Dec 13

FastAero: Vista-like Transparency (with Blurring) on XP

Posted in: Apple, Freeware, Hacks, Microsoft, Pre-Release, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili, Windows XP

This article was written on May 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

When we mentioned the Vystal software a month ago I was pretty excited. It was the first solution to come forward which offered Vista-like visual effects in Windows XP. Now there is another one called FastAero (Download Mirror) which hopes to do the same kind of thing, but it looks much more promising.

On FastAero’s homepage you’ll find several downloads available, with the latest claiming to be pretty unstable. I decided to give build 0510 a go (Download Mirror) on my only remaining XP machine, and getting it to run couldn’t have been much simpler since you don’t have to install it.

Unfortunately it didn’t work quite right probably because my graphics card in this machine isn’t the greatest, but I was still able to see the blurring effects in action. There were no borders to the windows though, so I took the liberty of outlining the borders in red so that they were a little easier to see:

FastAero
Click to Enlarge

I tried multiple versions of FastAero, and the latest one was the best. None of them put the minimize, maximize, and close buttons on the top toolbar for me though. If you do get it to work properly it would look something like this:

FastAero
Click to Enlarge

I recommend trying it out just for giggles if for nothing else. A new version is expected next month that takes advantage of the Mirror Driver. This will mean that a direct link can be made between the video driver memory and FastAero, effectively bypassing the CPU for much of the processing.

After you get done trying it out leave a comment letting us know how well it worked.

Note: This will not “skin” windows that you currently have open, instead it will only skin windows that are opened after enabling FastAero. And after closing FastAero, it will automatically restore the normal Windows XP borders so there should be no concern with it screwing up the appearance of your operating system.

FastAero Homepage (Download Mirror)

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Dec 13

Quickly Tag & Bookmark Sites in Firefox 3

Posted in: Firefox 3, Firefox Extensions, Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on August 16, 2008 by CyberNet.

One thing that I absolutely love about the new Firefox 3 is its ability to bookmark a site in one-click using the star button in the address bar. It doesn’t organize my bookmarks, but it makes for a great way to temporary bookmark a site.

With the new TagMarks extension you can alleviate part of that problem. What it does is display additional icons in the address bar that only appear when you hover over the gold star. Clicking on one of the icons will bookmark the site, but it will also apply a specific tag to the bookmark depending on what icon you clicked. You can apply multiple tags by clicking on as many of the icons as you want.

tagmarks.jpg

There are a few ways that the extension tries to keep the clutter to a minimum. First off, when you’re not hovering over the gold star the icons will be hidden, except for those you’ve applied to the current site. Secondly, only a handful of icons are shown when hovering over the star. To see more of the icons you need to place your mouse over the arrow located next to the leftmost icon.

If you take a look in your Bookmarks menu you’ll also see an option to open up a page containing your TagMarks. From there you can click on one of the respective icons to see all of the bookmarks with that tag.

tagmarks homepage.jpg

Overall I’d say that this extension is can be very helpful in making sense of your one-click bookmarks, but I think it needs some customizability. Users should be able to choose which icons show up in the bar, and also what tag gets applied when selecting a particular icon.

TagMarks Extension [via Firefox Facts]

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Dec 13

Safari Illegal to Use on Windows?

Posted in: Apple, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on March 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

After all that talk about Apple pushing the Safari “update” on Windows users (here and here), as it turns out, it’s actually “illegal” for Windows users to install it! Read the first sentence in the image below and you’ll see what I mean:

license agreement

It very clearly reads in Apple’s License Agreement which you have to agree to before downloading Safari, that “This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.” The last time I checked, my Dell computer had no Apple label to be found on it! It looks like Apple needs to take some time to review all of their agreements now that they’re branching out and offering software to Windows users.

What’s even more funny is that when the License Agreement pops-up, it warns to read it carefully. Well, by reading it carefully it was discovered that PC users really aren’t supposed to be using it! It says in big bold/all caps:

PLEASE READ THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT (“LICENSE”) CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE. BY USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE, DO NOT USE THE SOFTWARE.

Maybe Apple is pushing Safari so hard because they’ll threaten all of the Windows users later on that they must switch to a Mac or face being sued? :) It looks like us software users aren’t the only ones that don’t read the agreement, apparently those who write it don’t read it either. This was clearly an oversight by Apple, and we imagine it’ll be fixed soon.

Source: The Register – Thanks for the tip Max!

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Dec 13

WinRoll: Collapse Your Programs Like Google Talk

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on August 30, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNet's CyberWare
Tracking Down Great Software For You!

One of the coolest, and probably unknown, features in Google Talk is the ability to click on the title bar of a chat window and to have it collapse. It doesn’t exactly minimize the window but makes it smaller so that you reclaim your desktop space but you can also easily re-open the chat.

There is a program that provides a similar feature for all windows called WinRoll. If collapsible windows aren’t enough for you then maybe you will like a few of the other features:

Make a window roll into its title bar, send it to the back or make it stay on top. Minimize, maximize or close all visible windows, including minimizing to the tray area. Make a window translucent on Windows 2000 or above.

WinRoll Collapsible Windows

As you can see this program is great for clearing up your desktop space when you have a lot of programs open. Not only can you “roll the windows up” but you can also minimize them to the tray. Just like most of our favorite software this one is free! In fact, it is open source in case you wanted to mess with the code yourself.

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Dec 12

Portable Firefox 1.5 RC3 Review

Posted in: Reviews, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on December 04, 2005 by CyberNet.

I have been an avid user of Mozilla Firefox for quite some time now. At school, however, I was unable to install Firefox because of not having the proper permissions. They do have Firefox installed, but only version Firefox 1.0.6 and I like 1.5 much better. Since I am allotted a given space at the University, I am able to put the Portable Firefox on my roaming profile so it will follow me to any computer I go to on campus.

I decided to give the Portable Firefox a shot to see how it would work with the extensions I like to use. Well, let’s just say I can’t tell a difference between Portable Firefox and the real Firefox. I currently have IE Tab, CustomizeGoogle, Foxpose, and Tab Mix Plus installed. I have no troubles with any of them. If you are looking to Download Portable Firefox then don’t hesitate, because it works great.

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Dec 12

EverNote 2.2 – Image Editor, GDS Integration, and More

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

This article was written on November 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

EverNote 2.2 EverNote is one of my favorite applications because of its advanced note taking capabilities. With it I’m able to clip important information from the web, write up grocery lists, keep track of things I need to do, and more.

The new EverNote 2.2 raises the bar even more by adding some highly anticipated features:

  • Improved search for printed and handwritten text within images
  • Auto-import snapshots from your camera phone
  • Basic image editing right inside EverNote
    EverNote Image Editor
  • Google Desktop Search (GDS) compatibility – all searches using Google Desktop will include your notes
  • Universal Clipper with image markup
  • Open, manage, and edit notes in separate windows

The advanced version of EverNote ($49.95) includes searching within images, handwriting recognition, shape correction, and digital ink support. You’ll get to use all of those features for your first 60 days, and after that EverNote will revert to a fully functional mode without those features. I think it’s safe to say that if you don’t have a Tablet PC the free version will suffice.

Heads Up: The download is 56.5MB in size, which is rather large.

EverNote Homepage [via jkOnTheRun]

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Dec 12

Awesome Firefox Extension: Faviconize

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on November 16, 2006 by CyberNet.

Faviconize Faviconize is one of those Firefox extensions that you would have never thought about needing but once you have it you’ll fall in love with Firefox all over again. Well, maybe it isn’t quite that good but I have put this to good use several times already.

The concept is really simple. Essentially the text in the tabs is “collapsible” which means you can save a lot of room on your Tab Bar for those sites that can easily be identified by their favicon. It can be used for any tab but I only use it for the ones that I am familiar with such as Google and CyberNet (of course :) ). I had done it with Gmail but I forgot that it shows when you have a new message in the text so I didn’t want to do that.

To hide the text you just right-click on any tab and select “FaviconizeTab.” The text will then be hidden but you can re-enable it by right-clicking again and clicking on the same option. It is also configurable so that when you double-click, Alt-click, etc… on a tab it will automatically enable/disable the feature.

These space-saving Firefox extensions are always my favorite. They are typically small in size (in more ways that one) but do great things. Just like the one yesterday that I wrote about called Search Bar Autosizer…and now I don’t think I would use Firefox without it. Faviconize is quite as useful but it is pretty close.

Thanks for the tip Chris!

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Dec 11

Mozilla Responds To Microsoft’s Offer To Help

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on August 23, 2006 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Windows Vista Firefox A few days ago big news hit that Microsoft wants to help Open Source developers, such as Mozilla, make their applications compatible with Vista. It looks like the Microsoft Open Source team had troubles contacting Mozilla through email so they decided to use the Mozilla Developer’s thread in Google Groups instead. Now we all get to see it. :)

The Open Source Software Lab Director at Microsoft, Sam Ramji, started off the message in a wonderful way:

I sent this invitation to s…@mozilla.org as well, but in case their
spam filters are set to block @microsoft.com email addresses, I’m
posting here.

Mike Beltzner, the User Experience Leader for Firefox, responded by saying “Heh, no such blocking exists, I assure you.” That was the more amusing part of the ‘conversation’ so let’s move on to the interesting stuff.

Beltzner then goes on to respond to the invitation that Microsoft has offered:

As Mike Schroepfer indicated, I think we’re already in discussion with
someone on your team about this, but for the record: yes, we’d
definitely be interested in getting some 1:1 support. We have, of
course, been testing on Vista, and Rob Strong has done some work with
Ed Averett to ensure that we take advantage of the new “Default
Program” infrastructure.

Ah ha! The answer to the article I wrote about two weeks ago now arises. It was quite a heated topic and I was hoping that it was something Mozilla had to fix. I guess it is and hopefully I will soon be able to ‘easily’ set Firefox as my default browser in Vista.

A few other areas that Beltzner said they would like to integrate Firefox and Thunderbird into Vista:

– effects of running in the new application security mode
– interacting/integrating with InfoCard
– integration with the common RSS data store and services
– integration with the Vista calendar and address book

Hey, the more stuff that Firefox and Thunderbird are compatible with the more people that will use it, hopefully. Beltzner is a pretty cool guy and was nice enough to ask whether other open source groups that are based on Firefox, such as Flock, could get an open spot to for some help from the Microsoft product team developers.

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Dec 11

Fedora Core 6 Released – Sweet New Theme

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

This article was written on October 25, 2006 by CyberNet.

Fedora Core 6

From the makers of the ever-popular Red Hat Linux comes the new (free) release of Fedora Core 6! It has all kinds of amazing goodies packed with it but here are my favorites:

One thing that they also mention is that it comes with the latest releases of the most popular software. They specifically mention Firefox but I’ll give you a heads up that this version of Fedora was finalized before Firefox 2 was released, so you’ll have to download it separately if you actually want the latest Firefox.

They also say that there are “extensive performance improvements” which is good to hear. A few months back when I tried Fedora it seemed so sluggish that it actually made Windows feel like a Ferrari. Okay, maybe not that bad but it was pretty slow.

The popularity of the Fedora download must have been a little unexpected because their official homepage is replaced with a low-bandwidth version. You can, however, visit the Fedora Wiki for more information regarding this release and OSDir.com has a great screenshot gallery posted.

I am currently in the process of downloading this from one of their several mirrors that are available. Unfortunately it is 5 ISO images that you have to download to burn onto CD’s…too bad there isn’t just one DVD ISO. I’ll probably end up installing Fedora in a virtual machine before I put it on a partition just so I don’t waste the 5 CD’s and find out that I don’t like it.

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Dec 11

Windows XP Replacements For Vista Applications

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on October 04, 2006 by CyberNet.

Windows XP vs. Vista Applications Paul Thurrot has a great article for those people who plan on sticking with Windows XP even after Vista is released. He discusses some of the applications that you can use in XP that will give you the same functionality as the ones offered in Vista. Here is a brief overview of the software replacements that that he mentions:

As you can see he did a pretty good job covering all of the different aspects of Windows Vista. The funny thing is that I haven’t used many of those applications in the few weeks that I have been using Vista as my primary Operating System. From that list I have used the Windows Search and Windows Defender. Microsoft may be good at some things but there will always be applications that I like better than what they include.

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