Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 01, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

It’s not often that I come across a single widget/gadget that is good enough to constitute it’s own article, and I never expected to find one that would be good enough for its own CyberNotes article. When I tried out Informer, a Yahoo Widget, I was absolutely blown away at everything it could do. It’s almost an entire application in itself!

What could this possibly do that makes it so impressive. It rolls about ten or fifteen different widgets up into one. It can monitor your network/CPU usage, check your IMAP/POP3 mailboxes, show your battery life, fetch RSS feeds, and provide quick access to files/folders that you use often. To keep it all organized Informer shows everything in a single toolbar located on your desktop:

(Click to Enlarge)

Before we proceed with the different features that Informer has you should know that each thing you add to the toolbar is called a “sensor.” They are kind of like mini-widgets in some sense, and as seen in the screenshot above there is quite a lengthy list of different sensors that can be added.

Heads up: I’ve found that this widget alone will consume between 10MB and 40MB of memory depending on what and how much you add to it. With all the different things it’s capable of doing this might be worth it, but I know some of you covet your memory as if your life depended on it.

–Email Checker–

Informer is capable of checking email from a variety of different email accounts. It has special options for Gmail (both regular Gmail users and Gmail for Domains) and Yahoo Mail accounts, but it can be configured to work with any IMAP or POP3 email account. When you receive new mail you’ll be alerted with a slick little notification window that pops out of the side of the screen.

You can add as many mail accounts as you would like, and then pick how many messages it displays as well as the retrieval interval. Heck, you can even specify a custom icon to be used with each different mailbox you add.

–System Stats–

I know that a lot of you are stats addicts, and find enjoyment in knowing how hard your computer is working. Informer has a variety of different sensors that can be added for monitoring different areas of your machine: CPU, network, system uptime, battery, memory, disk, and swap.

–RSS Feeds–

Is it ever possible to have too many ways to read your RSS feeds? Apparently not because Informer is also able to retrieve and display RSS feeds for your favorite sites. With every feed that you have the widget monitor you can specify the update interval, and you can provide a custom icon.

–Shortcuts–

To make this widget even more useful you can use it as a place to hold shortcuts to your favorite files, folders, and websites. If you want to add a shortcut just drag and drop a file, folder, or URL onto the toolbar. If it’s a folder that you’ve added you’ll be able to open it right there and view the contents. What’s really nice is that the window that appears is completely resizable:

–And More–

Is that it? Not quite. There are several more sensors that we haven’t covered in this article including:

• A power button to turn off, reboot, or lock your computer
• Recycle Bin
• WiFi signal strength
• Internet Radio
• Date/Time (with a pop-out calendar)
• Images
• Text

–Preferences–

Not only can you customize each of the sensors that you add to Informer, but you can also customize the toolbar itself. You can do things like specify an external RSS reader and mail client, change the appearance of the toolbar, enable multiple monitor support, and much more. Here’s a glimpse of the different areas that can be customized:

If Informer sounds like something that would be useful to you head on over to Yahoo Widgets to get the Informer widget. It’s completely free, and I think you’ll be pretty shocked with everything it is capable of.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on February 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

One of the reasons Adobe Photoshop has become so popular is because of all the advanced photo affects that can be applied to images. Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of free alternatives emerge onto the scene saving users hundreds of dollars, but many of them don’t have the effects and control that I’m looking for.

The tool that we found for you today is called PhotoFiltre, and it is completely free just like most of the software we write about. It’s far from becoming a Photoshop replacement, but I’ve found that it is extremely handy at applying effects and touching up the digital photos that you have lying around. Lets look at some of the things that it can do…

 
(Click to Enlarge)

–Features–

• There are over 100 filters available including ones for standard adjustments (brightness, saturation, etc…) and even artistic ones (watercolor, puzzle effect, etc…). We’ll get into these more in the next section of the article.
• You can select portions of an image with an automatic shape (rectangle, ellipse, triangle, rhombus, rounded rectangle) or with the lasso, magic wand, and polygon tools.
• Well-organized toolbars make it easy to switch between the most used tools.
• PhotoMasque lets you create advanced effects of contour and transparency on your images by using preset masks. These masks are grayscale images, where white is the transparancy color, while opacity increases as the shades of gray become darker. Black means complete opacity. There are several basic masks included.
• The Automatisation module lets you apply basic functions/corrections (conversion, image size, framing) to a group of images.
• Advanced text effects are available including rotation, shading, and bevel.
• Assemble and blend multiple images.
• Automatic photo corrections that enhance your images so that they look the best.
• Free plug-ins add even more functionality including red eye removal, animated GIF importing, page curl effect, gradients, screen capture, and much more.

–Effects–

One of my favorite things with the PhotoFiltre application is the wide array of special filters that’s available. I wanted demonstrate what some of the filters can do, so here are some examples using the image pictured in the screenshot above as the starting ground:

• I cropped the image so that the mountains were removed, and then I applied the Lake reflection filter (in the Deform menu). It really does look like a reflection in a lake, doesn’t it?
  
• This is the Puzzle effect (in the Stylize menu)… you could really create your own puzzle if you had a steady hand with the scissors.
  
• This is the Trapezoid/Perspective filter (in the Deform menu) which can be used to angle your photos:
  
• Here I used the Lasso tool to select just the grass area, and then I applied the Fog filter (in the Visual effect menu) to the selected area.
  
• In a single click I was able to turn this wonderful afternoon photo into what appears to be a night shot. This was done using the Night effect filter (in the Color menu):
  

Those are just a handful of the filters available. Here’s a quick list of some of my other favorites that you might find useful:

• Blurring (several different types of blurs)
• Antialias
• Dust reduction
• Revive colors
• Sunset effect
• Colored pencil
• Comic strip
• Ripple
• Glass
• Mosiac
• Frames
• and dozens more…

–Overview–

PhotoFiltre has become a beloved application of mine over the last month simply because I do a lot of photo corrections and enhancements on a regular basis. If you want to edit your images this is a great solution, and once you throw a couple of the plug-ins into the app it will become a really powerful photo editor.

PhotoFiltre Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on February 18, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
These days computers are becoming more and more of a media hub for users to watch movies or television shows on. For awhile I’ve switched between a handful of media players including VLC, KMPlayer, and GOM. All of those are excellent in their own way, and now I think I’ll also have to add SPlayer to the list. On top of supporting the wide array of media types that the others do, SPlayer is fast.

The best thing about SPlayer is hands-down the simple interface. As you can see in the screenshot above it’s nice because all of the buttons are overlaid on the video when you move your mouse, and there are no visible menus to distract you. Not only that, but there is a minimalist mode (pictured above) that gets rid of the minimize/maximize/close buttons that are typically at the top of a window so that you get a very clean viewing experiencing without needing to go to full-screen mode.

As expected SPlayer also integrates with Windows 7 nicely. One way it does that is to show the progress of whatever you’re watching in the Taskbar icon, and I’m hoping that in an upcoming release it will also some basic jumplist support (for things like recently played movies). Thanks to some out-of-the-box jumplist functionality in Windows 7, however, you can always drag a file onto the SPlayer icon to have that particular file pinned to the jumplist menu. Whenever you select that video from the list SPlayer will immediately open and start playing it.

And I can’t forget to mention the performance, which is rather incredible. Starting up SPlayer takes about a second on my machine, and to start playing a video all I have to do is drag the file somewhere in the window. In terms of memory usage SPlayer uses about 5MB when sitting idle and around 36MB when a movie is playing. That definitely falls within the range of acceptability.

Everything about this app feels snappy, clean, and well thought out. I give the developers a lot of credit for the attention to detail that ensures users will have the best experience possible. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t already.

Get SPlayer (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on June 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

With every new release of Firefox there’s always going to be a few extensions that just don’t make the cut. Developers let the extensions fade into the dust as users keep their fingers crossed that someone else will pickup the project. Google Browser Sync is exactly one of those extensions, and it looks like there is very little chance of a resuscitation. That means you’ll no longer be able to sync your bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords, and tabs between browsers!

According to Lifehacker Google has no intention of making the extension compatible with Firefox 3 which is due out on Tuesday. Here’s part of the response that one of their readers received from the Google Team when inquiring about the future of the project:

Thanks for trying out Google Browser Sync and for all of your feedback. It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.

The response then goes on to talk about how Firefox 2 users who are still running the extension will only receive support throughout 2008. Looks like there’s really no point in someone trying to get it to work in Firefox 3 then if Google won’t be providing the hosting that’s needed to store the information.

My question is how many of you still use Google Browser Sync? I thought it was pretty cool when it first came out, but it didn’t last long on my computer. I just wasn’t comfortable with Google having that much of my information, and right now all I use is Foxmarks merely as a way to keep my bookmarks backed up.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on April 01, 2008 by CyberNet.

…not as good as I thought they would be. Apple brought Safari 3.1 out of Beta in the middle of March, and shortly after that they started to push Safari out to all of the Windows users who already had iTunes or QuickTime installed. Well, as we roll our way into April I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of bump Safari got in usage by using their rather questionable method of distribution.

Overall in February Safari had a market share of 5.70%, and in March it climbed to 5.82%. The disappointing news is that Safari already had 5.82% of the market share in January, and so the small jump that they had in March merely got the browser back up to its peak.

As you might recall from our last coverage on the browser stats Safari 3.0 was capturing a majority of the Safari browser market share. Here’s a breakdown of Safari’s March stats showing how the four most popular versions differ from February:

• Safari 3.0: 3.96% [down 0.60%]
• Safari 3.1: 0.82% [up 0.82%]
• Safari 41: 0.58% [down 0.12%]
• Safari 31: 0.30% [down 0.03%]

As you can see a majority of the people using Safari 3.1 are those that have likely upgraded from previous versions. It will be interesting to see what the stats are like for April since Safari 3.1 will have had a full month to incubate on the computers. But it doesn’t look like the overall market share for Safari will not likely soar because of Apple installing the browser onto millions of ill-informed Windows computers. You can, however, bet the bank that Apple will be boasting how many computers it has been installed on.

[stats via Net Applications]

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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