Review Chairman's Industry Comments (06/08)
The Computer Buffet
by Herb Goldstein, Review Editor
E-mail comments, suggestions, etc. to Herb Goldstein at:
revieweditor@spcug.org
BAD HYPERLINK?? Occasionally for reasons beyond our control, a
hyperlink provided here will not work. After carefully checking your
typing (needs to be 100% accurate), the only suggestion we can offer is
that you go to Google and enter the name of the software. If a more
current hyperlink is available, this is the best place to look for it.
Please also note: Most of the software mentioned below is
freeware. It is gathered through researching usually reliable sources. I
do not personally try most references, time being the obvious factor.
DLL-FILES.COM will let you find 99% of .dll files
you need. Sometimes you may get an error saying you need a certain .dll
file for a specific program. This site will let you find that .dll file
and make that program work.
MIRO was formerly known as Democracy Player. Video
is the most interesting thing on the web these days, but it’s easy to
get stuck on YouTube looking for the diamonds among the lip-synching
teenagers and inebriated video camera abusers. The Participatory Culture
Foundation offers this video feed aggregator-cum-personal video recorder
as part of its larger goal of jumpstarting a grassroots Internet TV
model. Democracy player lets you browse and subscribe to video channels,
including Seed Magazine’s science clips, Comedy Central, Adult Swim,
music video channels, and Democracy Now. You can also search the major
video web sites without leaving the player. Just like your Tivo box,
Democracy Player expires and deletes older videos automatically to keep
your hard disk from filling up.
www.getmiro.com/
THE FIFTH ELEMENT is one of several suites from
Ssuite (The double S is correct.) It aggresively tried to outdo Office
with more features, simpler interface, and, of course, by being free.
When it comes to giants in the land of software, none is as big and
powerful as the titans of Microsoft. Of programs foolhardy enough to
challenge Microsoft, few have returned to tell the tale. (Heard lately
from Netscape or OS2?) Most of those that have tried to compete with
Office, the hulking battleship of Microsoft’s fleet, have come from
other big companies such as Sun with the cash to try to one-up Microsoft
just for bragging rights.
And then there’s Ssuite (cq) Office’s The Fifth Element.
(Yes, "Ssuite" is spelled correctly, and, no, we’re not talking about a
Bruce Willis movie). The Fifth Element, which has come from South Africa
to take on the Colossus of Redmond, is a collection of office
applications with a wider range than those in MS Office. Any decent
suite can do word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and e-mail.
The Fifth Element includes a browser, tools for managing LANs, holding
chats and making calls using VoIP. It provides a drawing module, photo
and album editors, sound recorders, and MP3 and video players. There’s a
search engine, a sort engine, envelope printer, encryption, and a chess
game, for more than 30 programs overall. And if it’s not exactly the
right combination for you, Ssuite Office has several other office
software packages of various complexities, all free.
For all it’s breadth, The Fifth Element is shallow—and
that’s meant in the nicest sense. Most operations require you to go no
more than a couple of clicks into a menu. The most common tasks are
neatly displayed at the top levels of the screens, making for quick
learning and use. They are a welcome relief from the madly swirling,
morphing menus in Microsoft Office 2007. One reason for the simplicity,
over and beyond making the Fifth Element a snap to use, is that most of
the programs appear to be frankenware, pieced together from publicly
available code. That makes them a kludge, but they’re very nice kludges.
www.ssuitesoft.com/
CD SCRATCH is a virtual turntable CD player. Play
two songs from the same CD at the same time - one forward and one in
reverse. Scratch a CD track back and forth like a record, or listen to
your favorite CD automatically mixed between the turntables.
www.cdscratch.com/
PEGASUS MAIL. Microsoft has already declared that it
won’t support Outlook Express beyond version 6.0. Your choices, as a
result, are to stay with a program in its declining years (wondering
when to pull the plug), to lay out $100 or more for stand-alone Outlook,
or turn to an e-mail program of the open-source persuasion, such as
Thunderbird. Wait a second, though: Thunderbird is the most well-known
free e-mail program, but is it the best? Before you answer that, try
Pegasus Mail.
If you’ve never heard of Pegasus, that may be because
you don’t live in New Zealand, where it originated. The best reason to
use this free program is that is has built-in protection against spam,
viruses, Trojan horses, and other things that go bump in the Internet.
But even without that heavy-duty security, it puts other e-mail software
to shame. Although at first glance it looks like Outlook or Outlook
Express without a calendar and to-do list, closer inspection unearths so
many goodies that you’ll soon forget the lack of a mere calendar. After
all, it has encryption, mail merge, multiple address books, annotations,
notepads, the ability to circulate messages one person at a time for
orderly sign-offs, and (bless it) error messages that offer enough
information to help you actually figure out what’s wrong. If you want a
certain feature that isn’t built in, chances are good that one of the
scores of plug-ins its fans have concocted will do the trick.
www.pmail.com/downloads_maine_t.htm
GNUMERIC. You’ll find absolutely nothing fancy,
colorful, exciting, or gee-whiz about the open-source spreadsheet
Gnumeric. But do you believe that a thesaurus is essential to crunching
numbers? Microsoft’s Excel has a thesaurus. Gnumeric doesn’t. How about
translating from one language to another? You can do so in Excel. You
can’t in Gnumeric. Do you need to calculate the modified Besseli
function in (x)? Excel lets you. Gnumeric...oh, hold it...Gnumeric will,
too. In fact, when you get down to the more obscure spreadsheet
operations that I, and possibly you, have never heard of before,
Gnumeric can be as esoteric as the best of spreadsheets.
The important thing is whether Gnumeric gives the right
answers. Frankly, I’m no judge when it comes to financial derivatives,
Monte Carlo simulations, linear and nonlinear equations, or, for that
matter, balancing my checkbook. Gnumeric’s developers had math whizzes
in to check the program out, and this application got the same answers
as the high-priced spreadsheet did, only faster.
Give credit to Excel for its fancier and more colorful
graphs and charts. For pure number-wrangling ability, however, Gnumeric
makes installing Excel unnecessary.
http://www.gnome.org/
PHOTOFILTRE. Photoshop’s popularity is as high as
its list price, a stunning $999. (That’s "stunning" as in Taser.) You
can, of course, find that package for less, even for free if you are
willing to prowl the Internet’s dark alleys looking for a literal steal.
PhotoFiltre, on the other hand, will make you an honest
artist/designer/photographer, and you don’t have to hock your
grandmother’s wedding ring—or your soul—to enjoy it.
The important difference between PhotoFiltre and the
more elaborate Photoshop is PhotoFiltre’s simplicity—in use, not in what
it can accomplish. Its tools and menus, for one thing, are more evenly
distributed, reducing the need to plow deep into the program’s interface
just to flip an image 90 degrees.
PhotoFiltre lacks some of Photoshop’s professional
abilities, such as handling layers, as well as more arcane features,
such as stitching photos into a panorama and altering perspective. But
PhotoFiltre does have an arsenal of plug-ins that provide some tricks of
their own, such as a filter that emphasizes shadows, highlights, or
both, without your having to select the areas of dark and light. A
beautiful rippling water reflection is only three clicks away. Most
effects, in fact, take only a couple of clicks. PhotoFiltre doesn’t have
Photoshop’s jam-packed dialog boxes that permit the fatally fastidious
to fiddle with a photo for hours. It’s fast. It’s simple. It’s powerful.
It works. And it’s free.
http://photofiltre.free.fr/
AUTOSTITCH. So you can’t do everything in
PhotoFiltre that you can in Photoshop. That’s just more proof that
one-stop shopping is overrated. Take, for example, Photoshop’s
autostitching, which Adobe prefers to call "photomerge." By either name,
the feature attempts to piece and blend together two or more photographs
to create a panorama. Photoshop does a decent job of it, although
inevitably you must tell the application what photos should go together
and in what order, and you have to make sure that up is the same
direction in each picture. If you give Photoshop that many hints, it can
handle the rest, creating a seamless expanse of photography.
But whether Photoshop is too rich for your pocketbook or
you can pay for it from petty cash, you should get to know Autostitch, a
free tool dedicated to panoramas. In addition to producing a panorama
with the same perfection found in Photoshop, Autostitch can look at a PC
folder packed with pictures and select photos that are screaming to be
joined in panoramic splendor.
Created by Matthew Brown and David Lowe of the
University of British Columbia, Autostitch comes with a screen full of
settings for controlling how the final product should look, but most of
them are so esoteric that fiddling with them, trying to unravel their
purpose, is the sort of thing that can lead only to madness. Ignore the
controls. Just print panoramas with panache, and thumb your nose at
Photoshop.
www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
MAYA PERSONAL LEARNING EDITION. Today’s programs for
creating animation are amazing. They can turn the most klutsy artist
into a Walt Disney or Chuck Jones by automating the intricate,
finger-busting work of turning thousands of drawings into a few seconds
of animation. Just as incredible are such programs’ prices: Autodesk 3ds
Max 2008 costs $3495 retail, and Autodesk Maya Unlimited 2008 can be
yours for a trifling $6995. Or, you can pay nothing. Zilch. Nada.
That’ll get you a sizable chunk of what goes into the latest version of
Autodesk Maya.
Autodesk must be selling enough of those high-priced
programs to feel good about giving away free copies of Maya Personal
Learning Edition. The program doesn’t include all the goodies found in
its professional counterparts. It lacks the speed with which the other
applications render complicated images, and it also omits the newest
innovations, such as the latest shaders and skin editors. It does,
however, give you the rigging and animation technologies that let
characters move with both soft and rigid body dynamics, Maya paint
effects, a complete particle system, toon shading, and four renderers.
Though you have no tech support to rely on, you can find oodles of
documentation, demonstrations, and online discussion groups.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/home?siteID=123112&id=129446
BLENDER 3D. If Maya PLE doesn’t seem robust enough,
take a look at another animation program, Blender 3D. It’s a sterling
example of what can be accomplished within the GNU free-software
movement, and it can definitely hold its head high when compared with
commercial animation programs. The work it turns out is vividly
detailed—check out the screen shots—and movements are convincingly
smooth.
Folks frequently use it to build complex avatars and
environments on sites such as the IMVU.com 3D chat system. The reason is
pretty simple: Blender has all the features you need to produce
interactive 3D graphics and games that are compatible across platforms.
Its suite of features allows modeling, rendering, and postproduction
polishing.
http://directory.fsf.org/project/blender/
DIA. For people who depend on organizational charts
to make sense of life, Dia is a savior. A product of the Gnome Project,
Dia is best described as a noncommercial counterpart to Visio. Dia
doesn’t try to take on Visio diagram-to-diagram, polyline-to-polyline,
but it does provide more than enough of the usual components—boxes,
ellipses, polygons, and sticky connecting lines and arrows—necessary to
create office diagrams, chains of authority, and illustrations of
electrical circuits. If you need shapes that Dia doesn’t have, it gives
you instructions on how to add custom objects.
If those tools aren’t sufficient for you to diagram
everything from the office hierarchy to your children’s Little League
season, Dia has a few other tricks that can help. One particularly good
feature is the ability to work in layers. You can create your diagram as
a stack of subdiagrams, a digital representation of drawing the diagrams
on sheets of clear acetate. The layers let you extend your diagram into
the third dimension, too: Think of the layers as separate blueprints for
each story of a office building. You get to see not only how offices are
laid out on each floor, but how the floors are connected by wiring,
pipes, and elevators.
The program’s best trick, though, is Best Fit. If any
diagram you have ever drawn, on paper or on a screen, wound up running
off the edges because it was too big, Best Fit takes care of such
problems in an instant, reducing sprawling diagrams to whatever size
they need to be. http://live.gnome.org/
CLAMWIN FREE ANTIVIRUS. Dozens of antivirus
programs—Symantec AntiVirus, McAfee Virus Scan, and Kaspersky AntiVirus,
to name only a few—have much in common. They all work diligently to
intercept the next invasion of computer malware. And annually they all
wring as much money as they can out of users in exchange for their
services. You can get protection from viruses without paying a cent.
Turn to ClamWin Free Antivirus, an oddly named program that adheres to
the Gnu open-source model. It won’t charge you anything for virus
protection—not now, not a year from now.
What do you get for nothing? A program that, in its
latest version, works in Vista as well as in XP, scanning your files for
the fingerprints of viruses and spyware identified by a virus database
that is updated several times a day. You may schedule or launch scans at
your whim. A right-click menu choice provides more-selective scans of
specific files or folders. The program also offers integration with
Microsoft Outlook for inspecting message attachments that could be
carrying dangerous code.
What don’t you get? ClamWin does not yet automatically
inspect files as you open them. If you download the latest whiz-bang
plaything from the Internet, better check it with ClamWin before you
open it. That’s not a bad trade-off for a free malware checker. Since no
single antivirus tool is perfect, you should always use more than one
such program anyway. Why pay for them all?
www.clamwin.com/
PDF995 SUITE Don’t be fooled by the Acrobat Reader
that Adobe pushes at you every chance it gets. Sure, Reader is free for
the download, but it’s also passive software, letting you only peruse
PDF (Portable Document Format) publications that have been created with
a higher species of Acrobat.
If you want to extract pages from a PDF, add pages,
stamp it with "Approved" or "Burn After Reading," or do any sort of
editing, or if you want to create your own PDF documents, first you have
to shell out $95 to $450 for a version of Acrobat capable of creating
the files.
Instead, get Pdf995 Suite. It’s not exactly free;
whether you pay, and how much, depends on how you feel about enduring a
nagging ad for Pdf955 and other software from the same company. In
return for viewing the ads, you get the ability to create standard PDF
files by sending the original documents to a virtual printer, a setup
that lets you produce PDFs from within any software that can print hard
copy. Another module, PdfEdit995, lets you combine separate documents in
one PDF, insert comments and bookmarks, add rubber stamps, convert from
PDF to HTML, or, to retain just the text, convert to a Word .doc file.
Another module, Signature995, encrypts PDFs and adds digital signatures.
Despite that panoply of PDF pleasures, you may grow
weary of seeing the same ads each time you use the programs. If that
happens, you can banish all of the ads by buying a couple of the modules
that make up the suite; each is $10. For $20 more, you can buy every
program in the company’s arsenal, including such worthy utilities as
OmniFormat (which lets you convert among 75 file formats), Photoedit 995
(which provides the usual necessary touch-up tools), BackItUp995,
Zip995, and Ftp995 (all of which do exactly what you’d think they
would), and a half dozen others. Free with ads; $30 for the Suite
without ads. www.pdf995.com/
MONEY MANAGER EX. Software can become too good—or,
rather, too big, too full of features, too complex, and too difficult to
work with. One of the nice things about open-source software is that
it’s still a boutique operation; you don’t have hundreds of programmers,
testers, focus groups, managers, lawyers, and marketers, each throwing
in their two bits’ worth.
Money Manager Ex is the Baby Bear of financial managers:
Not too big, not too small, not too hard, not too easy—it’s just right.
For anyone whose finances are big enough to need frequent attention but
not so large as to require a dedicated accountant, Money Manager Ex
tracks money as it comes in and goes out. It’ll let you know how much
your investments have earned, when the bills are coming due, and whether
your cash flow is flowing down the toilet.
Though the program can import Excel spreadsheets and
make reports that let you examine your finances from assorted
viewpoints, it can’t help you pay bills, make bank deposits or
withdrawals, or calculate your taxes. But then, if it could do all that,
it would start looking like Papa Bear, and you’d wind up hiding from all
the work it would try to get you to do.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/moneymanagerex
EZYPAGE is a true what you see is what you get HTML
page(s) designer tool that allows you to create up to 600 pages all at
the same time, simply by dragging and dropping each object onto the page
layout using a number of scale measurements. All pages can be exported
to HTML, PDF, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and to e-mail format.
www.ezyware.com:80/ezypage.htm
SCREEN CAPTURE PROFESSIONAL is an application that
allows you to capture your printed screens without any help of image
processing software. Screen Capture deals with Windows clipboard and
specially images clipboard. When pressing on Print Screen on the
keyboard, Windows takes a snapshot of your screen-content. Screen
Capture Professional will automatically capture and save this snapshot
to a folder called Captured Screens, inside the program installation
folder or you can select any other folder on your local machine.
Additionally, Screen Capture Professional comes with an
easy-to-use BMP to JPG Converter that helps you to convert your captured
screens format from BMP to JPG. Finally, With Screen Capture
Professional you can capture and save unlimited number of snapshots
automatically without replacing them. Version 1.3.1.2 includes
unspecified updates.
www.download.com/Screen-Capture-Professional/3000-2192_4-10476765.html?tag=pub
QUICKMONTH CALENDAR is a freeware program which
displays a small calendar on your Windows desktop whenever your mouse
hovers over the clock in the system tray. The calendar display may also
be toggled on and off by using the Windows+Q keyboard shortcut or a
different key combination that you specify.
Here are a few of QuickMonth Calendar’s features:
— To quickly jump to today’s date, right-click on the
calendar or left-click the bottom of the calendar where it says "Today."
— Use the buttons at the top of the calendar to change
the month. You can also left-click on the name of the month to see a
popup menu of all the months.
— Left-click on the year to quickly change the year .
— The calendar automatically detects the location of
your Windows taskbar, so if you move the taskbar to the top, left, or
right side of the screen, the calendar will still display next to your
system tray clock (you may have to restart Windows once for the change
to take effect).
— The look of the calendar changes according to what
your system colors are (as determined by your current Windows theme or
visual style).
www.codedawn.com/home/quickmonth-calendar/
EUSING FREE REGISTRY CLEANER. A free registry repair
software that allows you to safely clean and repair registry problems
with a few simple mouse clicks. After scanning and fixing the invalid
entries, your system will be more stable and run faster.
http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_cleaner/registry_cleaner.htm
OPEN CONTACTS. An advanced address book program
for managing the contact info of individuals and organizations.
Distributed as freeware, the program was designed for people who need
more beyond legacy address book programs in order to improve dynamic
interactions with contacts. It will allow you to look up and manage
contact info.
http://www.fonlow.com/opencontacts/index.htm
TINYSPELL. Allows you easily and quickly to check
and correct the spelling of words in any Windows application. It can
watch your typing and alert you when it detects a misspelled word. It
can also check the spelling of text you copy to the clipboard. Installs
itself in the system tray for easy access. It comes with an
American-English dictionary containing more than 110,000 words.
http://tinyspell.m6.net/
MS WORD TIP. Most documents contain different
types of formatting throughout. If you want to change a specific
formatting, such as all bold characters to italics, you can manually
search through your document and change each instance. However, if your
document is large, this can take quite some time to do. There is also
the chance that you may miss some of the instances. A better option is
to use the Find and Replace options as described below.
-From the Edit menu, click Find.
-Click Replace.
-To search for specific formatting, leave the Find
what field blank.
-Click the More button.
-Click the Format button.
-Select the formats that you want to find and
replace.
-Click the Replace with box, click Format, and then
select the replacement formats.
-Click Find Next, and then click Replace.
-To replace all instances of the specified
formatting, click Replace All
FORUMS WATCHER is a free innovative forum search
engine, message tracker, and instant alerts system designed to provide
relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never
miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.
Forums Watcher was created in order to separate ordinary web pages from
information rich discussions. Use Forums Watcher to find out what people
are saying. Many times you will have a question that has already been
answered. Using Forums Watcher, you can avoid posting already asked
questions and quickly find your answer. Unlike ordinary search engines
that prioritize articles and edited web pages, Forums Watcher only
indexes discussion forums. Forums Watcher unique algorithm analyzes
forums not as a simple web page, but as an active discussion with a
title, topic and replies.
What makes Forums Watcher better than any other search
engine? Forums Watcher does not compete with regular search engines that
search articles and websites. Forums Watcher offers a different kind of
information, which exists in discussions and debates. The results are
usually in the form of "Questions and Answers" and are more useful when
you are looking to solve a problem or find answers.
www.forumswatcher.com:80/
WINAMP is a great free music player for those
looking for an alternative to the common "iTunes" software. It comes
with many features and plug ins as well. You can play all your music
files and save play lists as well. It also plays many music files that
other music software cannot normally play.
www.winamp.com/
CPU-Z is a small program that displays your current
computer specs. For example, it can show you your motherboard name and
even how much RAM you have. This is good to know when you are looking
for those drivers and you forgot the name of your motherboard.
www.cpuid.com:80/cpuz.php
HIJACKTHIS. A general homepage hijackers detector
and remover. Initially based on the article Hijacked!, but expanded with
a lot of other checks against hijacker tricks. It is continually updated
to detect and remove new hijacks. It does not target specific
programs/URLs, just the methods used by hijackers to force you onto
their sites. This program will search your registry for errors and
possibly anything that could be wrong with it. Not only that, it logs
all of the information it changed or found.
www.spywareinfo.com:80/~merijn/programs.php
STARTUPLIST. A simple tool that lists all and every
auto starting program on your system. You might be surprised what it
finds, this is way better than Msconfig. Commonly used to troubleshoot
malfunctioning systems, trojan/viral infections, new spyware/malware
breed and the likes. Compatible with all Windows versions.
www.spywareinfo.com:80/~merijn/programs.php
SHARPKEYS is a Registry hack that is used to make
certain keys on a keyboard act like other keys. For example, if you
accidentally hit Caps Lock often, you could use this utility to map Caps
Lock to a Shift key or even turn it off completely. This official
release includes support for up to 104 mappings, an extensive list of
available keys, and a "Type Key" option to help when managing mappings.
As it relies on internal support within Windows NT, Windows 2000,
Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Vista you must be running
one of these OS's for this Registry hack to work.
www.randyrants.com:80/2006/07/sharpkeys_211.html Thanks to
member Ken Aspinwall for this tip :
Return to Herb
Goldstein's Index
Return to
Columnist's Index
Copyright 2008. This article is from the June 2008 issue of the
Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota
Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL
34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit
computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and
our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication
the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For
further information about our group, email:
admin@spcug.org/ Web:
http://www.spcug.org/
The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,100+ members
and was established in 1982. We are members of the Assoc. of PC User
Groups (APCUG), the Florida Assoc. of PC Users Groups, Inc., and we are
members of the America Online Ambassador Program.
See http://www.spcug.org for all reviews from the Sarasota PC Monitor,
go to the Newsletter Section.