The reason they were not initially featured here on MakeUseOf is due to the fact that they don’t offer free products – they cost $49 per year, and typically we only review free products. I did test all the products and was very impressed, so I was glad to see this announcement a few days ago:

We’ve listened to your requests for free products and today we are releasing several free applications that will enhance your desktop:

• Free Video Converter – new application for converting and basic editing of home videos, also included in Extensions for Windows as a new update.
• Free Screen Capturer – new application based on our Screen Capture Extension.
• Free Disk Usage Analyzer – new application based on our Disk Analyzer Extension.
• Free Extended Task Manager – new application based on our Extended Task Manager Extension.

Please visit our updated Products page and enjoy!

The Screen Capturer, Disk Usage Analyzer and Extended Task Manager were previously only included amongst the subscription products, so I was surprised to see these released for free – especially considering I found them to be my favourite three extensions of the lot!

The Task Manager is great, and provides a significantly enhanced UI over the Windows XP Task manager and even over the improved Windows Vista version.

The New Video Converter tools are also very impressive, in fact it’s one of the best free video media converter tools I’ve found – it’s simple, looks great and is very functional. It’s also got a great implementation of the ‘Office Ribbon’, which makes this one of the few applications I’ve seen in the wild to do so.

The Disk Analyzer is also great for working out exactly where all the space on your computer is being taken up. Sometimes it’s a little slow during the analyses, but that’s a minor quibble. For alternative, see our previous article on Visualize your Hard Drive Usage with WinDirStat.

For users tired of Windows simple print-screen button the Screen Capturer is a great little tool with a whole lot of useful features.

If you like any of these tools then we have 10 FREE subscriptions for a year to all of Extensoft products. All you have to do is post a comment below telling us the ONE feature you feel Windows is most missing (Make Use Of employees and anyone connected to Make Use Of employees ineligible).

Enjoy!

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By using Flock you get stacks of features built right into the browser while retaining speed, performance and security which could potentially be compromised when installing so many extensions in Firefox. So jump in for my Flock review.

Cross-Platform

Like Firefox, Flock is compatible across all three major platforms, Mac, Windows and Linux, which is great considering the number of students who use other platforms instead of Windows.

Social Networking

I’m going to assume just about every student is on either Facebook, MySpace or both, so the inclusion of them into the browser certainly makes life easier.

As well as these two, there are 20 other supported services which you can see these in the image below:

One glaring omission is Windows Live which has around 300 million users worldwide compared to Gmail’s 20 – 30 million. Considering the huge Windows Live update happening right now I would assume the Flock team is working on including all of this new functionality.

Blogging

Plenty of students have blogs and Flock is perhaps the best browser for making blogging easier – it includes a decent blogging editor and support for several blogging services such as Blogger, Wordpress.com, Blogsome, Xanga and LiveJournal as well as self-hosted Wordpress blogs.

Research

Now most students are required to do a fair amount of research and study and Flock is the perfect browser to do this.

Flock has a built in feature called the Web Clipboard which really is Flock’s most understated tool. This clipboard takes the form of a sidebar onto which you can drag just about anything, links, text and images for later.

What’s so great about it is that unlike favourites which require sorting and organizing, using the Clipboard just requires the dumping of a whole stack of information while you research a topic.

There is one additional extension which I would recommend most of all and that is Zotero, the research extension for Firefox. All Firefox extensions usually work fine in Flock so you’ll have no problems there.

Zotero is fantastic for collecting a huge stack of online resources together for more careful reading and analysis later. I barely scrape the surface of its functionality in my own usage, but basically you can save webpages quickly for later (offline if you need it) reading. You can tag keywords, take notes and use various other ways of organization.

Also coming soon is Zotero sync for transferring notes between computers, a great addition to the tool.

Search Easier

Tell me, just how often do you Google something just to go straight to the Wikipedia entry? This extension modifies the Google search page so the most relevant Wikipedia result is shown along with search results.

WorldCat is a web service which can be used to locate books and journals in the nearest library to you. Add it to your browser from here.

Flock also includes instant results searching for many search engines like Yahoo, Google and Technorati. As you type in your search query the results are brought up instantly below the search box. I find it one of Flock’s handiest features.

This is what I use as my student browser, do any of you know of any other great research extensions?

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For me personally it’s Songbird. Over the last year I’ve been taking a real interest in watching the progress of the open source media player. I’ll admit I have not been using it as my main music management software recently ever since I bought a Zune, however I’ve still been testing and playing around with it as each new version is released.

Songbird launches today as a non-beta, version 1.0 release following 2 years of development. The significance of this launch should become apparent with time, but I think it’s safe to say this is an important milestone in the development and innovation of desktop media players and hopefully Songbird will gain the same community support Firefox did.

The Vision for Songbird

Rob mentioned the vision for Songbird briefly in his interview with us a few months back; “what happens when a desktop media player is connected to the Web is an unexplored and intriguing opportunity. Songbird re-architects the traditional desktop media player to go there. Songbird is an open, customizable desktop media player that is built to play the Web.”

Given that Songbird is open source, available across all three operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) and has been translated into over 60 languages this vision looks more like a reality every day.

However, visions and arguments for openness and ubiquity have rarely made much difference to what users actually use so the real test of Songbird will be what mainstream users think of the software and if they adopt it which only time can tell.

Performance

Performance and stability has been an issue for Songbird throughout much of the development – however it’s also to be expected considering it was being released as alpha software. The last few releases however have seen dramatic improvements in both areas – so much so that the experience of testing Songbird 1.0 feels almost like a new media player entirely.

Songbird has always been lightweight but for the first time however it actually feels lightweight. If you’ve come from using Media Player or iTunes especially than the experience will be a huge improvement. If you’ve been a longtime Songbird user than you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Customizability and Features

What I love most about Songbird is the ability to only include functionality that you actually need. Software development often follows a cycle in which a new development will quickly gain popularity for being lightweight and innovative. Users like it, but than demand all kinds of new features. This ‘feature creep’ eventually results in a product much like the software it was designed to replace – slower, bloated and loaded with features many users don’t need.

This is what I feel is happening to Firefox – the point of Firefox was always in creating an open, extendable platform which could be extended by developers, however now Mozilla seems to be also caught up in a features race with Microsoft and Google and what was once Firefox’s greatest strength – stability and performance – is failing behind. Since Firefox 3 I’ve got sick of the browser’s memory usage, random freezes and frequent freezes.

Songbird will hopefully avoid that and this can be seen by the difference in how features are introduced. The Songbird team develops extensions alongside the main Songbird client and these are what introduces new features to the media player. If you don’t want them you don’t install them – simple as that.

Some examples include support for various file types, media players, the popular MashTape extension, LastFm scrobbling and media views are developed by the Songbird team and made available from the addons website.

Incidentally the way the Mashtape extension aggregates data from various different sources really is fantastic, check it out in the screenshot below:

Add-Ons

Since extensions are such a huge part of Songbird you would hope this launch includes a number of addons to choose from.

There are over 70 community provided addons for everything from skins to media views to browser extensions. It’s not a huge number but it’s a significant start to what will hopefully grow into a strong community. Songbird is built upon the Mozilla codebase which it shares with Firefox so for many Firefox developers conversion of extensions should not be too difficult a process and may perhaps encourage them to do so.

To conclude – this is a great release and I would very much recommend it to anyone to use as their main media player. To be honest, I can’t think of the last time I reviewed a major product and really felt like the developers had totally nailed everything they needed to.

• Performance: fixed
• Stability: fixed
• features: provided by the community
• minor UI issues: fixed
• web integration: great.

I actually like to provide balanced reviews – point out the negatives and compromises however this time I really can’t. That alone is probably the best thing I can say about this product.

Download it now.

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To those of you with a feed addiction, it may come as some surprise to learn that RSS adoption is still surprisingly low across web users– even those who spend a lot of time on the internet. Most people are unaware of the technology or if they are – even less interested. A lot of people simply prefer email subscriptions and depending on the target audience of a blog this can be nearly equal with RSS subscribers. Even here on MakeUseOf, a substantial number of our subscribers are using email for updates.

There are hundreds of interesting ways in which RSS feeds can be put to use. Yahoo Pipes is one great example and this is something I’d like to write about in more detail at a later time. For now however I’d like to introduce you to PostRank.

What is it exactly?

“PostRank is a scoring system developed by AideRSS to rank any kind of online content, such as RSS feed items, blog posts, articles, or news stories. PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found an item or category to be. Examples of engagement include writing a blog post in response to someone else, bookmarking an article, leaving a comment on a blog, or clicking a link to read a news item.”

The 5 ‘C’s are used to determine the popularity of any particular post, I’ll leave you to check it out for yourself if you wish to find out more detail, but in essence this criteria includes the following:

• The creation of a blog post responding directly to another blog post. This is the biggest determinate of a post’s popularity.
• Commenting on a blog post – the second most important measure of audience engagement and the quality of the article.
• Discussion – this involves mentioning a post on other social networking services like Twitter.
• Sharing – submitting a site to Digg, or bookmarking it using a service like Del.icio.us
• User activity on the page – clicks and page views, not given too much weight in PostRank.

Using this system, blog posts can be run through PostRank to determine just how popular (and therefore how good) the posts are. In the example mentioned above, this is how NewsGator implemented PostRank.  When viewing one of your feeds online, you can choose to change the view to show only the most popular items – a useful feature for when in a rush.

Why Would You Want it?

For me the biggest issue I have is finding time to read all the feeds I subscribe to. While personal blogs may only get updated once a day, large multi-author blogs (like one particular blog you may be aware of) are updated much more frequently while other sites focusing on news will be updated constantly 24/7.

With this constant flow of information it’s become increasingly necessary to have the ability to filter out articles which are not of interest to you, and instead simply read the articles which are.

This is where PostRank comes in.

What’s great about this is that no matter what RSS reader you use, be it web based like Google Reader or a desktop application like FeedDemon you can still use PostRank to filter your feeds.

PostRank is both an online RSS reader, service and also an API which developers can choose to include in their applications if they wish. One notable online service which have done is this is Newsgator Online a few months ago.

How Else Can I Use It?

To use PostRank on any feed simply submit it to the PostRank website.  I’ve shown an example in the screenshot below.

If this is a fairly popular feed you’ve submitted then it’ll already be in the system.  If it’s a bit more obscure than you may have to wait a day or so for it to be fully submitted (I’m actually only guessing, I have no real idea how long it takes. Perhaps someone else knows?). In my own experience any feed I wanted to use was already submitted so I’ve had no issues.

After this you can choose what to do with the feed.  You can select from 4 different rankings:

• All Posts
• Good Posts
• Great Posts
• Best Posts

You can also filter the feed by any keywords you want.

After doing this, if you decide you would like to use this feed in your own RSS application then simply click the ‘create new feed’ button. Using this feed you can simply import it into whatever application you already use and replace the feed which may be overwhelming you slightly.

If you decide to create a PostRank account then you can use the site as your web based feed reader.  You can save submitted feeds and change them as you like. If you don’t want to sign up then if you want to make any changes to the feed you’ve created you’ll have to start over again – although it’s not really that inconvenient.

Hopefully some of you can find this useful, I know I did.  Has anyone else already been using it in this way?   You may also want to check out Mark’s previous article on using PostRank and AideRSS in Google Reader.

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As you may be aware, Windows 7 build 6801 was handed out to 8000 PDC (Professional Developers Conference) attendees.  A few days later I got hold of a copy myself.

I’m going to assume that for you the main issues you have with Vista are the following:

• Performance (both perceived and real)
• User Account Control (UAC)
• Bloat and bundled software

Well I can say that all three have been the main focus for the Windows 7 development team and all have received substantial changes and improvements.

Performance

The big one. With updated drivers, Windows Vista performance is actually equal or better than Windows XP regardless of what you hear.  However Microsoft wanted to do a lot better than that with Windows 7.

I’m finding startup times (from turning the computer on until you get to the login screen) is improved but only by a few seconds over Vista.  From the login screen to a usable desktop however is hugely improved, down from around 30-40 seconds to closer to 10 seconds. Shutdown time is similarly reduced, two thirds faster by my estimates.

RAM usage is down slightly, but this doesn’t necessarily indicate any differences in performance. In general the desktops seems slightly more responsive than Vista, although that could also be from other factors such as Windows gadgets not loading up from the first login.

Battery performance is substantially improved as well, in fact my notebook has gone from squeezing one and half hours from Windows Vista on power saver to nearly 3 hours using Windows 7. That’s a huge improvement and Windows 7 running on power saver is also much faster and more responsive than Windows Vista.

User Account Control

UAC never particularly bothered me much, except for when I was trying to delete things and UAC denied access to me, even if I was the administrator.

In Windows 7 the major changes involve UAC prompts no longer graying out the desktop, no longer appearing for basic system tasks like changing the time and date and generally only popping up during software installations.

It’s a huge improvement and one everyone will be happy with. Also included as you can see in the following screenshot is a slider control for no UAC prompts, or even more for extra security.

Bloat and Bundled Software

You may have heard that Windows 7 is going some of the way towards removing the ‘bloat’ which is present in Windows Vista. Well, in many ways this isn’t true. Windows 7 comes with nearly as much as Windows Vista does, perhaps more considering the number of new features.

I personally don’t have a problem with Microsoft bundled software because I actually use just about all of it, however I can see why some people would have a problem.

What Windows 7 does do is remove some of the duplicate functionality which was present in Vista such as between Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Live Photo Gallery. Instead now we just have Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center and you can choose if you want to download Windows Live Photo Gallery or not.

What is interesting is that Windows Explorer is now almost as good an organizer of media as the dedicated programs themselves.  Perhaps this is the way Microsoft is headed? I know they have announced their intention of bringing the concept of an OS back to just the platform between the hardware and the software and this is a way in which Microsoft could achieve this while still retaining many of the same features and functions.

In particular the new displays of music within Windows Explorer is fantastic.  You’ll never have to worry about folder hierarchies again for your music collection.  Using the meta-data, Explorer can display the files as Artist > Album > Song which is great for instant organization.

Anyway I hope this was interesting as a preview of the upcoming release of Windows 7.  You should be able to download a public beta within a few months.   In the meantime, let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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To recap, Digsby is a messaging application which lets you talk to people on all of the major instant messaging networks such as MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Gtalk and even Facebook Chat. More than that it also lets you connect up email accounts and social networks accounts including Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It also supports customization, skinning and even synchronizes your account details and Digsby skins between computers.

Steve Shapiro is the project manager for Digsby and he took the time to answer a few questions concerning this project:

Tell us about the ‘Digsby’ logo/mascot…

We wanted something that was a mascot and not just a logo so that it would “be Digsby” – we felt this would be a good way to brand it as a consumer friendly product. Another important aspect of it was that it needed to look good as a 16×16 or 32×32 icon since it is used on the desktop and in the tray.

How many people do you have working on this project? Is this purely a hobby project or do you hope eventually Digsby will provide some kind of revenue stream?

Digsby is developed by a company so we do need to pay the rent and keep the lights on.

What about this project aren’t you currently happy with? Is any part of the application frustrating you feature-wise?

We would love to finish stabilizing the Windows build so we can release for Mac and Linux!  We’ve had tons of requests.

What Instant Messaging application did you use before Digsby?

I used AIM 5.9 + Gtalk.

What is your personal favourite feature?

The email integration.  It’s nice not to have to keep checking my inbox through out the day.  If I get an email that’s important I can open it right from there.   If it’s spam, I can mark it appropriately without ever going to my inbox.

I’m interested to hear your comments on the whole ‘perpetual beta’ a lot of companies have going on these days. Are you working towards an actual version 1.0 release, or is Digsby going to do a Google for the next few years?

It’s a little more complex than that.  There will never really be a 1.0 or a 2.0 but it will also not stay in beta for years.  We adopted a development cycle that is more typical of a website than a software product. A software product typically releases version 1.0 and then there is a massive effort to release 2.0. You need to then convince people to start using 2.0 because it is better while also providing support for 1.0.

With a website, every time you visit the site you see the newest version.  Digsby auto-updates each time you run it so you are always running the latest release. We release new versions almost every week.  Check out http://changelog.digsby.com.  Once it is a bit more stable we will remove the alpha or beta tag that we put at the end of each release but the fast release cycle will remain unchanged so there won’t be a version 1.0 and version 2.0…..just constant builds that keep making Digsby better and better.

Any hints you’d like to share about something big which is yet to come?

Mac + Linux releases!

What do you think of Digsby becoming the ‘Firefox’ of instant-messaging applications?

We have seen that tag line in many reviews and are honored by it.  Firefox is a great browser and being put on the same level makes us smile and encourages us to push even harder to improve Digsby.

Do you have any opinions you would care to share on the latest Windows Live Messenger?

It’s a great IM client in my opinion.

So thanks to Steve.

If you haven’t tried Digsby out yet then I would very much recommend it!

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As of the Zune 3.0 update however the Zune has become a fantastic product, enough so that I actually went and bought one myself, a 120 gigabyte Zune I ordered from America and got sent here to Australia. The whole thing has seriously impressed me and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the product for anyone looking to replace their MP3 player.

What I want to talk about in this article however is just the computer software and why, even if you don’t own a Zune, it’s still worth using as a media player for your music.

Before I do however I would suggest that if you are not a US citizen, you download the International Zune Hack for the software. This will allow you to access all the features and sign up for Zune Social using your Live ID.

Interface

The Zune software often flies under the radar compared to rival Apple’s iTunes and it’s a shame because it’s one of Microsoft’s most impressive offerings and stands out from just about every media software I’ve previously used.

It looks great, functions great and performs decently. I would stress however that this software isn’t for meta-data geeks, of anyone who likes to fully customise every aspect of their listening habits and library. However it does provide a great experience as long as you don’t expect it to function in the same way as other media software.

Music Visualisations and ‘Now Playing’

Maybe I speak for myself here, but for years I never saw the point of visualisations. What exactly were they for? If I have my media player up on the screen it’s because I’m browsing my music library, not staring at the pretty shapes and colours while a song plays.

Anyway perhaps with this in mind the Zune 3.0 update provides a great way to show visualisations, down at the bottom of the main screen as you can see from the screenshot. To really appreciate it you’ll have to download and try it for yourself, it looks great trust me.

The ‘Now Playing’ screen is even better, rather than just a larger version of the visualisation seen above there is a full screen display of ever-changing album covers which looks fantastic. In fact when I’m not using the computer for anything else I often just leave it up while my music plays.

It gets even better though.

If you’re connected to an internet connection and you have the ‘Now Playing’ screen up than you’ll get a new kind of display for many popular artists which will look like the following displaying pictures, text and animations related to the band:

MixView

This new feature is designed to help you get involved in the Zune Social, discover new bands and find out more information concerning bands you already know.

Podcasts

Before getting my Zune, podcasts never really interested me, but the Zune software provides an easy way to subscribe so I got into listening to them. In the Marketplace you can find hundreds of podcasts with more being added all the time, although sometimes it can take a long time to get a podcast submitted and accepted.

These are just a few of the features of the Zune software. I would definitely recommend downloading it and giving it a try. There is so much I haven’t mentioned here. Do you use it and if so, what do you like about it?

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A lot of high-end software companies provide extremely good value packages for students often involving completely free giveaway editions, stripped-down versions or huge discounts on the off-the-shelf price.

Maybe you hate Microsoft for charging so much for its operating system, but at least it also has plenty of great free software giveaways (such as Windows Live). This year it has released two great deals, one for students only and the other for anyone else interested in getting into software or web development:

Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions

The Visual Studio Express editions are feature-limited but not in a way that will affect most beginners just wanting to try out development themselves. The Express editions are available for anyone to download and include four main applications, the two main stand-outs being;

Visual Basic 2008 Express

If you’ve ever wanted to have a go at learning how to develop your own Windows applications then this is the best place to start. 2008 Express includes the capabilities to create applications using the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft provides plenty of free guides, tutorials, samples and extra resources.

Visual Web Developer 2008 Express

Visual Web Developer is for the design and creation of web pages and more. 2008 Express includes a lot more support and tools for using CSS, building JavaScript applications and more complex data-driven web sites.

It’s great for learning for the same reasons described above, you’ll find plenty of tutorials and assistance.

The Express editions also includes Visual C# 2008 and Visual C++ 2008 for more.

DreamSpark

DreamSpark is restricted to students currently attending a university or academic institute which has been accredited and signed up for this program. The number of universities is actually pretty comprehensive and I would guess most universities around the world have actually joined up.

You’ll have to use the student number and password you should have received from your university. Verification is simple and instant before you can download for free any of Microsoft’s software for designers and developers. These aren’t trial or feature limited in anyway and are the exact tools you can buy off the shelf for hundreds of dollars:

Visual Basic 2008 Professional Edition

Provides the features missing from the Express edition. Create software for Windows, the web and devices running Windows Mobile. You can also create applications with then new Office 2007 Ribbon UI or create addins for the Office applications like Word and Outlook.

This file is downloaded as an ISO file which you’ll need to burn to a DVD before installing. Or if you have a mount program to mount ISO files that should be fine as well.

Expression Studio 2

Expression Studio is Microsoft’s set of products designed to compete with Adobe’s developer and designer software such as Dreamweaver and PhotoShop. This installation is 500MB and includes:

I’m still only trying these products out for myself so I can’t really give you a honest opinion at this point. For the price of free though there is little to complain about. Incidentally the Expression 2 applications were all re-written in WPF. An interesting point although I’m not sure what advantage this gives, perhaps someone can help me?

XNA Game Studio 2

The strength of this application is that it enables developers to easily create games for both Windows and Xbox 360 which have support for the Windows Live and Xbox Live respective multiplayer gaming networks. This application is for hobbyists and independent developers, for fun or profit.

The student download also includes a 12 month trial subscription to XNA Creaters Club which would normally be $100 per year. You won’t get access to premium content though. Seriously, what’s with these stingy companies these days?

If you try these tools you’ll discover the software alone isn’t the best part of this, but the community, the extra resources, free assistance and tutorials and sample code and templates which will go a long way to helping people who are teaching themselves.

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Since then I’ve been following the development of Songbird with a great deal of interest and was excited when Songbird 0.7 was released a few weeks ago.

This release introduced a great new UI, more features and significant performance improvements, all very welcome additions.

With Songbird on track and cranking up the pace for a version 1 release by December I decided to contact the Songbird team for an interview about their project. Rob Lord is the founder and CEO of Songbird and took the time to answer these questions about Songbird:

Perhaps you’d like to describe the team behind Songbird. I believe a number of you have been involved in previous media projects?

Hi Laurence, thanks for the interview. Yes, our Pioneers of the Inevitable team includes key developers from media players including Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Jukebox.

What do you think about development in other media players? With 4 main choices for consumers (iTunes, WMP, Media Monkey and Winamp) and each with a pretty unique market, things seem to have slowed down in the last couple of years. Apple only releases a new version of iTunes when they have a new product to peddle and Microsoft with their newest OS.

Our perspective is that the traditional desktop media player feature list is complete, thus there has been little innovation in desktop media players for years. However, what happens when a desktop media player is connected to the Web is an unexplored and intriguing opportunity. Songbird re-architects the traditional desktop media player to go there. Songbird is an open, customizable desktop media player that is built to play the Web.

Songbird has an incredible amount of potential. Have you been getting much interest or support from significant online companies such as Amazon? Without an iTunes/iPod lock yet still supporting them I would assume companies would be jumping on an opportunity like Songbird =)

Songbird has attracted a lot of attention from consumer electronics companies, especially handset makers, and media retailers/service providers. We’ll be making announcements as the partnerships are ready to launch.

We hear everyday from device makers that they want to focus on their devices. We hear everyday from digital media retailers, subscription, radio, video, recommendation, locker and other service providers that they want to focus on their services. Yet everybody – users, developers, device makers and service providers – wants those devices and services to work together with software. But only Apple offers a credible integrated service + software + device experience. Songbird is the solution for all those who benefit from open, customizable media player software. Songbird is the open solution for service + software + device integration.

That said, Songbird isn’t yet ready for everyone. If a user needs full feature parity with traditional desktop media players or has never installed a Firefox add-on, Songbird isn’t ready for them yet.

Songbird is based on Mozilla and not Firefox itself as I initially assumed. Can you explain what this means? Do improvements in Firefox, such as FF3 and 3.1 become part of Songbird? Does the Songbird team work with the Firefox team?

Songbird, like Firefox, is built from the Mozilla platform. So, yes, new Firefox features and enhancements are inherited by Songbird. Also our team provides testing, fixes and patches back to Mozilla.

What’s the best song you’ve ever discovered through Songbird?

So much to choose from! A Ratatat remix from the Gorilla vs. Bear music blog comes to mind.

What feature do you miss the most personally when using Songbird? CD ripping and burning?

CD Rip/Burn isn’t an issue for me because I ripped my CD collection years ago. I’m 99% pure digital now. Key for me is support for my iPhone 3G so I can leave my older iPod behind. FYI, CD Rip/Burn is on our roadmap.

What Media Software did you use before Songbird?

Winamp was for many including me the seminal MP3 player. Winamp was first to go big in the 90s with skins, plug-ins, EQ, visualizations, etc. and its community responded with thousands of extensions – the kind of vital community we see supporting Firefox today. In the last five years, I found myself recommending iTunes to others for its relative simplicity — and found myself using it for the solid service + software + device integration.

The approach for Songbird is almost a ‘make-your-own’ media player, even more so than Firefox is as a browser. By that I mean the Songbird Media player includes only the most basic functions and almost all new features, device support and codecs are all added via extensions. It’s a great idea as users can avoid having any features they’ll never use (such as iPod support when they don’t have an iPod), however will the most popular extensions eventually become part of Songbird, or are you keeping the system like it is?

You nailed our thinking. Like Firefox, Songbird will offer a baseline of what ever media player user needs and then offer customization via add-ons to your specific media player preferences. We’re experimenting with including highly requested add-ons, such as Last.FM integration, in the first-run bundle.

Does using Songbird make you more attractive to the opposite sex?

Works for me and my lady. Try playing the Groove Salad channel via SHOUTcast for best results. YMMV. ; )

Tell us your five favourite extensions.

Hard to pick as there are over 250 Songbird add-ons currently – and they are all specialized features. We’re very grateful to all the individual Songbird add-on developers that have embraced Songbird and the Songbird community.

Rather than pick favorites, here are the add-ons with the widest appeal based on downloads:

Wikipedia – artist biography of the currently playing artist.
Mashtape – a mash-up of Flickr photo, YouTube vdeos, Last.FM bios of the currently playing artist.
MediaFlow – Like iTunes Coverflow, view you music library by flipping through album art.
Last.FM Cover Fetcher – retrieve album art from Last.FM for your music library.
Last.FM Recommendations – artist recommendations from Last.FM based on currently playing artist.

Songbird have also been cool enough to provide us with a Songbird T-shirt to give away! To win this just comment below and tell us the craziest place you’re going to wear it (When you get the shirt we expect a photo proving it – and we’ll publish it! So no bare bottoms please!)

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR : MUO employees are not eligible to enter! This one’s for the readers!

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On an unrelated note we’d like to share some tools for the purpose of ripping, converting, downloading and backing up videos.

Since we’re starting from scratch the first thing I suggest you download is a Windows codec pack. Codecs are necessary to play various different ‘digital streams’ (thank you Wikipedia for making me sound smarter) and files. Varun has alsom briefly covered it in his article about Playing Unplayable Videos on your PC.

When you start dealing with video you’ll soon discover there is an awful lot of them. With these packs however you should have no trouble playing any video or audio files you encounter or download:

Free Codec Packs

XP Codec Pack

XP Codec Pack is one of the most completed codec packs which helps you to play all major audio and video formats.

Vista Codec Pack

The installer will automatically remove most other popular codec releases from your computer before installing this concise yet comprehensive package. You won’t need to make any adjustments or tweaks to enjoy your media content immediately. Windows Media Player and Vista’s Media Center will instantly recognize all your files as playable.

Vista Codec Package does not contain a media player software and it will not associate filetypes.

Free DVD Ripping Program

Without a doubt the easiest and best DVD ripping software you’ll find for free is DVD Shrink. It’s been officially abandonware now since 2005 thanks to some copyright infringement accusations and DMCA takedown notices.

Actually that may not be completely true. I think the developers still hang around on the DVD shrink forums, but as far as further development goes they have released nothing more.

It says something for the quality of the original application that two and a half years after the final release it is still one of, if not THE, best DVD rippers.

You can get DVD Shrink from various mirror-sites, here is one link to Softpedia.

DVD Shrink removes copy-protection and regional codes, although on some newer DVDs I have been unable to rip them, perhaps due to new copy protection measures.

DVD is not a DVD re-authoring program, you’ll have to use other software for that. It does however work in conjunction with Nero burning suite if you use that. If you don’t have plans to reburn DVD’s to other DVD’s then I would suggest not splitting the audio and video files. You’ll find the option when you ‘backup’ a disk.

Any Video Converter

Perhaps an explanation isn’t really necessary for Any Video Converter, however I will recommend it.

Any Video Converter takes some of the frustration out of converting media. It’s not infallible but in my experience it’s worked pretty much every time I’ve needed to do something. It also gets a big plus for having an attractive usable interface which is functional and easy to learn.

You can convert video for essentially any popular media player (iPod, PSP, mobile phone) and also for sharing online with services like YouTube. You can see it gets a nice big button in the screenshot below:

uTorrent

uTorrent is now clearly the most popular torrent client. According to TorrentFreak Azurus was the most popular bittorrent software until 2007 when uTorrent took over.

uTorrent got to be the most popular client for being simple, very light on system resources and stable. For most people, me included, this is enough. I can’t think of any feature I require aside from simply downloading the file.

What codecs, converters and rippers do you prefer? These ones or others? Let us know in the comments!

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With the rise of the internet came the ability for everyone and anyone to self-publish. ‘Webcomics’ is a term that came to refer to any cartoon published on websites and archives.

While many conventional cartoons are also published on websites like Comics.com, Webcomics developed a unique and definable style which differentiates them from print media comics.

To give you a sample of some popular Webcomics I’ve chosen just 5 which are my favourites. Don’t get too worked up over me omitting your favourite comic, it was hard narrowing it down and there were quite a few more I would have liked to put in.

Dinosaur Comics

Dinosaur comics is a WebComic that has also made itself into print media and a selection of strips have even been published in book form.

The format consists of just one set of 6 panels which contain exactly the same art each day but are accompanied by a different series of dialogue.

The characters consequently remain consistent throughout the series; T-Rex, Utahraptor and Dromiceiomimus. Occasionally other characters will interact with T-Rex but only through dialogue and stay off panel.

A Softer World

It’s hard to ever truly explain a Softer World. It’s humorous, sometimes, even when you’re not sure why. It’s thought provoking, which isn’t always a good thing and often it’s just plain disturbing.

Every strip contains three panels displaying one photograph by Emily Horne and several captions by Joey Comeau. It’s released three times a week and one book of selected comics have been published.

On the Softer World website hover your cursor over each cartoon for an additional sentence which often provides the text what could be a 4th panel.

Garfield minus Garfield

Barely 6 months old Garfield minus Garfield is already gaining rapid popularity and success and has been featured in numerous publications such as Time and Rolling Stone.

“Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.”

In fact Garfield creator Jim Davis likes the idea so much he’s even publishing a book juxtapositioning the originals against the modified ones.

Garfield creator Jim Davis was intrigued by—and pleased with—the concept. “I think it’s an inspired thing to do,” Davis said. “I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.’ It would have been funnier.”

Possibly the first original idea to come out of Garfield for 20 years.

Gaping Void: Cartoons on the Back of Business Cards

I don’t really know if this is a ‘web-comic’ as such, it’s published on a website so that is good enough.

Hugh Macleod draws cartoons on the back of business cards and yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.

In recent times he seems to have branched out a lot more and does giant squiggly patterns to sell to New Yorkers to hang in their apartments. He also wrote an incredible article on “how to be creative” which is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read.

He posts his business card cartoons on his blog as well as his work in progress and his thoughts on technology and marketing in general.

ToothPaste for Dinner

A minimalist hand-drawn WebComic consisting of single self-contained panels which cover strange, ironic and surreal topics.

Do you know of any good webcomics that I have missed out that you would like to recommend? If so, post the URL in the comments and let us know why you like it! Or maybe you have your own webcomic you would like to show us?

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

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“RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.”

These ’special programs’ and ‘filtered displays’ consist of either:

• Browser feeds – using a web browser to keep track of website updates (all modern browsers contain this functionality such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari)
• A dedicated reader – These include Google Reader, FeedDemon and a host of others where you can read blog feeds as you do email. Some readers are online, others are desktop based.
• An online aggregator – Such as AllTop or TechMeme. This lets an algorithm find out the most popular stories for the day and saves you the trouble of scouring countless blogs.

Whether you’re already a feed addict or just interested in the whole thing, deciding upon who you’re going to use may take some thought.

Online Reader? Desktop reader?

It all comes down to personal preference really, but if you really don’t know what you would prefer then you no longer have to worry. A perfect solution exists which means you can get all possible RSS functionalities through just one set of free products:

NewsGator Technologies

NewsGator is a ’social computing’ company which develops widgets, enterprise intranets and social extranets. Essentially NewsGator is about facilitating communication between both employees and customers.

Initially NewsGator sold their RSS products and services but back at the start of this year developer Nick Bradbury made the decision to release NewsGator as a completely free service, potentially I guess to increase exposure to the rest of the NewsGator business.

Now when I say that this is the most complete set of RSS products available I really mean that. Just take at the complete list of products available:

(Toolbar | NewsFriends | Didja Hear!? | Desktop | FeedStation | Y! Messenger)

In fact the best way to demonstrate exactly how all this works together is with a flow chart:

As you can see, this is a incredibly diverse and featured set of products. You don’t have to be put off – there’s no way you’ll ever use all of these products together.

NewsGator Online

Start with NewsGator Online.

NewsGator Online is a web-based RSS Reader, similar to and main competitor of Google Reader.

On its own merit NewsGator Online would be hard pressed to compete with Google Reader as the sharing features are fairly basic when compared and I find the navigation a little clunky for an online service. It does have a decent Digg style ‘Recommended Stories’ homepage, but it’s too broad to be of interest to many users.

It’s a solid web-based service, but the real strength is in NewsGator Online being the ‘glue’ which holds all the various products and services together by synchronising feeds between different platforms, devices and applications quickly and efficiently.

Registering a free account gives you access to this service which you can start using immediately either from scratch or perhaps by importing feeds from another Feed Reader.

NewsGator Desktop

Now if you are going to use just the online RSS reader service there are a couple extra downloads which provide some useful tools and features. NewsGator Desktop does two main things:

• Provide notifications from the system tray as new items arrive in NewsGator Online
• Synchronise with Windows RSS feeds, works with Internet Explorer 7.

NewsGator Toolbar

Additionally the NewsGator Toolbar is a helpful addition as it will search for feeds on a page, find out who else is linking to this page and best of all; let you take a ‘clip’ of a static which doesn’t have a RSS feed for monitoring.

FeedDemon

If you prefer desktop applications to web-based services then you can use either FeedDemon for Windows or NetNewsWire for Mac OS, or both if that’s how you work.

Both provide fairly similar features and functions specially integrated into each platform.

FeedDemon 2.7 is perhaps the most fully featured desktop reader for Windows and presents feeds in either a familiar Outlook style interface or alternatively a Newspaper style, something developer Nick Bradbury recommends as the superior method.

Some standout features include the Panic Button which detects when you are overcome by unread feeds and offers to scan through, marking older items as ‘read’ and ‘Prefetching’ which automatically downloads items such as pictures, videos and links for offline reading. It also includes tabbed browsing and feed reports.

NewsGator Inbox

Perhaps best used in conjunction with a main desktop reader, NewsGator Inbox lets you keep watching your feeds at work, while looking like you are still working!

It looks like email and even acts like an email (you can forward posts along to other employees or friends), but it still synchronises with NewsGator Online. It includes most of the functionality of FeedDemon and NewsNetWire including podcast downloading, feed subscribing, clippings whilst having some unique features of its own such as integration with Windows Live Writer.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire 3.1 is an award winning Mac Reader. I haven’t used it myself being a Windows user, but based on its popularity and the reviews I’ve seen it sounds like a great application.

Some of the standouts seem to be the desktop integration between “Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, Growl [and] Twitterrific”, podcast synchronisation to iTunes and the attractive and functional UI.

Now that you have a desktop feed reader setup (or alternatively just the web reader) and synchronising with NewsGator Online, you can download some extra tools to further enhance your experience.

NewsGator Go!

NewsGator Go! is how you can access, read and manage all of your feeds from any mobile device either by simply going to http://m.newsgator.com on your phone’s browser and logging in, or by downloading the dedicated applications for Windows Mobile, Blackberry devices or Java enabled devices.

With NewsGator Go! you can also email feeds to friends and if you use Windows Mobile then you play video or audio enclosures.

Alternatively for the iPhone owners amongst you, NewsGator released this application recently. Again, I haven’t used it, so if any of you have, let us know in the comments how you’ve found it!

Some features described are “one-click access to view news items in Safari” and clipping capabilities which allows offline (or out of range) browsing of feeds.

This really is just a very brief overview of many of the NewsGator services and applications. I could spend just as much time on one alone. For anyone who moves between various devices, locations and platforms this really is the best solution you could find to managing all your feeds together for no cost at all!

There is so much I haven’t covered here, and even whilst going through these tools myself to research this article I discovered 10 times more additional tools, features and services then I knew about originally.

I couldn’t recommend this set of services more.

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

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“Starting this morning, more and more users started seeing prompts on their home pages inviting them to switch over and try out the new Facebook. We’re also really happy to say that anyone can try out the new site now by visiting http://www.new.facebook.com.”

I have to say I love the re-design. This isn’t just a new theme with a few rearrangements here and there. It’s a dramatic change from the old Facebook you knew. What’s also great is that while no new features have been introduced as of yet, everything has been so well integrated now that everything feels new again.

Frankly, I think it leaves other social networks in the dirt. I know Facebook has been the social network darling since the development platform was released last year but that hasn’t meant everyone loved it. Criticisms over the last year have covered everything from privacy concerns, the moving target that is the Facebook API, the “walled garden”, spam, the useless applications and the crowded and noisy Facebook profile pages.

Personally I was never a fan. I used Facebook on the very odd occasion because everyone else was on, but it actually annoyed me a lot and there was barely one application which seemed worthwhile to add. The original idea of Facebook, to communicate and share, seemed lost beneath all the rubbish coming from the applications.

Well, the last year has seen Facebook taking steps to change all this. Sure, if you’re not a convert already you probably never will be, but at least take a look at some of the new changes:

Clean and Simple:

One of Facebook’s distinguishing features used to always be the simplicity of design and the profile pages. It lost some of this with the introduction of new features like the once-maligned news feed and the application platform. Remember the profile pages stretching interminably down the page?

Well the re-design has gone someway to bringing back the simple Facebook. What you will find on the Profile pages are a dramatically changed Wall which now includes the mini-feed, the wall and status updates all together.

This occupies a far larger space but simplifies the profile page considerably.

Profile Pages:

Pages have been widened and Tabs now run across the top of the profile and provide quick and easy access to additional information, photo albums and applications.

The redesign also goes some way to making advertising more prominent and in-line with the profile and feed above the fold. It’s one more step towards turning Facebook into the advertising platform it was supposed to become, with its recent deal with Microsoft to integrate Live Search and Microsoft advertising into the network.

As I mentioned, the wall and mini-feed have been combined to create an area you can post and share just about anything. This includes photographs, links, posts and status updates. More then that you can also comment directly to anyone’s newsfeed.

Taking over the World!

Okay, maybe this isn’t a specified aim, but Facebook has been making it pretty clear they have no intention of pulling down the walled garden. Rather they would like everyone to spend as much time as possible within Facebook itself.

Facebook Chat is one more way to keep people inside Facebook for all their communication purposes. Incidentally there are now a few external chat clients which also uses Facebook Chat. These include Digsby and Pidgin .

The Facebook re-design has incorporated a suspiciously Twitter-like interface for writing status updates:

The addition of the two extra words “right now” do little to assuage this impression.

Not only that, but threaded conversations can occur thanks to commenting on the newsfeed, something TechCrunch referred to as the “FriendFeed-isation of Facebook” . Comments can in fact be placed on any of the items shared on Facebook including links, posts and photos.

Also, along the lines of FriendFeed and the 394 thousand other web aggregators, you can import your feeds from various social networking sites including del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg and Last fm.

Effectively these changes include the functionality of just about half of all Web 2.0 services I can think of.

Speed:

Facebook has a lot of aspirations, perhaps the most ambitious is to become the ‘online OS’, the ‘Windows’ of the internet. It’s actually been very successful so far, but one issue has always been speed and usability.

Facebook has done a lot to reduce the number of page views required to navigate the site. The news feeds were a major factor in this, but even more so has been the increasing use of Ajax across the site. You can see this in the many overlays and instant results rather then being taken to a new page.

I think this is a very good step for Facebook. In some ways it’s not great in the many external websites that may feel threatened by the introduction of features aimed at stealing visitors from themselves. However I guess this is the natural order of innovation and competition, although I’m not sure if I see Facebook as the next Google or Microsoft of the web.

What do you think about the changes and re-design?

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

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Well, as I said in my last browser review, I use both Opera and Flock about equally – for no real reason apart from my inability to choose one over the other. Basically I use Opera for the speed, and Flock for all the great features.

Flock contains what would literally take hundreds of extensions in Firefox, and pulls it off without a huge performance hit or lack of stability.

That said, Flock 2.0 is a beta product so it goes without saying that you can expect a few more issues then normal.

Tina introduced Flock (version 1.1) on Make Use Of a couple of months ago. Since then Flock has released version 1.2 and two betas for Flock 2.0 as well.

With growing popularity (over 4 million downloads) Flock has a business model similar to Firefox and gets income from Yahoo based on the number of Flock users per year and for having Yahoo search as the default Flock search engine.

Flock 1.2 introduced a number of new features and enhancements but I noticed at this point that Flock was beginning to suffer a bit from successive releases continually adding more functionality without addressing usability.

I stopped using Flock for a while, mainly because of this. Not long afterwards however Flock 2.0 beta was released and in this release the Flock team had concentrated on the performance, interface and usability of Flock rather then adding any more features.

This review covers everything you can expect to find in Flock 2. Flock is built on top of Firefox and so can take advantage of all the Firefox 3.0 performance improvements and innovations, some admittedly inspired by Flock itself.

Supported Services

The purpose of Flock has been to make web services part of the browsing experience, rather then just something you use your browser to access. Of course given the sheer number of web services, the decisions on which to include in Flock could be quite controversial.

According to Evan Hamilton the decision making process involves the popularity of a service, the ease in which it can be integrated, whether or not an API is supplied and how well it will fit into the browser’s direction and focus.

As of version 1.2 and 2.0 Flock includes these services in these categories:

Features:

All the features themselves have largely all been reviewed by Tina in her review so I won’t go there.

Some of the new usability changes and enhancements include a slight improvement to the people sidebar. Previously the increasing number of services was overflowing the sidebar and resizing it resulted in concealing or hiding these.

Flock 2.0 makes some changes so icons relocate and fit the sidebar size. It could still do with some improvement, but it’s a lot better then before. You can see the before and after shots below:

The bookmarks and favourites manager has also been greatly improved and I would say it is the best browser bookmarking system I have seen.

Both local bookmarks, browser history and online bookmarks are stored together and can be sorted and managed together as well. Additionally the Firefox ‘Awesome Bar’ is part of Flock and gives even easier access to favourites and history. If that isn’t enough for you then you can do pretty much the same thing from the search panel next to the address bar which undoubtedly inspired the awesome bar.

The Media Bar also got a revamp, but as I don’t particularly use that feature I won’t comment on that.

Performance:

Performance improvements for Firefox are well documented, but unfortunately just about all the comparisons of Firefox 3 I have seen are with Firefox running with no extensions.

Comparing Flock to Firefox is ridiculous just like I mentioned above, it would take hundreds of extensions to get the functionality of Flock with Firefox.

If you fire Flock up and check the memory footprint you may be surprised to see it is actually larger than Flock 1.2, just as Firefox 3 is larger then Firefox 2. Don’t be alarmed, the footprint is bigger but the overall memory management is significantly improved so memory usage shouldn’t increase with time.

With the great new performance and memory management of Firefox, all the previous Flock features and some great interface enhancements Flock 2 is a must-have download. That said, it might be worth waiting a few weeks as beta 2 for Flock 2 seems to be a little unstable, more so then beta 1 in my experience.

What do you think? Are you a Flock fan? Or can nothing tear you away from Firefox or Opera?

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

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If you have only very recently upgraded or bought a new computer then hopefully this list of essential downloads will be useful for you.

These are not suggested replacement applications, these are downloads to enhance and complement what already comes with Windows Vista.

1. Windows Live

Windows Vista comes with Windows Mail and Photo Gallery which are not bad, but I would suggest replacing these with the newer and updated Windows Live suite.

It’s not necessary to install and use all of these services and programs. Windows Live comes with 5 programs: Windows Live Mail, Photo Gallery, Writer, Messenger and Family Safety. You will get the option to choose which of these you want after downloading the Live installer.

Windows Live Mail will update Windows Mail and is a lot more stable and has more features such as support for Hotmail and Live email accounts.

Windows Live Photo Gallery upgrades Photo Gallery and has some great features like creating panoramic photos and uploading to Flickr. For a easy way to organise and share your photos I recommend updating to this.

Windows Live Messenger is a way you can keep in touch with your contacts through instant messaging. You can talk to both Windows Live and Yahoo contacts.

Family Safety: Only download this if you plan on controlling your children’s access to the computer and possibly restricting where they browse and monitor what they do. Vista also has some comprehensive parental controls which are useful for this purpose.

2. Vista Codec Pack

This download is guaranteed to save you no end of frustration.

Did you just try and play a DVD on your new Vista computer, and got nothing but the soundtrack? Or perhaps you tried to open a torrent file movie and couldn’t play it at all.

It’s annoying but very simple to fix. Just download the Vista Codec Pack and you should be able to play just about any video or audio file that you come across.

This isn’t a media player – it simply enables the media player you do have (Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center) to play just about any file or DVD.

3. Windows Search 4.0

When you got Vista it came with Windows Search 3.0 and this is the technology behind the start menu and the search panels in all the Explorer windows.

In case you didn’t know how Windows Search works then here is a Make Use Of article from a few weeks back on the subject. Essentially this update will make your computer search faster and give you more accurate results.

Take a look at the Windows Search Overview, or download it directly from the Microsoft download centre.

4. Windows SteadyState

Only very recently Microsoft released Windows Steady State for Vista and here on Make Use Of Karl covered it in detail a short while ago.

In brief, Steady State is an application that you can use to restore your computer back to the state it was in before you screwed it up. Particularly useful for anyone with kids who like to muck around on the computer and occasionally delete unimportant system files.

Install this and you’ll thank me later.

5. Download add ons for Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer actually does have a few add-ons which at least brings the browser up to a semi-comparable level with Firefox and other modern browsers.

Microsoft has actually made a page of 5 recommended add-ons of which I would say 3 of them really are worth downloading:

IE7Pro: If you are going to use Internet Explorer then this add-on is really a must have. It provides a lot of enhancements and features which really should have been included with IE7 by default.

LeechGet: A download manager which greatly enhances the built in manager and enables you to start, stop, pause and resume downloads.

RikReader: IE7 actually introduced a lot of people to RSS feeds, but as far as a feed manager goes it’s pretty inadequate. RikReader enhances the reader significantly.

6. Windows Gallery

Here is where you can find all kinds of extras to download and customize things like the Windows Sidebar and Live Messenger.

Gadgets are the main thing you can use to customize your desktop and sidebar and provide you with access to all kinds of web services and tools within quick and easy access. Microsoft has created some easy to follow guides for using and customizing the Windows Sidebar.

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Starting as a research project in 1994, Opera has been responsible for some world changing innovations (think tabbed browsing) and yet never seemed to achieve the kind of success it deserved.

But this isn’t a history lesson, it’s an article on a few of the killer features of Opera that keep me using it each day. I use Firefox and Flock pretty frequently as well, but Opera, as of version 9.5 has become my favourite.

This isn’t just a list of Opera features, these are what genuinely make life easier for me, and what makes me want to use Opera for my daily web browsing. So for example I haven’t included Mouse Gestures with this list. Why? Because even though it is much more productive, I haven’t yet got in the habit of using it.

1. The Interface

I’ve liked the Opera interface ever since they removed the pathetic banner ads and instead focused on creating a free browser to rival Firefox. If only they made this decision earlier, things may have been a little different.

Whatever the case, Opera 9.5 introduced what I think is a fantastic new interface and theme which is both attractive, useful and unique. My only complaint would be that the tab-bar colour is maybe slightly on the dark side, occasionally making it hard to locate tabs.

You can of course download more skins, and customize various toolbars and buttons yourself, but personally I haven’t bothered changing many default settings as it works fine for me and I think that this shows in the great design.

A new theme may seem cosmetic and hardly something to increase productivity, so I’ll just give you a quick example of how small things make such a big difference:

The left screenshot is a menu from Opera, the the right, from Firefox 3. I realise they don’t have the same functions, but the addition of the icons to the most used items in the Opera menu both breaks it up and makes it easier for the eye to find where an item is.

A ‘recycle bin’ has been added to the end of the tab bar and provides a list of recently closed tabs. Again, simple and useful. I find myself needing to use it all the time, and it’s a lot quicker then having look through the browsing history.>

2. Speed Dial

What can I say about Speed Dial?

It’s one of those things like tabbed browsing, so simple that you wonder why no one did it before, and yet so useful you would hate to be without it.

Also, chicks love it.

No seriously, Opera is a browser that seems to appeal more to women, and I’ve had discussions with a few people who back that up. In fact I would be really interested if any of you want to let me know in the comments wether or not you think this is true.

My theory is that the average female uses the internet for a mere handful of tasks… perhaps email, MSN, MySpace, FaceBook and a couple more sites. They couldn’t care less about what browser they use and are unlikely to ever feel the need for extensions like Firefox.

Speed Dial is just so simple, point, click, add: instant access… add that to the easy to use interface and page loading speed and you have a winner.

3. Bit-Torrent and Download Manager

Opera has a simple Bit-torrent manager as well as an enhanced Download manager, significantly better then you’ll find in either Internet Explorer 7 (With the IE Pro add-on) or Firefox 3.

The complaints have been the Bit-torrent manager is far too slow, and I agree it’s not a great client. However your satisfaction will depend on what kind of user you are. I use Bit-torrent but only occasionally and I’m more interested in reducing the number of applications running then having the best possible Bit-torrent software. I’m happy with having Opera torrent files and slowly downloading them. I’m in no rush.

4. Saved Sessions

Just close Opera safe in the knowledge you can come back later and resume where you left off. And yes, I know Firefox 3 has this now as well, but that doesn’t diminish its usefulness in Opera and I like it.

5. Mail Client

The Opera Mail Client is under-rated in my opinion as it really is quite useful, particularly with 9.5’s general update and improved Gmail integration.

As you know Gmail provides free Pop3 and SMTP access, which makes using Opera Mail all the more useful as you can use it either as an offline client like you’re used to, or as a way to access mail through SMTP and not have to reload the Gmail web interface whenever you use your email.

You can organise multiple accounts. However one thing I noticed is that emails can only be created in plain-text, no formatting, which I find I bit annoying.

To get the most out of this feature I suggest using it in conjunction with Opera Link, another feature which will synchronise your Opera profile across multiple locations including desktop versions and mobile devices.

6. Search, History and Indexing

I must admit to being surprised by the fuss some Firefox fans kicked up about the new “Awesome Bar” in Firefox 3.

Sure, I haven’t yet adjusted myself to taking advantage to all the possibilities offered by it, but when I first saw the new design and larger fonts it just made finding pages in my browsing history so much easier.

In contrast the Opera URL history now seems a little cramped, but it’s still pretty effective and if it had more spacing between results would be very similar to Firefox.

All pages you’ve visited are now indexed and you can search based on any word or subject you remember being vaguely associated with the page you visited.

Before you ask why I’ve left out some great Opera features just remember this is just what I personally find most useful, feel free to tell us what it is you like most about it.

And finally, before someone corrects me, I know Opera wasn’t the first browser to invent or implement tabbed browsing. Netcaptor introduced it way back in 1997, Opera was the browser which first brought it to public attention in 2001, and then sadly to mainstream usage through Mozilla Phoenix (early Firefox) in 2002.

So, that’s what I love about the Opera browser. What do YOU love about it? Let’s see if our tastes match.

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

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I vaguely remember trying Songbird years ago and soon gave up due to it being hopelessly slow and buggy, but considering it’s still only in alpha (0.6.2) I can understand.

After reading Mark’s article I was motivated to try it out again.

I discovered huge improvements and while there are still performance issues, its acceptable and usable and has a great default theme. Music libraries of 10,000 songs are now comfortably supported and development moves every bit closer to beta.

I like keeping my music organised and easy to navigate though, so up to now I have mainly been using Windows Media Player as my software of choice and Media Monkey for occasional song tagging. I know, I know… so Media Player sucks etc, etc, but I’ve always liked it and have kept using it over the years.

The best thing about Songbird is the community contributions, just like Firefox. A small but growing number of extensions and ‘feathers’ are available for download and provide many of the media player’s best features.

With iTunes rapidly becoming the dominant online music store, software like Songbird will become increasingly important to other music stores like Amazon and eMusic as it isn’t tied to just one store.

Here are what I think are a few of the best extensions currently available.

1. Details Pane

A great details sidebar which runs alongside the main interface and provides all the metadata associated with the song. Useful for displaying lyrics and other details typically missed by most media interfaces.

2. Minimise to Tray

One thing I like about Windows Media Player is the mini toolbar player which sits on the task bar. With Songbird you can instead use this add-on to minimise to the system tray like Media Monkey does. It clears up the task bar and still gives easy access to music playing functions.

Yes, Songbird does have a mini player mode already, But I find it annoying as it just sits on top of all your windows. It would be okay if it wasn’t so large.

3. Metrics Media

This is one of my favourite ones, a graphical representation of your music collection. Includes details like hard drive space, information on artists, genres and albums and the total number of tracks in the library, play length etc.

4. Album Art Manager

You can download and add album art through this extension which provides a separate interface to manage your music from. You can add more services to search and fetch art later on.

5. Media Flow

As Mark mentions in his review, Songbird has been created with a focus on competing with iTunes, and so takes many of the better iTune features and improves them or adds alternatives.

Media Flow replicates Cover Flow, and while I’ve never found it particularly useful myself, a lot of people seem to have. So if this is something you like about iTunes then here is how you can also get it in SongBird.

6. AdBlock Plus!

Yes, because Songbird is a web browser as well as Music Player I recommend you use Adblock. Music Sites are pretty bad for banner ads and popups so this will make your life a whole lot easier. One thing to note however, you cannot manually block ads as Songbird doesn’t have the Adblock context menu you may be used to in Firefox.

7. Now Playing List

I’ve actually got no idea as to why Songbird doesn’t have a Playlist bar as a default feature, not that it matters because it’s simple to use this add-on to achieve the same thing. It sits to the right of your screen and you can drag and drop songs on to create playlists or just listen to in a specific order.

8. Directory Browser

I find this one particularly useful as well. Directory browser means instead of navigating your library, you can have the actual folder in the sidebar and browse from there. I often find myself using Explorer when I’m fixing up my music, so having this kind of feature within the media player itself is great.

So if you like the look of any of these then maybe you should consider giving SongBird a try? If you already use it then I’d like to hear what your favourite extensions are. You might also wants to check out our recent poll on free music players.

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

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That is the claim of Xerobank, yet another group of software developers amongst the increasingly competitive world of web browsers. Firefox is now taking on close to 20% of the browsing market, Internet Explorer has 70% or so and Opera and Safari squabble over the rest.

XeroBank browser “is the most popular anonymous web browser in the world” according to the developers, and could be true. I’m Just not sure of too many other browsers competing in that space.

What does it do?

XeroBank uses two anonymity networks, Tor and XeroBank, to ensure completely anonymous browsing with secure and encrypted connections.

This anonymous browsing uses a technology called onion-routing which makes tracking a user next to impossible. Tor is available as a standalone download for computers, but it’s worth noting that it needs to be set up correctly to provide real anonymity, something XeroBank does automatically.

Onion routing encrypts messages and data in various layers and sends it through unpredictable paths routed between various servers. It’s not untraceable, but to do so someone would need the ability to monitor every router in the network, which would be next to impossible.

Portability

I wouldn’t personally be interested in using XeroBank on a regular basis as it’s lacking in normal browser features that most modern browsers like Firefox and Opera contains. The biggest advantage is that it can installed on portable devices like a thumb drive and used anywhere you may be worried about network restrictions.

For example using this browser should enable you to get around censoring issues on a campus network or anywhere with wireless access. All data produced by the browser is completely wiped upon removing the drive so it’s very secure.

XeroBank is developed for Windows and runs under Wine. It’s free and open source and came out of development of a portable, anonymous version of Firefox a couple of years ago.

Browzar

Of course you don’t have to be stuck with just one solution, Browzar is another anonymous browser (still in beta) based on the Internet Explorer engine. It’s pretty basic when compared to XeroBank and really just puts a few restrictions on IE to not gather cookies, auto-complete, web history or cache sites.

What tips do you have for keeping your privacy online, or getting around network restrictions?

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

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Read on to find out about some websites that give you the ability to monetize your clips.

MetaCafe

MetaCafe is a video sharing website which claims approximately 25 million unique viewers a month and over a million registered users. It isn’t a website like YouTube for hosting any dubious video that you want to upload, in Metacafe’s words the site hosts videos which are:

Short-form, an average of 90 seconds across the site

Entertaining, no personal or webcam videos here thank you

Audience-driven, Videos are voted upon and benefit from the community deciding which are good and which are not.

MetaCafe benefits you by providing a revenue sharing service in which you can monetize your videos. It’s not huge but for successful videos it’s not bad either. You can expect $5 for every 1000 views of your video, receivable after 20,000.

So no, this isn’t a way you can make money from that blurry footage you took last Christmas which was totally hilarious (you just had to be there!), but for beginner home directors it’s a way you can begin to gauge your skills and hopefully make a little money out of it. The community determines the good videos, the submitter gets paid.

Revver

It has an oh-so web 2.0 name, and a revenue sharing model of 50-50, split between number of views and ad clicks.

Videos are apparently paired with targeted ads and tracked across the web. The greatest feature of Revver is that videos posted here are tracked to Myspace, Facebook and any other major video sharing website (excluding YouTube I presume) and including WordPress support via a plugin.

They have some great widgets, developer tools and video hosting services, although that probably doesn’t interest you as much as the monetization. Payment isn’t clear cut like MetaCafe, but reports are that it’s actually fairly generous, some people reporting CPM (Costs Per Impression) of around $4.

However from this TechCrunch report things may not be so rosy with the site, but then again, TC do love Dead-Pooling people.

Crackle

For those who really want to hit the big time Crackle provides opportunities for the talented to get noticed by people who matter.

Run by Sony Pictures, Crackle is a multi-platform network which is aimed at exposing local talent and rewarding it with prizes such as meetings with studio executives. This site was new to me and having a look through it I found some very entertaining stuff.

Competitions involve things like uploading a short video explaining why you would want to date Brad Garrett (watch it). A 100mb limit is imposed on uploads so keep it short, but for reaching the non-YouTube crowd this site is a good bet.

Veoh

Veoh is yet another non revenue sharing video hosting site, but before you dismiss it as pointless compared to YouTube, Veoh has a couple of very good cards up its sleeve.

There are no size limits on video uploads, a feature that I don’t think any other video hosting site shares. For this reason videos can be much higher resolution and quality than the other sites, although going to extremes will only annoy users with lower connection speeds.

Veoh also has the feature of being able to automatically post your videos to YouTube, MySpace and Google Video (Yes I know, who uses Google Video these days?). So for less video restrictions and great playback tools Veoh is definitely an option, you’ll just have to work out your own way to monetize!

What tips do you have to monetize your videos online? Do you use any of these services? Fire away in the comments…

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

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I decided it was time to teach myself how to really use one of Vista’s best new features… Windows Search.

Yeah, I know… wow, exciting stuff. It’s not something I used to care about either. I remember whenever I heard Microsoft banging on about the gee-whiz search capabilities of Vista I really didn’t care as I was stuck in Win32/XP style navigation; of menus and forms and tabs. Why would I be interested in changing what was already working for me?

This year however I got to a point where the standard folder system just wasn’t working for me.I’m a university student and I’ve been keeping my files and folders organized pretty well, but after spending so much time constantly navigating through folder after sub-folder I finally got sick of it and I started looking for something more productive.

The strange thing is that it takes so little effort to get used to using the integrated Windows search, it just takes a bit of time spent re-adjusting old habits.

I hope this guide can help you to do just that as I will be covering how you can use utilize Windows Search. Part one involves setting Search up to function optimally, Part two involves how best to use the many capabilities of Search itself in your organisation.

1) Updating Search

The very first thing I recommend you do is download the new Windows Search 4.0 and update your system (this applies to XP as well).

With Vista there is no new features or changes to the User Interface but the Windows indexing technology will be working significantly faster. (If you are using XP then you will see a whole new search interface, and I would suggest you download this update if you haven’t already.)

After updating you can then modify the search options with the Indexing section of your Control Panel. The easiest way to access it is by simply typing ‘”Index” into the start menu.

2) Optimising the Index

Here is the place where you can change exactly what Search indexes and when it indexes. You can also rebuild it from scratch, something I would recommend every 2 – 3 months. Without this, old files that no longer exist will hang around in the index messing up your searches and slowing it down. You’ll find Windows Search 4.0 will rebuild your index much more rapidly then previous versions.

In the indexing options, ‘Advanced’ options will allow you to change what file types are included in the index. It’s a long list and a time consuming task to do properly, but I would recommend giving a quick skim through the list to see what may not be necessary.

For example Command and Conquer game campaign files were unnecessarily included in mine, as were text files which I knew I would never need to search for.

A good way to find what files you don’t need is to run a unspecific search and take a look at the results. Chances are you will see some kinds of files included which are fairly irrelevant and unnecessary, right-click these and take a look at the file types in the properties panel.

In the screenshot below you can see the problems with having an old index. Here are fragments of old files which have been deleted but are still included in the search. If you want to rebuild it quickly leave your computer running all night. Background indexing slows down or pauses with user activity so if you only have your computer on when you are using it then it will take a significantly longer period of time to complete a full index.

3) Changing Index Locations

In ‘Indexing Options’ you can also change the areas of the hard drive which you want indexed.

The modify button takes you to the options, but you will have to reveal ‘all locations’ in order to get a complete overview such as I have in the screenshot here.

I would suggest excluding certain areas of the hard drive from indexing. For example I have no need for all the System32 files to be included.

It’s up to you how you want Search to work, but I suggest you optimise it to suit just the files you will always be wanting to call up quickly. If you do need to search for other rarely needed files or system folders the Search will still find them, just a little slower.

4) Changing the Default Windows Search

If you have Vista SP1 then it’s now optional to use Windows search as the default indexing service. You can change it to any third-party indexing technology such as Google Desktop.

Setting it as the default is now as simple as opening up the “Default Programs” panel then associating the search protocol with the third-party service you want. You will also need to set this program as the default.

I hope this helps you get the most accurate search results as quickly as possible. Some of it’s pretty basic I know, but in part two I will be going through how to search using filters, saved searches and virtual folders which will make your organisation a whole lot easier.

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

Windows Search 4.0 Image © Microsoft 2008

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If you’ve ever played Risk, the classic take-over-the-world board game then you will know its no fun playing with less then three people, or even setting up to play at all. So I decided to have a bit of a look for a good – and free – game of Risk on the Internet.

After sorting through a couple of pages of Google searches wanting us to buy the official PC version of Risk I came across some nice unofficial alternatives for you to play.

Here, for your enjoyment, are the best free Risk games:

The Facebook application

At last this may truly be it… a Facebook application that is not either completely pointless or annoys the hell out of me. Attack! is similar to Risk and can be played against your friends or anyone else who has the application (2% of Facebook users apparently). Just be aware, no matter how good you think you are… everyone else is better!

Java Risk

When you visit the download site this game sure may not look pretty and you may even think it not worth downloading at all. However the actual game is fairly decent. There are a large range of options and player AI, and even a number of extra maps to download when you get bored of the original.

Luckily too, Java Risk doesn’t seem to have gone the way of most small developer games and still gets the odd update. The last one was only a month or so ago and provided an installer for Vista.

Conquest

If you want a nice simple and easy game of Risk then Conquest is a good choice. Unfortunately the AI is very predictable and can be counted on to make the exact same moves and strategies again and again.

What this game is especially suited for is Pocket PC’s and you can download a version designed just for that right here.

Play online with LandGrab

This is maybe the best online Risk game I’ve seen. After registering for an account you can start playing. If you particularly like it then you can also purchase a premium account.

DominateGame

is another good Risk game which you can play either on your desktop or in your browser. The desktop version is free but unfortunately you will have to pay if you wish to play online. For 25 Euros a year I don’t really think it’s worth it so just play for free on your desktop!

Also see Top 5 Addictive and Challenging Online Games.

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He has begun his blog: Not Waving But Drowning.

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Shankar has previously discussed this subject but the latest Windows Live Writer code drop has been released as a technical preview and so I think it’s as good a time as any to go through a few more of the things you do with Writer and describing the changes in this build.

Live Dev stated that “this release is largely about updates to the Writer SDK” but once you load it up and have a bit of a poke around you’ll find quite a number of subtle new features and UI changes. Here is a rundown and a guide to making the best use of them as you can:

Word Count

Yep. This is a bonza one.

In the previous Live Writer getting a word count required a plugin. That was still pretty simple, but more involved then it had to be (such as, select all text> insert> word count).

Now its been added into Writer itself and you can simply go to Tools > Options and select “Show real-time word count in status bar” to get it displayed just like this:

Auto-Linking

This is another great new feature which will save you a lot of time if you find yourself repeatedly linking to the same place. For example I can now set Make Use Of as an auto-link, every time I type it now it’ll be instantly linked to the pre-specified target. You don’t have to worry about your paragraph being filled with identical links either, an option is available to “Link to each term only once per post”.

Image Editing

You’ll find a number of additions to image editing in Live Writer. For a start you can now centre your image from the properties panel (this was limited to just three options before) and five new borders have been added; photocopier, reflection, rounded corners, solid 1 pixel and solid 3 pixel.

Better still are a couple new options to crop and tilt images. No more cut-and-pasting into another image editor for a some quick edits, then cut-and-paste back into Writer.

Support has also been added for Lightbox… which is great I know, but what is Lightbox?

Lightbox is a script you can install on your blog so selected images are overlaid onto the page, rather then being opened in a new window or tab.

It’s quite popular and I’m sure you’ve recognized it by now. It’s dead simple to set up and if you’re interested here’s how you can do it.

Have you noticed these settings way down at the bottom of the properties panel?

Writer automatically pastes images with a drop shadow, so if you don’t want that it’s a pain to change.

It’s quite simple to fix, just change the border once then “save settings as default”. I must admit I didn’t notice this one for some time but when I did it sure made things easier.

That’s just a few of the new things you can do with Live Writer, with the updated SKD expect to see some great new plugins soon!

Also see Five Things To Do After Installing Windows Live Writer.

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He has begun his blog Not Waving But Drowning.

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In your comments a few were from people who had tried Digsby a while ago and found it too buggy to be a serious alternative to their current chat client. Despite being less then a year old, it came third in our poll about favorite Instant Messaging client. I can now confidently say that after the number of recent updates, Digsby is at a point where I can now confidently say it should be perfectly safe to download and try. Errors, CPU spikes and especially RAM usage have been considerably optimized over the last few weeks.

If, like Keith , you’ve been using another application for some time and have all your chats logged then it may be a bit of a deterrent when deciding to switch to Digsby. This is no longer a concern. Chris, one of the Digsby developers, dropped in and left a comment saying that you could now convert all your old log files with the Digsby log converter. I recommend this handy tool.

A few days ago on his own blog fellow Make Use Of writer Shankar linked to Digsbies Themes , a new and growing resource for Digsby skins and tools. Although at this point there isn’t a huge number to choose from, I’ve made a selection of what I think are the best three skins available.

To install a new skin:

Installing these skins is pretty simple. After downloading the folder, you’ll have to unzip it into your Digsby folders. It’s likely Digsby will be in a path similar to these:

C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\Application Data\Digsby\Skins\

C:\Program Files\Digsby\res\Skins\

Choose either your user folder or the program folder. You will need to reveal hidden files if you want to find Digsby in your application data. If you install the skin in the program files, you will find future Digsby updates will erase the data, so it’s preferable to install it in the user data. Once you have done this you can activate skins by opening Digsby and going to Tools > Preferences > Skins > and selecting your theme.

Top 3 Digsby Skins

This skin is “an extensive make-over which makes Digsby look like Windows Live Messenger for those who like the look of Live messenger or just like the clean modern style which is popular these days.based upon the Windows Live is a very nice theme which borrows the Windows Live look.”

This is my favourite and in my opinion is currently the best Digsby theme. You can get it here.

AeRoyale

XP Royale is a theme that didn’t make into the original XP release but was made available for download a couple of years later. Long Zheng managed to find an alternative black version which he released unofficially on his blog .

AeRoyale is a very nice Digsby theme which combines elements of the XP Royale theme and Vista Aero. A good combination of the two and designed to fit well into both desktops.

OSX Leopard

This theme is a fairly good attempt at designing a Digsby theme to mimic the look and feel of MacOSX. . Digsby is available for download on both PC and Mac, so if you’re already using MacOSX this may be perfect for getting Digsby to fit in nicely with the rest of your desktop. Get it here

Emoticons

One other thing that may annoy you about using Digsby is having to use a new set of emoticons. Luckily Digsbies.org has all the smileys for the main chat networks. You can download and install these in much the same way as the skins, just look for Digsby\res\emoticons\ in your files.

In the emoticons folder rename “default” to something like “default-backup”. Copy the emoticons folder (example: MSNemoticons) in your downloaded zip file to C:\Program Files\Digsby\res\emoticons\ so that you have e.g. C:\Program Files\Digsby\res\emoticons\MSNEMOTICONS\angel.gif. Rename it to “default” and open up Digsby.

Here are a some of the most well known smiley packs:

A useful tip for using Digsby is that you can use keypad shortcuts to rapidly control some of the features and dismiss the notifications window with a right click. I find that one particularity useful as although I like having notifications, sometimes they pop up at the wrong time and annoy me.

Lastly, if I still haven’t persuaded you to give Digsby a go then why don’t you check out this this Make Use Of list of the best alternative multi-messaging applications around.

Laurence John feels over his head on the internet, too many people, too much to learn… however he tries his best and even has a new blog over at ShippingSeven.com where he is chronicling the ongoing development of Windows 7.

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• Why I’m Digging Digsby (31)
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Networks like Facebook and of course Twitter started it, and now everyone seems to be adding them in. MySpace now has numerous Facebook-like features including the current status message, newsfeeds and applications.

It’s all a form of micro-blogging and services like Twitter have been growing immensely over the last few years. If you’re a big user then you may get tired of keeping all your profiles updated at any one time.

Here are a number of fairly simple tools that you can use to quickly update the status message on a whole number of services at once. You might also want to check out Mark’s review of Ping.FM which also does the same job.

Posty

Posty is one of the new applications built on Adobe’s AIR platform and supports the four main micro-blogging services; Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr and Pownce. It doesn’t need much explaining, just save all of your login data and start using! The convenient thing about having a desktop client is that you don’t need an additional account to access Posty itself, just the services.

Hellotxt

To be honest though, it’s unlikely you will be using those four services together seeing as they are all pretty similar. Hellotxt is a better alternative as it has support for Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Pownce, Jaiku and Bebo. Hellotxt is a website that functions in the same way as Posty. After registering you can enter your details and update your status’ whenever you feel the need.

Sociogami

“Instantly update your status across all networks at once!” Sociogami is a great looking application that supports MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. It only supports these three at the moment but I’m sure more will come with time. We’re seeing a lot of these kinds of applications lately and Sociogami is looking to become one of the better social media managers.

Mingll

I was slightly suspicious when I found Mingll as free toolbars are pretty much synonymous with ’spyware’ and although users are a little more savvy these days it can still be a problem. I must admit I’m pretty against filling up my browser screen real estate more then I have to, but for what it does Mingll is actually very good. If you’re like me and prefer minimalistic approach then check out Aibek’s article on how to keep your browser functional and save as much as space as possible.

More then just a simple status updater Mingll is in fact a fully featured social media manager. It’s simple and easy to use and currently offers support for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIN, Digg and promises that YouTube, Flickr, Bebo, Orkut, LiveJournal, Yelp and Flixter are coming soon.

The best thing Mingll does is keep you logged into all your services and essentially combines features of each services into one. So all IM and mail is together, contacts are accessible from one place, friends, notifications etc

What do you use to update your social network status messages?

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He has begun his blog: Not Waving But Drowning.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Here are six little features and applications in Vista which I think are quite useful:

Snipping Tool

The Snipping Tool was an application I didn’t even know existed till yesterday. This tool was introduced with Windows Vista (although it is not present in Vista Basic) but I just hadn’t come across it yet.

I’m so used to replacing any Windows applications with better freeware alternatives that it didn’t occur to me a Windows tool could do the job adequately. Sure, Snipping Tool isn’t the best screenshot application but it does all the basics, and even has a few extra features such as the ability to directly email a screenshot, or highlight something quickly. All it needs is a setting that enables it to be launched from the printscreen key.

Quick Launch ToolBar

If you initially tried to drag the Quick Launch toolbar off the Vista task bar, you wouldn’t have had much success. However this feature hasn’t been removed from Vista – its just been made less accessible for some strange reason.

If you want to enable the Quick Launch bar, simply create a new folder on your desktop. Drag this folder to the right edge of your screen and let go. The toolbar should have now have appeared down the side of the screen. By right clicking on the bar and selecting ‘Toolbars > Quick Launch’ you will have enabled the Quick Launch toolbar.

There are a couple of adjustable options such as hiding the title and folder text or making the icons smaller. I like using this as my application launcher as it’s the best launcher you’ll find, and I can live without the visual effects of others .

Photo Slideshows

You’ve probably seen this option amongst the buttons along the explorer bar, but have you actually tried it?

The Slideshow is actually a nice way to view your photographs. You can change the speed and effects of the presentation, and a number of themes are included such as “collage”, “album”, “glass” and more. You can display photographs in Sepia, black and white and normal. It may seem trivial but it can be quite useful when you have relatives around, you can bore them with your latest travel photographs or something.

Windows Media Encoder

Windows Media Encoder was included with Vista but has been available to anyone as a free download for quite some time. Again it may lack some of the power of alternative applications, but I think you’ll find it does a fairly decent job.

You can use Media Encoder to capture audio or video, convert files, screen capture and more. The capture is particularly useful if you want to create a video of a program demonstration, etc.

Resizing Icons

Icons can be resized anywhere in Vista by simply holding down the control key and scrolling your mouse. Even though the ‘view’ options only list seven icon display sizes, there are actually nearly forty which you can scroll through via this method. It also works on your desktop icons.

Show Windows Side by Side

Ever got annoyed with Windows Explorer? Haven’t we all. Shankar offered some tips a few weeks back for the power user, but if that’s a bit much then there is one simple thing you can do to make moving your files around a bit easier.

Hold down the control key and select two windows on the task bar. Right click and select “Show Windows Side by Side”. You’ll now have the two windows aligned next to each other. This isn’t just for Explorer windows of course, it’ll work on any application. Especially useful for comparing documents or online research.

What are your favourite tools in Vista?

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. Read his blog over at Not Waving But Drowning

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Now its time for a look at the browser you may never have heard of : Maxthon .

What is Maxthon?

Maxthon is an award winning browser.

I’d never actually used Maxthon before giving it a test drive a few days before this review. In fact of the reported downloads – 55 million – the majority has been in China meaning Maxthon is still relatively unknown amongst the English speaking internet users.

Maxthon is Internet Explorer. It began as an extension of Internet Explorer, and although a browser in its own right it still uses the same rendering engine. I say this now because I know many of you, being Firefox users, will become fairly unreceptive to adopting this as an alternative Web browser.

That out of the way, I think you will still find that Maxthon has some pretty handy features.

First Impressions:

Maxthon is ugly.

Yeah I know, aesthetics probably shouldn’t be that important, but frankly Maxthon has possibly the ugliest interface of the other four browsers. (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari)

The theme looks like it has tried to be ’smooth’ or ’streamlined’, but fails miserably. Whatever the case it doesn’t work and there’s currently not much selection in the way of downloadable themes which provide much of an improvement to the interface.

Performance

Maxthon has solid performance and is noticeably faster then IE7 and Firefox for basic tasks such as loading, opening new tabs and navigating between them. I would imagine actual page loading speed to be just the same as Internet Explorer.

Features

Maxthon has a lot of features. However this doesn’t seem to be much of a selling point these days due to the ability Firefox users have of downloading just about anything and adding it to their browser.

That said, most internet users will never download an extension even once and simply use a browser as it comes. Maxthon is aimed at that audience and does a good job of incorporating a wide range of features which make the user experience an easier one.

Here are a couple which I particularly liked.

Screen Capture :

Maxthon comes with a decent screen capturing tool available through the tools menu. Thinking ahead, the Maxthon team has created a keypad shortcut for the ‘Capture Region’ option which is the one people are likely to use the most.

Magic Fill

I really liked this one.

With Magic Fill you can save any number of online identities and all the associated details. You could have one identity with fake details for signing up to forums or other websites where spam may be a risk. You can save another identity containing real details for when you wish to use those. And of course, like all the browsers, Maxthon also saves username and password details for websites automatically.

Multisearch :

I think this is one of the best features of Maxthon. You can customize and import the search engines you wish to use, then after a search you can rapidly flick between them to compare results – this is especially useful for image searches.

Digg Integration

A simplified Digg service is incorporated into the sidebar. If you are a heavy Digg user then you may like keeping an eye on this and watching the latest popular stories as they appear.

Del.icio.us

Maxthon also provides built in support for your Del.icio.us bookmarks in the sidebar. Through a toolbar button in the top right hand corner you can tag pages, access your bookmarks, change settings and access all the other Del.icio.us features.

Maxthon provides a lot more features and options for customization. In fact any toolbar or button can be moved, dragged or modified. Unfortunately however it’s also one of the negative points as many useful tools are fairly inaccessible or hidden away. It’s a pity because there are a lot of really good ideas here, but not enough to make me change browsers.

If as a Maxthon user you think this review to be overly negative then feel free to fire off in the comments below. Tell us why you chose this browser over the alternatives.

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He has begun his blog: Not Waving But Drowning.

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Well luckily there is always a free alternative. This list is short, but provides you with all the essential tools and resources to learn and improve your guitar playing.

Guitar Tabs

Don’t feel bad if you can’t read music notation, 90% of guitarists can’t either regardless of fame or success. Using guitar tabs will provide you with everything you need to know to play any piece of guitar music.

Power Tab Editor

Power Tab Editor is a completely free music notation creator. Tabs can also be played back using MIDI. Not only can you create your own music, but you learn songs by downloading Power Tab files created by other people.

There are a huge number of online tab websites, but in my experience only two are necessary:

A user submission system, tabs are submitted then voted and commented on accordingly.Ultimate Guitar Chords is always my first source for tabs as the quality and quantity here is much greater then any other site.

If I cannot find a song I am looking for here then I will resort to 911 Tabs.

This is a search engine that indexes all available guitar tabs online. The reason that this isn’t my first choice when searching for tabs is that the website can be very slow and frustrating. Although a user rating and reporting system exists it is barely used so a huge proportion of indexed tabs are either dead links, duplicated content or just crap tabs.

As you download a number of tabs then you may start having trouble locating the songs you want on your own computer. Luckily the creators of Power Tab Editor thought of this and have also created Pt Librarian.

Pt Librarian will sit in your taskbar and after scanning your tab files meta data organize your collection much like music library software.

Guitar Scales V2

This is a fantastic application created using Adobe AIR. This application provides you with more scales then you will ever need, tuning options, strings and even number of frets. There isn’t much more I can say about this, its simple, attractive and incredibly useful.

What do you use to practice guitar? Do you have any favourite freeware applications? Let us know in the comments!

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He has begun his blog: Not Waving But Drowning …..

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What is Live Mesh?

Windows Live Mesh is a powerful service which combines cloud computing and online storage with file synchronisation and remote desktop access. Potentially a wide variety of devices will be supported such as Macs and mobile phones. So you can access and synchronize your files between several computers and mobile devices.

In essence this means that any file added to the ‘mesh’ can be accessed by, transferred to and modified by any device on the mesh.

Why would I need it?

Live Mesh is incredibly easy to use and yet is extremely powerful. I’ve only been using it for a few days now but it has already become a must-have application for me. Even if you haven’t really been a big user of online storage or synchronisation in the past you should give it a try.

Live Mesh is currently made up of an online desktop and a downloadable application. This component adds options to your Windows context menus, enables you to have folders on your computer that directly sync to your online desktop. it also puts an icon into the task bar from where you can view data transfers, members, devices and folders.

How can I get it?

This is the difficult part.

The problem is that Live Mesh was released to only 10,000 testers as part of the initial pre-beta tech preview which means most of us missed out. Signing up to the Microsoft website is useless as, who knows when, if ever, you will receive an invitation.

Luckily there is another way.

If you already have an invitation then you are able to invite 2 more people to share folders with you. Once you have been invited to share a folder, you can then create your own Mesh account.

After this news was broken on LiveSide , Long Zheng, istartedsomething blogger, quickly created a website called Share Live Mesh :

As soon as I got my own invite, I started thinking of the original “Gmail invite sharing” website and began to build one for Live Mesh. Thus, www.sharemesh.com was born. If you would like a Live Mesh invite or have one to share, I encourage you to check it out.

In case you were wondering, this only took me roughly seven hours from to design, develop, test and deploy using PHP and MySQL. I owe most of it to Dreamweaver and Uniform Server .

Last night there were about 60 people registered when I signed up. The next morning there where 550 and I already had an invitation. Just make sure once you get an invitation you share the love around by inviting a couple of other people on the list.

For more Live Mesh information go to LiveSide.net , If you have trouble installing Live Mesh on a non-US computer Long Zheng provides a quick guide here .

Also note: You cannot install Live Mesh in an elevated Administrator account or with UAC turned off. Even after Mesh is installed you will need UAC activated to run it.

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He has begun his blog: Not Waving But Drowning …

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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If you want instant message aggregation, there are a number of applications. You could try Trillian, Pidgin or any number of other lightweight multi-messaging applications. Or you could check out Digsby and for me there is no choice.

I have been using Digsby since it was in early beta, and it has rapidly became a favourite of mine. Digsby is a messaging application that integrates instant messaging with easy access to your email and social networks:

Here are some of the best features of Digsby in my opinion:

Customisation

The Digsby team encourages people to customize the application how they wish. This includes skins, themes, layout, notifications and conversations.

Most elements can be modified in some way. This includes status
(the coloured dots), messaging network logos, buddy avatars and names.

If you are using a number of major messaging networks then you have the options to control what information to be displayed to contacts on each, such as an “away” status for MSN contacts and a status showing ‘available’ for Google Talk.

Messaging + Email + Social Networks

The biggest problem with bringing social networks to the desktop is often the hugely disruptive notifications you constantly receive (ahem… Twitter).

Out of the applications I have tried, Digsby has maybe the least disruptive way of providing notifications. If you would prefer no pop-up notifications at all, you can choose to have them displayed down on your task bar which is pretty handy.

Conversations are logged and archived if you choose. If you need to find something later you can search for text or browse dates.

A contact on two of your networks can become one merged contact, and re-named if you wish, so you no longer have to put up with people changing their display names every 2 minutes.

Digsby can also be synchronized between installations so any preferences and themes are not lost.

Digsby is still in beta, and not the trendy Web 2.0 beta. You may notice occasional dropouts and bugs, but updates are frequent – sometimes as often as once a week, and performance has been steadily improving with time. Well worth having a look at.

Are you using Digsby for instant messaging or have you used it? What do you think of it? Is it a worthy contender to Trillian and Pidgin? What do you like and hate about it? What features do you like the best? Tell us in the comments!

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He is going to write on his blog Not Waving But Drowning … as soon as he stops fiddling with WordPress templates and plugins and gets on with it!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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In a series of articles, I hope to cover Windows Live in a greater amount of detail then you may have seen before. I am aware that Make Use Of has previously covered several services (such as Live Writer and SkyDrive), so I am going to avoid simply giving a run-down of features. You already know it.

No what I hope to do is really give you a great deal more detail on fully integrating Windows Live and maximising your experience. These articles will include tips, hacks, reviews and most importantly the comparisons between Live Services and its competitors.

Windows Live SkyDrive

The first service I thought I would start with is SkyDrive. SkyDrive delivers a satisfactory online file storage and sharing solution in a free and easy to use service. It has a design that is both attractive and functional.

However I can’t help but notice some of the complaints people have expressed so far about the service. These include the 50MB file size limit and that the service is useless due to the fact their particular photo/video/music collection is larger then 5GB. Just remember this is free, and no-one is making you use it.

Moreover instead of just loading up on features, Microsoft is taking the approach used by Apple; aesthetically pleasing products that are designed with ease of use in mind. So yes, there are limitations, but weigh them up against the benefits and see if it’s worth the trade off. I love using it for the easy access, sharing capabilities and rapid sign-up through your Windows ID.

But I know, there are many of you who are not big Microsoft fans, and even more for whom SkyDrive just may not be the service you are looking for. If you’re one of those people, I have found three alternative free storage solutions. Why just three? Well this list is by no means comprehensive, so please forgive me If I have missed a popular one. What I have tried to do instead is to choose services which can be distinguished through their unique focus.

Skydrive Alternatives

(1) FOR THOSE WHO WANT SPACE

ADrive – Yes, ADrive is light years in front of its competitors when it comes to free storage capacity. The closest you’ll anyone else gets to it is MediaMax which offers 25GB.

So what’s the catch?

That was the first thing I thought. Either this just a ploy to attract a large user base before reducing the offer, or it’s just some sort of scam. But surprisingly after I clicked ’signup’ there was no request for billing details.

This really is 50GB free storage, no catches. If you can believe them, they state they will not be reducing the storage amount in the future and are simply aiming to provide the largest storage space available.

However ADrive is simply… a drive. So don’t expect it to much in the way of sharing features, or even features in general. Essentially you upload a file from your computer and store in the directories. You may make files available for public access by moving it into the sharing directory, but that’s about it. It isn’t ‘pretty’, and it doesn’t try to be. It is just a place for you to archive a lot of data and media in case of emergencies, and it is very good for that.

So if you are the type of person who wants to back up their complete photo, video and music library then this might be the service for you. Grab a account and upload away!

(2) FOR SOCIAL NETWORKERS

ESnips is the ‘Myspace’ of online storage, meaning it has been designed as a service to share and network with your files and friends. It is also the most generally feature filled service that I have reviewed here. The focus of ESnips is to share your files with people who have similar interests and hobbies.

Organisation is also a much larger component of ESnips and you will notice this when you begin uploading files. Each file can be given a name, a description and a series of tags. This is how you will locate your own and other associated files uploaded by other users.

You do have private folders, but the incentive here is to share your files with your friends and anyone else. The navigation bar gives you a range of communities to choose from when browsing public files. Not only that, you can create favourite folders, playlists and slideshows of videos, images and music.

This also reminds me, most of the MP3 search engines that are out there use eSnips as a source.

(3) FOR INTEGRATION

Divshare doesn’t stand out as far as storage goes, it provides 5GB like SkyDrive, but it does have a much greater emphasis on integrating your files into your own personal pages and networks for streaming and viewing.

Divshare has a wealth of sharing features and even specific integration for Facebook, WordPress and the iPhone. They also provide the DivShare API for developers to use on their own sites.

There is a 200MB maximum file size upload limit and a 50GB download limit. The service is ad-supported with upgrades to silver, gold and platinum accounts.

When it comes to streaming your music, images and video then DivShare is the way to go. After uploading your files it provides you with a page of codes that you can use to insert your files onto a page, post or website, wherever that may be.

I hope that my first article on MakeUseOf has helped you find a online storage solution. Even if you weren’t looking for a solution, maybe now you have a reason to! Drop me some comments and tell me what you think about SkyDrive or online storage in general.

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He is going to writing on his blog Not Waving But Drowning… as soon as he stops fiddling with WordPress templates and plugins and gets on with it!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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