Mar 21

Pandora Extension for Chrome is the Perfect Compact Player

Posted in: Freeware, media player, Music, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on February 22, 2011 by CyberNet.

Pandora chrome extension

I’m an avid Pandora listener, and for the most part I’m listening to the music when I’m on-the-go with my iPhone. I still like to have some tunes turned on while I’m working though, and for that I fall back to the web interface which can often feel clunky. Last week, with very little hope, I decided to see if there was a Google Chrome extension for managing Pandora playback, and I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

The unofficial Pandora extension is perfect for any Pandora listener. As you can see in the screenshot above there is an icon added to the Chrome toolbar just like with other extensions. When you click on the icon you’ll have to login the first time, and from there you can switch between and manage stations, manage playback, thumbs up/down a song, and so much more.

Are you a keyboard junkie that would rather manage your music with an interface that is reminiscent of the command-line? Well, the Pandora extension has some special Omnibar commands that can be activated by bringing focus to the address bar and then typing “Pandora” followed by the tab key. After that you can enter things like play, pause, skip, like, dislike, tired, and station <station name>. Yes, you can skip songs and control playback without lifting your fingers from your keyboard. It’s a geek’s dream come true.

Pandora extension omnibar

If you’ve been looking for a better way to play your Pandora music in your browser I’d say this is almost as good as it gets. Frankly I’m surprised that Pandora doesn’t offer something like this for users that pay the annual fee, but I guess it’s better this way since both free and paid users can take advantage of this.

Unofficial Pandora Extension for Chrome

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Mar 21

Tweak Vista & XP with XdN Tweaker

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili, Windows Vista, Windows XP

This article was written on August 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

XdN TweakerI’m astonished at how many tweaking utilities have been released for Vista thus far. We’ve got TweakVista, VistaTweaker, TweakUAC, Vista Sidebar Styler, and Vispa. Now we’ve got one more that we can append to that list: XdN Tweaker. This one is a little more unique than the others, and the reason for that lies in its cross-compatibility.

This tiny app has customization tweaks that work in 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista, Server 2003, and XP. There’s nothing to install…just download and run the tweaker. After you’re done you can safely remove the program, and your changes will remain in place.

There are quite a few different things that you can do with this, but my favorite is the option to disable the black "faded" background that appears behind a UAC prompt. It takes just one click to remove that background, and I actually think the prompts appear faster by having that disabled.

Here’s a mixture of the things that you can customize on both XP and Vista:

  • Changes the number of Folder views Windows saves.
  • Resets the folder views Windows has saved.
  • Add/Remove classic Windows 2000 user control panel icon.
  • Disable/Enable ATI Catalyst Control Center right click on Desktop (only for use if you have an ATI video card and have the Catalyst Control Center installed).
  • Disable/Enable ‘SendTo’ right-click menu.
  • Allows you to adjust and tweak TCP/IP settings.
  • Disable/Enable ZipFolders.
  • Disable/Enable the Outlook Express/Windows Mail splash screen.
  • Put the File menu above the Back/Forward buttons in IE7.
  • Remove or Replace the Search box in IE7.
  • Disable/Enable User Account Control prompts under Vista.
  • Disable/Enable the “- Shortcut” text under Vista.
  • Attempt to force Vista to better save folder views.
  • Disable/Enable Windows Media Player Explorer context menus.
  • Add/Remove “Take Ownership” to right-click menus under Vista.
  • Disable/Enable the Documents item on the Classic Start Menu.
  • Changes “Delete” to “Search…” on Recycle Bin.
  • Turn off the annoying full screen “black” UAC prompt.
  • Add/Remove the Network Connections icon to Control Panel

XdN Tweaker Homepage
Source: Lifehacker

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Mar 19

Foxit Reader 2.2 – Now the Best PDF Reader

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Newly Released, search, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on October 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

Foxit Reader 2.2 Screenshot

Foxit Reader just got perfect in my opinion. You may think that I’m crazy for thinking that it wasn’t perfect before, but one thing that always bothered me was the poor text selection. Before to copy and paste text from a PDF you had to draw a box around the text that you wanted. It was nothing like what Acrobat does for selecting text, and it was far from what people are accustomed to when selecting text in a word processor.

Now, however, that has all changed. Foxit Reader 2.2 has a greatly improved text selection feature. With it you can highlight text line-by-line which is incredibly handy when working with multi-column layouts. If the text that you’re highlighting gets close to the bottom of the page Foxit will automatically begin scrolling for you, too!

The other good news is that the improved text selection is just one of the many new features in Foxit Reader 2.2:

  • Capture words via mouse: If you are using a dictionary software, you may want to use your mouse to capture words inside a PDF file and have them translated. You can turn on this feature by checking “Screen word-capturing” option under Edit>Preferences>General.
  • Advanced PDF Search: Now you can search a string either in a single PDF file or in multiple PDF files under a specified folder. When the search finishes, all occurrences will be listed in a tree view.
  • Minimize Foxit Reader to the system tray: You now can save space on your task bar by minimizing the Foxit Reader to system tray. This feature can be turned on by checking “Minimize to system tray” option under Edit>Preferences>General.
  • Work with friendly bookmarks: Now when you navigate through the PDF document, the highlighted bookmark item will automatically be kept in sync with the current page being displayed. And you can click on a handle to hide or show the bookmark panel.
  • View PDF page size: Now the actual size of each PDF page is displayed on the status bar.
  • Enjoy other improved features: You will enjoy many other improved features, including:
    • Well-organized toolbars
    • Better command line support
    • Enhanced support for eastern Asian languages
    • Many bug fixes

Download Foxit Reader

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Mar 17

WinExpose No Longer Being Developed

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on January 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

WinExpose WinExpose is a truly amazing (and free) application that brought to Windows what I consider to be one of Mac’s best features: Expose. When the Windows application was started back in September of 2006, new builds were being released once or twice a week. There were even several times where multiple releases occurred on the same day.

Unfortunately, the day has come for this application to be discontinued. The developer, known as “matonga” in the forum, announced that he lacks the time that it takes to continue improving WinExpose on a regular basis. For that reason he will not be adding any new features or releasing any versions in the future.

I am very disappointed that he can’t continue to develop this application because I found it to be really great. He is a very upstanding guy and I am happy that he is at least turning over the source code with the hope that someone else will take the project under their wing to make it better.

There are other applications that add Expose-like features to Windows, but many of them you have to fork money out for like TopDesk, anthabounce, Reflex Vision, and Exposer for Windows. I haven’t found many free alternatives other than iEx, which I think needs a lot more work than WinExpose.

iEx

It does what its supposed to, but if you enable the feature to include minimized windows it slows down a little too much if you have a lot of windows open. Not only that but every now and then it has a hard time taking the screenshots. For example, in the image above there is an application in the upper-left corner that just shows up as a black blob when in reality it is a Google Talk chat window. There is also the Windows Explorer window in the bottom-right corner where it couldn’t take a screenshot of a small portion of the window so it returned a partially-black result.

I didn’t expect the application to be perfect because it is free, but WinExpose was so close to being a truly amazing freeware program. I never really had troubles with it, so I will continue to use it in hopes that another programmer finds the application to be interesting and continues the development process. Thanks for all the hard work that you put into this “matonga”!

Thanks to “netster007x” for the tip!

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Mar 17

How Much Carbon Dioxide is Your Computer Saving?

Posted in: Freeware, search, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on October 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

Snap CO2 Saver

Sometimes it is fun to see how you’re actually helping the environment, and the free Snap CO2 Saver will give you the info you want to know. It reminds me a lot of the Local Cooling program we previously wrote about, but it is a little more sleek and useful.

The program has two different modes, one that is compact and one that is fully extended. The compact mode only shows how much CO2 has been saved by you, and by all of the CO2 Saver users. If you expand it out you’ll get a search box, which can be customized to a search engine of your choice (there’s a handful to choose from).

When you head on over to the options the first thing you’ll want to do is adjust how strict you want the settings to be:

  • Mild – Turns off the screen after 30 minutes of inactivity, Turns off hard disks after 60 minutes. Computer does not enter standby mode or hibernation.
  • Medium – Turns off the screen and hard disks after 60 minutes of inactivity. Enters standby mode after 2 hours. Saves about twice as much power as the Mild setting.
  • Aggressive – Turns off screen and hard disks after 15 minutes of inactivity. Enters standby mode after 30 minutes. Power saving happens faster than in the medium setting.
  • Custom – Change the values mentioned above to what you would like

Oddly enough this program comes to you from Snap, which is well known for showing small thumbnail previews of websites when hovering over a link. I originally thought that they might be using their own search page for the search box, but that’s actually not the case. You can choose their search engine from the list, but Google is the default.

Snap CO2 Saver Homepage

This article was written in part for Blog Action Day.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Mar 16

Q10 is a Full Screen Writing Program

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on January 20, 2011 by CyberNet.

q10 writer.png

arrow Windows Windows only arrow
I’m not real big on full-screen writing applications, but I know quite a few people who use Q10 on a regular basis. This is considered to be a distraction-free way to write stories, articles, or just about anything that is text-based. It isn’t a feature-packed app like Microsoft Word, but it includes a lot of the things that writers really want including spell check capabilities.

I’ve got a full list of features found in Q10 below, but one of my favorites is the autosaving configuration options. You can, of course, have it save based on a certain time interval specified in minutes, but you can also have it save after a number paragraphs. I like the concept of saving based on the amount of content that has changed rather than on a set time interval. It would be even cooler if you could do it based on sentences, but I’ll take what I can get.

Here’s a better breakdown of the features available in Q10:

  • Full-screen
  • Live text statistics – Word, page and character counts are updated live as you type.
  • Programmable page count formula – Specify what formula to use for page count calculation.
  • Customizable look and paragraph format – Change the colors, line spacing, first line indent, paragraph spacing, font…
  • Perfectly portable – A single self-contained executable file. That’s all. Easy to use with a pendrive, so you can carry your writing environment with you everywhere. Q10 will remember the last file you worked on, even if the drive letter assigned to your pendrive changes from computer to computer.
  • Easy to use timer alarm – Perfect for timed writing sessions and word wars. When the time is over, it will tell you how many words you wrote in that period.
  • Spell checker
  • Notes – Any paragraph starting with “..” is considered a note. You can get a list of all notes in the current document and jump instantly to any of them.
  • Target count – Displays completed percentage. You can choose units: words, pages, lines, paragraphs or characters.
  • Partial counts – Keep track of the extension of current chapter or see how much content you’ve produced in the current writing session. You’re free to use partial counts as you like: up to four counters with customizable labels and units: words, pages, lines, paragraphs or characters.
  • Autocorrections and quick text – Unlimited autocorrection entries to fix on the fly those persistent typing errors. Unlimited quick texts list for frequently used words or phrases, like character names, places, etc.
  • Standard and clean text format – You will be able to open your work with any text editor or word processor.
  • Typing sound effects – Get that typewriter feeling again. For the trivia lovers among you, the typing sounds were taken from the movie “Amélie”.
  • Small, fast and stable – Less than 360Kb in size, you don’t need huge frameworks or runtimes to use this beauty.
  • Autosaving – You can ask Q10 to save your work after some number of new paragraphs, or after some time has elapsed. If you’re really paranoid, set Q10 to save every paragraph.

There is really only one disappointing thing about Q10, and it’s that there have been no updates since 2007. There isn’t much that the developer could really add to this without making the application overly complicated/bloated (thereby defeating its purpose), but it’s always reassuring to see regular updates.

Q10 Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Mar 12

KatMouse Scrolls Background Windows with Ease

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili, Windows, windows 7

This article was written on March 10, 2011 by CyberNet.

Scroll background window

arrow Windows Windows only arrow
Last year we wrote about a useful program called WizMouse that would let you scroll windows that were in the background (i.e. a window not in focus).  I use this kind of functionality all the time when writing articles, but it also carries over into other situations. For example, the other day I had two spreadsheets open and was comparing values between them. Normally in Windows I’d have to constantly switch focus between the two spreadsheets if I wanted to scroll each of them. With an app like WizMouse that’s not the case because I can simply hover my mouse over any window, and then use my scroll wheel to navigate through the content. This kind of behavior is built-in to Mac OS X, but not Windows.

I’m not here to talk about WizMouse though. When we wrote the article Amber left a comment with an alternative app called KatMouse. It has some settings that set it apart such as the ability to push in the middle mouse button to have it send the foreground window to the background. You can also specify custom scroll settings on a per-application basis, which is definitely helpful for those programs that seem to scroll at different rates. Plus you can always click on the cat icon in the System Tray to quickly disable/enable the functionality.

How do some of these features work? Here’s a slightly abbreviated version of the KatMouse usage as described by the developer:

  • Scroll most windows page wise by holding the wheel button over the window and clicking the left (up) or right (down) mouse button. If you hold the left or right mouse button, you’ll get continuous, accelerating pagewise scrolling.
  • To push a window to the stack bottom, just click with the wheel button on the window (double click on ‘always on top’ windows). This works even while dragging something with the mouse (i.e. copying files from one explorer to another). To raise that window again, click and hold the wheel button on it for some time.
  • Choose individual wheel scroll settings for applications and windows. In the Applications tab, choose the applications executable file in the file dialog and set the desired scroll width by double clicking on the new entry in the list.
  • In the Classes tab you can select the kind of window (its class) to customize by draggin the crosshair to the window. If the chosen window does not behave correctly you can disable the ‘Window has wheel scrolling support’ checkbox in its settings dialog. This will force KatMouse to use a different, possibly less efficient approach to scrolling the window.

The good news is that KatMouse is just as efficient as WizMouse in terms of memory usage. I found it consuming a mere 1.1MB on my system, and I’m definitely willing to give it those resources for the functionality I get in return.

KatMouse Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

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Mar 12

Fast Email Filtering in Thunderbird

Posted in: Freeware, Newly Released, Software, Today's Chili

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

One of the great things about the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client is that it has an extension system much like it’s browser counterpart Firefox. Because of this Thunderbird users can really benefit from features created by developers around the world, and a great example of this is with the Seek extension.

Seek actually capitalizes on an idea that has been around for ages, but it’s typically found only on websites. A prime example would be eBay where you can filter results according to the product type, and then by manufacturer, and so on. With Seek you’re able to filter through your emails using a faceted browsing system, which is essentially performing searches using multiple criteria. For example, you can have Thunderbird show only the emails from a specific person that were sent in the last week directly to you.

A screenshot doesn’t really capture just how great this feature is, and so here’s a quick screencast put together by the developers:

Seek is a great idea, but I’ve moved my email management over to Gmail so that they are easily accessible from anywhere. The good news is that Gmail has a similar system setup except that it is classified as an “advanced search” (located next to the search box). It doesn’t have an interface quite as sharp as Seek’s, but it serves a similar purpose for those of you not wanting to use a desktop email client. With it you can filter your emails based on multiple criteria including when the emails were sent.

Get the Seek Thunderbird Extension
Thanks to Jack of all Trades for the tip!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Mar 11

iPhone Dev Team Posts Jailbreak Stats

Posted in: Freeware, iPhone, jailbreak, Software, stats, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on May 11, 2010 by CyberNet.

jailbreak stats-1.png

If you have an iPhone there is no doubt that you’ve at least heard of the iPhone Dev-Team. They are the ones that are behind most of the iPhone jailbreaks and unlocks out there, and continue to deliver with each major release that Apple puts out. As of April 30th the team says that there have been over 9.8 million installs of ultrasn0w, which is the most recent unlock solution that can make the iPhone work on other carriers.

If you follow their Twitter account you may have seen some of the postings they made about their visitor stats going from January 2008 all the way up to present day. The screenshot above is from their Google Analytics account, and shows off their 56.3 million visits, 22.3 unique visitors, and 93.7 million pageviews. What I thought was cool was the graph showing the gradual increase of traffic as well as the spikes. Some of the surges in traffic can be related to Apple product releases, such as the iPhone 3GS in June 2009 (the largest spike) and the 3rd generation iPod Touch released in September 2009 (the following spike).

The team also broke down some other stats from their site…

Top browsers:

  1. Safari
  2. Firefox
  3. Internet Explorer
  4. Chrome
  5. Opera

Top visiting countries:

  1. United States
  2. Germany
  3. United Kingdom
  4. Canada
  5. France

Countries with the lowest number of visits:

  1. Åland Islands (lowest number of visits)
  2. Zimbabwe
  3. Zambia
  4. Yemen
  5. Wallis and Futuna

This kind of stuff may not interest a lot of people, but I’m kinda a stat nerd so I found it to be pretty interesting. I’d be curious to hear what their operating system breakdown is.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Mar 11

CyberNotes: Creating Screencasts With Freeware Software

Posted in: CyberNotes, Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on December 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Time Saving Tuesday

Screencasts are becoming the way of the Web and are a great way for people to visually explain how to do something. A screencast, for those people unfamiliar with them, is a recording of a user’s computer screen that is often used to demonstrate the capabilities and features of a software application. Anytime I see a software product that I’m interested in I always look for a screencast because it will give me a better idea of whether the software is right for me, without even downloading it.

As far as professional screencast software goes there are two that I recognize as the industry leaders: Techsmith’s Camtasia and Adobe’s Captivate. Before you pull out your checkbook to purchase these it is probably good for you to know that Camtasia busts-the-bank at $300 and Captivate doubles that at $600, making these two software packages unreasonable for most home users. That is why I wanted to focus more on the great freeware solutions that are available for you to use.

–Cropper (Homepage/GIF Plug-in)–

Out of the three solutions that I am going to discuss Cropper is the most unique. It doesn’t create a video or Flash file like the others and the actual purpose of Cropper is to capture screenshots. It is written in C# so the program will only work in Windows but the true power isn’t applied until you get the Animated GIF plug-in. Once the application and the plug-in is installed you’ll be able to create animated screenshots like this one:

 

–CamStudio (Homepage)–

CamStudio CamStudio, not to be confused with the non-free Camtasia mentioned above, is probably one of the most popular screencast applications available. Using the software you’ll be able to record portions of your monitor or even the entire screen if you desire. After everything has completed and you’re done recording you can have it save the video as an AVI or generate a Streaming Flash (SWF) file.

The SWF file is particularly useful if you want to host the video yourself because it is a compressed version of the video, but then again the AVI file is great if you want to upload it to a video site like YouTube. Another way to knock down the size of the output file is to make the region your capturing a little smaller and then enabling the autopan to move the recording area with the mouse.

I had some problems getting CamStudio to record a screencast in Windows Vista despite it looking like it worked. The output would be a video that is all scrambled and switching codecs resulted in the same mess. The CamStudio blog has announced that version 3 of the software is just around the corner with a target release date in January of 2007 (it has been 3 years since a new version was released) but no details are given about what new features to expect. I’m crossing my fingers that Vista-compatibility is on the list.

 


–Wink (Homepage)–

Wink Wink is probably my favorite screencasting software out of the ones that I have mentioned here. It has an extremely large set of features and a unique frame-by-frame editor. Another really nice thing is that you can have it export your screencasts not only as a SWF flash file but also as a standalone EXE file that anyone can just double-click on to run. Or you can even have it generate an HTML file that will embed the screencast into a website for you which saves even more time. There are just too many features to sit here and name so here are the ones that Wink highlights:

  • Freeware: Distributed as freeware for business or personal use. However if you want to redistribute Wink, you need to get permission from the author.
  • Cross-Platform: Available for all flavours of Windows and various versions of Linux (x86 only).
  • Audio: Record voice as you create the tutorial for explaining better.
  • Input formats: Capture screenshots from your PC, or use images in BMP/JPG/PNG/TIFF/GIF formats.
  • Output formats: Macromedia Flash, Standalone EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML or any of the above image formats. Use Flash/html for the web, EXE for distributing to PC users and PDF for printable manuals.
  • Multilingual support: Works in English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese.
  • Smart Capture Tools: Capture screenshots automatically as you use your PC, based on mouse and keyboard input (great time saver and generates professional captures).
  • Performance/Quality: Creates highly compressed Flash presentations (few kbs to few hundreds of kbs, much smaller than competing commercial products) ideal for using on the web.
  • Tools:
    • Navigation buttons to move to next/previous/random frames in the presentation, you can use custom bitmaps for these buttons (full transparency/alpha channel support).
    • Callouts and shapes for displaying text explanations. The inbuilt Callout Editor is used to create custom shaped callouts as you want.
    • Intuitive drag-n-drop editing of the frame, callout, cursor, navigation buttons and the title elements.
    • Advanced features like templates, cursor editing, palettes, background images, control bars & preloaders for the flash output etc.
    • Completely PC and Web ready with exports to PDF, HTML, SWF and EXE formats.
    • Innovative compression techniques applied to reduce filesize of output Flash file. Generated flash file plays in Flash players from version 3 and above, giving you widest array of target audience.
    • Uncompressed output to allow you import the output of Wink into other Flash editors.

That’s quite an impressive list, huh?  It’s hard to believe but Wink is missing something that I think is crucial for a lot of people using screencast software. While it can export a screencast to a SWF file it does not support AVI at this time. That means you would have to get your hands on an SWF to AVI converter if you want to upload the screencast to a video hosting site like YouTube. I tried to find a freeware converter that worked but I came up empty handed (I tried several, including SUPER, and they all gave errors for some reason). If Wink ever gets AVI compatibility then I will be really happy.

 

–Summary–

There you have it, three great ways to demonstrate something to your audience without ever having to pay a dime. Of the three Wink is my favorite but the lack of AVI compatibility is really disappointing. I couldn’t even get CamStudio to work properly on Vista so I couldn’t accurately compare the output of the applications but it seems to have a lot of similar features to Wink. If you know of another great freeware screencasting utility make sure you let us know so that we can try it out!

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