Filed under: Open Source

AutoHotkey is one of the most incredible applications ever. As far as programming languages go, it's not exactly elegant. But it is easy to learn (if not to master), free, open-source and insanely powerful.

But I guess you might already know all that. What you might not know is why no new AutoHotkey version has been released since September 25, 2009. That's almost a year of stagnation: for one of the most active scripting communities on the Web, that's a small eternity. Is the project dead?

Several AutoHotkey branches started popping up, including a .NET port called IronAHK and other varieties. And still there was no word from AutoHotkey's developer, Chris. He was simply gone; no word on the forums for months, despite multiple threads wondering where he is and whether or not he's deserted the project

I decided to send Chris an email, and to my surprise (and delight), he replied! It turned into a short interview, which you can read after the jump.

Search Google for "stock photography" and you will get an endless list of results. There's no shortage of sites trying to make money off the work of stock photographers, and apparently no shortage to drab sites and blogs who seek out the stockiest images, despite the fact that it all looks like the same clip-art that was used in 1996. Finding truly good images usually requires a lengthy search through the annals of Flickr, DeviantArt, and other sites not actually meant to provide stock photos. Stocky aims to bridge the gap between quality content and traditional stock photography -- but right now it's only a project on Kickstarter.

The idea behind Stocky seems to be that all creative media can be exchanged freely and collaboratively in an open, engaging environment. Photography isn't alone in this; if the project ever comes to fruition, Stocky would also incorporate video, vectors, Photoshop brushes, audio samples, design templates, fonts, and just about anything else that an artist or designer could create and hope to share. So, if you're an avid user of the Share and Share Alike type of IP licensing, then you might be interested in a new service like this.

The project was posted to Kickstarter about a week ago, but has yet to receive any notable pledges. It's currently sitting at under $100 USD, which is quite a distance from the $5000 goal. The deadline for pledges is July 28, and no funding will go to the project if the goal isn't met by then -- so if you're interested, pledge!

John T. Haller's Portable Apps suite sets the standard when it comes to one-stop-shopping for programs for your USB flash drive. Today on the official Platform blog, Haller has shared details and screenshots of the upcoming 2.0 release -- and it's looking good.

Currently in beta for about two more weeks, the final release is slated for some time later this month. Among the improvements you'll find are an enhanced theming system, a new Aero-enabled theme, and a built-in PortableApps.Com Updater to keep your suite current. There's also an expanded options screen with dozens of user-configurable settings and access to the new themes via an easy-to-use switcher.

Another part of the 2.0 platform is the much-improved Launcher, which makes it even easier for developers to create portable versions of their apps. More details about the Launcher can be found on the PortableApps blog.

ZUploader will also upload to an FTP server, and context menu integration can be enabled if you want super-fast right-click uploading. ZUploader is open source, portable, and runs on all versions of Windows.

It wasn't that long ago that VLC finally hit version 1.0. Since then, progress has been steady -- and today, version 1.1 is ready for download just two months after first going beta.

So what's new in VLC 1.1? First and foremost, hardware acceleration has arrived for VLC users who run Windows Vista and Windows 7 or Linux. MKV HD support has been improved, and VLC 1.1 can now play VP-8 and MPEG-4 lossless videos. VLC 1.1 also sports a buffed-up Web plug-in which supports the WebM container and offers generally improved video streaming.

VLC 1.1's code has been optimized as well, yielding big performance gains (up to 40%, according to the official site). "Tens of thousands of lines of code [were] removed," states the VLC 1.1 news page.

Apart from improving VLC's ability to handle various media types, the biggest addition might just be the new add-ons and script framework. Yes, VLC is now extensible -- so expect to start seeing some awesome extensions in the coming days and weeks as developers begin tinkering.

Good news if you use FFmpeg in your video app or if you're simply running an application which uses FFmpeg to process video -- and let's face it, there are a ton. Version 0.6 has just been released, and among other things it adds support for Google's recently open sourced VP8 codec and the WebM container.

AAC and H.264 decoding have also gotten a shot in the arm. More detail about the release are available on the FFmpeg website.

The end of the 21st century's first decade is shaping up to be a period full of portentious software fruition! The year 2008 saw the release of WINE 1.0 after an epic 15 years of development; in 2009, after only 13 years, VLC reached 1.0; and then, earlier this year, Foobar hit 1.0 after a meager 7 years. Today, PDFCreator adds itself to the open source hall of fame, with version 1.0.0 now available to download.

If you've never used PDFCreator, you'd be forgiven -- there are a ton of PDF authoring tools out there, after all -- but now, with v1.0, you really should give PDFCreator a go! Basically, PDFCreator installs itself as a printer. To create PDFs, you send a document to the PDFCreator -- just like you would to your inkjet or laser printer. It's as simple and foolproof as that.

There are other neat functions that have been added over the 8 years of development, however! You can convert documents from the context menu -- just right-click a document. There's command line functionality, if you like doing it the hard way, and it will also run on Terminal Servers. You can use it to 'print' other document types too, like PNG or BMP or JPG -- ideal, if you're trying to generate a truly 'open' file that can be read by anyone!

The only drawback is that PDFCreator only runs on Windows. Still, there are plenty of alternatives for Mac and Linux.

You'd think Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg would be dismissive of Diaspora, the upstart effort to provide an open-source Facebook alternative, but Zuck says that's not true. In fact, he donated to the crowd-funded Diaspora project via Kickstarter. Although the amount he donated is unknown, the Facebook founder told Wired he saw himself in the Diaspora kids, who are current NYU students.

My take is that Zuckerberg doesn't feel threatened by Diaspora, and that he might actually see it as an incubator for new ideas that Facebook can use to push its agenda of opening the Web. [See Microsoft bailing out Apple back in 1997! -Ed] It also wouldn't be surprising to see Zuckerberg make an attempt to hire the Diaspora team at some point, although I doubt they'd be swayed by the offer. Including Zuckerberg's donation, Diaspora has raised nearly $200,000 on Kickstarter.

For more on Diaspora, check out Download Squad's point-counterpoint series: Why Diaspora Will Win and Why Diaspora Will Fail.

Spotify, the (European) king of music-on-demand, is a real pain in the ass to actually use. I mean, it works, but only just. It's one of those annoying apps that minimises itself to your system tray -- and while that might be OK with Windows XP, on Windows 7 that's just crap. I want Spotify on my SUPERBAR! I want the ability to stop, start and change tracks without having to dig Spotify out of my system tray! Fortunately, Spotifycontrol does just that... and it's open-source!

It's not ideal -- really, I just want that Spotify icon on my Superbar to become 'active' -- but Spotifycontrol is a monumentally large step in the right direction. First, it lets you control Spotify (duh), and the control bar is always-on-top, so you'll never lose it. Second, it's integrated into Aero, so it's all translucent and pretty (it also pops up notifications when the track changes). Third, it exposes global hotkeys so you can control Spotify with your keyboard! AND FINALLY -- it has a built-in lyric search! Just hit that icon that looks like a text document... and blam! Lyrics!

There haven't been any updates to the project since the beginning of April, but seemingly they are currently working on a Web-based control server. There might also be a small memory leak: the memory footprint keeps climbing until you move Spotifycontrol -- still, mere teething issues... and we have gigabytes of RAM for a reason, right?

Clip art can be useful for more than just boring presentations; if it's high quality and in a vector format, it can be used as a basis for other projects, such as T-shirts, stickers, gig posters, etc.

OpenClipArt Library is a large site that features thousands of bitmap and vector clip art images. As can be expected, the content is quite often crappy. I'm sorry, I'm not going to sugarcoat it; if you're looking for a nice image, you may have to spend some time sifting through a lot of pretty awful stuff.

Still, it is free, and some of the content is vector-based. You can browse by artist, which might help filter the amount of bad clip art you have to endure before you find something you like.

Search could be improved, too. It may just be a matter of policing tag usage; try searching for cat to see what I mean. Perhaps 10% of the results are actually images of cats; the rest is composed of pretty random stuff (green checked border?).

Criticism aside, this is a valuable initiative. The domain name is good, and I hope that, over time, search will get better and more high-quality content will be added. If you have any free clip art of your own, do consider adding it to this massive collection.

I love freehand painting. While I have absolutely no talent, I love the freedom of working with paint or even crayons. It just feels nice, even if the result is nothing to write home about (in my case, at least).

If you're looking to replicate the same experience on a computer, there's always Corel Painter. But on the off chance that you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend just to doodle, MyPaint gives you a nice chunk of functionality for the even nicer price of... free.

The program comes with many brushes that are divided into several categories. The brushes seem to work quite well at default settings. In case you want to tweak something, though, hitting Ctrl+B shows the Brush Settings dialog, which has a mind-boggling array of parameters that you can change for the brush you've selected.

The interface is multi-windowed but is not as horrible as GIMP's (sorry, GIMP lovers). The color picker is quite advanced and features color-matching harmonies (which I completely failed to use in my creation shown above).

Right-clicking the canvas rotates between the last five colors selected, which is a very handy feature. The program also features a ton of single-stroke hotkeys for changing brush sizes, saving favorite brushes, and more. MyPaint even supports layers, and it is available for both Windows and Linux.

Bottom line: This is not a toy. Whether you are serious about painting software or just starting out MyPaint is a great option.

The Appleseed Project's been going through a bit of a resurgence lately, and along with a redone source page and a growing amount of mentions in the media, the project is now getting serious about funding. Project-founder Michael Chisari has set the goal he's looking to meet at $10,000 -- and you can donate at IndieGoGo, the fundraising site where Appleseed is listed.

Chisari's stated on the fundraising page that any excess funds will be used for documentation and non-profit promotion of the project. Also, if you've got the itch, you can actually contribute in other ways and try Appleseed yourself -- since this open-source project actually has a working prototype available right now. Just don't expect any bells or whistles quite yet.

You may recall Appleseed getting mentioned recently in our sister-posts, "Why Diaspora will win" and "Why Diaspora will fail." We got a lot of comment love (and hate) in those posts, and whichever side of the fence you fall on, it's clear that the community is very interested in open-source alternatives to networks like Facebook.

A best-case scenario would be multiple, viable alternatives to choose from, and the best way to ensure that such projects actually develop is to fund them. At the time of this article, Appleseed's only raised $470, so they could definitely use some help.

We covered the exciting launch of the Humble Indie Bundle a few weeks ago -- and more fool you if you failed to pick up titles like World of Goo and Penumbra at a fantastic price -- but now it's time to look at the results, because they're even more interesting. First and foremost: Linux users made up 25% of the total sales revenue.

Take a look at the tasty pie chart on the right: while Linux users (obviously) represented the smallest number of sales, they spent much more than the average Windows or Mac user. Linux is only used as a platform on 1% of all consumer computers. 1% make up 25% of the revenue. Think about that.

Sure, it's biased -- 30% of the sales revenue was donated to charity, one of which was a major exponent in digital civil liberties movement: the EFF. And true, the Humble Indie Bundle was more likely to attract those that don't spend all of their time playing Halo or MW2 on their Xbox... but still!

The point is clear: Linux users, for a variety of reasons, have lots of money to blow on video games. If the game is good, and the price is right, it will sell to the marginalised Linux desktop market.

I get the feeling, with the Source engine now ported to OpenGL and thus Linux (and Mac!), beardy gaming is about to take off in a big way.

There's been a lot of buzz lately about Diaspora, with its being called "the new Facebook alternative" and getting treated like some sort of social networking Holy Grail for privacy. It even set a record for start-up fundraising site Kickstarter by raising over $170,000 in pledges.

Everyone seems pretty excited about the prospect of some magical new social network that will be private, secure, and "owned" by the users instead of evil corporate monsters. And who wouldn't be? I mean, it sounds great in principle, but with all of the excitement stirred up over the last week, nobody's bothered to talk about the harsh reality that it's all nothing more than a pipe dream.

...A very well-funded pipe dream.

Take a look at what these kids are selling for a moment -- and yes, I said kids, because that's what they are, kids. There isn't even a product here, just a promise, and it's being made by four fixie-hipster computer science majors at NYU who can't even act mature for the four minutes needed to film the video they somehow thought necessary to sell their "idea" to the masses.

What's this super-amazing, fantastical idea they've come up with? It's a distributed social network that would exist as individual nodes, called seeds, which would be owned and operated by the users of the network. Why seeds, you ask? Well, it might have something to do with a little open source project that's been floating around for a few years now, since this idea is so strikingly similar to one that was tried for the first time, in 2005, with a project called Appleseed.