It is getting a bit dated now though. It relies on DNSBL lists (lists kept online of known spammers) so, it can be slow at times...and it doesn't learn from it's mistakes like a bayesian filter (like the one built into Mozilla Thunderbird). If you're using Mozilla Thunderbird, you don't need this. If you're not using Thunderbird then WHY NOT!?!?! :-) Hehe, if for some reason you're stuck with another client with no built-in spam filter then this one is a good, easy to use choice.

SpamPal Homepage

Inkscape 0.42

2005-07-27T07:39:00.000+01:00

When I was writing the review of OpenOffice.org's presentation program the other day, a thought struck me "I've never seen a fully featured (i.e. Adobe Illustrator standard) open-source vector graphics program" (or a good open-source DTP program either - but I'm on the lookout for one of those). For bitmap/raster graphics, there's the open source the gimp - which I'll review at some point (but it won't be good because I really don't like it) - but for vector graphics there isn't really anything.

Well, fast-forward to today and this post shows up on slashdot linking to Inkscape - an open-source vector graphics program. It's still a very, very early, pre-1.0 release so I'm expecting it to be flaky and incomplete. My first action after starting it was to go to "help -> about", after about 45 seconds to a minute of it sitting there doing nothing you finally get the about screen. Not a good start.

The interface is dated and cheap looking. It doesn't inspire confidence. It needs a lot of work. To change the colour of a created object, you have to delve into a dialogue box - there's no colour picker in the interface by default. You can turn one on from the object menu - but for some rather annoying reason it doesn't stay floating on screen. Sometimes you can click on an object in the main window and the colour picker disappears again behind the main window. Sometimes it stays, sometimes it goes.

While the interface is horrifically slow at times, actually manipulating objects is quite fast...much quicker than most vector programs I've used. I don't know whether they've hit on some more efficient way of doing things, or (much more likely IMO) they're not doing some form of advanced anti-aliasing or something similar that's done in other vector programs. Image quality doesn't seem to noticeable suffer too much though.

All of the standard vector tools you'd expect are there: simple predefined shapes, a freehand pen tool, a bezier curve tool, gradient fills, transparency, shape intersection type tools, various options for aligning text to paths. Some of the more advanced features are quite nicely implemented and the grid arrange tool is a nice addition.

One thing I was quite impressed with are the tutorials. Rather than being text based or rolling animations, they're in the form of vector files that open inside the program itself and encourage you to interact with the objects in them...for example - "Select the object below, switch to the node tool, and drag its handle to get an idea", underneath which is an object ready for you to experiment on with the tool being described. It's a simple idea, but something that's not often seen...even in high-end programs.

Overall I think there's plenty of potential there. This is still a very early version after all. Not sure I'd recommend it as it stands right now - but there aren't really many free or open-source alternatives. Adobe Illustrator is what it needs to stand up against, but there's just no comparison. If you can afford to, stick with Illustrator at the minute.

Inkscape Homepage

Home automation

2005-07-26T19:26:00.000+01:00

Not really a review, I know, but hackaday has a cool article about an open-source home automation system.

Mozilla Thunderbird

2005-07-25T22:56:00.000+01:00

This sort of belongs with the Firefox review really. It's an email client from the same guys responsible for Firefox, equivalent to Microsoft's Outlook Express.

Like Firefox, it has plenty of extensions and themes available...also like Firefox, it's a lot less vulnerable to internet nasties. It has a built in Bayesian spam filter that is very effective (although it takes a little time to train it). It can import all your mail and settings from most popular applications, although it had a tendency to choke on large imports in earlier versions. I don't know whether this is still a problem now - all of my mail is kept online with gmail now so I don't have any way to test it out. Earlier versions also weren't exactly the most stable piece of software in world, but that seems to have been corrected now.

There's also a built in news reader and an RSS aggregator (which is much more at home here than it is in Firefox IMO).

Other than that, it has everything you'd expect in a mail client. Support for POP3, SMTP and IMAP, as well as NNTP (usenet) and RSS. Built in spellchecker, support for plain text or HTML mail (scripting is disabled by default) and a variety of view options (although it isn't as customisable in this area as Microsoft Outlook - the client included with MS Office, not Outlook Express which is a different thing).

Thunderbird Homepage

Eraser 5.7

2005-07-24T21:03:00.000+01:00

Eraser is a program designed to remove all traces of files from your disks. Why do you need this, surely once a file is deleted and the bin is emptied it's gone right? Well, actually no. When you delete a file (and remove it from the bin) all that happens is that the space it occupied is marked as free. The file is still there until something is new is written to disk (and therefore written over the space the file used to occupy). Even after a file has been over-written once, it's still not 100% gone...it's possible for it to be recovered if specialist equipment is used. It may have to be over-written several times before it's completely gone. What this program does then, is take your "deleted" file and over-write it repeatedly with random data. It can do this for a single file, for all the free space on the disk (which in theory will contain files that you long since thought you deleted) or you can use an included command-line program to completely wipe out a whole disk (though understandably this is a bit more complicated than point and click).

Do you really need something like this? Well, maybe. If you're selling your computer or hard-drive on to someone else, then you should definitely use something like this to clear all your data off. If you're dealing with company secrets, or something dubiously legal on a day to day basis then maybe you'd want to use this (in combination with encryption) to clear deleted files...but for the average person it's probably overkill.

The program itself couldn't be easier to use. It also integrates nicely into Explorer, so you can right-click on a file and choose "Erase" and have it delete the file, and then wipe the space for you. You can also set it to run automatically on a schedule to erase the "empty" space on your hard-drive. You'll definitely want to schedule this task because it takes HOURS to run. There's also a great help file included that not only details how to use the program, but explains a little more about exactly what it's doing and how it's doing it.

There are a couple of reviews on download.com where people are claiming that it wiped out their hard-drive...but to be honest, I wouldn't put too much faith in what people say there. I've seen all sorts of dubious claims on there over the years by people - things that simply aren't possible, so take what they're saying with a grain of salt. All I can say is that I used this regularly for about 12 months without anything ever going wrong (though I admit this was a few years ago). It shouldn't screw up your hard-drive, and it probably won't...but bear in mind this is doing some pretty low-level stuff, so there's the possibility there that something might go wrong.

Eraser Homepage.

NASA World Wind 1.3

2005-07-24T02:24:00.000+01:00

I can't really review this because it won't work on my aging machine, but it's basically similar to Google Earth...in other words, it's like a digital atlas only more. The NASA one (which was around loooooooong before Google Earth) is supposed to much better than Google's...although...I can't really try either at the minute, so it's up to you to decide.

NASA World Wind
Google Earth (free but not Open Source)

OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 [part five - bits and pieces]

2005-07-22T21:25:00.000+01:00

This is the final part of my series on OpenOffice, I intend to wrap up the little bits and pieces that aren't really part of the main chunk of the program and generally just wrap the whole thing up. So, the other bits and pieces...

Drawing

Basically, this seems to be the Presentation module Impress but with a page to work on rather than a slide. You'd think this might be a bit of a cop out, but as I mentioned yesterday Impress is a much stronger drawing tool than Powerpoint is and is more than capable of being used to draw simple charts and diagrams (think organisation charts, network diagrams - that sort of thing). It's no replacement for Illustrator or something along those lines (and neither is it intended to be), but for simple diagrams for general office documents it's perfect. It'd have been nice if they'd included some predefined shapes for common business diagrams (the classic cloud represents the internet in a network diagram for example), but you can always pull those sort of things from clipart if not draw them yourself.

Webpage Editor

Appears to use a very slightly modified version of Writer. You're going to struggle to create an advanced website using this - but again, that's not what it's for (check out Nvu for that) - it's for basic webpage creation really...maybe for a corporate Intranet or something like that. For that purpose it works well enough, you don't need much above basic word-processing to achieve that. Microsoft Word can of course also write out to HTML or you could use Microsoft Frontpage. The advantage of using OpenOffice here is that it writes out to standard HTML, whereas Word and Frontpage insert all kinds of proprietary tags into their HTML that makes it bloated and incompatible with anything that isn't Internet Explorer.

Other Stuff

Well, there's the various templates and wizards to create standard documents such as letters and reports. They don't need much explanation really. There's the "master document" which I covered a little bit about in the first part of this series. There's a tool to bulk convert MS-Office and StarOffice documents (Wordperfect support is "coming soon" apparently), a rather strange "Euro converter" that will automatically go through documents and convert any currency references found into Euros, automated tools for creating labels and business cards and finally (although I'm sure there's probably more buried away that I've missed) a formula creation tool to help with inserting Mathematical and Scientific formula into documents.

All of these extras are available at any time from any module of the suite. The model for creating a new document is universal across all the modules. So, when creating a new document in Writer for example you choose there and then whether it'll be a text document, a spreadsheet, a presentation etc. A bit strange at first, but it fits in with the general philosophy of the suite which seems to more focused on a task rather than a particular program.

Conclusion

It's a worthy competitor to MS-Office, but it still lags behind in it's spreadsheet and presentation modules. Writer is great though - far and away a better piece of software than MS-Word, which has been neglected by Microsoft since at least Office 95. The task focus of OpenOffice.org makes it much easier to use for someone new to computers IMO. Version 2.0 of OpenOffice is in beta now with a final release sometime in October/November. From what I've seen of it, it promises to be quite a big improvement of this version. Also promised for version 2.0 is Base, a database intended to compete with Microsoft Access.

OpenOffice Homepage

OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 [part four - impress]

2005-07-21T19:35:00.000+01:00

Impress is the presentation tool in OpenOffice.org, much like Powerpoint in MS Office but with a slightly stronger emphasis on drawing tools than Powerpoint.

The good

First of all, the general focus of the program seems to be slightly more towards drawing than Powerpoint is. The general drawing tools are much better than in Powerpoint - having more in common with something like Illustrator than Powerpoint's "choose a predefined shape" sort of philosophy (although Impress does have some basic predefined shapes like Powerpoint).

One thing I like is the "connector" tool - it allows you to easily draw lines, arrows, etc, that join two objects together. The way it works is nice and very intuitive, although it probably has questionable value in real-world usage. How often do you need to join two objects together with a line in a presentation? Do you need a specific tool to achieve this, over and above a standard line tool?

Another tool it shares with things like Illustrator is it's "eyedropper" tool...allowing you to pick up colours from objects already in your presentation (including down to the pixel level in bitmapped images). This is something that's sorely missing in Powerpoint...it's just a shame it's tucked away under the tools menu in Impress.

The bad

The "outline" view is nowhere near as good as Powerpoint's. In Impress you get a full screen text outline, with a tiny little floating preview of the slide. In Powerpoint, the outline text is displayed in a small frame on the left of the screen and the slide display is fairly close to it's original size. A much better layout IMO.

Slides are treated fundamentally differently as well. In Powerpoint the slideshow is treated as a single long document, so scrolling beyond the bottom of one slide automatically skips you on to the next. In Impress, each slide is treated seperatly...so you can't scroll down to the next slide - you need to specifically click on the tabs at the bottom of the screen to switch between slides (similar to switching sheets in Excel). Personally, I prefer Powerpoint's approach...but I think it's more down to personal choice than it is about what's right.

Something I saw right away - PRESENTATIONS AREN'T ANTI-ALIASED! WHY!?!?!?! Strangely, they're anti-aliased in the preview in the program while you're working on it, but for some reason it doesn't extend to the actual slideshow view. I don't know why, or whether it's just my computer (I can't see why it should be - Powerpoint doesn't do this) but it's pretty inexcusable. It makes a huge difference to the quality of the slideshow. A big minus IMO.

Like Powerpoint, Impress has those (cheap looking IMO) 3D effects. In Powerpoint these look, well, cheap but passable...in Impress the quality is terrible. I'm convinced that somehow something isn't right with my machine because I can't believe that someone would release a program with something that looked this bad. I'm pretty sure it's not my machine though and they really are that bad.

Compatibility

Office compatibility rears it's head again. In my tests, simple documents were fine - sometimes slide backgrounds became slightly distorted (stretched out) but this was simple enough to fix manually. A more complex show though caused Impress to crash - although not consistently, sometimes it would display OK, sometimes it would crash. Wordart embedded in presentations isn't displayed the same - for example, a presentation I opened had wordart in it that had been rotated and slightly curved. When opened in Impress, the text appeared in the same font, colour and size but it was no longer rotated and curved.

Conclusion.

Iffy at the most. It's not a replacement for Powerpoint. I think you're likely to disappointed if you're expecting that. As it stands on it's own though, it's passable. It'll work OK for the job it's designed to do. It's probably more suited to an advanced user, there's more control there over things like drawing tools than there is in Powerpoint. I think for someone who knows what they're doing - Impress could give them a better quality presentation. For the average person though Powerpoint is probably a much better choice. The anti-aliasing issue in Impress though is a bit unforgivable. I think I might look into that, see if I can find out why that's the case and if there's a setting buried away somewhere that can change it.

OpenOffice Homepage

OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 [part three - calc]

2005-07-20T22:31:00.000+01:00

Continuing on the series about OpenOffice, this time I'm looking at the spreadsheet component - Calc.

First of all - it looks a lot like Writer, definitely a good thing because Writer's interface is quite strong yet simple.

Something that's quite useful, that isn't available in Excel 2000 is a tooltip/autocomplete when typing formulae in. For example, to test the program out I downloaded a csv report from my google adsense account. Playing around with some formulae, I decided I wanted to know the average number of page impressions I get a day...so I started to enter a formula "=av..." at this point, up popped a little tooltip with "=average" written in it...hit enter and the start of the formula is auto-completed. Not a huge thing I know, but Excel 2000 doesn't do this - so, if you don't know the word for the formula (in this case "average") it either means a trip to the online help or using the formula builder...neither of which is a particularly quick option.

Compatibility

Here's where the problems begin. One (rather complex - but not data heavy) Excel spreadsheet I tried to open in Calc claimed to be "password protected", when in fact, it wasn't - it opens fine in Excel. It seemed to cope with basic Excel spreadsheets OK though...but you have to bear in mind that people use custom macros in spreadsheets much more often than they do in basic Word documents - so you're bound to run into compatibility problems more often (as I mentioned yesterday - OpenOffice can't deal with macros created by MS Office applications).

Conclusion

I know I've not written much, but there really is very very little to separate Calc from Excel. Easy to use formula builder, conditional formatting, graphing, huge range of built in mathematical functions...there's little, if anything I can find to separate the two of them. For the most part, it's very close to Excel. There's much less difference between Calc and Excel than there is between Writer (which I tested yesterday) and Word. It works perfectly well, if you can live with the iffy Excel compatibility. If you're looking for a replacement for MS Office, then there's no reason not to use OpenOffice because of Calc - it easily fills Excel's shoes (which is no mean feet - Excel always has been one of Microsoft's killer applications). There's just nothing to set it apart from Excel - which is a bit of a disappointment really. I was expecting big things from this after playing with Writer yesterday.

OpenOffice.org Homepage.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 [part two - writer]

2005-07-19T16:58:00.000+01:00

Continued on from yesterday, today I'm looking at "Writer", the Word-processing application of the suite.

When you first start, you get a view that is equivalent to Word's "print layout" view but with visible margins. This is the first place Writer wins out for me. In Word you have "print layout", "web layout", "outline view" and "normal" views. In OpenOffice you have the default layout and you have an "online layout" for use when creating webpages. Why do you need anything else? Word's normal and outline views are overkill and confuse a lot of people I've worked with. If you can see something that resembles a sheet of paper on screen, then people will understand that. The "normal" view - which is a hangover from the days of pre-WYSIWYG word-processors is unnecessary bloat now IMO.

The interface is much, much cleaner than Word. I did a quick look at what other people have said about the application and one quote I came across summed it up perfectly "[the] interface could be called the overhaul that MS Word's has badly needed for several versions". In writer, you have two toolbars at the top and one down the side at the most. In Word, if you turn all the toolbars on you have a screen-melting 16 toolbars.

One fantastic feature is the "direct cursor". Click this icon, then click ANYWHERE on the page to start typing from that point. How many times have you tried to get that cursor where you want it in Word? In this it's just click and go...exactly how it should be. A MAJOR improvement over Word. It also has built in tools for managing a bibliography and cross-referencing...and of course, the usual array of text/paragraph formatting. It also has the equivalent of Word's document wizards in the form of the "autopilot" feature. The feature works just as well as it does in Word, my only complaint is that you're presented with too many options - if I'm using a wizard to create a letter quickly, do I really need to be presented with options to position the logo and set the margins of the page? These should be done automatically by the wizard, as they are in Word.

Another strong feature is it's ability to write directly to PDF. This alone makes it worth it's weight in gold, although, of course...any application can write directly to PDF with the right - potentially very expensive plugin - (although open-source alternatives are available now, which I'll look at some point in the future).

Word compatibility

Well, I had my doubts but try as I might, I couldn't break it. It opened all the Word 2000 documents I tried faultlessly. One thing it won't do though is macros. OpenOffice has it's own macro language, but it's not compatible with MS-Office...so if you use macros, you'll have to rewrite or convert them. It will preserve an office macro though, so if you open a Word document with macros, make changes to the document and save it again, the Word macros will be preserved and still work normally when the file is reopened in Word.

Summary

To sum up, it's a BIG improvement over Word IMO. The fact that it's free makes it all the more worth the while, but even if it was a commercial product I think it's a far better option than Word. I still have my doubts over Word compatibility, experience suggests that making something compatible with an MS Office application is next to impossible, so it'd take a lot of convincing for me to have complete faith in it. Having said that, in my tests I couldn't break it and I have no real reason to believe that it wouldn't work - other than paranoia. :-)

NB: It should be noted that I only have Office 2000, so that's what I'm comparing it to. I have no idea what the newer versions of Word are like or how compatible Writer is with them.

OpenOffice.org Homepage.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 [part one]

2005-07-18T17:13:00.000+01:00

I've been putting this one off since the day I started this blog because it's so huge and intimidating. What I'm going to do is break it down into parts over the next few days.

Part One - Introduction and Installation

As you probably know (or could at least guess from the name), OpenOffice.org is an attempt to create an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. Sun Microsystems is one of the big names backing the suite - their own StarOffice is based on OpenOffice.org but with some extra, licensed components bundled in. It's also NOT free. :-)

OpenOffice.org itself is free however. Being open-source the suite is available for a variety of platforms - Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and Mac OS X (but NOT OS 9). There's also a variety of versions - the one I'm testing here is the latest stable release - 1.1.4 (there's beta version of OpenOffice.org 2.0 available if you're interested in testing it).

The download is around 65mb for the Windows version, which isn't too bad for a complete office suite - but could still be pretty heavy if you're stuck on dial-up. There are CD-ROM versions for sale from various distributors around the world listed on the website if downloading a file that big would be a problem to you. One UK distributor I checked out was selling a CD-ROM version of the software for about £10. Interestingly, they also sell a "portable OpenOffice.org and Firefox for Windows" bundle on a USB key - the idea being you can take this with you and run OpenOffice.org and Firefox directly from the USB memory stick on any computer you use with a USB port without having to install it etc. £28.99 for 256mb version, £39.99 for 512mb version if you're interested.

Installation is fairly painless, as you'd expect it's the usual wizard driven affair. It installed much faster than Microsoft Office for me, taking up about 140mb of disk space when completed.

So what's in there? Well, it's a bit different than Microsoft Office. There's no named separate listed applications. Instead of choosing "Microsoft Word" to create a text document, you choose "Text document" which presents you with a word-processor and a blank document, ready to be used. It has more in common with the "task based" approach of Microsoft Works, rather than the "program based" approach of Microsoft Office. By default there are options to create the following documents:

Text Document (equivalent of Microsoft Word)

Spreadsheet (equivalent to Microsoft Excel)

Presentation (equivalent to Microsoft Powerpoint)

Drawing (no specific equivalent in Microsoft Office, although most of the office components have limited drawing tools included)

HTML Document (equivalent to Microsoft Frontpage *coughsplutterCRAPspluttercough*)

Master Document (a bit like the old binder idea that was introduced in Office 95 then quietly pushed away into the background in later versions. Essentially it lets you bundle several different types of document together in a single project - i.e., a sales pitch might have spreadsheets of sales, text documents of sales letters etc all bundled together)

Formula (Microsoft Office has a small tool to do this too I think, but it's buried away quite deeply)

Labels

Business Cards

Templates and Documents (I couldn't get this to work properly for some reason - maybe I didn't install optional templates)

So, that's the introduction. Over the next few days I'll try to dedicate an entry to each of the components (word-processor, spreadsheet, etc...).

OpenOffice Homepage.

GraphCalc

2005-07-17T19:23:00.000+01:00

It's a simple little graphic calculator, offering 2d and 3d graphing modes. I barely scraped through A-level Maths so I can't really say a great deal about it. You'll know if you're looking for something like this I guess. I was surprised to see that the 3d modes actually work on my laptop with it's cruddy graphics card - 3d stuff like this hardly ever works on my laptop.

On my basic understanding of higher maths, it seems to work quite well. One thing that annoyed me is that it doesn't like you writing things like "xy", you have to specifically write "x*y"...which is a minor irritation at most, but "xy" is standard mathematically notation and I would have thought it'd be able to understand that.

It renders surprisingly quickly, having said that - the last time I rendered a graph was on a crappy old Texas-Instruments scientific calculator...the P-III laptop I'm using here probably has several thousands times the processing power, so I'd damn well hope it'd render faster! :-)

According to the website, it has different modes of rendering - I couldn't work out how to change between them. Perhaps because the software has since been updated (but the website hasn't) or maybe because the graphics card in my laptop doesn't support any other modes.

Once you've got your graph, you can export it to a bmp, copy it to the clipboard or export it to dxf to open in a 3d-rendering package.

One disappointing feature for me is it's "insert menu". Here, you can pick from a list of scientific functions by name and the program will automatically insert it's notation. Great! You don't need to remember weird notations! The only problem is, it only works in the calculator mode. So, when you're entering an equation for a graph...you need to either know the notation, or switch between the standard calculator view and the graph view. It's a shame they didn't extend the feature throughout the program really.

As well as the cool 2d/3d graphing stuff, it can also operate as a standard scientific calculator (including an equation solver). There are also built in scripts for calculating the area, surface area and volume of various shapes as well as the standard quadratic formula.

Overall, it seems pretty cool...the rendering options are a bit limited, but I suspect that's down to my aging machine rather than the actual program itself. Obviously, it's never going to match up to something like Mathematica, but I'm sure it's fine if you're only doing fairly simple stuff.

GraphCalc Homepage

Notepad++ 3.1

2005-07-16T20:46:00.000+01:00

Text editors - not the most exciting of topics I know, but a few months ago I was on the lookout for a new one. I'd had enough of Window's Notepad's silly quirks, and started to look for something else. I used Notepad 2 for a while, which isn't open-source (although it is freeware). Looking through Sourceforge though I came across Notepad++.

There's far too many features in this to describe them all (although given all the features it's still surprisingly light on memory).

There are dozens of built in formats for various different types of code. What this does is format the colour and style of the text of your document to make it easier to read the code. See the example below, formatted as HTML...

...compare this with the same file viewed in Window's Notepad...

Isn't that much clearer? As well as all the predefined types you can see in the screenshot, you can also create your own custom type if the format you're using isn't available. Something else to note from that top screen-shot is how you can expand and contract html tags - in a similar way to how you can expand and contract folders in the folder view of Windows Explorer.

The program also supports tabs, so you can work with multiple files easily within one instance of the program. You can also create macros (record a series of actions once and then repeat those actions again and again with a single command). There's commands to automatically convert the text file between windows, mac and unix formats (very useful to some people - you'll know if you need that feature)...and of course there are tons of display options (including an usual, but useful zoom function), line breaking options etc

Notepad++ homepage

Freemind 0.8.0 RC5

2005-07-15T20:15:00.000+01:00

Freemind is a "mind mapping" tool - brainstorming on a computer if you prefer it. Maybe the best way to show it is with a screenshot:-

It's a cool idea for a program and it works quite well. You can assign various labelled icons (good, bad, priority 1, 2, 3, important, question etc) to each of your ideas/points. Obviously, you can move, edit and format each idea as you see fit too (different fonts, colours, "bubble" styles etc)

My only complaint really is that it's not quite transparent enough. The reason paper and pen work so well for brainstoming is because you have complete freedom...you can scribble, doodle and correct quickly and easily - it has a minimal slowing effect on your thought process. So, if you were going to create a piece of software to replicate the same process digitally, it should be at least as easy and "thought-minimal" to work with. While I'd say this program is very easy to use compared to say, Microsoft Word - I don't think it's easier enough to use for it's intended purpose. Personally, I found myself exerting a lot of effort to remember how to do something while using it. Maybe given time using it, it'd become second nature and this wouldn't be so much of an issue.

Having said that - it is a good idea for a program, and I'm keeping it around on my machine to see if it does help me out at all. It's not a replacement for the old pen and paper for me though. Maybe I'd sketch down my initial thoughts on a piece of paper as normal and then transfer them into this program to present them to myself and others in a cleaner way.

Freemind Homepage

Filezilla 2.2.14b

2005-07-14T18:47:00.000+01:00

This one is a biggie to me - most of the FTP software I've tried recently isn't up to much. It either a) costs money or b) doesn't work properly - especially with new versions of ISS for some reason...

*insert rant about Microsoft "reinterpreting" standards for it's own financial gain here*

So, here we have Filezilla - a modern, open-source FTP client (they also have matching open-source server software to go with it if you need it). Despite the name - I don't think it has any association with Mozilla.

What can you say about it really? It's an FTP client...nothing to get too excited about. The interface is a little cluttered and confusing at first...but it's very customisable and you can easily trim down some of the fluff (why do you need a tree view *and* a file list?) to get the sort of interface you like.

It has all the usual features you'd expect of an FTP program...including some nice preferences that I've not seen in FTP clients before (at least not free ones). For example, the program can interface with putty to create secure, encrypted transfers with supported servers. It also has a "speed limit" option so you can limit the speed of transfers (separate values for uploads and downloads) which is a pretty useful option.

Filezilla Homepage

Feedreader 2.90

2005-07-13T12:34:00.000+01:00

Feedreader is an open source RSS aggregator. RSS is a way of distributing web-content. It gets used a lot by blogs, but more recently a lot of the large online news sites have started to embrace it. Basically, you use this program to subscribe to a feed and then periodically the program will poll the website to see if that feed has been updated. If it has then it'll download the latest story/entry from the website and display it in the reader.

Why would you want to do that? Well, you can add all your favourite site feeds into the program and then leave it running in the background (it'll minimize to the system tray like MSN messenger does). It'll then check all your favourite sites for you periodically, and alert you when they've been updated.

As for the program itself...it seems to work quite well. It supports all the major RSS formats, as well as Atom and comes preconfigured with feeds from a lot of the major sites on the net. It's nice and light, simple to use...clean interface etc. I have a bit of problem with the icons on the toolbar - they're a bit cryptic as to what they actually do, but it's only a small point. There's only half a dozen or so buttons - so it doesn't take long to figure it out, and everything is replicated in the menus.

There's no online help though, although I don't know that it's needed really. It's that easy to use. If you're familiar with traditional email clients then you'll soon pick it up. It should be there though - it's impossible to under-estimate people's stupidity when it comes to computers in my experience! :-)

Feedreader Homepage

No review today. Meeep :-(

2005-07-12T21:07:00.000+01:00

My initial intention was to post a review here everyday, but today it's just not going to happen. I bought a wireless router and it's been a nightmare. Read more about it in my livejournal if you're interested. Anyway, of semi-relevence to the subject of this blog - today, the BBC released their open source microsite. At first glance there appears to be quite a lot of cool stuff there. Worth checking out, and hopefully some of it will make it into future entries here.

FreeGuide 0.8.6

2005-07-11T12:37:00.000+01:00

FreeGuide is a TV guide essentially. Installation is pretty easy. Choose your country and choice of channels and off it goes and downloads the TV listings.

It works OK. Just OK. It's been written in Java, so for a start it's very VERY slow. It also appears to have "lost" some TV channels for me. I used an older version of this program a few months ago, and it didn't do that then - so I don't know whether there's a bug in this new version or somehow I screwed something up this time.

I run my computer under a limited user account most of the time and this program refused to run properly unless I was logged in with higher priviledges. This is reason enough for me to dump it - I'm not throwing away my computer security just to run a TV guide. Not many people run Windows computers without admin privileges though (which is a pretty dumb thing to do IMO but that's another story) so this won't present a problem for most people.

One neat thing about it is that you can choose your favourite shows - either by browsing the schedule and selecting them, or by searching the listings by a keyword(s). Once you've chosen your favourite shows, the program will then present them in a text based schedule with a brief description, perfect for printing out. See below...

It supports listings for Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan (Linux only), the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US.

If you're in North America, you need to register an account with zap2it to be able to download listings. It's free as far as I can tell but they expect plenty of juicy demographic information from you. That data is worth far more to them than a few TV listings are to you IMO, so I wouldn't do it. The other supported countries all have freely available listings so this step isn't needed if you live outside of North America.

Although I couldn't get it running satisfactorily today, I have had it running properly in the past and it does (did) work. It's biggest failing is speed - most java-based stuff I've used suffers from the same problem. I'm sticking with the EPG on freeview and the radio times website for now.

Gaim (version 1.4.0)

2005-07-10T13:30:00.000+01:00

Gaim is an IM client. A lot like Trillian, it supports multiple IM networks, so you can talk to your buddies on MSN, ICQ/AIM and Yahoo all at the same time through a single program. In fact, it supports:- MSN, ICQ/AIM, Yahoo, Gadu Gadu, Groupwise, IRC, Jabber, Napster and SILC accounts.

By far the best feature of this program is it's wealth of plugins. One of the strongest of which has to be it's on the fly spellchecker that underlines misspelt words with a red line, like Microsoft Word.

Another fairly cool (but potentially annoying) feature built into the program is "buddy pounce". This allows you to configure the program to automatically send a message or execute a specific command when a buddy of your choosing comes online, goes offline, or commits one of several other actions. Pretty cool, although there's potential for annoying stalker behaviour there surely?

The interface is pretty clean. Nothing special, but nothing horrific or confusing either (although it can changed with downloadable themes if that's your thing).

One thing that annoys me is that (by default at least), there's no way to set your buddy list to be "always on top". There are plugins to do it, including the cool stock ticker like "buddy ticker"...but I think this is something that should be built into the program. *shrug*

Personally, I'd use this myself if they could replicate that new feature in MSN that allows you to draw pictures/handwrite messages. I only really use MSN on a regular basis now (since ICQ became a hack-fest a few years ago and lots of people abandoned it) and I love that feature. Given Gaim's great selection of current plugins, it's perhaps only a matter of time before someone adds it in.

I'd say that if you use multiple IM clients then it's worth using this. I prefer it to trillian which is really quite heavy on memory and resources in my experience. If you only use a single network, then you might be better off sticking with the original client because you're bound to lose the odd feature, especially the "fluff" ones like custom background images in MSN.

Gaim Homepage

7 zip

2005-07-09T13:53:00.000+01:00

7 zip is a utility to open and create compressed file archives. It supports all the major formats (zip, gzip, rar, tar, arj, cab etc...) as well as it's own 7z format that is claimed to offer higher compression rates over traditional formats. Obviously, if you do use their own format then you sacrifice potential compatibility with other software.

Technically, this program has it all. Better format support than either winrar or winzip, it's own superior format if you choose to use it. The problem is it's confusing to use...the interface appears much like Windows Explorer but it doesn't work the same. There's no ability to "draw" a selection box around a group of files for example. The file list "drop down" address bar doesn't work the same (or at all in fact - at least for me). The directory structure doesn't follow the same as Windows' - in 7 zip, going up to the "top level" by continually clicking on the up button lands you with a screen that shows "my computer" and "my network places". In Windows Explorer this set of actions lands you on the desktop. To me this is a big problem, they've copied the visual appearance of Windows but not copied the behaviour. This only leads to confusion.

Back to the desktop. Most people use the Windows Desktop as a temporary working area - so it's fairly important that it's easily accessible. This isn't the case in 7 zip. The only way to access the desktop is to track down to it's location under "documents and settings\username". This is a problem, because if you're not an experienced user then you won't know that that's where the desktop is "really" located. The same thing with the "My Documents" folder.

As far as I could tell there's no way to add files from multiple locations into a zip file either. In Winzip, you can pick a file from "My Documents" and drag it into your zip file...then navigate over to another folder, drag in some files from there, etc. In 7 zip you can't do that. You can only add files and folders from a single location. In effect, you have to create the file structure of your archive outside of the program. When you finally do create your archive, you get presented with this rather scary looking dialogue box...

...for someone who knows what they're doing, I'm sure this is great. But let me tell you - I've been using PCs for over 10 years and *I* have no idea what dictionary and word size I should choose. I suspect that NO-ONE does, unless they've actually worked with file compression on a pretty advanced level. So why are these options visible? They should be hidden away under an "advanced settings" heading or button if the default settings are good enough. If they're not good enough in a majority of cases (and if not - why not? Winzip/Winrar don't require this level of detail), then it should be explained to me how I go about choosing the correct sizes.

I know this is all pretty scathing - this is far from a bad piece of software. It does what it claims to do...but it's just SO difficult and complicated to use. Even I get frustrated by it. There's no way I could recommend that an average home user attempt to use it. A program like this should be quick and simple to use, most of the time the advanced features this program presents aren't required. Sure, it's nice to have them there...but they should be kept out of the way until needed. If you need to change the default word size...then you know what you're doing and why...and a seperate "advanced options" dialogue isn't going to faze you.

Media Player Classic

2005-07-08T10:30:00.000+01:00

A bit of a strange one this - a first visual impression is that it's an exact ripoff of the classic media player Microsoft included with Windows 2000. The interface is VERY VERY similar. Under the surface it's very different though.

Feature wise, it has all the things you'd want in a simple media player...as well as some advanced stuff. It can listen for commands issued to it across a network for example...not quite sure why you'd want to do that though... :-)

The thing with it is - it's nothing special, but that's the point. It's a basic media player...it plays media, it has all the controls you'd expect (rewind, pause blah blah blah) and some you probably wouldn't expect, like a slow-mo feature or the ability to advance through a single frame at a time. What it doesn't have is the pointless garbage other media players are loaded up with. Do you really need freeform skins, online media guides and the silly visualisations that dance to the music that you get with Microsoft's latest Windows Media Player? If you want that stuff, then this program isn't for you. If you want something that will start up in a fraction of a second while still doing the job, then this is perfect.

One other thing to say - it's often bundled with the K-Lite Codec pack, Real alternative and Quicktime alternative. All of which are worth getting on their own.

K-Lite Codec pack - contains codecs to allow your computer to play different types of video. DivX for example. If you've ever downloaded a video from the net and found that you couldn't play it properly, or that it played the sound but not the video - then more than likely you were just missing the right codec. This pack contains dozens of common codecs so you (hopefully) won't have that problem in the future.

Real alternative and Quicktime alternative - these will allow you to play Realaudio/Realvideo and Quicktime files without having to install the bloated official software that likes to sit in your system-tray sucking up memory and resources for no particular reason.

Personally, I'd reconmend you grab the "K-lite mega codec pack". This contains the K-lite codecs, Media Player Classic, Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative all bundled together in one download.

If for some reason you can't download it from the above link and do a web-search for it...be VERY careful where you download it from. Some unscrupilius arseholes are repackaging this software with spyware and/or attempting to charge for it! The original version is open-source and COMPLETELY FREE, and is also spyware free. The site I linked to above is somewhere I know is safe to get it from. You'll be OK if you get it from there.

Audacity - audio recording and editing

2005-07-07T12:33:00.000+01:00

I've got a bit of confession to make on this one. The last time I used a professional level, commercial audio editor was in the mid 90's - so I really can't compare this to the current standard of commercial, professional software.

Having said that, I have used this program in a couple of real world situations...so I can certainly comment on how well it worked for me there.

So, what is it?

Well, it's an audio editor/recorder...like I already said. Use it to record and edit audio files. It has all the basic audio editing stuff you'd expect, as well as some pretty advanced features like noise removal, normalisation and compression (compression in terms of dynamic range, not compression in terms of file size - although it can output directly to compressed formats like mp3 and ogg).

The interface is a bit quirky - it's not that it's bad, it's just that it's slightly unusual in a few aspects. For example, one of my favourite features is it's "noise removal". This works really well. Say, you have an audio file that has a constant background hum running through it. Using this command you select part of the audio that has this hum in it, but none of the audio that you want to keep (i.e. - a part that would be completely silent, if it wasn't for that damn hum!). The program will then sample this hum based on your selection and subtract that hum from the rest of the audio file. Great feature - but the way it works is far from user-friendly. In order to get it to work, you have to select part of the audio you want sampled, choose the command, click the "get noise profile" button, then get rid of the dialogue box, go back to your audio file, select the part you want to apply the sample too, then go back to the same dialogue box again...but this time choosing the "remove noise" button. I don't really have any suggestions for how it could be improved, but it just seems a needlessly complicated set of actions...which is a shame, because in my use of the program I've found this feature to be one of the most useful it offers. I've successfully used it to clean up an audio interview recorded from a fairly badly tuned radio broadcast.

Conclusion

It's a great piece of software if you find yourself needing something more feature laden than Windows Sound Recorder. The interface takes a bit of getting used to, but it's nothing terminal. The other thing I'd say, is that it's not exactly speedy when handling large files...but overall, it's pretty good.

Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Firefox - lets start with the biggies

2005-07-06T13:37:00.000+01:00

You must have been living in a cave for the last few months if you haven't heard of this web-browser by now.

I don't plan on writing a huge amount about this one. Lots of people far more knowledgeable than me have written so much, it seems pointless for me to rewrite it all again when I can just link to it (see the end of this post).

Brief Introduction

So, Firefox is a web-browser. It's based on the Gecko rendering engine that was originally written for Mozilla. Mozilla itself is a separate open-source browser suite that evolved from what was left of Netscape after Microsoft killed it in the late 90's. It has a rather bizarre history that has little relevance here. So, I'll just link you to this Wikipedia article and let you decide whether to read about it yourself.

What I like

Security - ignore the FUD put out by Microsoft and their bum-chums. Use Firefox and you will get less, if any, spyware when browsing the net. Fact: I've used Firefox for a few years - back since it was a mere 0.3 release. I've not had any spyware at all since I've used it, and believe me when I say that I browse some of the dodgier neighbourhoods of the net on a regular basis *ahem*.
Tabs! Once you've browsed the net with a tabbed web-browser, you'll never go back again. You can open more than one site/link in each browser window - a middle click on a link (if you have a 3 button mouse or scrollwheel) will open the link in a new tab in the background. So, you can middle-click a few links and have them load silently in the background while you continue to read the current page.
Extensions - the thinking behind Firefox is to supply a fairly basic, lightweight browser - but build in extendability to allow people to add in any additional functionality they want. Mouse gestures, Adblocking, integration with various sites (including an extension for blogger), FTP clients, RSS readers, live weather reports for your status bar. At the time of writing there are over 550 extensions available at Mozilla update alone (and plenty more available at other places online)
Themes - "skin" your browser to look however you like. Similar to the sort of thing you see in Winamp (amongst many others). Again, there's a huge community online creating new themes - nearly are 100 listed on Mozilla update alone.

What I don't like

STILL no partial updates - whenever a new version is released, you have to download and reinstall the whole browser. It's only something like a 5mb download, so it's not too bad...but partial updates should be made a priority. People have been requesting this for a long time, but it's still not made it in.
The slightly shadiness of Mozilla. Not so much a problem with the software, more the organisation behind it. The idea behind open source is openness. Mozilla's recent behaviour on a few things have been a lot less than transparent.
Memory leaks and general slowness. It's gotten a lot better since they hit the 1.0 release, but the program can still get a little too bogged down sometimes - especially with Flash based sites.

What others have said

CNET review of Firefox
About.com's review of Firefox
Washington Post - "Firefox leaves no reason to endure Internet Explorer"
The Guardian reviews Firefox
ABC News review

Nvu - open source web authoring

2005-07-06T12:09:00.000+01:00

I've just installed this today - the final 1.0 build was released last week. It's an open-source web authoring program put out by the team behind Linspire. It looks pretty good - cross-platform, uses Gecko (the engine behind Mozilla and Firefox) as a HTML renderer.

I'm not sure it's quite as powerful as Dreamweaver (which would be my choice for this sort of thing in an ideal world), but it's FAR more powerful than any of the other free stuff I've tried in the past. A tabbed interface, site manager, integration with the W3C's online validators...it seems pretty good.

I'd need to test it by working on a proper site to get a total picture of how well it works, but I think it's certainly a worthy rival for dreamweaver...perhaps even beating it in some cases - it seems to deal with CSS and server-side scripting much better than Dreamweaver. It's rendering also seems to be a little more accurate and polished than Dreamweaver (just minor bugs that you occasionally see in Dreamweaver don't seem to present themselves). Although - it has to be said that I'm comparing it to Dreamweaver 4, which is a little out of date now. Also, for an open-source piece of software - it's VERY polished, up to Mozilla sort of standards. I'm going to keep it around for a while and use it over Dreamweaver, see how it measures up in the real world next time I'm working on something.

Links
Nvu homepage
Linspire homepage
Macromedia Dreamweaver

This was originally posted here in my other blog - since it's sort of the thing that kicked off the idea for this blog, I thought it'd make a decent enough first post.