Filed under: Open Source

The aptly-named Paint.Net PSD Plugin is one of those pieces of software which pretty much spells it all out right in the name. It's a plugin...for Paint.Net...(wait for it)...which lets you open files saved in Photoshop's PSD format.

Download the zip archive, dump the included PhotoShop.dll file into your Paint.Net FileTypes folder (usually c:\program files\Paint.Net\FileTypes), and you're ready to rock. Pretty well anything in the PSD for which Paint.Net has an implementation will load just fine. Saving is another story, so you'd best stick to Paint.Net's native .PDN file when you're done working.

If you don't have Photoshop, the plugin is a handy for looking at PSDs your friends might send you to look at. It's also a nice way to transition yourself to a free alternative if you no longer require Photoshop.

Thanks to FreePSD.com for the template I experimented with -- it's been so long since I used Photoshop on one of my systems that I can't even find any of my old PSDs...

Though Macs ship with a reasonably good video player in the shape of QuickTime Player, the sheer number of different types of video files that are available out there can be frustrating to keep up with. You have to install various plugins to make QuickTime compatible with them all. Or, you can choose an all-in-one solution like VLC.

Of course, some people are not fans of the look and feel of VLC. If you're in that camp, check out Movist. Movist is another all-in-one video player for OS X that has so far handled every file type that I've thrown at it. You can even go into the preferences and manually control the decoder that you want to use for each file type in case one works better than another.

Movist's UI feels very at home on my Mac, and I like it enough that it has become my default video player. I'm looking forward to see what the next update holds for Movist, which appears to be a very active project hosted on Google Code.

[via MacStories]

Fans of free and open source software, I hope you have a change of pants handy, because this is some big news. Symbian, a platform that has been proprietary and closed-source for a decade, just opened up its code and turned free. It's been close to two years since Nokia first announced plans to open the source code for the OS.

The Symbian Foundation is boasting that this is the biggest switch from closed to open in the history of software. With their software powering 330 million Nokia devices, that sounds like a reasonable claim.

It's no secret that Android played a big role in this move. The competition from Google's hot new mobile OS (that's been marketed as an open alternative) meant that Symbian had to make a change. Now all of Symbian's code is open, and they can take shots at Android for its partially-closed code. Symbian's roadmap of planned features through 2011 will soon be published for anyone to comment on and contribute to. Hopefully, this move will keep the aging OS around past that point.

[via Wired]

If you're looking to implement a secure, private chat environment in your company, have a look at what's going on at Ignite Realtime with their OpenFire real time collaboration server and Spark cross-platform IM client.

Being that they are open source, both OpenFire and Spark are free; that makes it easy to convince management to give it a try.

But the open source nature of the products also means that if they almost but don't quite suit your needs, you can always modify them to fit the bill.

Ignite Realtime also hosts a number of other related projects including SparkWeb, Smack API, Tinder API, Whack API, and XIFF API. If you're an IT manager or developer looking to implement a secure private chat environment, have a look at OpenFire and Spark.

For once, a cloud app I downloaded had absolutely nothing to do with storing files on someone else's remote server. This cloud is all about the tags, baby!

CloudPad is an open source note/task pad application that is elegantly simple to use and incredibly handy. Title a new note, set its priority, fill in all the necessary details, add some tags, and you're done. You can also add tags in bulk via a pop-up window or by inputting a comma-separated list.

Two quick ways to view your notes are provided -- the tag cloud (left) and the priority items view (right). A speedy and flexible search feature is also provided, and will no doubt come in handy once you're saved a few dozen/hundred notes.

If you're willing to overlook the required .Net 2.0 runtimes [Filehippo download], CloudPad can also be considered portable. It is for me, anyway, since all the machines I plan to use it on are running Windows 7 anyway.

You may find fuller-featured apps out there, but CloudPad certainly packs a big punch for such a small package.

It looks like KDE 4.4, the newest version of the popular Linux desktop environment and app suite, is on track for its scheduled February 9th release. A second release candidate just became available for ambitious experimenters to try out, and that milestone was only a few days off schedule. A bump from 4.3 to 4.4 doesn't sound like it would be a big deal, but don't discount it just because it's not a nice, round version number: KDE 4.4 includes new widgets, enhancements to existing apps, multitouch support, and even some entirely new apps.

Bloggers will be glad to hear that there's a new blogging tool, Blogilo, included in this release (I was kind of expecting them to call it Klogger, but hey). Konqueror, the KDE browser, now has a history sidebar. Akonadi, the personal information manager that plugs into apps like Kontact and KOffice, has been updated with POP3 support. There's also an onscreen keyboard and multitouch for hardware that supports it.

Pinned tabs are a great way to save room on your tab strip in Google Chrome. But suppose you want to free up the resources something you've pinned is using -- say the 50+ MB of memory used by Seesmic Web or another similar web apps?

In the latest Chromium nightly builds, a new feature has been added called phantom tabs. When enabled, you can right-click and close a pinned tab and its favicon will stay behind -- Chromium simply unloads the renderer process for that tab, freeing up the processor and memory resources it was using.

Click on the phantom tab's icon, and Chromium fires up a new instance your pinned page. Right-click and close a phantom tab, and it disappears from the tab strip completely.

And what if the only tab in your current window is pinned and you close it? Chromium stay open -- instead of closing the browser down completely as it normally would. Clicking the pinned icon won't rejuvenate it, at least not right now. You'll have to create a new tab first and then click back to it.

Like many other additions, you have to enable phantom tabs via a command line switch: --enable-phantom-tabs. Not sure how to add switches to Chrome or Chromium? Check out our brief how-to post!

If you've never downloaded one before, here's a link to the Chromium buildbot snapshots.

Pop quiz: what's the largest photo site on the web? Flickr? Photobucket? Picasa? Nope, it's Facebook.

Like me, you might find that fact a bit surprising, since we don't immediately think of Facebook as a photo sharing site -- that's just one of its features.

What's even more interesting when thinking about Facebook as a photo sharing site is that it has a built-in permission system that says that if you are tagged in a photo, you are given permission to see that photo.

A new Mac and Windows application called PhotoGrabber uses that permission (and your credentials) to go harvest all of the photos it can find of you on the service, and download them into a local folder. It can also download all the photos you have access to of your contacts.

Interestingly, it doesn't appear to download profile pictures, but sticks strictly to photos where the target person has been tagged.

[via Lifehacker]

In case you aren't familiar with it, the Pomodoro Technique is a time management system. The original book by Francesco Cirillo has been extremely popular since its publication in the early 1990s and it's now available as a free PDF download [Google Viewer link].

The technique is simple and involves setting up 25-minute intervals for a given task and taking a short break at the end (five minutes or so). Every four intervals you take a slightly longer break, and the cycle begins again.

While the only supplies necessary to follow the technique are a timer, a piece of paper, and a pen or pencil, you can cut down on desktop clutter by using a program on your PC - like Keep Focused.

It's a tiny, portable app which is as simple to use as Pomodoro itself. The white square is your "stop button" - click it to end a session. Click "play" to start a new session and tell Keep Focused what you're going to work on. Move the miniscule toolbar anywhere you wish by clicking on the hand icon and dragging.

When a session is done, take a break and then start anew!

Keep Focused is currently an alpha release, but it works well. It's a nice little productivity tool to add to your USB flash drive.

I haven't bothered with a dedicated screenshot app for a while - the Snipping Tool in Windows 7 is pretty decent, and I'd become comfortable with my inefficient image-creation workflow. Then suddenly I realized how dumb that is, and I went back to an app that used ages ago: ZScreen.

The developer's description on Google Code doesn't begin to tell the story here. Brandon Z says "ZScreen is an open-source screen capture program for Microsoft Windows. It can upload screenshots, pictures, text & files and put the URL in your clipboard in a single keystroke." That's just the tip of the iceberg, though.

It now handles more than just images on your clipboard - URLs, text, files - ZScreen can send them a dozen different places with the tap of a hotkey. And like any connected app, it also has the ability to (sigh) update your Twitter status following an action.

ZScreen has become so configurable and integrates with so many online services that it's in a class by itself. On top of that, Windows 7 superbar integration has been built-in. If you're looking for a seriously kick-ass screenshot app, keep reading after the break!

Speaking on Cranky Geeks, a ZDNet-owned online television show, Google bigwig Chris DiBona quite plainly admits that Android open-source development isn't plain sailing for its developers. "We could do better," he says, but he isn't apologizing. And rightly so: he would be apologizing for moving too fast. It would be like a pussy-whipped man apologizing after cleaning the house, but forgetting to do the car: "We could do better," yes, but Google could also do a lot worse.

Open-source development is one tricky can of worms. Unlike almost every other technology, time and energy and code is given freely by its developers. It's crazy, and counter-intuitive by most capitalist measuring sticks, but it seems to work -- it's just darn messy. Take Android for example: there are branches everywhere with patches coming in and going out from every which way. All the while you have the leviathan-like megalith of Google producing its own source and only periodically gracing the repositories with its new code. Let's not forget the primary partner-and-now-competitor Motorola: they have 'behind the scenes access' to Google's Android code, which they can develop into their own fork -- later, they might splice it back into the main branch.

And it works. It works at a rate unmeasurable by any non-contemporary standard. Sometimes, for the sake of progress, a little sloppiness is acceptable: after all, the only resource you have to lose is developers -- developers that aren't being paid anything! "[...]The only thing that really matters is how many of these we ship -- how many Android phones. There is a linear relationship between the number of phones you ship and the number of developers," DiBona says in the interview. As cynical as it sounds, it's true. There's no Android roadmap, no way for developers or Google or Motorola to predict what Android 2.2 or later might bring: there's just developers. Throw them at it and see who sticks. In today's day and age such a model is a huge advantage: no one knows what will happen within the next year, let alone a few months.

Open-source projects, to compete with the old-school, closed-source, NDA-ridden oligarchs, simply have to attain a critical mass of developers. That's the sole purpose of the Nexus One: more users, more apps, more coders. Once Android has enough interested and invested parties, there'll be no stopping it. I just hope someone sends out a rescue vehicle to pick up those that are flung by breakneck speeds to the wayside.

[via The Register]

Whilst there's a couple of excellent, paid-for, virtualization options around for OS X (Parallels and VMware), they can be a little heavy-handed if you only need to run one or two applications. Not to mention the price of a virtualization application as well as the necessary Windows licence can make it an expensive purchase! Of course, there's Boot Camp, but that also requires a Windows license. But there's is an alternative: the free and open-source Wine project. Wine allows you to run Windows applications within Mac OS X without either a Windows licence or virtualisation application -- though not every application will work.

As Wine's not the easiest thing to install, this handy guide is available to walk you through the setup and configuration. You'll need to be comfortable in the Terminal to make the most of the tutorial, but if that's not too big a challenge, a little Terminal-fu is a small investment for begrudgingly running the odd Windows app.

[Photo by kcdsTM]

Before I start: this is for Linux. Specifically, it's for Ubuntu and Debian, but it'll probably work on other Linux distros if you know what you're doing. With that out the way, I give you rTorrentWeb, the best BitTorrent client for Linux.

If you've heard of rTorrent, you've probably guessed what this is: a Web GUI layer for rTorrent. If you haven't heard of it, which is really unlikely, rTorrent is a command-line interface BitTorrent tool. rTorrentWeb basically straps a PHP-enabled web server to rTorrent. In this case Lighttpd is used, but you could use an existing Apache installation if you like.

After you install rTorrent, 'screen' (isn't this installed on every Linux system by default?), and a web browser, you need to install rTorrentWeb itself. This basically uses rTorrent's XMLRPC to hook in and provide you with a nice Web-based user interface.

Take a look at the full installation instructions if you want to give it a go -- it's fairly early days for the rTorrentWeb guys, as you can see, but they've just reached version 1.0 Beta! Hooray!