IrfanView is a light-weight, but powerful Windows tool for viewing and editing pictures. Version 4.20 is out, and it has a slightly new design, a bunch of bug fixes, and some new features.
At its heart, IrfanView is an image viewer with some editing functions thrown in for good measure. Nobody will mistake it for PhotoShop anytime soon. But you'd be surprised just how much you can do with this free utility.
First of all, IrfanView can handle pretty much any image file type you throw at it. But second, it includes a ton of basic options for editing images, including cropping, resizing, rotating, and applying effects like sharpen, blur, and red eye reduction. Version 4.20 includes a ton of updates, including improved relative zoom, an "auto crop borders" feature which removes outside lines of the same color, and a shiny new icon set.
With torrents hiding in all corners of the 'net finding what you want can be difficult. Sure you could go to all the sites that host torrent files one by one or you could use Speckly and search all of them in one shot.
Speckly takes what you're looking for and searches most of the popular torrent sites for you. Speckly further breaks down your search results into categories to help narrow down your results.
In our test we searched for the very popular Linux distro Ubuntu which returned 312 matches. From this Speckly also listed that 198 matches were for the software, 39 for books and 2 for movies. Un-categorized results were listed as others.
Speckly results also lets you know how many" complete sources" (seeders) have the file as well as how long the file has bee online. This all helps in determining the success of retrieving what you are looking for.
All in all Speckly is a great option if you know what you want but don't want to spend the time hoping from one site to the next looking for it.
It can takes a lifetime of schooling and practicing to learn how to write music. But why do you have to write music the traditional way? Is there really a need to learn the theory behind music? Maybe it's time to start drawing music.
With HighC, you won't need any formal music training to write your first piece. All you need is a mouse and the ability to drag it across the screen.
Of course when we tested it we had dreams of creating something that would ride Billboards Top 10. Unfortunately, it turns out that what we created sounded like a twisting knobs on an analog synth at the beach and nothing like the next club hit.
No matter how hard we tried, everything we made sounded a bit more atmospheric than anything danceable. But HighC never claimed that it would make dance music and is probably used for more for the creation of sound textures.
So if you're into musical experimentation give HighC a try but if you're sights are set on winning a Grammy better get back to that theory class you skipped out on.
A lot of desktop word processing and text editing apps feature templates you can use to jazz up your documents -- or make them look terrible, depending on your opinion. Now Google Docs gives you the same option, with a new template gallery. There are over 300 templates, featuring everything from resumés to cards to calendars.
The selection of different templates is impressively versatile. Expense reports, presentations, invitations -- it's all there. Styles range from minimal (basic blue bars) to ostentatious (robots!). Something that immediately struck us as clever is the selection the Avery Dennison-sponsored themes, so you can print to those Avery labels and business cards that every office seems to be up to its ears in. If you use templates in your desktop writing app of choice, you'll probably also find a use for them in Google docs. Although the designs are hit or miss, there are enough of them that you should be able to find what you're looking for.
Attention, law-abiding citizens! If you believe in BitTorrent as a means of distribution for large files, but you're concerned about the claims of piracy that are often associated with it, you should take a look at YouTorrent. Despite having to shut down for a while because of legal issues, YouTorrent is back in operation, with a reported 67,170 torrents that are all legal to share.
YouTorrent is a meta-search that can find verified torrents across a number of popular torrent sites, including Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova's featured torrents section. With all those sites combined, you can use YouTorrent to search over 6TB of data. This is a very good thing for the torrent community in general, as it shows how widely BitTorrent is used for non-piracy purposes.
Hey, we know some people really did care very much about the Mozilla world record for Firefox 3 downloads on Download Day. And hey, yeah, we'll concede mad props to the Mozilla team for getting out there and getting those downloads.
But OpenSUSE just upped the "let's get lots of new users" ante. Record books are all well and good, but what about stakes that are a little higher, a bit more exotic? For instance, what would happen if OpenSUSE hit a million installs of the OpenSUSE 11.0 release by the SourceForge Community Choice Awards at OSCON next week?
Now, a million installs is a lot. You can't really blame Zonker though, as a tattoo is a pretty big deal, depending not only on one's pain tolerance, but the idea that one day you will have to explain to your grandkids why any given image is on your back (or arm... or...). We suppose he had to set the bar pretty high so that even the jaded future generations would be duly impressed. Zonker is still willing to amuse us, though, and has said that a more attainable 300,000 registered installs would get him to leave OSCON with green hair.
But c'mon, a tattoo is so much cooler. If you were thinking you'd like to try OpenSUSE 11.0, but needed just that little kickstart to try it, this is a pretty fine reason to at least give the LiveCD a whirl. If you like it enough to install it, you will have to register (no cost or spam involved) the install in order for it to count towards Zonker's new tattoo.
And no, no word yet on prospective placement of the geeko.
The newest version of the VLC media player isn't ready for the streets yet, but if you're they type who doesn't mind risking your precious computer for the sake of satisfying a primal curiosity for experimental software, the pre-release of VLC 0.9.0 is now available for both Windows and Mac. Unfortunately, anybody with a Windows 98/ME or OS X 10.3.9 machine is out luck since such technology is no longer socially acceptable as those operating systems are no longer supported.
It now supports Last.fm (AKA Audioscrobbler) straight out of the box disk image, so it'll update your Last.fm account as you play music through VLC. To enable Last.fm support in the 0.9.0 release, enter your username in the preferences pane under Audioscrobber, but don't forget to visit Control interfaces to check the box labeled "Submission of played songs to Last.fm."
Other changes also include better tag support, more subtitle support, improved mouse gestures, album art support, Shoutcast TV listings, and a lot more that we don't want to bore you with, but you're more than welcome to check out the whole list on the VLC forums.
Remember when your less than cool cousin started blogging and used black text on a background covered in multi-colored flames? And you shortly developed a headache, not only from the content but from squinting and tilting your head to the side just so you could sort of read the text. If you are color blind your every day web browsing might be a bit like this as well.
DLS reader, Eric, sent us a question, wondering if there was anything out there to help color blind web surfers see things, like weather maps, a little bit more clearly. "Like 8-10% of males, I have a degree of red-green colorblindness. Unfortunately, many web designers do not take this group into account when designing web sites and applications. This leaves many features most people enjoy daily unusable or at least hard to read for people with this condition" Eric says.
The simply named Colorblind Web Page Filter may be a solution. It's not fancy and it's still in development stages, but if you type in a URL and pick your color filter (red/green colorblind, grayscale, etc.) according to the type of colorblindness you have it will load up a page that you can hopefully read a little bit better than that white text over kittens. If not, break out the 3D glasses to really spice things up!
Digital and satellite TV stations have given us so many channels to choose from it's sometimes difficult to decided on what to watch. And with the availability of shows on the Internet that decisions has become even harder. What if you could just type in what you felt like watching, maybe something romantic or some dancing and a list of videos that fit your criteria all came to you ready for viewing. If you like the idea of watching videos this way then iSofa may be what you've been waiting for.
In order to use iSofa, simply type in a search string and iSofa will bring back videos that matches your search and displays them in a heads up display type interface. From there you can just let them play in order or pick and choose what videos you want to watch.
The site is clearly in beta as some options only have graphic placeholders instead of actual functions. Also video quality is poor when you have your browser scaled larger than a post-it note, so we wouldn't even recommend you try the full screen option at this time.
Despite the negatives, we really like the idea behind the site and hope that in future versions iSofa increases the video quality as well as include an option to save favorites videos.
So far we like what we've seen and iSofa just might have something here.
There are plenty of things the Windows shell does really well, but there are other relatively minute details that have been overlooked since Windows 95 that really piss us off - like the ability to click and drag taskbar buttons.
Thankfully, this 600k app that will let you do just that. Taskbar Shuffle is 32-bit Windows-only (it works on all versions, 95 to Vista), obviously, and it gives you free reign over your taskbar buttons and system tray icons. Yes, at long last you can drag them all around to your heart's content.
We first looked at Taskbar Shuffle in 2006, but it's such a simple app with such great purpose that it deserves another look.
There are a couple added features as well, like the ability to middle-click to close a task button or group and tweaking for the "group similar buttons" function. Several improvements have been made since 2.0: settings are no longer stored in the registry, shuffling buttons in a group is possible, and it is now portable (and we love portable).
Of course you're going to give up a few resources, but the cost is minimal. Taskbar Shuffle uses only 5mb of memory barely any CPU. It's a tradeoff we're willing to make to gain some long-awaited functionality.
VNC allows you to remotely manage one computer from another. But the thing is, you usually have to be at another computer to do this.
MochaSoft has just released a Mocha VNC Lite a VNC client for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch allowing you to control another computer all from your finger tips. We tested VNC Lite with a Mac Mini and an iPhone and after enabling remote management on the Mac connecting with the iPhone was a breeze.
The app supports both portrait and wide screen modes as well as the zoom in and out gestures. Along the bottom edge you have buttons for the on screen keyboard, options and to enable/disable mouse clicks.
Screen refresh on the iPhone was a bit slow but adequate but because the iPhone/iPod Touch sole input device is your finger it was hard to do any meaningful task.
Generally, when you're using remote management software like VNC you're using a keyboard an a mouse. Without these devices, trying to administer a computer with one finger proved to be slow and awkward.
VNC Lite is a great application, but we couldn't recommend it for any type of serious administrative task.
So you've got a new version of a file that you need to upload to an FTP server. Sure, you could fire up a full-blown client like FileZilla, but why bother? DropUpLoad offers elegantly simply uploads in a tiny, portable package. It's a 114k download and only consumes 9mb of memory, and is very different from other FTP clients.
For example, there's no directory browsing: set up your remote server info (including destination directory) and it will appear in your list of FTP servers. Setting up a new site is child's play, and you can clone settings from an existing server - useful, since you'll have to set up multiple profiles if you upload to more than one folder on your server.
Select your target from the drop down, drag a file or folder from your Windows machine into the "drop box," and you're done.
Need to give a customer upload access to your FTP but don't want to give out passwords? Created a "locked" version of DropUpLoad, which limits connections to a single server and hides and encrypts login information inside the generated executable.
Give it a shot, FTP uploads don't get much easier!
Reading and writing to a Mac formatted drive from Windows couldn't be any easier than selecting the samba file sharing option in Leopard. This works great if you have 2 physical computers but what if you only have a Mac running Boot Camp? Since Leopard isn't running getting to that document on the Mac partition from Windows would be difficult unless you installed MacDrive.
Once installed, Windows Explorer is able to mount the Mac drives right along side your standard Windows formatted drives. You are free to access them like any other drive.
If you're worried that you may accidentally delete files off your Mac partition just tick the option to mount the drives in "read only" mode, thus preventing any accidents. MacDrive's options can be access by double clicking it's icon in the system tray. But once you have tailored it to your work flow you'll rarely have a need to access the options.
In our testing we found no noticeable performance drops while accessing standard office documents and music files. And even if there were any drops in performance, the benefit of being able to access files created on the Mac partition from within Windows more than makes up for it.
So if you have your Mac set to dual boot you may want to consider MacDrive in order to swap your documents back and forth.
We're big fans of FriendFeed, the social network aggregator that helps you keep track of your friends' activities across different platforms like Twitter, LastFM, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and about 1,000 36 others. If you're a fan or if you're just getting started, below are 10 tools to help you experience it just the way you like, after the jump.
If you've got a mammoth widescreen monitor on your desk and you're a Windows user, you may be wondering what to do with all the extra real estate you've got. Why not use it to visually manage your running applications?
Microsoft Scalable Fabric takes your monitor periphery and turns it into a tumbnail gallery of your non-active windows. After installing the app (which requires the .Net 1.1 framework), the middle of your desktop becomes a hot zone. It's totally customizable, so you can stretch the boundary lines as far to the edges as you like to prevent accidental resizing.
Drag a window out of the zone, and it will shrink, getting smaller as you drag it farther away from the boundary line. Drag it back, and it returns to its restore size. It's even smart enough to remember the position you drag your windows to - click a taskbar button to minimize, and it'll shrink back to it's thumbnailed home.
Oh yeah, there's a little more eye candy inside: minimize and maximizing are animated, albeit somewhat poorly. It's a good way for anyone who heavily multitasks to keep their arsenal of applications at the ready.
