Just a week after Digsby widened its private beta by giving away 5,000 invites to Download Squad readers, the development team has already issued 4 new builds of the chat, email, and social networking client. Probably the most significant new feature is support for proxy settings to help users get around corporate firewalls.
There are a ton of other bug fixes and minor new features as well, including:
A fix for "connection lost" issue when logging in
A fix for MSN Messenger IMs not being sent
A fix for Digsby getting stuck while loading skins during the login
A fix for freezes while logging into Yahoo! Messenger
Ctrl + Backapsace now deletes one word at a time in the input box
If you already have a Digsby account, you can either download the latest client from the Digsby home page or just fire up Digsby on your PC if it's already installed. The client will download all the updates automatically. While the lack of proxy support was one of the main complaints we heard from users last week, there's one other issue we'd love to see Digsby work on: The program's large memory footprint. Digsby can easily use 70MB or more at launch. Considering how many functions the service has, that might not seem like a lot, but similar applications like Pidgin use just a small fraction of the RAM that Digsby does.
If you covet your RAM like Gollum coveted the ring, then Instant Memory Cleaner should be one of the tools in your toolbox.
Designed for XP and Vista, Instant Memory Cleaner frees up your memory by forcing pages out of physical memory and reducing the size of running processes' working sets to a minimum.
The program sits in your Windows Taskbar; when clicked, it pops up a small and simple interface. There's a button to show you real time memory usage (with stats for physical memory, pagefile, and virtual memory), another to click for help, and one that will initialize the memory freeing process.
Short, sweet, and now you know it complete.
Instant Memory Cleaner is a free download for XP and Vista.
While Firefox enthusiasts swear that the web browser is the best invention since sliced bread or the scientific calculator, there's no question that Firefox can be a bit of a memory hog. When you load your first window, the browser zips along smoothly. But open a few more tabs, do a little navigating back and forth, and before you know it Firefox is eating up half of your system's RAM.
Mozilla has long insisted that this isn't a "memory leak" bug, per se, but rather a way to ensure that Firefox opens pages at blazing fast speeds. That's because an awful lot of information is kept in cache.
But bug or no bug, as Mozilla tries to figure out how to cram Firefox onto mobile phones, 200MB+ memory requirements just aren't going to cut it. Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter has posted an interesting analysis of Firefox memory use on his blog. And Mozilla board member Christopher Blizzard suggests that over the next few months, we'll see developers tackling the memory use issue a bit more aggressively.
Of course, it's possible that reducing memory use will also reduce performance, so we may eventually see a version of Firefox with a smaller memory footprint for mobile devices, with a fuller-fledged version for desktop use.
From the "if we really thought about it we would have been able to figure this out on our own" department comes a handy tip for speeding up OpenOffice.org -- by increasing its memory use.
The open source Microsoft Office alternative is great if you're looking for a low cost word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. But it takes so long to load up, especially if you don't enable the quick start application.
Here's how to cut down OpenOffice.org's startup time:
Start OpenOffice (it doesn't matter which application you load, Calc, Impress, or Writer will all work)
Click Tools>Options
Select Java menu and uncheck "Use a Java runtime environment"
Select the Memory Tab and change the following options:
Number of steps: 30
Use for Open Office: 128
Memory per Object: 20
Number of Objects: 20
Next time you start an OpenOffice.org application it should open much more quickly. But it will also eat up more memory. If you have an older computer with less than 1GB of RAM, you might want to just live with a slow load time. Or buy more memory.
DieHard is a joint venture between Emery Berger at University of Mass. Amherst and Microsoft researcer Ben Zorn which is meant to prevent common memory management and allocation crashes. Its creators claim that it prevents errors known as "double frees", "single frees", "dangling pointers", and common types of buffer overflows, amongst others. Even though memory consumption may go up to 50-75% with DieHard running, it promises to protect your system without any major slowdown (as long as you have enough RAM). What does this mean for the end user? Potentially, a reduction in many common annoying crashes. Check out this demo video (AVI) to see an example of DieHard in action.
At the moment it's available for Windows, Linux, and Solaris. The Windows version will only protect Firefox, while the Linux and Solaris versions will work with any application. I can see where something like this can really fit a lot of niche situations where mission critical work is being done and downtime is not an option, but that can come at a price. Not all applications are perfect, but there is a difference between good coding practices and sloppy work. However, preventing common crashes, even potentially preventing overflow attacks, can't be a bad thing, can it?
I've been tinkering around with the Mac version of that new Photoshop CS3 beta Adobe unleashed, and I have to say that so far it feels like a more significant and worthy upgrade than CS2. Adobe has packed a lot of new goodies in CS3 which we'll be covering in our Imaging Tip series, and today's tip praises the return of true memory management to Photoshop.
As you can see, the Performance tab of PS CS3's updated Preferences display brings back complete control over how much RAM Photoshop gets to play with, and the scratch disk UI has received the steroid treatment as well. These are both great improvements for fine-tuning Photoshop's performance, especially for those either on older, slower systems or those blessed with desktop powerhouses.
Ever have a virus or other program that you can't get rid of because it won't die long enough for you to delete it? When Spybot, Ad-Aware, and others fail, turn to Killbox. This handy-dandy download will kill anything currently running on your PC, so you can remove it. Simply enter the path of the offending guest, and Killbox will go to town on it. Think of it like the in-memory mafia. Killbox doesn't care, it will take out pretty much anything. From time to time those of us less technologically savvy (relatives, family, friends) need help with renegade programs too, so if they ever have this problem, at least now you know a guy. Sort of. No problem, he take care of it. Don't worry about it.
Firefox has its own memory issues, but once you've got a few dozen extensions installed (like yours truly), things can get really hairy. Leak Monitor is a Firefox extension that's intended to help developers keep an eye on their extensions, but even for non-developers it can come in handy to figure out which of your extensions is eating up more memory than it ough to. It doesn't really offer a fix, unfortunately-unless you're an extension hacker your only option to plug such a leak is to just get rid fo the extension-but every little bit helps.
Josiah Cole at Oomny, a very odd
little gem of a blog, has posted an interesting
comparison of the memory usage of Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 ("Bon Echo") and Internet Explorer 7 beta 2, both
of which were released this week? The results are a little surprising. Firefox consistently outperforms IE, using
slightly more than half the memory for single pages. Cole notes, however, that IE's memory use drops significantly when
the browser is in the background or minimized, wheras Firefox's stays constant. Cole also does some tests using multiple
tabs in which Firefox again performs well, but these results are offset by the fact that he's using an about:config tweak that makes his
experience atypical. Still, though both browsers are early in their development cycles, it's interesting to see how
Mozilla's alpha browser compares to Microsoft's beta.
PhotoRec is an
open source multi-platform app intended to help you recover photos from corrupted media like memory cards and even hard
drives and CD-ROMs. In addition to photos, PhotoRec can recover many other types of files, including video files,
documents, and archives (e.g. zip files). PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it'll
work even if your media's filesystem is severely damaged, and it'll work on FAT, NTFS, or ext2/3 systems. PhotoRec is a
companion program to TestDisk, an app for recovering lost
partitions on a wide variety of filesystems and making non-bootable disks bootable again.
As I've mentioned in previous
posts, for the number of apps I tend to run concurrently, my system is starved for RAM. Yes, I know this could be easily
remedied, but until I get around to it I'm really enjoying Cacheman, a Windows app from Outer
Technologies that's "designed to improve the performance of your computer by optimizing the disk cache, memory and
a number of other settings." In addition to helping you tweak some settings to give your computer a little boost,
Cacheman also has a great memory recovery mode that'll monitor your computer's memory use and, when it's running low,
shuffle things around in RAM and free up anywhere from (in my experience) 10-50MB of physical memory. For that feature
alone Cacheman is worth it's weight in gold, but fortunately for us software doesn't weigh anything and Cacheman is
free.
If you covet your RAM like Gollum coveted the ring, then Instant Memory Cleaner should be one of the tools in your toolbox. 
While Firefox enthusiasts swear that the web browser is the best invention since sliced bread or the scientific calculator, there's no question that Firefox can be a bit of a memory hog. When you load your first window, the browser zips along smoothly. But open a few more tabs, do a little navigating back and forth, and before you know it Firefox is eating up half of your system's RAM.
DieHard is a joint venture between Emery Berger at University of Mass. Amherst and Microsoft researcer Ben Zorn which is meant to prevent common memory management and allocation crashes. Its creators claim that it prevents errors known as "double frees", "single frees", "dangling pointers", and common types of buffer overflows, amongst others. Even though memory consumption may go up to 50-75% with DieHard running, it promises to protect your system without any major slowdown (as long as you have enough RAM). What does this mean for the end user? Potentially, a reduction in many common annoying crashes. Check out this demo video (AVI) to see an example of DieHard in action. 
Firefox has its own memory issues, but once you've got a few dozen extensions installed (like yours truly), things can get really hairy. Leak Monitor is a Firefox extension that's intended to help developers keep an eye on their extensions, but even for non-developers it can come in handy to figure out which of your extensions is eating up more memory than it ough to. It doesn't really offer a fix, unfortunately-unless you're an extension hacker your only option to plug such a leak is to just get rid fo the extension-but every little bit helps.
Josiah Cole at Oomny, a very odd
little gem of a blog, has posted an interesting
comparison of the memory usage of Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 ("Bon Echo") and Internet Explorer 7 beta 2, both
of which were released this week? The results are a little surprising. Firefox consistently outperforms IE, using
slightly more than half the memory for single pages. Cole notes, however, that IE's memory use drops significantly when
the browser is in the background or minimized, wheras Firefox's stays constant. Cole also does some tests using multiple
tabs in which Firefox again performs well, but these results are offset by the fact that he's using an about:config tweak that makes his
experience atypical. Still, though both browsers are early in their development cycles, it's interesting to see how
Mozilla's alpha browser compares to Microsoft's beta.
PhotoRec is an
open source multi-platform app intended to help you recover photos from corrupted media like memory cards and even hard
drives and CD-ROMs. In addition to photos, PhotoRec can recover many other types of files, including video files,
documents, and archives (e.g. zip files). PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it'll
work even if your media's filesystem is severely damaged, and it'll work on FAT, NTFS, or ext2/3 systems. PhotoRec is a
companion program to TestDisk, an app for recovering lost
partitions on a wide variety of filesystems and making non-bootable disks bootable again.
As I've mentioned in previous
posts, for the number of apps I tend to run concurrently, my system is starved for RAM. Yes, I know this could be easily
remedied, but until I get around to it I'm really enjoying Cacheman, a Windows app from Outer
Technologies that's "designed to improve the performance of your computer by optimizing the disk cache, memory and
a number of other settings." In addition to helping you tweak some settings to give your computer a little boost,
Cacheman also has a great memory recovery mode that'll monitor your computer's memory use and, when it's running low,
shuffle things around in RAM and free up anywhere from (in my experience) 10-50MB of physical memory. For that feature
alone Cacheman is worth it's weight in gold, but fortunately for us software doesn't weigh anything and Cacheman is
free.
