Ubuntu comes pre-installed with a wealth of apps - covering almost every task you need to do, while still managing to fit on a CD. Are you ready to discover some pretty cool Linux apps that don’t get the attention they deserve? Let’s check them out.
You can easily install any of these apps using the ‘Add/Remove Applications’ from the upper panel.
Midori is a web browser that uses the well-known WebKit rendering engine, providing quite a speed bump from Firefox and standards complying page rendering. Midori is currently packaged into Xubuntu and features include tabs, bookmarks and customizable search engine box. The browser is extensible via Javascript.
Due to the popularity of my first article regarding free alternatives to commercial Mac applications, I’ve decided to roll out a second part, shining the spotlight on more free applications for MakeUseOf’s Mac adopters. I hope you’ll like these applications just as well as their commercial counterparts, maybe even more since they’re free!
Jing is a screen-casting program which has come a long way since it first started. Their current version is pretty impressive because it integrates sharing to Screencast.com, Flickr and uploads to any FTP; you’ll automatically get a download link which you can share with your friends (something like Skitch). It does everything iShowU does and it even records from the microphone. The one thing it doesn’t allow me to do is adjust the video output quality. But hey, it’s pretty decent for a free app.
These days the internet has transformed itself into a large source of media content (apart from other things), be it video, audio or images. However with so many media formats, it often becomes necessary to be able to convert from one type to the other.
FormatFactory is one such tool that can assist you in most of your media conversion needs.
FormatFactory is a multifunctional media converter that supports:
Audio Conversion:
From all formats to MP3/WMA/MMF/AMR/OGG/M4A/WAV.
In no way do we wish to encourage you to infringe copyright.
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.
I got a rather strange request this morning in my AskTheAdmin inbox. It sounded strange to me at first but after thinking about it, I realized it wasn’t that odd. The request was for a way to rip the audio from a YouTube video… wait there’s more!
So the ripping method could not involve any downloaded or installed applications and had to be done online - and of course for free. The end result had to be a MP3 that could be played on a Windows Mobile phone.
Nero is one of the best piece of softwares available in the market for CD/DVD Burning Purposes, but it’s quite expensive. It’s bulky and comes with a lot of programs that you’ll never really use.
Why not try some freeware CD DVD Burning Apps applications that can serve as an alternative to Nero Burning ROM for your Windows PC?
1. CDBurnerXP
This is by far the most popular free alternative to the expensive Nero Software. Works on Vista as well, and here’s a features-highlight from CDBurnerXP:
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