Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

Web 2.0 is a pretty big deal with new start-ups popping up all over the place. There are so many of them, that’s it’s nearly impossible to keep up with them all.  One that we haven’t mentioned yet, but is starting to appear all over the radar is an online community called Imeem.

Imeem is full of users who are able to join public communities, or private communities where they are able to upload and share a variety of media like photos, videos, music, even blogs. This media can be tagged, and then added to playlists.

Over the last few months, they’ve been on an uphill trend with their traffic with tremendous growth. It probably won’t be easy street making it to the top though.  They have tough competition along the way like MySpace and Facebook.

I use MySpace and Facebook myself, but there are several attractive things that have made me consider Imeem. 

—Privacy—

Privacy is one of the first things you might like with Imeem because they give you options. You can make it as private as you want, or as public as you want. Your options for viewing content include:

• Viewable by your friends
• Viewable by your friends, and your friends’ friends
• Viewable by all users
• Publishable on the Internet

Other social networks offer some form of privacy, but don’t offer all of the different options that Imeem does.

—Features—

First, you must register before posting your media, but once you’re registered, you’re all set to get started.

• Integrated chat client makes it easy to connect with your friends.
• Create profiles for any of the topics that you’re interested in.
• Connect with commenting, content rating, and tagging.
• Content can be embedded on a variety of sites like Blogger, WordPress, Digg, and Del.icio.us
• Pulse – gives you a real-time look at what people are up to.

All of the features work well together, and when your friends update, you’ll receive notifications of what your friends are doing so that you can view their content and comment.

—Community—

As with any community sharing service, copyright is an issue.  Imeem relies on their community to report items that would violate copyright law by flagging the content. 

Who would use this service? Well, just about anyone. Right now they’re experiencing a lot of growth in the United States with the younger tech savvy crowd. Besides individuals, groups are also getting in on Imeem like artists, bands, schools, etc.

—Wrapping it up—

One of my favorite features is the playlists that users create. Imeem has them organized into different categories like rising, falling, most played, etc. Everything is organized so that it’s easy to find what your looking for. The use of tags really helps as well. You can find these “top ranked” lists for music, videos, and photos.

Below is an example of what a music playlist would look like embedded into your site. 

 Overall I was impressed with Imeem.  Their user interface is pretty simple, and easy on the eyes. Signing up takes just a minute and can be done here. With the recent growth they’ve experienced, who knows how far they can go!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

I’m not sure about you, but I have a collection of bookmarks that is almost unmanageable. Some of the bookmarks I probably haven’t touched for years, and I thought it was time for a little spring winter cleaning!

So I started browsing around looking for a utility that would assist me in the daunting chore. Sure there are Firefox extensions out there that can check for duplicate bookmarks and look for dead links, but all of my bookmarks aren’t in Firefox alone. I needed something a little more universal.

That’s when I stumbled across a free Windows-only program called AM-DeadLink. It’s a nifty little tool that can check your Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera bookmarks for both dead links and duplicate entries. This would really be a killer application if it didn’t require any installation, but I’ll take what I can get.

–Dead Links–

If you’re a bookmarking fanatic you probably have some pretty ancient sites saved that don’t even exist anymore. Just startup AM-DeadLink, select your browser, and click the green button with the checkmark in it. The app will begin scanning all of your bookmarks 10 at a time (number of concurrent connections is adjustable in the settings), and it will alert you of its findings:

Click to Enlarge

The nice thing is that it will ignore local bookmarks and bookmarklets which would likely return an error. You’ll also notice that it points out when a bookmark is redirected to another site. Unfortunately there is no option to automatically update the address of all the redirected bookmarks, but that might be a nice feature for the developer to add in the future.

If you find a broken bookmark that you want to delete you don’t have to worry about opening the browser to remove it. Just select the bookmark from the list (Ctrl+Click to select multiple bookmarks), and then click on the Recycling Bin button located at the end of the toolbar.

–Duplicate Bookmarks–

There is an option located on the toolbar that will filter out all of the displayed bookmarks except for those that have duplicates. This is great for finding those sites you’ve bookmarked one too many times:

Click to Enlarge

–And More–

AM-DeadLink has a few other features as well, such as the ability to download favicons for all of the websites in your bookmarks. If you find that the browser doesn’t have a lot of favicons for your bookmarks this is a fast and easy way to do it yourself.

And since your bookmarks are so important it only makes sense that the app lets you back them all up. In just a few clicks they will be saved to your computer in a compressed ZIP file.

–Overview–

In the end AM-DeadLink managed to hunt down 23 dead links and 6 duplicates in my hundreds of bookmarks. It might not be a huge amount, but I thought that I did a good enough job managing my bookmarks that it would have a hard time finding anything wrong with them. Guess everyone should clean “house” once in awhile!

Download AM-DeadLink (Windows only, requires installation)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on February 20, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

One of the areas that I’ve always felt Firefox has lacked in is sidebar configurability. Other browsers, such as Opera, come with way more sidebar options out-of-the-box making it easy to throw a sidebar onto any side of the browser. The beauty of Firefox, however, is that there are plenty of extensions to solve any complaints.

We sifted through over a hundred different extensions that deal with the sidebars in Firefox, and handpicked three of them that offer outstanding customization options. Things like adding multiple sidebars, undocking the sidebars, and much more.

–MultiSidebar (Homepage)–

Hat tip: I have Tonino to thank for pointing out this extension to us.

MultiSidebar is a great example of the functionality I would love to see Mozilla incorporate into the browser by default. Once installed you can right-click on the header of any sidebar and have it open on the left, right, top, or bottom side of the browser. So if you want your bookmarks open on the right side, and your history open on the left side it’s a piece of cake:

The best part is the MultiSidebar remembers your options for the next time you go to open a particular sidebar, and that saves a lot of headaches. It even works great with the websites that you’ve setup to open in the sidebar.

–All-in-One Sidebar (Homepage)–

The All-in-One Sidebar is pretty much what the name says it is. It’s a highly-configurable extension that will let you place one “almighty” sidebar on either the left or right side of the browser. You can then add icons to the slim toolbar located next to the sidebar so that you can easily switch between the different sidebars that are available. One of my favorite features, however, has got to be the quick access to your downloads and extensions:

This also works well for those of you who are trying to conserve your precious screenspace. That *really* thin bar along the left side serves as a quick way to collapse the sidebar, and it can be set to expand the sidebar when you hover over it with your mouse.

–Ez Sidebar (Homepage)–

Sometimes it is nice being able to undock the sidebar from the browser for one reason or another. Personally what I like to do is open up my bookmarks in the sidebar, undock them from the browser, and align the window along the left side of my monitor. That space on my computer is, for the most part, reserved solely for my bookmarks. By doing that I can have extremely fast access to any bookmark no matter what application I’m in.

This is all made possible because of Ez Sidebar which provides docking and undocking capabilities for the Firefox sidebar:

The other thing that is really cool about this is that you can add “panels” which is equivalent to setting a website to open in the sidebar. Using Ez Sidebar to do this is nice for two reasons: it’s a much faster process and doesn’t clutter up your bookmarks.

–Overview–

So those are three tools that any frequent sidebar user is sure to drool over. If you know of any other sidebar configuration tools I would love to hear about them in the comments below!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on September 09, 2006 by CyberNet.

Weekend Warrior

You could easily spend months traveling the globe to seek out the best sites and attractions. Along with the  lengthy time it would take,  it most definitely would cost you a fortune! Now you can travel the globe in a weekend without leaving your house, let alone a chair! There are several websites  that have compiled a great list of  the best attractions around the world brought to you by Google Maps. A complete list of the sources used can be found at the end of this article.

CyberNet’s Top 10 (listed in no particular order)! Oh, and unfortunately these are not clickable images. 

– Number 1 : Grand Canyon –

– Number 2: Statue of Liberty –

– Number 3: Great Barrier Reef –

– Number 4: Great Wall of China –

– Number 5: Eiffel Tower –

– Number 6: Leaning Tower of Pisa –

– Number 7: Oprah Winfrey Maze (okay, someone had too much time on their hands– cool nonetheless) –

– Number 8: Sear’s Tower — (I like this one simply because the Sear’s Tower is so huge yet in this image you almost can’t tell that it’s there.!)

– Number 9: Bill Gates’ House –

Number 10: Wrigley Field (My Hometown Team– Go Cubs!) –

Alright, now this is where you can spend an entire weekend traveling the world.  The website is called Sightseeing With Google Satellite Maps, and they’ve got loads of great places to see around the World- broken down by country. They also have categories like sports and architecture. They say to “think of it as armchair sightseeing, now with 8798 destinations.” I browsed around several different countries and got a great mini-tour from the pyramids in Egypt to Mount Fuji in Japan. Another website called Googol Maps has a list of the top 10 and the top 100 maps viewed with more great attractions to visit from your computer.

Instead of packing your bags to visit all of the most popular tourist destinations, just sit back, relax, and enjoy them all from the comfort of your home.  It will undoubtedly save you some time and definitely save you some money!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on December 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Personally I believe that screenshots are one of the best elements to any blog. We use screenshots all the time, and there is no way that I could have done it using the built-in Windows Print-Screen. There seems to be reassurance when you see someone else has installed the program or you are at least given an idea of what to expect before you go ahead and install it yourself, which makes screenshots a very valuable tool. Many blogs try to give text-only descriptions of software and trying to follow what they are saying could be like directing traffic with a blindfold on…it just doesn’t work well. I like a visual.

One thing that I’d like to get into is creating screencasts. I think that they are a step up from screenshots but I have had a hard time finding some good software that is completely compatible with Windows Vista. I’m sure the time will come where screencast software will work with it, but for right now the screenshots will have to do.

I’ve spent a lot of time playing with screenshot software and I think I have come up with the best 5 freeware applications that are available for taking screenshots. I’ll save my favorite for last but they all have a lot of really great features.

–WinSnap (Homepage)–

If your looking for simple then WinSnap is your solution. WinSnap replaces the Print-Screen button association so that the application is brought up, which is what all of the other screenshot utilities mentioned here. If you look at the screenshot below you can see that in a few seconds I made a professional looking picture that is ready to be displayed wherever I would like to put it. Many of the different aspects are fully customizable, such as the degree of rotation, watermark, and shadow but you should be aware that this does not include an image editor like some of the other applications do. However, you can’t really complain when the program weighs in at less than 100KB and a portable version is offered.

• Makes screenshots of windows with rounded corners
• WinSnap saves info about window form and adds real smoothing shadows!
• Unique “Application” mode allows you to capture all visible windows of the foreground application with one click.
• Basic coloring effects and canvas transformations.
• Advanced auto-save and auto-copy options.
• Usual keyboard and mouse control (Print Screen replacement).
• Make all this work with one 100-kb application – smaller than Paint!

–Gadwin PrintScreen (Homepage)–

This application is probably one of the least extensive screenshot utilities but it is great for anyone who wants just a little more oomph when making screenshots. Here are the features that you’ll find available after installing Gadwin PrintSscreen:

• Customizable hotkeys
• Choose the destination for the screenshot: printer, clipboard, folder, or email.
• Capture the full screen, a certain window, or a region.
• Adjust the quality of the resulting JPEG image or choose from one of the 5 other graphics formats (BMP, PNG, TIF, GIF, TGA).
• Add a shadow
• Make the image grayscale
• Resize the screenshot with the option to maintain the aspect ratio

–MWSnap (Homepage)–

Before using MWSnap you should know that it hasn’t been updated in over 4-years. With that being said, I don’t have any personal experience using it since I like applications that are updated a little more frequently. It does work with Windows XP which is probably important to most of you and the features should satisfy nearly everything that you need:

• Capable of capturing the whole desktop, a highlighted window, an active menu, a control, or a fixed or free rectangular part of the screen
• Support for BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats, with selected color depth and quality settings.
• System-wide hotkeys.
• Clipboard copy/paste.
• Printing.
• Auto-saving, auto-printing.
• Auto-start with Windows.
• Minimizing to system tray.
• An auto-extending list of fixed sizes, perfect for snapping images for icons and glyphs. 
• A zoom tool for magnifying selected parts of the screen.
• A ruler tool for measuring screen objects lengths.
• A color picker showing screen colors with separated RGB parts.
• Fast picture viewer.
• Adding frames and mouse pointer images.
• Multilevel configurable undo and redo.
• Multilingual versions.
• Configurable user interface.

–Screenshot Captor (Homepage)–

 To be honest, this one was either a little advanced for me or it is just not laid out in a user-friendly way. It seems like the features are just bursting out of the seams which might be right up your alley, but I try to get things done in only a few clicks and I just couldn’t do it with this. I had to sit there and think about my every move instead of blindly clicking like I typically do. On a positive note, it does have a built-in screenshot editor.;)

There is one thing I’ll tell you in advance about this being free. There are no strings attached (as in no advertisements, spyware, or scams) but you need to have a license key in order to install it. The keys are free but there are two different keys available to encourage donations:

1. If you become a member of their forum (for free) you’ll get a 6-month license key and after it expires you’ll need to return to the site to generate a key that lasts another 6-months. Then after you are a member for an entire year you’ll get a key that never expires.
2. If you don’t want to signup to become a member you can get a 60-day license key but you’ll need to return to get a new license key every 60-days. 

If that doesn’t sound like too much hassle, you can move on to the list of features to see if it is still right for you:

• Optimized for taking lots of screenshots with minimal intervention.
• Smart autonaming of files, and ability to embed textual comments in files.
• Good multi-monitor support.
• Highly configurable to make it work the way you want it to; stays out of your way in the system tray.
• Lots of capture modes: Multimon (multiple monitors), Desktop, Active Window, Region, Windows Object. Each mode has a hotkey for quick access.
• Unique Cool Effects, including automatic active window enhancement (see pictures below).
• Unsurpassed support for 3rd party user configurable tools, including file browsers and image editors; extend the program to do whatever you need by interfacing it with other programs.
• Slimline sidebar file browser provides full shell operations.
• Optional automatic image file versioning.
• Seamless integration with Unicode Image Maker tool.
• Autoscroll capture for windows too big for screen.
• Deluxe thumbnail maker.
• Quick PostCapture PopUp Dialog.
• Quick Screenshot Emailer Menu.

–FastStone Screen Capture (Homepage/Beta)–

Okay, here is my personal favorite that I wouldn’t be able to survive without. FastStone can easily be summed up by saying ”if a picture is worth a thousand words then FastStone is priceless!” That’s all there really is to it.

Currently I am using FastStone 5 Beta 1 which was just released 2-days ago which proves that this program continues to expand so you’ll never have to worry about using an outdated application. It also looks like minor versions of the program are released every few weeks and I found that to be really impressive.

What about features? Don’t get me started because I won’t stop talking about them! The built-in Editor (pictured below) is so incredibly easy to use yet it offers an extensive list of features:

• A small floating Capture Panel that can be dragged anywhere or minimized to the Windows tray area
• Resource friendly – uses a very small amount of memory, especially when minimized to the Windows tray area 
• Global hotkeys to activate the program’s capture capabilities anytime, anywhere
• Efficient tools to capture windows, objects, full screen, rectangle/freehand-selected regions and scrolling areas
• Capture web pages in Microsoft Internet Explorer, FireFox and Opera
• Option to specify destination (internal editor, clipboard or file) where the captured image will be sent
• Screen color picker
• Text/Arrowed line/Highlight/Watermark annotation
• Resize, crop, brightness, contrast, gamma, sharpen, blur, gray, negative
• Zoom in/out
• Undo/Redo
• Save as BMP, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, GIF, TIFF, TGA
• Send captured images in e-mails
• Screen Magnifier
• Divide it into multi-pages when printing long document
• Multi-monitor support
• Option to run when Windows starts

–Overview–

That’s my list of what I consider to be the top 5 freeware applications for taking screenshots in Windows. FastStone, in my opinion, blows all of the others away and I even prefer it to the commercial SnagIt software. I don’t know how the FastStone developer made it so easy to use and still make it feature rich, but he remarkably did it, and did it well.

If you happen to know of a better freeware application for taking screenshots make sure you let us know. For all of you that have your own blog…never underestimate the power of a screenshot.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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