Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Windows only
One of the things that I thought was pretty cool with my Mac was that it lets you rotate your desktop backgrounds at set intervals using images on your computer. That got me wondering what kind of solutions are available for Windows users that do something similar, and what I happened to stumble upon is a real gem.

John’s Background Switcher is a free application that does exactly what you would expect it to, but likely goes a step further than anything you’ve seen before. It’s not only capable of grabbing images directly from your computer, but it can also interact with multiple online services including Flickr, Phanfare, SmugMug, Picasa, and Yahoo. What’s really nice is that it even supports retrieval of your private images for nearly all of the online services either through authorization or by providing your username/password. Heck, you can even mix and match the sources you want to pull images from. Neato!

Need a calendar on your desktop? No problem! Background Switcher has an option to display a monthly calendar directly on your wallpaper, and it will highlight the current day. Now how convenient is that?

Oh, right, but you use multiple monitors. Yeah, it supports that, too. You can have it show the same picture on each monitor, one picture for the entire desktop, different pictures on each monitor, or only show one picture on the main monitor. I think you get the point… this is a very full-featured background rotation utility.

(Click to Enlarge)

One thing that I do want to point out is that you can obviously specify the interval that the backgrounds will rotate, but it can also be done manually. To do that just double-click on the System Tray icon, and it will immediately begin processing a new background to use.

–Very Impressive Layouts–

Not only can this flip through your images, but it can also take multiple photos and lay them out in a way that is sure to make your friends go “wow.” Take the “Snapshot Scrapbook” mode for example, which takes a handful of your photos and lays them out in a polaroid fashion. It also takes one image and converts it to black and white to be used as the background. The number of images shown on the screen at any given time are dependent on your monitor’s resolution, and here’s what it looks like using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

Note: The application does place some text in the upper-right corner of the background with the program’s name. I didn’t see any option to eliminate this.

If you want to see more images at a time just switch over to the mosaic mode where it will grab a lot of thumbnails, and then tile them on your desktop. Here’s what that looks like once again using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

–Performance–

One of the questions that I frequently get asked when writing about apps like this is what kind of performance hit a PC will take for running this. As you can see above there are a handful of multi-image layouts that you can choose from, and Background Switcher has to generate the background each time the wallpaper is switched out.

On my Vista machine the memory usage for the app sat around 13MB when idle, and 21MB when hard at work. The processor usage obviously spiked while putting together the background, but the highest I saw it go was 65% (it only did that for a split second, too). That’s not all bad for what the program accomplishes.

The nice thing is that Background Switcher is actually a performance-conscious app, and offers several different settings to make sure it doesn’t interrupt your work. Here are some of the things you customize:

• On start up don’t switch the wallpaper for a specified number of seconds. This gives the rest of your apps a chance to finish loading before it starts working on the background.
• Stop switching the background when the screensaver is running.
• Stop switching when running over terminal services (ex. remote desktop).
• Only switch when the system has been idle for at least 15 seconds.
• Stop switching if any programs you specify are running. Great for games or applications that require extensive use of your computers resources.

–Overview–

To be honest I haven’t gotten this excited about an application in a long time. The interface is very intuitive and simple, but at the same time there are tons of things you can customize. And the fact that it supports so many online photos services is astounding. Plus it’s free! The developer is even very active in the support forum in case you need help using it, or just have a feature request. It’s not often that you see an application and developer of this caliber that doesn’t charge a dime.

Get John’s Background Switcher

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 05, 2011 by CyberNet.

Windows only
I use PDF printers quite a bit since I’ve grown accustomed to having the feature built-in on my Mac. In order to do this on a Windows machine you’ll need a third-party application, and there are quite a few that you can choose from. Most of them all do the same thing, but we came across one recently that we liked.

The reason why I think Dora PDF Writer stands out is because it doesn’t try to install any toolbars or other apps during the setup process, and it is pretty simple to use. There aren’t a lot of configuration options that you can choose from, but it has the basics such as encryption, save-to location, and some meta properties for the PDF that will get generated. The screenshot above is what you’ll see when you choose Dora as your printer.

This is also compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, which is nice since I’ve seen some that don’t support 64-bit yet. If you’re in the market for an app like this I’d say it’s worth the minute it will take to download and install it.

Doro PDF Writer Homepage (Windows only; 32/64-bit; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 09, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
I can think of a handful of times that I’ve wanted to export a list of all the files from a particular directory so that I could share them with someone else. That kind of task sounds like it should be really easy, but there aren’t too many apps out there that are versatile enough to meet most users’ needs. One that I stumbled across, getFolder, should cover most aspects that you’re looking for in an app like this.

Aside from being both free and portable, getFolder will let you export a list of files and folders to an HTML, XML, TXT, RTF, or CSV file. All of these options mean you can create an ultra-simple list, or get a bit more complex by using a CSV file and opening it up into a spreadsheet app such as Excel.

Looking for more features? getFolder can do basic bulk renaming of files and can filter out results according to criteria you specify. It’s not exactly a ground-breaking program, but since it’s portable I’d say there’s some value in keeping it around for those one-off situations where you need to list out the contents of a folder.

getFolder 2.0 Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Last Thursday we showed you how to make Windows Live Writer portable, and today we are going to show you how to create powerful text templates that will save you incredible amounts of time. Unfortunately the plugin you’ll need to install, Dynamic Templates, won’t work with the portable version.

Dynamic Templates was created by Joe Cheng who happens to be one of the primary Live Writer developers. For that reason I had expected the plugin to be good, but I didn’t expect it to be this good!

As of two-weeks ago I was using the free Post2Blog software for writing all of my articles, and it had a built-in template manager. It was designed to let users quickly enter in some HTML code that would otherwise be found repetitious. It was limited to doing what Dynamic Templates can do in the first example below, so if the plugin doesn’t seem special from that demo make sure you move on to the others!

Before we get started with the four demonstrations I want to give you a heads up that there is some C# code involved in some of the examples. I’ve never actually programmed in C# before, but I’ve done 7 or 8 other languages so I was quickly able to pick up on the basics. The Dynamic Templates page has some instructions on how to insert the syntax, but you’ll probably learn the ropes from the videos.

–HTML Templates–

This is a basic HTML template that is what most of you will probably want. We use these all the time to insert things we frequently use in posts, such as our daily CyberNotes logo. That way we don’t have to insert the image every time we want to use it.

Code:

<p align="center"><a href="http://cybernetnews.com/category/cybernotes/"><img alt="CyberNotes" src="http://tech.cybernetnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/CyberNotes.gif"></a><br><strong>Time Saving Tuesday</strong></p>

–Selection Formatting–

The Dyanmic Template plugin has a command, "_selection", that lets you insert the highlighted text anywhere in your template. You might be asking yourself how that would be useful, but I think you’ll be surprised at how many things you can do with it. In this example we show you how to wrap multiple HTML tags around the text that we’ve highlighted thereby creating a one-click colorful header.

Code:

<h3><strong><font color="#800000"><%= _selection %></font></strong></h3>

–Selection Processing–

This is using the same "_selection" command mentioned in the previous demonstration, but now it is really starting to tie in some of the C# programming. More specifically this code will send the highlighted text through an HTML filter which will transform any plain text HTML tags into valid HTML.

Code:

<%= HtmlDecode(_selection) %>

–Advanced Video Insertion–

This demonstration shows you why I love the plugin so much, but you’ve got to know a little bit of programming to completely understand what it’s doing. Here I setup the plugin to prompt the user for a Google Video ID and the desired width/height for the embedded video. If no dimensions are entered in it will fall back on some defaults which can be designated in the code.

Tip: This code can easily be configured for use with any video service, but sites like YouTube specify the ID, height, and width twice in the embed code. Make sure you replace all necessary instances if you want it to work properly.

Code (there are also a few variables which you can get from the video):

<% if(width == "")width = "400"; %>
<% if(height == "")height = "326"; %>
<embed style="width:<%= width %>px; height:<%= height %>px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=<%= ID %>&hl=en" flashvars=""> </embed>

–Overview–

While the plugin is very complete in my eyes there are a few things that could make this even better:

• Hotkeys! Oh man, it would be really sweet if you could assign hotkeys to some of the templates you use the most often.
• I would like the option to set the size of the window which lists all of your templates. I have about two-dozen templates, and I don’t really like having to scroll to get to some of them.

To wrap things up Dynamic Templates is a great way to remove the strain of repetitive tasks, but to harness the true power you’ll need to sit down for an hour or so and learn how to write code that works well with it. Believe me, you won’t be sorry!

Dynamic Templates Homepage (Download)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

Gaim has become a widely known instant messenger because it is not only cross-platform (meaning it works on multiple operating systems) but it is also cross-network. Using only this application you can connect with friends on AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Jabber (or Google Talk), and ICQ without needing separate messenger clients for each one.

AOL, however, had a little fit because of the similarities in the name “Gaim” when compared to their already trademarked “AIM”. AOL must have realized that Gaim could become the messenger of choice for users since Gaim has already become pretty popular as a no-cost instant messenger alternative.

AOL and Gaim finally settled on a name change to Pidgin, which will definitely take some getting used to on my part. The good news is that the development team had been holding back releasing a new version of the messenger until all of their legal woes cleared. Now that it has passed they say that 2.0.0 should be available late this week or early next week.

Here is what the team had to say about the situation:

Getting a settlement with AOL has taken FAR FAR longer than we would have ever guessed. On legal advice, we have refrained from any non-beta release during this process as a show of good faith, and to keep AOL from giving up on it. Again, on legal advice, we have also kept this information closely controlled.

At long last, I am pleased to announce that we have a signed settlement and can release our new version. There is one catch however: we have had to change the project’s name.

I’m still a little in shock that this even had to happen, but I guess that is how the legal world works. If someone is jeopardizing the success of your own software (and advertising) then do what you can to remove them from the picture. Maybe I’m wrong about AOL’s reasoning for having to do this, but I think they saw a genuine competitor for their own instant messenger client which makes AOL a lot of money for displaying embedded ads.

The new homepage for the messenger is Pidgin.im, but it still looks like they have some rebranding to go through because most of the site still refers to Gaim and not Pidgin.

Source: Slashdot

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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