Following up on the release of the new Thunderbird 3 Alpha, lifehacker has a screenshot tour.
Still not convinced about tabs though.
Saw that Thunderbird 3 has an alpha released.... check out the Shredder a1 Release Notes. Oooh! Tabs!
WorldWide Telescope was released today from Microsoft. If anyone remembers, this is what made Scoble cry.
It makes me cry becuase it is, of course, Windows only (the requirements for Mac are "Microsoft XP SP2 or Vista", ha!). Guess I'll stick with Google Sky for now.
The Google Reader Blog announces that they have a Brand new Google Reader for iPhone. Looking forward to playing with this.
Saw via my RSS this evening that VMware Fusion 2.0 Public Beta 1 Now Available. Highlights are multi-display support (for real), running apps from your boot camp partition, and 3D acceleration. Woot!
When I first saw the post about Microsoft Pro Photo Tools V1 I immediately dismissed it as more MS marketing crap, selling "meh" software as the 3rd coming. However, when looking into it a bit more, their Geotagging system looks.... "interesting". I'm a metadata freak, I figure if I can metadata the hell out of something I can always go back later and re-organize or find whatever I need to find. The idea of dropping a photo on a map (a la Flickr's tools) and have it's location/city/state/country/etc data in the IPTC fields really excites me. Looking forward to seeing this when I'm back around a windows machine.
Microsoft Pro Photo Tools also allows photographers to use geotagging for their photos. Geotagging is the ability to "tag" something with location information - and in the case of photos the location of where your photo was taken. You can quickly add location data from a GPS device or Live Search Maps to a photo's metadata.
From LifeHacker comes a good list of Superior Alternatives to Crappy Windows Software.
Nice, AVG, the best (I've found) free anti-virus program out there has announced that AVG Antivirus 8.0 is now available in a free edition.
Buddy pointed me to the uTorrent 1.8 beta thread. Looks like lots of goodies including an encryption protocol to get around that pesky ISP filtering of P2P packets.
The Official Google Blog says they have A whole new world to explore. Google Earth 4.3 was released last night with a bunch of new features, including better 3D buildings, a sunrise mode, integrated street view, and various other goodies.
The 3D buildings are not all as good as Microsoft's Virtual Earth, which, while I'm no MS fan, I have to say their 3D cities are much more complete than Google Earth. GE 4.3 closes this gap somewhat. Of the two cities I quickly explored Seattle had only a few photo-realistic buildings, and lots of grey boxes, but San Francisco was f-n gorgeous. I'm sure there are other areas. See the link for downloads and more details.
Via slashdot is the softpedia First Look: The GIMP 2.5.0 - Introduces cool new features and redesigned interface!
Unfortunately some of the article is a bit thin.... IE: the new GEGL interface I'm sure is awesome, but what is GEGL again? Ah, some sort of generic graphical library.... Some new tool improvements are cool, but I don't see a "redesigned interface", or at least not radically so. The Gimp layout and "odd" window interface (which is pretty easy to get used to truth be told) still looks like it's there.
Anyway, it's great to see development continuing, much as I have turned into a Photoshop-guy, the GIMP definitely has it's place and is definitely needed to be out there!
Computer-Darkroom has a nice and fairly comprehensive look at the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 Public Beta. Lots of yummy screenshots!
VMWare just announced their Workstation 6.5 Beta Program. The short news:
Adobe Labs - Adobe Lightroom 2.0 Beta. Can't say more, must.... download.... now....!!!
Some highlights are:
* Localized corrections -- Enhance specific areas of an image for unsurpassed nondestructive flexibility and control reminiscent of the traditional darkroom dodge and burn experience.
* Improved organizational tools -- Find the images you need quickly and easily.
* Multiple monitor support -- Add an additional monitor to efficiently manage photographic workflow and presentation.
* Flexible print package functionality -- Create custom layouts containing multiple sizes of a photograph on a single page.
* 64-bit support -- Lightroom 2.0 now takes advantage of the latest hardware architectures with improved memory handling and performance.
Full release notes here (pdf). Can't wait to play with this!
Slashdot pointed to OpenOffice.org 3.0's new features, an early look. Highlights - some visual improvements, notes in margin (looks cool), office 2007 compatibility (wonder if MS opening up the API documentation helped with this), charts and tables improvements, and more.
Timothy Armes Photography has released a plugin for Lightroom called LR/Enfuse, a lightroom plugin for the Enfuse program, which is HDR (kinda).
Aperture 2 was released earlier today, and Fraser Speirs has his Aperture 2 First Impressions. I downloaded and played with it a bit, and wasn't all that impressed... course, Aperture is pretty foreign to me as I've been a lightroom guy for a while (due to the cross platformness and my lack of a Mac till recently). The list of improvements is impressive though. Check the article for more details.
XXCLONE, A New Way of Cloning the Windows System Disk is a bit old (2007-02 was the last update) but it promises a fast and easy disk clone (with lots of extras) for windows.
Opera Mobile 9.5 was announced over at Opera Watch... lots of funky new stuff, speed improvements, widgets, etc, etc. A preview will be available Feb 11.
VentureCake has some OpenOffice 3.0 details that make it sound like a very sexy beast of a program. Well, hopefully not too much of a beast... OO.o is still a bit heavyweight for me sometimes :) Not scheduled till September though, so still lots of time to wait (and play with alphas and betas).
Note for myself.... TestDisk appears to be a good winner for doing computer partition recovery.
Along with the previous note about NetNewswire being free, I see that the Windows RSS reader from NewsGator (though I knew it long before it was bought) is also a free download. Wonder what the NewsGator plan is? Right now syncing accounts with the NewsGator service is free... maybe they are seeing erosion by Google Reader and friends? NNW and FD do have the advantage of easy offline operation, which Google Reader does have with Google Gears, but (from my experience) this isn't as slick as a desktop app caching pages to the computer.
Oh, FeedDemon also has the "Panic Button" which is something I could use a lot (detects when you have lots of unread feeds).
Very cool to see NewsGator doing this though.
A cool interview by scoble on Fav.or.it RSS reader. Anyone got an invite they can throw my way? I love my google reader, but this does look pretty cool....
Picasa Web Export Plugin for Lightroom... nifty stuff, hoping for a Facebook and Flickr exporter as well!
An Easy Web-Based IDE for iPhones is called "Jiggy", which looks... well.... supercool, even for someone such as myself who has put no thought into iPhone development (outside of using it as a user). Check out the video in the link for the niftyness.
Jon Patch of the great Vancouver+ and Victoria+ addon packs points that FSX SP2 is available for download.
Lifehacker has an app I've been searching for... the MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter. (From this list of 20 iPod utils.)
Google Maps has released a new update for it's mobile application which uses Cell towers to figure out your location instead of relying on GPS... very cool, and it works on my blackberry for work! Great way to not have to zoom into wherever you are from a view of the entire world! :)
Darren pointed out that PuTTY just got a big update. New icon, tray icon, url hyperlinking, transparency, optional portability, reconnect on wakeup from stand-by are just a few of them. Go get it!
The Google Reader blog has notes on some improvements on my favorite RSS reader. Recommendations and drag-and-drop are the two big new features, one interesting, one useful. Looking forward to see how they are all working!
I downloaded the latest episode of something today only to find it wasn't (apparently) playable without a spyware laden POS software. Luckily I found a blog with good info on a Domplayer 3Wplayer Fix that fixes this. Hopefully others who have been bitten by this will find this (or the linked blog) to get around it. Then send a nuke to the domplayer headquarters, okthanksbai.
Darren pointed me to the Engaget early look at the Android SDK. I had originally ignored this story because I figured it was just saying that the SDK was available. However the screenshots and videos look very cool (and somewhat iPhone like for the full screen device). TIght integration with google apps of course, IM, Maps, etc. The second phone demoed looks very iPhone like, though it's a bit confusing if it's a touch screen or button controlled. The demo shows the user touching and moving pages and globes with a finger, but looking at the web browsing almost looks like it's done with button nav.
Course, it's all an SDK demo anyway..... :)
Looks very cool though!
Interesting... forgetfoo points to the first Firefox3 Beta. I'm adventourous so I'll install it and see how it is. I'm looking forward to see if the new "visual refresh" is in there.
Update: No visual refresh, basically first glance is that it's pretty much the same as firefox2. I'll wait until something more drastic happens.
Update: Not an official beta.
Engaget has the Leopard vs. Vista: feature chart showdown. Some interesting stuff in there, and some (of course) stuff that's subject to your own interpretation.
Now that GIMP 2.4 is out the GIMP 2.4 Release Notes have some nice demos and screenshots of the new functionality and features.
Yay, Gmail gets IMAP. Apparently it'll be rolling out in to everyone in the next few days.
Found a "How I Learned to Love Testing" presentation via RailsEnvy. Interesting talk, rails focused, but easy enough to bring the philosophy to perl, java, .net, etc etc etc. It's a 30 minute .mov BTW.
Demonoid Aftermath: An Open Letter to the CRIA.
The record labels cry about downloading cutting into the profits of the sales of albums. They put out “greatest hits” albums by 20-year olds with 2 or 3 albums under their belts, released with one new track to try and sucker the fans that already have both albums into spending another $20 for one new song, or re-releasing a 3-month old album with a “previously unreleased bonus track”. Then they can’t understand why people aren’t buying them, and cry foul that people are downloading the one new song instead.
An Aperture User Looks At Adobe Lightroom is an interesting look at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom from the point of view of an Apple Aperture user. I've never used Aperture (it's Mac only) and am quite a dedicated Lightroom user for my photo organizing need. Some of the points noted are fairly "getting used to" based. I'm personally used to some of the UI bitches he has, but everyone will have their own interpretation.
Noted deficiencies are ability to upload to flickr (meh) and lack of dual monitor support (agreed).
Definitely a good look and review though.
Remember the content aware image resizing thing that I linked to a while back? Happy happy joy joy, here's the Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin which implements this technology in The GIMP on both Linux and Windows. Wh00t! Can't wait to check it out.
Steven Hodson talks about why he'd use a bloated email client. Xobni certainly does look interesting.... check it out. They have a blog as well....
Anyone got any invites? :)
How to extract songs off your iPod using iTunes. Though it probably won't work with the latest gen of players.
Another great article from Joel on Software on the death of GMail. Basically he looks at the current state of webapps, and how things are looking a bit like they were with the "write once, run anywhere" portable C programming language and the even more run-anywhere-y Java with javascript and CSS. The suckage of developing for the 4+ major browsers for webapps is looking a lot like having to develop your app for the 80286, 80386, powerPC and RISC chipsets... (sounds a bit like my own rant about the various states of support that IE has :)
Best quote from it:
You could six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Microsoft selling Office 2007 Ultimate for $60 (for students) via Forever Geek. If you go to the site it says it's only for students, which means:
You must hold a valid email address at a U.S. educational institution ending in .edu (for example, leina@contoso.univeristy.edu) AND be actively enrolled with at least 0.5 course load. Also, you must be able to provide proof of enrollment status (ie, student card) upon request by Microsoft. If you are unable to provide proof of enrollment, you will be required to pay the full retail price of Office Ultimate 2007 (approximate ERP $679USD).
$700 USD for an office suite!?!?!?!?! Holy crap!
LiveSlick.com has a half decent list of the Top 10 Freeware Software Nobody Knows About. I've heard of some of them, but others(like imgburn) I haven't heard of and would make a nice addition to the list of software I "need" on a windows install.
Via my buddy Fozbaca comes DisplayFusion, windows software that appears to make life with dual monitors, especially disproportionately sized dual monitors, much, much easier (for wallpaper anyway). Will have to test this when I get to work tomorrow.
Yay! They finally added it! The Official Google Reader Blog has the details of the new search box in The Google Reader. Wh00t!
Opera 9.5 alpha is out. That is all. Download and enjoy.
Update: Sadly a no-go for me... you can't click to change your status on Facebook :(
For the photographers out there, looks like there is a Capture One 4 beta out. Also some good videos displaying the new user interface and some of the new features.
Cybernet news has a look at Opera 9.5 Features. Opera is a very cool browser, don't get me wrong, but right now it just doesn't give me anything right now that Firefox doesn't give me, though some of it's features (like keyboard navigation with the 1, 2, x and z keys is very cool).
The new Opera 9.5 alpha will be available to the public tomorrow apparently, so everyone can have a look at it.
Suprnova.org – The Universal Bittorrent Source, is back. I'm not sure if it's as relevant today as it was Back In The Day(tm), with the advent of the age of TPB, Torrentz, mininova, etc, but it is nice to see it back. Torrentfreak has an article on what is old and what is new.
Content Aware Image Resizing is a super slick and super cool technology which allows you to resize images in a (duh) content aware way, allowing you to expand or contract an image not by simply throwing away columns of pixels, but by figuring out which parts of the image are more or less important, and then inserting or removing averages. It's kinda hard to explain, the video shows it really well though.
Darren let me know this morning that Movable Type 4.0 was released. Lots of new stuff. I played a bit with one of the betas and it had some nice stuff in there. Might be finally time to update the UFies.org install to something a bit more modern.
Lifehacker has a good list of Power replacements for built-in Windows utilities. Most I think I knew about, but there are a few others I didn't. Also nice to know that some of my choices for replacement apps are the same as other peoples :)
Andrew writes up a bit about Version control that doesn’t make your eyes bleed, in this case, the bzr system.
Techdo brings a good look at a Preview of the User Interface for Firefox 3. I'm looking forward to a version that's in beta that I can give a whirl.
Chris Pirillo pointed out some software from BananaSecurity which uses a webcam to recognize your face, lock your computer when you're not there, and unlock it only when it recognizes your face again. Obviously there are some questions about this, like what if I'm wearing a hat, what if it's darker/lighter, how secure is the lock it puts on your computer, and what if I want to use the webcam? Course, it still interest me greatly as the laptop that work got for me has a built in webcam on it...
Wired points that a firefox 3 beta should be coming really soon.
The final alpha of Firefox 3 was released to developers today. After this Mozilla’s roadmap calls for the release of beta 1 on July 31st which will be the first feature complete version of the next generation Firefox browser.
Congrats to Jon Patch for the release of Vancouver +for FSX, of which I am a proud beta tester, and was very impressed with the rendering(s) of my hometown(s).
An apple weblog pointed to a new GUI subversion client called Versions. Unfortunately it's in a private beta at the moment, but sign up and maybe you'll get a chance to check it out (if you're on a mac of course).
Mark Phippard talks about one of the new features in Subversion 1.5, merge tracking, which allow you to: "Record and use merge history to avoid the repeated merge problem and allow for cherry-picking."
Bryce 5.5 is available as a free download for those happy fun people who like 3D modeling.
So this one is pretty specific... if you use lightroom and want to find out what your most used focal length(s) are, this post on schussman.com has some perl + RRDTool magic to create a graph from your LR library file.
Craig discovered what he describes as Windows Vista Media Center Killer App. Glad that MCE has finally caught up with MythTV in 2003 :)
Just kidding guys, glad you can realize the power of setting up your soaps to record from work!
Perfect timing for a flame war.... here's Laptop Magazine's article on Mac OS X Tiger vs. Windows Vista. Of course, in a week this will be almost out of date with the new OS/X release that's expected at WWDC. Of course as with everything, this is completely subjective... Vista's advances with it's pictures folder will mean nothing to say, pro photogs (who will use something like Lightroom or Aperture anyway), while to mom and dad wanting to organize snapshots, it might count for a lot. Gamers will probably still pass OS/X by due to the far greater availability of games on Windows (course, based on the benchmarks I've seen they'll pass by Vista for XP as well). However, it's an interesting view of 10 separate areas of each OS compared against each other.
One item I do disagree with is the networking discussion. My experience with Vista has been that copying and moving files around, even on the local system, but especially copying files to and from a fileserver (maybe this is MS trying to mess with Samba setups?) is d-o-g s-l-o-w. Unreasonably so. I'm pretty sure you don't need 10-20 seconds of "calculating time remaining" to copy a 100kb file from one folder to another. Also setting a folder to be shared seems to take forever as well... over a minute on a dual core 2.4 G machine.... f*king unacceptable IMHO. That said, I haven't had a mac for years and don't recall how their network setup is compared to the new "network and sharing center". I do remember things generally "just working" though.
Another item I disagree with is backups.... backing up a few files online with .mac is fine, but in this day and age of mass media, having a disk based backup is a huge advantage. That said, I haven't actually used Vista's backup, and would probably go with a 3rd party solution (trueimage or ghost or the like) anyway. Having online backup only isn't a winning position IMHO (assuming that OS/X only has .Mac as a solution of course).
Flame on!
Darren (again) pointed me to the Movable Type 4 Beta that was released. It's got some nice features, a new interface, supporting OpenID, a dashboard overview, etc. Eric has only this to say about it, and while I'm not that uninterested, I'm not hugely excited. One thing that was a nice little feature was the ability to reply to a post from within the admin UI. Since generally a blog owner will be replying to other people, this makes far more sense to me.
I threw MT 4 on a test server and imported my current blog into it to play a bit. The UI is nice and new, but a bit slow in parts, and there are a bunch of perl errors that are thrown out doing fairly simple and one would assume, well tested, operations (ie: approving a comment).
I'm going to keep my eye on this, but probably won't get too involved until beta2 comes out at least.
This is interesting..... Lifehacker points to how to Speed up file copying with TeraCopy. I never thought you'd need a special program for file copying, but I guess when you're copying large media files around (I moved 60G of data from one disk to another the other day.... took over an hour with Vista), it might come in handy.
The software optimizes buffer settings to do fancy things.... now if only windows/linux/whatever would/could do that natively! Well, assuming it actually does anything of course :)
Inside Lightroom has details of Adobe Photoshop Camera RAW 4.1 and the next update of Lightroom. Sounds like some nice little enhancements coming for the photogs around. Some other details and links can be found here.
Nice list of 20 Free Applications to Increase Your Productivity via lifehack.org.
Upside-Down-Ternet has some great recipes for screwing with people stealing your wireless (or anyone else for that matter!)
For all you photo buffs out there, LightZone released version 3.0.. looks funky and cool, I'll be checking this out tonight when I get home.
This is cool... I use Lightroom for my photography organization and asset management, and have wondered if it'd be possible to give it a view on the web. Well, nothing for Lightroom yet, but PHPture does just this for Aperture (sadly still Mac only). Looks pretty cool. Anyone know if anyone is working on this for Lightroom?
I heard about AutoRate: iTunes rating done right and wish I had a mac to run it on. Basically it lets you auto-rate (imagine that) your iTunes library and bases it on play frequency, skips and a funky formula. It avoids the need to rate things by hand and is apparently pretty accurate.
Anyone got a spare mac for me? :)
Nice article Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi? which explores some of the misconceptions about the much beloved Vim and some of the cool stuff you can do with it.
Lifehack.org has 15 Coolest Firefox Tricks Ever. Some that I've never seen before, like shift-space will pageup!
Ars has a Pidgin 2.0 review online. Pidgin (how the heck do you pronounce that?) is the newly rebranded version of GAIM, which had to change it's name for legal reasons (AOL are bastards apparently). This is a multi-im client a-la Trillian, except it's cross platform.
Ars Technica has a very nice review of Adobe Photoshop CS3 complete with lots of screeshots and example movies.
Wow, Firestorm looks mucho cool. Well integrated bittorrent support in Firefox. Doesn't appear to be released yet though :(
If you're interested in the latest release of photoshop, you'll probably find this a pdf of what's new from Martin Evening enlightening. It's 21 pages with lots of screenshots and images with lots of great info.
According to PopPhoto Photoshop CS3 Now Available.
Adobe has shipped the new regular and Extended versions of its Photoshop CS3 image-editing software.
Very cool download for Win, Linux and Mac is Packet Garden, which captures your network traffic and then grows a virtual world based on that. Wonder what your world looks like after visiting alt.binaries.hot.naked.sheep.pics? Hmm...
Very cool little hack for OS/X, Sticky Windows allows you to (go figure) stick your windows to the sides of the screen for easy access. Not 100% sure why this is easier / better than using the dock, but hey, it's a neat idea for sure.
O'Reilly Digital Media blog has a good look at Photoshop Bridge in CS3 from dekebytes. Wait a minute, I didn't think that CS3 had been released yet? What's going on?
Found via a scoble show are the labs at thirteen23, which have some cool .net 3.0 and/or Vista apps which do various interesting things.
Postfix 2.4.0 stable release released. Features include:
Evolution, the Open Source Mail client is now available for windows.
Evolution features virtual folders, advanced filtering, spam filtering, security, calendar, todo list and contact management, Exchange support, signing mail with S/MIME / GPG / PGP, and syncing with palm pilots.
This should be very exciting for people who are stuck having to use Exchange / Outlook (through either choice or decree from The Bo$$tm) and are looking for an alternative to some of the less-than-perfectness that is MS Outlook.
A quick test here shows it's far from perfect. Default window layouts are odd (you have to turn on status bars, sidebars, and toolbars), and it took a bit of finagelling to just get to my exchange mail, which then wouldn't load. A bit disappointing, but there is definate promise there, and there's still a decent pop/imap client there. Anyone else played with Exchange with this new Evolution?
Saw a note (via digg) about an article on Linux MCE. Uhmm.... Why hasn't someone told me about this? Where did it come from? Auto-dims your lights (if you have a home automation system of course), can send a control application to bluetooth mobile phones, turns on your TV and receiver and sets the right inputs? Scans all networked computers for shared media? Cover-flow like browsing? Where the hell did this come from?
And is it free? Huh? Really? From Linuxmce.com:
LinuxMCE is a free, open source add-on to Ubuntu including a 10' UI, complete whole-house media solution with pvr + distributed media, and the most advanced smarthome solution available. It is stable, easy to use, and requires no knowledge of Linux and only basic computer skills.
The video is a bit smarmy in it's comparison of LinuxMCE to Windows MCE though, something that the Linux Community has to work on. However, if the features they advertise work as... uhm.... advertised. I've had discussions with a buddy of mine on MythTV vs Windows MCE and MCE definately came out on top. I use MythTV and prefer it, but it's setup vs WinMCE make it far more usable to normal people (and even geeks). However, if LinuxMCE (which integrates MythTV) this works like they say, I'll be replacing my MythTV Box with this ASAP.
Anyone else know about this of have any experience in it?
Oh, and LinuxMCE also integrates Asterisk (the free phone system), provides network boot to easily put up other LinuxMCE systems in the home, and it seems like the list goes on and on...
Sorry for the rambling, but this is really exciting!
Update: OK, a bit more digging through the website has enlightened me a bit more. LinuxMCE is a project where the software is given away for free, but the commercial side of it is selling you consulting and a $1,000-$7,000 setup with varying levels complete home automation. So basically you can put it together yourself, get the right hardware, get the right bluetooth module yourself, etc etc, or pay someone to give you an out of the box plug and play solution. Looks like the software given away is 100% complete though, so if you can set it up and get the right hardware, you can make it work as advertised. I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like you might need two computers, a "core" and a "orbiter", where the latter is a non-hard drive, network boot device only that is what is connected to your AV equipment and is controlled by the core. Maybe, I'm not sure exactly if the "hybrid" setup is everything on one computer or everything on two...
The project is a fork of pluto home apparently.
Lifehacker has a niced list of the Top 10 Greasemonkey scripts to improve your productivity. Some good stuff in there, especially number 10, a feature I'd love to see moved to all email clients :)
Nice (and quick) wrap up of the Top 10 best Linux DVD ripping and encoding software.
Photo / graphics geeks take note.... PopPhoto has confirmed that Adobe Adobe has Confirmed March 27 CS3 Release.
Nice collection of Analytics packages on the Cheap for web devs.
In my continued quest to flood UFies with Lightroom stories, I bring you the review from Ars which is a nice in depth look at the software, including a comparison with Aperture. Until I have a mac I'm sort of stuck with Lightroom (not that that's a bad thing).
The Lightroom Blog was the first one I saw to break where to download the trial version of Lightroom: Lightroom that is available. Wh00t!
Cool article on How much control should our users have? Hehee.... "canyon of pain". A nice relation (with pretty graphs) to demonstrate the cost/payoff of things from iMovie to hotel faucets.
Slashdot reports that a NASA World Wind 1.4 Released With Trailer. World Wide Wind is a application similar to Google Earth, but it's fully free and have different goals to GE. Also includes the ability to explore the moon, mars, jupiter and venus. Some sexy new effects and addons, check out the what's new page for full details.
Found this one on LifeHacker.... a nifty portable app for your ipod (works fine on a USB key though) called DemocraKey.
Imagine carrying a portable security suite with you wherever you go. Walk up to any computer, quickly scan it for viruses, and then defeat any internet access blocks to view any website you want anonymously. It’s here, and the DemocraKey 2.0 Lite let’s you have it on your iPod.
Lifehacker has a nice article on how to get good with Google Reader. Some nice stuff there that I didn't know about (hint: hit 'g' then 'u' then type in the feed name you want to find). Wh00t!
First of all a new site for lightroom news has appeared and it comes to you with a nice list of changes in Adobe Lightroom from Beta 4.1 to version 1.0. Lightroom is an Aperture-like professional photo management software solution from Adobe (released to the wild on Feb 19th).
If you are a student and interested in photography, you'll qualify for the super-super discounted price of $95.95 in the Photoshop Lightroom student pricing page.
After many months of beta, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 has been released into the wild for a fairly reasonable price (assuming performance issues from beta4 have been fixed) of $199. Or maybe it'll be released Feb 19... one of the two :)
A short list of changes from here are:
Another page with some details is here.
Paint.NET, a free graphics program written in .NET has been released. Here's the Paint.NET - Roadmap and Change Log. I'm actually a big fan of this program. When it first came out I basically said "meh", and since then I've changed my mind. My original complaint was that it was a really lame version of photoshop, with funky (but useless) transparency resulting in basically a glorified Microsoft Paint.
However, MS Paint is far too lame to do some things, and Photoshop is far too big and complicated for simple tasks. For what I do at work most of the time (taking screenshots, minor editing, cropping, etc) this program works just fine. It also updates itself nicely and is fairly fast. I'm sure that there are other alternatives out there, but this one is free and decent. Hey, the default save format is PNG, which out to tell you something :) (well, if you're geeky anyway). Maybe someday Microsoft will replace the aging MS Paint with something like this in it's Windows releases.
Oh, and there's a mono port in progress, which means that this could be a contender to replace (or augment) The GIMP for graphics work on Linux. Honestly I think that the functionality of Paint.NET is pretty close to the GIMP (from the user perspective anyway, it has layers and effects and whatnot) and it's a more familiar environment UI wise.
Darren threw me a link to Humanized.com, a company who has a product called "Enso", which claims to deal with the fiddly little things that you are always having to do without getting in the way of your productivity.
It's a bit like quicksilver. You select something, hit a hotkey (capslock), type what you want to do (calculate, upper case, open, google, etc etc (not having to type everything of course)) and it does it. Looks like it's got a lot of potential as far as helping people work with their computers in a more logical way.... ie: you just tell it what you want to do (ie: upper case) instead of going to the right click -> properties -> characters -> upper case, or hitting a menu option, etc. Extensible with python (in the future) for doing potentially any interesting things.
They have two products currently, a launcher for $24.95 and a universal spellcheck and dictionary for $39.95.
Interesting screen shot comparison of Mythtv vs windows. Mostly they look the same, one is easy to install, one has more features and works on lowerend hardware. Depends on your level of geekness I suppose.
For those interested in what's been released recently in the Microsoft and Apple worlds, well, I can give you a bit of half of that. The keynote from CES is here. I am only about 10 minutes in and can't say I have heard anything yet, lots of "blah blah digital decade blah blah" so far. Dana's Blog has a note on how he's switching to Windows Home Server.
Anyone got any other info from Microsoft at the CES show?
On the Apple side, well, their keynote is tomorrow, January 9th, so we'll have to wait until then. As to what's coming from them? Well, the rumor mill has been going crazy lately, everything from something HDTV related (dimensions of the graphic on the Apple main page has a 16:9 ratio), the much talked about iPhone, the much waited for (by me) full screen video iPod, the release of iTV, and the thought that maybe Apple will trump MS by releasing the new Leopard. For the rumor mill going full steam hit macrumors or thinksecret.
More updates on the apple stuff tomorrow.
Update: If you are interested in the windows home server stuff, I'm told you should watch the on10 video, as the one at the microsoft site blanks out at the good part with a note about "intellectual property". Grrr.... stupid stupid stupid.
This is more for me for later, but it looks like this guy has already figured out the solution to an issue I have with my router, and has documented all about bittorrent and the Linksys WRT54GL Router.
Oh, and happy new year everyone!
Someone discovered Ask X, a new web 2.0ish interface for Ask.com. Looks ok, the one interesting thing in there is the 'add to my stuff' button that appears when you mouseover search results. Haven't seen where to recover these though, potentially very useful feature though. Oh, and it suddenly decided that my browser wasn't new enough, or didn't have the settings it needed, even though I just completed a couple of test searches.
Oh well, it is still a testbed. Interesting to see what comes of it, and if it has any chance of gaining ground against google. I have a feeling not though, simply because of the google mindshare. I'm probably more interested in seeing google integrate some of the nice touches that ask.com has put in the new interface, which is a bad thought I know!
Well Adobe Labs has the new Photoshop CS3 Beta available for download. If you don't have a valid CS2 key you get two days with it.
I've played briefly with it and saw some new stuff.
Dr. Brown has some CS3 video tutorials online for your watching pleasure as well.
DPReview confirms that there will be a Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta tomorrow. You'll need CS2 or the beta expires in 2 days. Adobe claims that CS3 is "packed with new features"... interesting to see what's new.
Cerulean Studios (makers of trillian) are now taking alpha signups for their next gen client that I wrote about a few days ago.
Trillian Astra is the next gen version of my favorite multi-im client. Notable improvements involve a whole new UI (not sure if I'll trade it as I like the minimalistic look), integration into all sorts of "social software", spotlight search, performance improvements, easy guest login, and much else. Check out the feature tour after the movie. Wonder if there's a way to get in on the Beta testing?
Joel of Joel on Software has a good read on choices = headaches as he examines the new Vista shutdown options which give you 9 different menu options to choose from as you walk away from your computer. He also goes into how choices suck and actually restrict you more (ie: notice how in the open source world there are probably 50 different distros out there, and only maybe 5 of them are "real" choices; and while there are probably 10 different window manager / desktop environments, you really only ever choose between GNOME and KDE). I also like how he takes those 9 choices for shutdown and manages to combine them down to.... well, I'll let you read the article yourself.
Sean Mccormack has some details of Lightroom: Beta 5 which he saw demoed at Photo Plus Expo in New York. Among the gems in there are a spot healing brush, abillity to apply spot healing to other photos with the same pattern, and having real time display of how printing/printers would affect a given image.
If you're a Folding @ Home user, you may want to check out this review of the GPU client. Long story short, doing the calculations in your graphics card's processor looks to be way more efficient (though a bit more power hungry).
The downside? Only the ATI Radeon X1900 is supported :(
The boys over at Songbirdsnest have released Songbird 0.2 onto the world. This is not the 0.02 release from last month.... nope, we dropped a whole zero! Songbird is a Firefox based music player/library/everything. From their page:
"It’s like taking iTunes, ripping out the music store, and replacing it with the rest of the internet."
Speaking of the iTunes store, if the GNOME Music player Banshee has a plugin to allow you to access the iTunes music store, I'm sure that can be plugged into this app.
One thing that I'd like to know is can I sync podcasts to an iPod (or other music player) with it? I presume something like that will show up before release though, this is version 0.2 only of course. As far as the idea it's pretty cool, scraping for media, etc etc. Anyone using this yet?
This is kinda cool, the Songbird Media Player, an XUL/Firefox based itunes/windows media player/rhythmbox/everything clone has released version 0.02. This version actually runs and doesn't crash as soon as it starts! Nice interface as far as integrating web other web services. Only used it quickly, but will play with it more tonight.
I wonder if this is possibly the new open source, cross platform media player to compete with everything else...
One of the nice new features of yesterday's released iTunes is the ability to backup your music to CD/DVD. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has the detail. Nice it just backs up the directory structure too, not some funky apple-format.
Any potential 3D modellers can download Bryce 5.0 for free until Sept 6. They are getting ready to release a new version I believe, so you just need to sign up for a free account to get a serial number. Pretty cool stuff.
I know I rag on Microsoft, and Windows security, but at least there are those out there doing something about it. My ex-boss, ex-coworker and good friend Dana has just released version 1.1 of Firewall Dashboard. New features include:
There is a good review of the latest iteration of Windows Media Player (version 11) over at Paul Thurrott's site. Looks a lot cleaner than the abomination that was version 9 and 10, I'll give this an install later today and see if it's usable.
I might be the last person to hear/talk about this, but I've found that the spam blocking plugin built into Movable Type 3.2 has been sucking lately. This morning I got about 100 blackjack spams, which confused me because I figured after I marked the first 50 as Junk, the system would be smart enough to know. Guess the new system isn't that smart. Anyway, I recently found the Wordpress Akismet spam blocker is available for MT. Seems to work very well. You need a wordpress account to get an API key, other than that though, there's nothing you see in the interface other than a huge lack of spam comments/trackbacks.
<sarcasm>I can understand that you have to reboot when you upgrade your mp3 player, but not your web browser.... </sarcasm>
Huge thanks to Jari and Mika, the authors.
And another link. Hey, why not another. I wonder if anyone can guess what I'm trying to do right now :)
Another hint for issues I've had. Now to find out how to do it with a remote tomcat.
