Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on October 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

One of the most common things that I’ve been getting asked is how people can stay up-to-date on the latest software. I got really excited about the free UpdateStar application which I mentioned last week, but it still didn’t have information on a lot of the software that I used.

There are hundreds of sites out there that provide RSS feeds for downloads, and I began to think to myself that there had to be a good way to use some of those feeds to my advantage. Then Yahoo! Pipes came to mind since I had just used that last week to show how to translate RSS feeds, and it works perfectly in this situation.

–Overview–

What we’re going to do with Yahoo! Pipes is combine several feeds from popular download sites into one central feed. I recommend a handful of sites at the end of this article that should offer exactly what you’re looking for.

Then we’re going to use Yahoo! Pipes to sift through every item in each of the feeds, and pull out only the items that interest us. Because of the nature of Yahoo! Pipes it will only take a second to go back and add more things to watch for, so don’t worry if you forget to put an app on the list to be monitored.

–Instructions–

1. Go to the Yahoo! Pipes homepage, and begin creating a new pipe.
2. Drag the “Fetch Feed” item over onto the grid (located under the Sources menu):
   
3. Add the feeds you want to monitor for the downloads (a recommended list can be found at the end of this article). To add multiple feeds just use the plus sign located next to “URL”.
   
4. Drag the “Filter” item over onto the grid (located under the Operators menu):
   
5. Adjust the filter so that it will only “Permit” a feed item to make it through if it matches one of the names you are looking for. You can add multiple names to search for by hitting the plus sign next to “Rules”. Just make sure each one has the “item.title” selected.
   
6. Now you just have to connect the dots, literally. When you’re done hit the “Refresh” link at the bottom to see a live preview of what the resulting feed will look like. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see any items because there may not have been updates to your programs in a little while.
   
7. Go ahead and hit the “Save” button in the upper-right corner of the screen, and give your Pipe a name. Then click the “Back to My Pipes” link towards the top, and you should see your new feed listed there. Click on it, and then subscribe to it with your feed reader!

–Feeds–

There are hundreds of different download sites that you can subscribe to, but that’s not really necessary. Below is a list of five different feeds that should take care of all your needs. All you need to do is copy and paste each of the URL’s that I provide into Step 3 above.

1. Download.com: http://www.download.com/3409-2001-0-10.xml?tag=lr_rss
2. Fileforum.com: http://fileforum.betanews.com/rss2
3. MajorGeeks.com: http://majorgeeks.com/news.xml
4. FileHippo.com: http://filehippo.com/rss/
5. CyberNetNews.com: http://feeds.cybernetnews.com/CyberNetDailyDownloads

–Tips–

• One feed will probably be enough, and that way you eliminate the possibility of receiving duplicate entries in the feed which you can see happened to me in Step 6 above. I like to know as soon as possible when new programs are released (for obvious reasons), and having multiple feeds lets me do that. I recommend the MajorGeeks feed if you are going to choose just one of them.
• Let’s say you have something that you’re tracking called “ER”. You can’t just enter that into the filter because every title that has “er” somewhere in the words will match. To get around this just put spaces before and after the “ER” in the filter so that it is treated as a word.

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Uh oh. Since its debut, the iPad has been variously hailed as the final nail in the coffin of all physical media and the savior of the magazine and newspaper industries. A few magazines, such as Wired, had truly impressive digital launches, with over 100,000 downloads of its first issue in June. It doesn’t seem, however, that the stellar start was in any way sustainable. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which collects magazine circulation data from companies willing to furnish numbers, all iPad magazines have seen fall offs in downloads over the past few months. Wired was averaging 31,000 downloads from July through September, had 22,000 and 23,000 respectively in October and November. Other magazines have seen similar declines: Vanity Fair sold 8,700 downloads of its November issue, down from an average of about 10,500 from August through October; GQ sold 11,000 copies, its worst showing yet. Now, not all magazines release their numbers, of course — including The New Yorker, People, and Esquire — but the numbers we do have seem to be indicating a trend of general decline after a short burst of excitement.

iPad magazine sales numbers show steep decline over a few short months originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on May 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft has finally opened the doors to the project that was codenamed Tahiti. When this was first released back in March there was such an overwhelming response to try out the software that Microsoft quickly rejected anyone else trying to use the service. Now they have launched it for everyone to play with, and the new name is SharedView.

This free application makes it easy to share applications and desktops with up to 15 users in real-time. Here’s what Microsoft says is so great about SharedView:

• Microsoft SharedView Beta is a fast, easy way to share documents and screen views with small groups of friends or coworkers; anytime, anywhere. Use SharedView to put your heads together and collaborate.
• More effective meetings and phone calls
  Connect with up to 15 people in different locations and get your point across by showing them what’s on your screen.
• Work together in real time
  Share, review, and update documents with multiple people in real time.
• Use anytime, anywhere
  SharedView is easy to use, from anywhere, at a moment’s notice.

When trying it out myself I wasn’t disappointed, but then again I was just playing with it to see what it was like instead of actually trying to put it to good use. Here are a bunch of the screenshots that I took of SharedView in action (click any of them for a full-size image)…

Choose how you want to invite people:
 

Here are the configuration options:
  

And then here is the main interface where you choose exactly which applications you want people to see, or you can show them your whole desktop:

The new version got a nice facelift, as you can see in the screenshots. One of the cool things that I found was being able to share files between users (called handouts), and soon you’ll also be able to talk and chat just like you would at a normal meeting.

Of course, there is no reason why this would only be useful for business, because it could also be used to do other helpful things. Maybe it will be useful when connecting to a friend’s computer to help them solve an issue or walking them through a new application. There are a lot of things that this could be used for that aren’t business related, and hopefully Microsoft will try to promote the software that way as well.

Download Microsoft SharedView Beta (Direct Link – requires no WGA validation)

Source: Webware, Digital Inspiration, & Download Squad

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This article was written on August 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows only
We always like coming across an interesting free application… especially when it sets out to accomplish a lot of what a paid application does. That’s exactly the first impression I got when using Artweaver. They don’t come out and say they are trying to emulate Photoshop, but they don’t need to. A lot of the menus are organized the same way, things like layer management all work the same, and the upper-toolbar changes based upon the tool you’re using… just like in Photoshop. The only question is how successful were they at cloning the functionality.

I was actually pretty impressed with some of the things it offered. It has a wide array of features, image adjustments, gradients, and much more. Obviously it’s not capable of doing everything Photoshop can, but I’d say it includes most of, if not everything that casual Photoshop users need:

• Support of many different digital brushes e.g. chalk, charcoal, pencils…
• A wide variety of adjustment settings to customize the default brushes or to create new brushes.
• Standard image editing tools like gradient, crop, fill and selection tools.
• Support for the most common file formats like AWD (Artweaver), BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG, and PSD (no layer support).
• Transparency and Layers support.
• Effect filters like sharpen, blur, emboss and mosaic.
• Editable text layers.
• Pen Tablet support for a realistic feeling.
• History function to und/redo last editing steps.
• Expandable by Plug-In modules (Artweaver Standard).
• Support for many languages through language files.

This is a program that I highly recommend trying out, and that’s easy to do since there is a portable no-install version available. Just download, extract, and run it to see if it’s right for you. Plus the fact that you can throw this on a USB drive is awesome!

Get Artweaver

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

Simple Interface – Click to Enlarge

A few days ago I claimed that ReNamer was the best free file renamer available, and Mouser over at Donation Coder decided to prod their readers to see if they had come across any that were better. One member, iphigenie, mentioned a program called Flexible Renamer (a.k.a. FlexRenamer) that I decided to test out.

This free file renamer isn’t all that different from the last one, but the good news is that Flexible Renamer has a live preview feature. This makes it easier to see what you’re renaming your files to since the changes are shown, but not executed, in real-time.

When you launch Flexible Renamer it will start in a "simple" mode (pictured above) where it offers a lot of common file renaming operations right there at your fingertips, such as inserting a number at the end of the file names. Just choose your poison, and rename the files!

The only thing I don’t like about this program is that you have to perform one operation at a time, meaning to insert a hyphen followed by a number would actually require two different operations. In ReNamer you could prepare and order operations in bulk before going through with the file renaming process. That may not sound like a big deal, but it would suck having to wait a few minutes between each operation if you’re dealing with thousands of files.

Advanced Interface – Click to Enlarge

If you’re a bit more adventurous you could also switch over to the advanced mode. Here you can use wildcards, regular expressions, and translations for renaming the files. ReNamer also supported the use of regular expressions, but Flexible Renamer is a bit better mostly because of the powerful live preview. If you’re not familiar with using regular expressions then it will take awhile before you get used to them, but they are often considered to be a programmer’s best friend. To help you along the way Flexible Renamer does have some preset regular expressions:

Here are some of the other things Flexible Renamer can do:

• Rename a media file based on tags
• Batch edit file attributes
• Add context menu entries for when you right-click on files
• Copy and move renamed files to another directory preserving the originals
• Recursive renaming (can find files nested in folders)
• Drag & drop files from Windows Explorer
• Customize the font (size, type, etc…) that’s used throughout the program
• Save folders to favorites for one-click access

Flexible Renamer (for Windows – no installation required)

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