Hasta La Gadget!

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

The Windows Live Writer team just posted the Beta 2 which is now available for you to download. It has a handsome list of new features, but nothing I hadn’t really seen in a blog editor before:

• Inline spell checking
• Table editing
• Ability to add categories
• Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
• Support for excerpts and extended entries
• Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
• Paste Special
• Automatic synchronization of local and online edits
• Integration with Windows Live Gallery
• Support for Blogger Labels
• New look and feel
• Available in 6 languages
• Improved accessibility and keyboard support

My first impression of the new Live Writer was…wow! It looks amazing, and if appearance counts for anything it blows the other blog editors out of the water. It is sharp, sophisticated, and most of all, usable.

Click to Enlarge

The inline spell checking and table manager are awesome features that will surely come in handy. Unfortunately it still doesn’t appear to support the XHTML standards, but I’m sure many of the Live Writer users don’t know what that is.

I played with it a little more, and two things I thought you might like to see is the appearance of the right-click menu for the spell checker, and what you can actually do with the tables. Here are two screenshots that will sum that up well:

When creating the table, it asks you for all of the basic information just as if you were creating it in a word processor:

As you can see there are a lot of great things available with the new Live Writer, and you should consider giving it a shot. Personally, I’m a huge fan of Post2Blog which coincidentally turned to freeware the other day. It is a great application that has a ton of features, but I would have to say that Live Writer looks better and is a little simpler to use.

So what’s it missing? Despite Live Writer supporting plug-ins, I still think there are some things that should be built-in. Some of these things might be available via a plug-in, but this is what I would like to see Live Writer shipped with:

• XHTML standards compliance
• Table options (a.k.a. the stuff from the Table Menu) should open in the sidebar like they do when you click on an image.
• Customize the order of the categories (I don’t know of any blogging software that does this though).
• Enable Auto-saving by default. I don’t know who wouldn’t like the assurance that their documents are constantly being saved?
• Align buttons! If I want to center some text, I shouldn’t be going to the Format -> Align menu. That takes way to long. There should be buttons to do this. Also, what about the shortcut keys for aligning things, such as Ctrl+E for centering?
• I’m not sure about this one, but maybe make the sidebar expand/contract when you hover over it? That way it saves space and is still extremely easy to get to.
• I would like to create snippets as well. That way some of the repetitive things aren’t so…well, repetitive. This is great for people who guest blog and always conclude each post with a short summary of who they are.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’m sure many of you are YouTube addicts, and you probably can’t get enough of people jumping off roofs or watching those sonic booms. Now there is a Firefox extension to help match your crazy addiction!

YouPlayer appears as a sidebar item in your Firefox browser once it is installed. With it you can drag and drop YouTube video URL’s into the player to have it create a playlist.

One of the reasons I found this extremely useful was that I could drag and drop YouTube search results right into the player, and then watch them all without leaving the page that I was currently on. The only downside about doing it that way was that it didn’t retrieve the title of the video, and would have to be manually renamed if you wanted an easy-to-understand playlist. If you go to each videos standalone page, and then drag the tab over the naming convention is similar to what you see in the screenshot I took to the right.

There are a few things that came to my mind which would make this extension a must-have:

• It would be awesome if I could add videos from multiple video sites. Sadly it only supports YouTube right now.
• A bulk video adder seems like a necessity. Think about being able to drag a YouTube search results tab over into the playlist, and then having it automatically add all the videos from that page.
• What about searching YouTube from within the sidebar? Then you could setup “smart” playlists like iTunes has.
• A one-click option to have a playlist generated for the day’s most viewed videos would be nice.

Source: Lifehacker & Mozilla Links

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

Time Saving Tuesday

We have raved about the free PhraseExpress software before, and we are going to do it again! They recently released version 4 of their application, and the enhancements it has will make you so much more productive that you’ll be wondering how you got by without using it!

The concept behind PhraseExpress is extremely simple: you type some text in an application and PhraseExpress will automatically replace that text with something else. When would that be useful? Well, I’m sure you use abbreviations all of the time without even thinking about it. Take for example a chat conversation where you type messages like BRB (be right back) or TTYL (talk to you later). You probably use those abbreviations because they are faster to type, but you can setup PhraseExpress to automatically kick the habit of sending abbreviated phrases!

The newest version of PhraseExpress has all sorts of enhancements that take the program beyond just being a simple text replacement utility:

• Formatted text and bitmaps: This is great news for people who have signatures that they automatically want inserted when composing an email or document. I’ll explain more about this below.
  
• Automatic spelling corrections: This is just like Microsoft Word because PhraseExpress will automatically correct misspellings of thousands of the most common words. Having this feature when composing emails or typing comments in a browser is extremely handy!
• Assign multiple phrases to an Autotext: With this feature you can essentially have multiple phrases assigned to a single “keyword.” Whenever you type that keyword you will be presented with a drop-down menu for you to select which phrase you would like inserted:
  
• Assign multiple Autotexts to a phrase: This is the opposite of the previous bullet because this lets you setup multiple Autotexts (or keywords as I like to call them) for a single phrase. This is useful if you have a hard time remembering what Autotext you assigned to a phrase. An example of this is seen below with the default “.com” auto replacement that is setup. If you mistype “.com” with any of the variations listed it will automatically correct it for you.
  

There is a whole lot more that is new in PhraseExpress 4, but what I have listed above are the most beneficial for me. There are a few kinks that I have noticed with the formatted text and bitmaps addition though:

• To copy a Bitmap image or formatted text into a signature you actually need to highlight it in either a browser or in a document. Then click on the PhraseExpress icon in the System Tray and select the “Create new phrase” option. This will prompt you with a dialog box to save the highlighted text, but you need to make sure the “Save text formatting” box is checked. Click here for more detailed instructions.
• Saving formatting in Firefox doesn’t seem to work, so you’ll either need to use Internet Explorer or an application that supports text formatting/bitmaps if you want to save anything besides for a plain text phrase.
• When originally seeing the image support feature I must have bypassed the word “Bitmap” in the description. I spent about 15 minutes trying to get a JPEG image to be saved in an email signature, but it just wouldn’t work. I’m guessing that the image must be saved in the Bitmap format for this feature to work properly.

There’s a lot more that you can do in PhraseExpress, which are all explained more in the manual. Here are a few of the tips that might be the most helpful for you:

• Add the current date to a phrase
• Call a phrase within another phrase
• Add manual text input to a phrase
• Create an email from a phrase
• Launch an application from a phrase
• Open a file from a phrase
• Open a webpage from a phrase
• Add a special key into a phrase

Download PhraseExpress 4

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 12, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
It seems like on Windows I always come across those pesky files I can’t delete because another process is using it. Up until a few months ago I had always used a program called Unlocker to get around this, and it has served me well. I had to stop using it, however, when I moved to Vista 64-bit since it only includes support for 32-bit versions of Windows.

LockHunter, on the other hand, is a similar free utility that works on Windows 2000 up to Windows 7, and comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Just like Unlocker it integrates into your Windows Explorer context menu to save some clicks each time you want to unlock a file.

Here’s a rundown on some of the features:

• Shows processes locking a file or folder
• Allows to unlock, delete, copy or rename a locked file
• Allows to kill locking process
• Allows to remove locking processes from hard drive
• Integrates in to Explorer menu
• It deletes files into the recycle bin, so you may restore them if deleted by mistake
• Supports both 32 and 64-bit Windows

There’s just one more thing that I’d like to see LockHunter do, and that’s add a command-line interface. I have some scheduled tasks that used to use Unlocker’s command-line functionality to ensure that a a file wasn’t locked before trying to perform an operation on it. Unfortunately automated tactics like this don’t appear to be possible in LockHunter, but I’m sure that’s something they could easily add. Oh, and a portable version would also be pretty cool.

LockHunter Homepage (Windows only; freeware)
[via Lifehacker & gHacks)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

I don’t think anyone was really expecting to see a new release of Apple’s Safari browser today, but it has dropped down the tubes for all to enjoy. Apple is once again boasting the performance of the browser when stacked up against the other mainstream alternatives, and according to them Safari comes out well on top in terms of HTML performance and JavaScript performance.

As you may recall we recently put many of the different browser up against Apple’s SunSpider JavaScript test, and Firefox 3 pre-release builds topped the charts. At the time though we didn’t test it against pre-release versions of Safari 3.1, and so we thought that we would do that now. Here are some of our past results intermingled with the newest versions of the browsers (the lower amount of time is better):

1. Firefox 3 Beta 4: 6972.2ms
2. Safari 3.1: 7411.8ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1: 14302.0ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms

Note: All tests were performed on the same Windows machine.

Apple definitely holds the performance crown when comparing it to other released browsers, but once Firefox 3 makes its way out there will be a new king of the hill. So if you were developing a lengthy diabolical plan as to how you were going to switch from Firefox to Safari you might want to hold off if performance was the sole deciding factor.

As far as the Acid 3 test goes Safari 3.1 scores a 75/100, which isn’t quite as good as the nightly builds demonstrated when we last tested it. It’s still the closest a browser comes to passing the test though.

I haven’t noticed any new features in Safari 3.1, and so if you find something I would love to know about it. I do have to say it does feel pretty snappy though when it comes to loading pages. I might have to whip up some more comparisons between the browsers available.

Download Safari 3.1 (Mac or Windows)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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