Mozilla Firefox (otherwise known as just Firefox) is a free open source internet browser originally developed by Mozilla Foundation. Currently Firefox is available for 3 major operating systems, namely Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, as well as several other UNIX-like operating systems.
SmartDefrag is a free hard drive defragmentation tool from IObit for Windows. It is designed to simplify and automate the defragmenting process with very little system resource utilization.
As we have mentioned before, this time around we will review another freeware from IObit. Just like the GameBooster we previously reviewed, this tool may also be integrated into Advanced SystemCare and can be launched from within that software's interface.
From our test on a 'cute' Intel Atom 330 powered PC, it turned out that SmartDefrag is quite fast, around 20-25% faster than Windows' built-in defragmentation utility. We did not compare SmartDefrag with other tools because we are already satisfied enough with its performance.
The program's interface, as you can see from the image above is pretty simple and everything can be figured out right away. There are 3 optimization options to start with, namely Defrag Only, Fast Optimize and Deep Optimize. We have to admit that even with the Deep Optimize option, SmartDefrag did not turn us down with its speed.
The auto defrag feature works wonderful too. Even when running at the background it only use roughly 1MB of system memory, leaving you a lot of memory for your games applications. The best of all is you can tune when it should kick in to do the auto defrag, for instance when the PC is idle or CPU utilization is below certain percentage. Very convenient.
Our only complain about this software is it can't defragment any USB flash drives, which is very surprising, considering all other tools we have tried before offer this feature. This may not be a big deal for many but for us here who have USB flash drives with the capacity of 8GB and more, this is really important, especially we tend to store our mp3s inside them.
The absence of USB flash drive defragmentation feature may be disappointing to us but for those who don't mind about it, we don't hesitate to recommend you this utility for its speed and the auto defrag feature.
Download IObit SmartDefrag here:
http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html#
Game Booster is another freeware from IObit, the people who brought to you the Advanced SystemCare we reviewed before. As we had mentioned before, Game Booster can be integrated seamlessly into Advanced SystemCare, giving you the ultimate set of tools to uleash you PC gaming capabilities to its fullest.
Game Booster is a system utilities for Windows. It does just what its name bears; boosting your PC gaming power. This is done by disabling certain numbers of Windows services that are pretty unecessary when the PC is in gaming mode. Disabling those services gives the CPU more processing resources that is valuable to games and 3D applications. Extra processing resources is also achieved by temporarily closing background-running applications to give more room for resource-hungry applications. Game Booster can do all this without a fuss.
Game Booster is really fast in closing and restarting those services and background programs. By default, Game Booster already have the list of Windows services to be disabled. The good news is user is free to modify this list, either to remove or add entries to the existing one; pretty convenient especially for Windows power user who really know what services that are really safe to be disabled while on games. Furthermore, we did a head-to-head comparison with Windows' batch processing files to get the real feeling of how fast Game Booster work. First we create a *.bat file containing commands to stop the same services as in Game Booster default list and we named it "stop.bat". Double-clicking this file stops all the services but on our first try, there was a catch where it requires the confirmation to stop services that are dependent to the other. The trick to overcome this is to rearrange the command and it worked smoothly, albeit it took up to 30 seconds to execute all stopping commands. Then we changed the commands in the same batch file to service starting commands and saved a copy as "start.bat". Again, it took around another 30 seconds to execute everything. Game Booster, on the other hand does the same almost instantly to the extent that we were unable to see the progress of stopping/restarting the services. Not only that, Game Booster have very small memory footprint, only utilizing roughly 700kb when minimized to system tray.
Currently Game Booster is in version 1.21. Version 1.21 is more of a bugfix version because the version 1.2 has been detected by many antivirus software to be containing the pattern of certain computer virus, though nothing actually happened if the user choose to ignore it. Since version 1.2, one useful feature, Game Defrag has been added. This feature allows the user to specifically defragment the files of installed applications, especially games. It also allows the user to scan individual folders for defragmentation and then defragmenting the defragmented files. This is also done quite fast and saved a lot of time because user may not always have to resort to full hard drive defragmentation. However please take note that this is not to replace the overall system defragmentation and user still need to defragment their system regularly from time. For automated/scheduled HDD defragmenter, we recommend another IObit freeware, Smart Defrag (we will review Smart Defrag in the near future. Stay tuned with us).
Download Game Booster for free here:
http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4842-game-booster.html
Songbird is a free and open source audio player for all major operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is part of the Mozilla Foundation project and the current stable release is version 1.2.
We finally urged to put Songbird under a series of tests for a review after informed that the latest version comes with equalizer, a sound enhancement we have been longing for in Songbird. The unavailability of the equalizer all this time is what makes most of us here reluctant to use itor even try it because we here love to manipulate sounds to suit our personal preferences.
Songbird was intended to be the world's first 'web player' which was said to be able to play web media seamlessly. This was made possible thanks for the utilization of Mozilla's XULRunner Platform which also contributes to the multi-platform nature of this software.
Songbird has been around since February 2006 and has been steadily developed and improved by the developer and contributor community. Many features has been added since then and the most recent and noticeable feature would be the inclusion of 10-band equalizer. This equalizer is not much but it is what user has been nagging and anticipating for more than 2 years. It is a pity that a sound enhancement feature like this was missing and been underestimated (ignored/overseen/undermined) by the developer when they first release the software.
Songbird, unlike its web browser siblings (Firefox, Flock, etc.) however fails to gain its own identity. From the beginning, it tries to mimic both Firefox and iTunes, and the UI and even the default 'Feathers' (skin) is very much resembles iTunes in most aspects (around 90% if we must say). This is probably because "Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players" (Aaron Boodman, Greasemonkey) as well as being as powerful as iTunes. Nice try they had there and they succeed to certain extent while most of the time they failed hard.
We must say Songbird tries to be as powerful as both Firefox and iTunes combined although in reality it is not as powerful as either of the software alone. To be another Firefox, it disables many of Firefox's capabilities despite adopting its entire codebase. To make it worse, the developer has announced that the browser extension is just a secondary (minor) feature and they won't take care much about it. What a waste when they can just make it to be a browser with media playing capability. On the other hand, to be an iTunes, Songbird did not include great features like the individual EQ settings for songs and there is not even a CD ripping/writing present. To make it worse, although there's an add-on for EQ presets (presets are unavailable by default) there is still no way to create your own. Luckily it supports more audio format than iTunes, particularly open source format like OGG and FLAC. Not to mention the skinning (Feathers) that makes iTunes looks lame.
We have a suggestion to Songbird developers. Instead of mimicking only Firefox and iTunes, they might have to look forward on Windows Media Player too. We know Songbird has built-in volume gain feature but it is not as powerful as WMP's "Quiet Mode" (sound limiter/filter). Perhaps they may try mimicking WMP in the next release? Even as a plain audio player, Songbird still does not match Winamp so as long as we still see both iTunes and Winamp as our favorite, Songbird won't last long in our software installation list. Thanks for trying Songbird.
We have tried and tested the software and it fails to replace iTunes, WMP and Winamp in our heart. We can't accept an excuse like "this is due to its immaturity" for this software has been in development for 2 and a half year already. Honestly, we found that Songbird is not as heavily polished as Firefox (talking about slower development here). We hope this will change soon because we here are long time (die hard) open source software supporter and we are looking forward towards the next release. We would like to have an open source media player that can rival head to head with those old timer.
Download Songbird for free here:
http://getsongbird.com/
Server2Go is a 'donationware' by German-based Server2Go software group. It comprised of a complete WAMP server-stack package (Apache web server plus additional PHP, MySQL and Perl components) that runs natively from virtually any portable media (USB drives, memory card, etc.) as well as write-protected media like CD-ROM, without the need of installation.
The idea of having a complete portable web server configuration is for instance, to allow one to make a live presentation of how a newly developed PHP web without the need for a remote server and internet connection for that purpose. It sure sounds interesting and we already have a set of tests to see what this software package can do.
One of us here is running his own blog and forum on his PC for our LAN. He is using another web server package, XAMPP, and it does the same work as Server2Go, albeit it has to be installed locally on the machine. So we decided to perform a head2head comparison between the package and following is the result. For this test, we are using the complete Server2Go (for Windows) package, complete with Perl. The package comes in a 45MB .exe file.
First we need to turn off the Apache and MySQL service on the PC to avoid any conflict. Then we started with extracting all files to the local folder but inspite this we are going to treat it as if it is running in a write protected environment. Unexpectedly, our first complaint comes right before the extraction completed. It was painstakingly long and we remember installing XAMPP was a hell faster than this. We noticed that most of the extraction time was for extracting Perl files (which is not present in XAMP package actually) but we don't think it should take that long. The extraction finished only after a couple of cups of coffee and there are about 300MB of files successfully extracted.
Then comes the most tricky part. Just like XAMPP, our package of Server2Go also comes with both Apache and MySQl but unlike XAMPP, there is no control panel to play with. There is neither explanation nor user manual to begin with so we have to figure out how things work only after running and stopping the server for several times.
Everything lies in the settings file (pms_config.ini). We had to play with several different sets of configurations before we can get the server to run as we intended. However the setting explanation in this file is quite confusing because of the English language the developer are using. We are not saying that their English is bad. In fact we do understand how things are going on with them since English is also not our first language here but they should have done something to make it more straight forward.
By default, we have to say that server works only as a server and you can't use it to test your new PHP apps without configuring it to work together, unless you developed the PHP page right for the package (which kills the purpose of developing PHP apps offline). For example, we tried installing Wordpress and it simply refuses to proceed. Then we change the Apache HTTP port in the settings file to 80 (default is 4001) and things finally work (but still not as expected).
The default settings are really sucks in most ways. Since it does not have any control panel, it has to start with a browser by default. To make it worse, default browser was Internet Explorer! We changed it to our favorite Firefox but only to reveal more annoying default configurations; for example the server stopped when the browser is closed (when in the case we were switching to browse through Firefox). We changed the settings, as well as enabling the system tray icon to allow access to the server even after the browser is closed, without having to go to the Task Manager. My, they should have made the system tray icon enabled by default then when they don't have any control panel at all. Not only that, no matter what settings we are using, all the newly built MySQl databases as well as their newly entered data will be deleted when the server stops. This is ridiculous and we still can't figure out how to solve this.
Finally, we decided to give up on it and choose to stick with the proven-good XAMPP. Server2Go is actually nice and simple but those tricky settings and bad default configurations are major turn-off for most of us here. It is supposed to be user friendly but we find it is far from it. We can hardly recommend it but you may have a try if you think we made as mistake. Our final words:
Pros:
+ Simple
+ Portable
Cons:
- Tricky settings
- Bad defaults
Download Server2Go for free here:
http://www.server2go-web.de/download/download.html
Lingoes is a desktop multi-lingual text translation software for Windows. There are 2 versions of Lingoes, namely the freeware version and the paid version. As usual, the paid version offers more features but the free version does too restrictive either and still provide users with numbers of great translation functions.
At a glance, most people would have an impression that Lingoes is very much similar to Babylon dictionary software. It can't be helped though since they are indeed share some similarities, up to certain extent. However Lingoes has its own uniqueness too that sets it apart from Babylon dictionary, thus it is unfair to say that it had copied the concept from Babylon. Besides, any other translation software would appear the some so it's not a big deal and we can't say Lingoes lacks of innovation either.
Unlike Babylon dictionary that emphasizes more on online translation, Lingoes has both online and offline translation balanced and worked together. Currently it supports around 80 languages and there are many offline dictionaries are available for download from Lingoes website. We perform a search for an English dictionary for Latin, an extinct language and surprisingly we managed to find and download it. Thanks to it now we are able to read some texts from Vatican City official website.
Current version of Lingoes is 2.6.2. There are two types of installations available; a Windows installer version and standalone version. The latter would be an ideal choice for those who are always on the move since it can work right from USB drive. Lingoes offers text input translation, word capture translation and selected text translation. All these can be done seamlessly, provide that Lingoes is running in the background.
Performing online translation is where Lingoes do its works fast. Although Lingoes online translation service does not provide translation by itself, it acts as an interface to other available online translation services like Google Translation and Yahoo Translation, as well as several other translation services. During the test, we are quite impressed with the accuracy of translation provided by this software. We tried to translate one page of a Japanese manga it it seemed there is nothing wrong with the translation it provided. We even confirmed it with one of our Japanese friend and even he was impressed by how accurate this translation software can be.
The download size for Lingoes is roughly around 5MB and upon installation, it only takes approximately 12Mb of disk space. Very lightweight and perfect to be a companion for a road warrior who choose to have it in an USB drive. However, our only complain about this software is it will be rendered unusable when a newer version is available, as we call it "version expiry". This is quite annoying since the user is forced to install the newer version when the older one still can work excellent. This is the field where Lingoes developer should really look into.
Overall, Lingoes did its jobs well and has small memory footprint (10MB of system resource). Definitely recommended for those who want an alternative for the existing Babylon dictionary software.
Download Lingoes for free here:
http://www.lingoes.net/en/translator/download.htm
Flock is a free open-source Firefox-based web browser developed by Flock Inc for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Just like any other Mozilla-derived software which is always named after animal-centric words, Flock is probably named either after the word that represent a group of birds or perhaps after a genus of flower plants. As an open source software, it is mainly licensed under GPL, while some other components of it are separately licensed under LGPL+MPL.
Flock is currently at version 2.5. What distinguishes Flock from the original Firefox browser is it integrates social networking and Web 2.0 technology into its user interface. Flock supports all common social networking and media services including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, MySpace, AOL Mail, Digg, Facebook, Youtube, Photobucket, Picasa, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, etc. With these services built-in interface, Flock users can track updates from friends: profiles, uploaded photos, and more, as long as the service are supported. This is a very convenient feature especially for those who are regularly using these services.
Just like the original Firefox browser, Flock shares many of Firefox's user-configurable optimizations, provided that the user know how to deal with the "about:config" settings editor, though this is not really advised as it might rendere Flock unusable should any misconfigurations happen. However, users always have other options as Flock also supports 3rd party add-ons, just like Firefox. On top of that, Flock supports numbers of Firefox extensions. We tested Flock with all Firefox-recommended extensions and all of them works without a glitch. Our advise: only use Firefox extensions that modify the core settings, not the interface. If you're unsure on what you're doing, you can always ask the Flock developer community.
Since its first release to the public in 2007, Flock has gained many awards due to its usability and functionality. Frankly speaking, we are agreed because we can hardly find anything that turn us off about this browser. So far, we found there is no other way that makes the Web 2.0 user experience very smooth and exciting. It really deserves those awards. If we are really going to give an award to this browser, we could give it "Editor's Choice" or "Editor's Power Award" or "Editor's Platinum Award" or something like that. Enough about the award thingy, we can say from our desk that this browser is 100% recommended. Just hope that Flock can retain this reputation for the future releases.
Download Flock for free here:
http://flock.com/download/
Advanced SystemCare Free is a system optimization package for Windows. It is developed by IOBit.com who is known for their award winning optimization tools.
Advanced SystemCare Free offers a basic optimization options for Windows system. This 'free' version offers some basic options to optimize the system. More optimization options are available in the Pro version but for average home user and occassional gamer, the free version is adequate to meet their needs.
We tested the software on our Core 2 Duo (mp3 & games infested) office PC with both Windows Vista Ultimate and the good old Windows XP Professional installed side by side. First, we boot to Vista to test it. From the test, we have to say "don't judge this software by it's name". Despite the so-called 'Basic' nature, it managed to give performance gain up to 50% in Vista. Still unable to believe the result, we reboot the machine and now into XP. Since we use XP a lot more compared to Vista, it is no surprise to see the system crawls. However, after running all the available optimizations, we can see significant increase in performace, perhaps around 25-30%.
To put this software to the ultimate stress, we fork out our unused dusty 1GHz Pentium III machine from our store. After ensuring the Windows XP Pro inside up and running after a 5 years hiatus, we install the software and crossed our fingers to see the result. Surprisingly, we managed to get approximately 20% of performance gain! It is really impressive considering that many of the hardware inside have been obsolete in terms of today's computing standard. We even managed to play some resource hungry games of past years such as The Sims 2 and Sid Meier's Civilization IV smoothly without having much problem on the same machine, thanks to the optional tool named Game Booster that can be downloaded separately and integrated into this software.
Advanced SystemCare Free offers better system optimization tools than those Windows built-in defaults. The utilities are are well categorized and all of them are reliable. Most of them are very useful and usually found only in commercial software. IOBit did a good job for offering this software for free and there are even utilities we didn't expect to be bundled in this free package. Our final words? Highly recommended not only for those who want the most out from their system, but also for those who want to keep their old machines run at their top peak performance.
Download Andvanced SystemCare Free here:
http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=download
Avira Antivir Personal is a free antivirus software developed by Germany-based Avira GmbH. It is available in various major computing platforms like Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris. Avira Antivir Personal is currently in version 9. From version 9, the free Personal edition comes available with antispyware and antiadware which was only made available in Premium and Security Suite version before.
For those who are familiar with the Avira company for a long time, you should know that today's Avira Antivir is an evolved version of the previously known as just 'Antivir'. Before adopting the Antivir name, the antivirus was weirdly named "H+BEDV Datentechnik GmbH"; may sound like a technical stuff to many.
AS its name bears, Avira Antivir Personal is free for personal use, and any new scanning engine comes with one year license, of which renewing is just a matter of installing software updates; a very simple license renewal system for an antivirus software. So far, we found no annoying restrictions for the software.
Other than the free Personal edition, the antivirus also have two other versions, namely Avira Antivir Premium and Avira Security Suite, which is targetted at commercial and business user and of course, comes with more extensive crucial features for people in this field. The free Personal version is on the other hand, is adequate for the basic, day to day home use.
Avira Antivir Personal is one of the best free antivirus software. The downloaded installer package for Windows is roughly 33MB in size, small enough in today's standard. Upon installation, it only occupies double of that size and only utilize slightly more than 10MB of system resource when running in the background, even with the AHeAD (Advanced Heuristic Analysis and Detection) enabled. The heuristic behavior scanning ability is important to detect the virus based on behavior, should they passed the traditional first level virus signature check.
In our test, it even beats some of well-known commercial ones. For example, our office which is using the regularly updated PC-Cillin OfficeScan antivirus solution fails to detect the surprisingly common SPR/AutoIt.Gen, TR/Patched.GY.3, TR/Crypt.ZPACK.GEn and JS/Dldr.Agent.VG! This is quite humiliating for a commercial antivirus software but then it shows how good this software is as it managed to detect all four. We even comparing it with 3 other 'big name antivirus software' but those software only managed to find 1, 2 and 3 respectively. Shocking, ain't it?
The only bad thing we found about Antivir is it keeps alerting us about some of legal hacking tools found in our system, even after we choose to ignore it for several times. It's not really a bad thing though as it only show that how good the "Luke Filewalker" engine (a pun for Luke Skywalker?) in doing it's job. Other than that, it keeps telling you to purchase the other 2 versions whenever you run the update, though this only occur once in a day, or once every 3 days, if you choose to update in every 3 days, that's it.
Personal home user will have to bear with the unavailability of webguard (against maliciously scripted webs), antispam (for email), rescue system (should things go haywire), firewall, backup, game mode and some more though. However, you can always opt for many other free tools available on the net to cover these absences. In conclusion, this software is highly recommended.
Download Avira Antivir Personal for free here:
http://www.free-av.com/en/trialpay_download/1/avira_antivir_personal__free_antivirus.html
Safari is a free web browser for both Mac and Windows PC. It is developed by Apple Inc. and is currently in its 4th version. THe browser is made based on Apple's own WebKit webpage rendering engine, of which was developed based on Konqueror's KHTML (in the form of WebCore) and KJS (in the form of JSC). Since both KHTML and KJS are open-source, WebKit also has been made open-source as well (under GNU Lesser GPL), allowing 3rd-party software developer to use it for instance, to develop another brand new browser, just like in the case when Netscape source-code was made open-source thus gave birth to Mozilla Firefox. However, some parts like the GUI elements of the software continue to remain as Apple's proprietary.
For most people, Safari is just yet another web browser. This is true to some extent though, as it shares common notable features with other modern browsers such as tabbed browsing, built-in pop-up blocker, integrated major search engines, spell checker, auto web form filler, feed reader and many more. However, Safari do have some "Safari-only" features like the "Keychain" password manager, Web-Inspector (a DOM Inspector-like utility), iPhoto integration as well as Apple Dashboard integration, where most of them are like some sort of rebadged similar features often found in other major browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Opera. They also usually only benefits Apple-esque web.
The first public release was in 2003, where it was only made available on Mac OS X. A Windows-ported version was only released in 2007. On that time, Safari is already in it's 3rd version. From various unofficial sources on the net, it appears that Windows users has been requesting for a Windows version of Safari, although those requests are made solely for the purpose of "satisfying the geek thirst". In real world application though, performance wise, Safari itself has never been a better browser actually, as it is always at average with other browsers.
The most notable controversy about Apple Safari is Apple's official web browser comparison chart which was publicly displayed on the company's corporate website sometime back in 2004. On that time, Safari was compared with other browsers with the fast browser reputation like Opera and Mozilla Firefox, of which both were already in their 8th and 2nd version respectively. However, surprisingly, Apple used Opera 7 and Firefox 1.5 to make the comparison. This biased and doubtful comparison was seriously offending that it resulted some European and Asian countries banned the advertisement of the software. Some long time Windows users admitted that this was expected because for them, "this is not the first time Apple tells us a lie". Even the more recent comparison still compares Safari with Firefox 2, as if Firefox 3 does not exist. A group of Firefox fans have been mocking about this on the net but there is no official respond from Apple so far (probably because they are eating back their words?). To make it worst, Apple still self-proclaimed Safari as "the world's fastest browser" although they are constantly being confronted by professionals for such false claim. In fact, even the Apple official website sometimes may took ages to be fully loaded when browsed through Safari, especially on first visit (upon first install or cleaned cache/cookies) while Firefox or Opera never really have this problem when visiting there.
Since version 4, Apple has included major changes and revamped around 25% of the interface of the software. It now somehow resembles the Mobile Safari, the iPhone version of Safari. It also support native Windows look for Windows version. There is also a 'CoverFlow' (like the one found in the iTunes) for browsing the history and bookmarks. The JSC engine also has been superseded by SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript engine. Apple, just like Google on Chrome, emphasize heavily on speeding up the JavaScript execution process. Both Google and Apple claimed that this greatly speeds up internet browsing experience, though this will only has significant impact if the website is heavily scripted with JavaScript (which only a fractionof websites do).
Still, despite in version 4, Apple still stubborn (or stupid) enough not to include a pulldown menu button in the addressbar, where this feature has been proven extremely useful in all other browsers. With this feature, user does not need to retype addresses or opening the history just to browsethe previously visited website. Not only that, Safari shares the same flaw with Google Chrome, where it can only recognize the first few letters of a typed URL in the address bar in order to suggest the previously opened URLs. Firefox and Opera are much better in this, where both browsers will suggest any previously visited URLs if the user only typing the 2nd level domain of a URL or even the sub-page URL.
Safari still have lots of rooms for improvements, and it would be better if they (Apple) would consider to tend to any kind of complaints regarding this browser. No, we are not asking them to make Safari as "another Firefox" but just want them to properly implement 'proven-useful' features. It is pointless to be different where in fact you are just being bad.
Download Safari for free here:
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
StorYBook is a free book authoring software. It is mainly developed by Intertec but being an open-source software, many parts of this software are also jointly developed by the open-source community.
StorYBook is pretty much a book authoring software for beginner as it offers adequate assistance for new authors. The interface is neat and clean, almost resembling some other professional commercial book authoring software out there. Anybody can start using this software right away after installation and through the wizard, it will guide you upon the creation of your first project.
Project creation and management is very straight forward. Even a novice writer will easily master it in no time after some practice. For example, you can just write whatever ideas you have in your mind first in separate parts. Then you may manage and edit these parts and see how your story develop. Story writing can never be easier and simpler than this thanks to the ease-of-use of this software.
Technical wise, the story written using this software is stored in the form of a database. Each project will have its own database and starting and opening a project is literally 'connecting' to that particular database. This is what makes it easy to manage your ideas and story. This software also requires Java to run so you have to install Java runtime first before you can use it. Other than that, this software works similar to word processor, albeit without the advanced grammar checking tools.
As usual, no software would come without a single flaw. Despite its easy to use nature, this software is surprising failed in the most unexpected term; version upgrading. Previously, there was no backup option available to backup your project (database) and you have to manually backup them. Only in more recent versions the backup tool has been made present. The actual use of the backup tool is to avoid the deletion of the database when upgrading or reinstalling the software. Yes, you read it right. Even a simple thing as an upgrading and reinstallation of this software will require you to uninstall the previously installed version, putting your projects at the verge of vanishing. In our testing session, we did expect that our demo project is at risk, and it did vanished along with the previous version. The only retrievable thing is the project name (title) and nothing else. This is very much unforgivable sin committed by any software.
Overall, this software is good if we don't need to reinstall or upgrade it but the requirement to uninstall the older versions before we can proceed with software upgrades is a complete turn-off. We have contacted Intertec (via email) right after the incident happened but still no reply from them up until the time of writing of this review. If the software has the mistake as mentioned above, added with the 'unfriendliness' of the main developer, we can just say we couldn't hardly recommend this software for you. We know some other (free) software that do similar thing without this flaw and we will write about them soon. We hope the future version will promptly fix this but until then, use this software at your own risk. Just be sure to have a backup before upgrading it.
Get StorYBook for free here:
http://storybook.intertec.ch/joomla/index.php/download
SUPER is a video encoder software for Windows. It is developed and distributed for free by eRightsoft.
SUPER is not an encoder by itself. It is just a GUI front-end for real encoders beneath. These encoders include FFmpeg, MEncoder, MPlayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora, musepack, Monkey's Audio, True Audio, WavPack, libavcodec, and the Theora/Vorbis RealProducer plugIn projects. SUPER is meant to replace the command line interface which are used by these back-end encoders.
While the encoders used underneath this software are mostly open-source, the case is different with SUPER where it is closed-source and solely developed by eRightsoft. Despite this, SUPER keeps up its reputation of having rapid development with almost having one new version each month. This development rate is usually only seen on open-source software.
Being a video encoder (it also features audio encoder as well), minimum system requirement by this software is quite high, although it may not as high as most of other commercially available encoders. For instance, it requires a CPU of minimum 1.8GHz clockspeed, 512MB RAM with 176MB free system memory and 20GB of free space in the partition where the OS is installed. This however should have been expected and should not be much an issue anymore in today's computing. In fact, this requirement is already low enough to make professional video encoding viable. Anyways, during the test on an old Pentium 3 1GHz machine (with 512MB SDRAM), the software face no problem at all encoding a full length movie, albeit took a few hours longer compared to on newer Intel Core 2 Duo machine.
eRightsoft so very confident of their software and claims that "SUPER does for free what other encoders can't do for money". This is quite true considering how many formats the software supported and the availability of presets for mobile device such as SONY PSP, Nintendo-DS, iPod and NOKIA phones adds more value to this software.
After all this, SUPER also comes with some flaws. It lacks of controls that might have been posible by using the command line interface. For example, 'intercoding/transcoding' (encoding from another encoded format) an anime movie with Matroska video format (*.mkv) to an *.avi (with x.264 video codec) are missing the option to resize the font for the subtitles (since subtitle comes as a separate layer in MKV), rendering the resulting movie with the default subtitle size covering more than 10% of the scree, which is pretty much annoying to watch. This option should have been made available in the first place for most MKV videos might have more than 1 embedded subtitles/audio.
Overall, SUPER is good for home use, and might be great to be used side by side with other free video encoding/editing software like VirtualDub and tMPEGenc.
Get SUPER for free here:
http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html
Apple iTunes is a free media player for both Windows and Mac OS X. It was a media library made by Apple for Mac OS X only until a Windows-ported was launched since version 4. It was a hit since then.
Initially as a proprietary digital music organizer for Mac computer and iPod, iTunes is now regarded as one of the best media player of all time. Despite the criticism it received for not having a Windows version from the beginning, today many Windows user who have tried iTunes are satisfied and decided to continue using it. It has evolved much, with the current version (ver. 8.2 at the time of writing) offers several features like movie player (though limited to mp4 video only, not even the Quicktime mov files), podcasting and many more.
As its name bears, the iTunes player is associated with the iTunes online music store in many ways. Registered user can purchase songs (DRM-enabled) via this service for less than US$1 per song, though user would need a credit card to make a purchase. This is quite cheap for most users, and also comparable to most of other online music stores.
On the surface, iTunes is very simple to use, especially the Library that is much more easier to manage than those found in Winamp or Windows Media Player. Just with a few clicks and drags&drops, you'll be just a step away to play your selection of songs a.k.a. playlist. Media library can't be easier than this.
iTunes also features built-in CD ripping, allowing you to convert CD musics to AAC (DRM or non-DRM), mp3 or Apple Lossless. It also plays non-DRM Windows Media Audio (WMA) files but it could have been better if it allows conversion to other format like FLAC. iTunes also supports 3rd party plugins but so far there is no plugin to extend the capabilities of handling the non-default audio format.
Even iTunes comes with its flaws too. It is BLOATED with many most likely unnecessary stuff like the Bonjour service and less than useful Quicktime player, though Bonjour may be uninstalled later. Quicktime is however compulsory or iTunes won't work, which may make people doubt is iTunes by itself really a media player when it has to rely on the presence of Quicktime where most of the time Quicktime is only used to watch downloaded movie trailers? There are ways to use iTunes without Quicktime but this is another story.
Users also have been nagging for a long time about iTunes support for portable media player other than iPod but Apple is just too stubborn (or stupid) to listen to these complaints. Thank God there is a software named Bad Apple that allows iTunes to work seamlessly with most major portable media player like Creative Zen and Microsoft Zune although there is no guarantee that the process would be fuss-free. Overall, iTunes still do a good job especially allowing each song to have its own equalizer setting (because different song need different equalization).
Get iTunes for free here:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
Beo Player is a free mp3 player made by Bang & Olufsen for Windows. The program is currently in its 5th version, now with support for picture management since the 4th version. There is no video playing capability yet, and it is likely that Bang & Olufsen won’t include video playing at least in the near future.
Despite in version 5, the program has not much changes since the very first one. It still retaining the same look, and as expected, there is no EQ control at all. This may be surprising for many but Bang & Olufsen claimed that this player produce “honest sound” so there is no need for an equalizer. This might be true considering that Bang & Olufsen is well known for producing premium-priced audio-video products as well as being one of the oldest consumer electronic company that still survive since the World War II (they made the communication radio for the war veterans on that time!). Perhaps even their physical products range don’t have EQ as well? Who knows, unless we buy them and have a try ourselves, but that is not likely since the price to pay may cost us both of our arms and legs. Even their 256 MB mp3 player costs more than the latest generation of iPod (which have tens more of gigabytes for your music at the same price)! Luxury, quality or stupidity? Anyways, just live it at that.
As mentioned earlier, Bang & Olufsen claimed the player to have the most honest sound (playing the music as it was recorded). Well, at least it is true at both theoretical and software level but not in practice. In the test, Beo Player was compared head to head with other 2 much-loved players, namely iTunes and Winamp. Since Beo Player does not come with any EQ, so to make the competition fair, both Winamp and iTunes EQ are disabled. During the test, there was no noticeable difference or perhaps no difference at all between those players when playing music. Therefore, Bang & Olufsen’s claim of the so-called “honest sound” is not necessarily true. If it is just about being minimalized player, even low profile players like Freeamp and Liteamp do much better, and both of the latter even comes with EQ. Bang & Olufsen seems to have bad karma with EQ and mysteriously keeps avoiding to incorporate that feature in their products range. Music may need to be listened as it was intended but it is a fact that different people have different hearings. Therefore some people may need enhanced bass or treble in order to enjoy the music. iTunes is better in providing this, by allowing different songs to have different EQ settings; perhaps because different music needs different adjustment? Winamp also can be enhanced to do the similar thing by using the RTEQ plugin (Realtime Equalizer), a kind of dynamic equalizer that adjusted automatically based on initial user settings. The reason of this one is, on the hand might be “because different parts of music need different sets of equalizer settings”? Again, just leave it at that for now.
Beo Player also is not really having small footprint. It occupies almost 80 MB of disk space upon installation and another 8 MB of system memory when running idle. Not to mention the 30 MB requirement of system resources when playing the music. 8 MB is maybe small enough for a media player but to run on, Beo Player needs a background program called Beotray that occupies 5 MB of system memory. That is ridiculous for being a background program, especially for something that only appear on system tray and only have the ‘Exit’ command. It should have occupied smaller resource or at least do more things than just closing the program.
The interface is prretty simple but may be confusing and not straight forward for first timer. Unlike any other existing media player out there, it has no application window at all. All there are only vertical autohiding player bar on the righthand side of the screen and the autohiding library bar on the other. The info and scan ‘window’ only appear between these bars, covering the entire screen when you click on the assosicated buttons. The available buttons are the resemblance of those found on BeoSound 2000 (mp3 player) and Beo remote control. You might not have the slightest idea to know what this and that button do unless you are ready to experimenting with them, and there is no tooltip to guide you. Luckily, just like the buttons on iPod, there are very few of them on Beo Player and you’ll master them in no time. There’s also a cool-looking and extensive help file should you need assistance, and the guide is also available in several European languages as well, if English is not for you (not surprising as Bang & Olufsen is based in Germany after all).
On functionality, the player also features speedy CD ripping, one of the feature should hae been found in any media player these days, although Winamp still shamefully offer restrictive function for that (the full speed ripping is locked until you purchase it! Damn!). Media is added to the library by scanning the hard drive and there is no way to selectively scan only certain folders so you will have to wait longer if you have your music scattered in your local disk. Songs are divided by Playlists, Albums, Genres, Artists, Folders and Titles. The library looks pleasing too, as if it is an AJAX website. It also features album art display, if you have any (you should have, if your mp3s are original!).
The most annying part of this player is the software keeps bugging you to register before you could run it, although this can be skipped by simply canceling the process. This is weird for a free software to do, and Bang & Olufsen should know there are many people who choose to stay completely in privacy by refusing to register any software at all. If you are lucky, you’ll see the window with the checkbox “Stop reminding me” after several times (usually when it detected active internet connection). Choose it and the bugging registration window will gone and you can continue using the software. However, some people may not lucky enough where the player refuses to run. This usually occur you refuse to register when the internet connection is present. In this case, those who are on older Windows will be out of luck but for Windows XP and Vista user, if you still despereately need to run this software, you can just create another user account and use it there (regardless the privileges).
Overall, this player may get 2.5 points out of 10 and is not really recommended for those who used to EQ-enhanced music.
Get Beo Player here:
https://www.bang-olufsen.com/beoplayer/software-downloads
Paint.NET, as its name bears is a free digital painting software for Windows. It is built based on the existing Microsoft Paint by some college students in US. The development project itself is advised and assisted by Microsoft as a mean to be an extended version of Microsoft Paint. Again, as it name bears, the software is built on Microsoft .NET Framework, thus requires the .NET installed to use it. Windows Vista should come with .NET and Windows XP user may download it from Microsoft website.
As an ‘extended version’ of Microsoft Paint, Paint.NET is a more polished software with a set of tools not available for the former, such as layering capability. The interface is clean and looks pleasing, especially those inactive floating windows that changes transparency/opacity on mouse hover. This is good to make sure the hidden part of the working document remains half-visible when covered by those floating windows, eliminating the need to constantly move/close those windows just to see how things are going beneath them.
Yes, this software DO have layering capabilities, but it only supported on the *.pdn file format since it can’t handle any Photoshop *.psd files or at least the VESA standard *.svg files that is used by Inkscape, the free-opensource illustration software. Anyway, it still handles the legacy Windows Bitmap (*.bmp) files well just like the original Microsoft Paint. The Tools, on the other hand only offers very slight or almost no enhancement over the original ones. For example, the Line and Curve tool is now shares the same button but the Curve can only be edited once as in the original Paint, except in this software it allows you to move the control point as much as you want, as long as the curve is still selected/active. Once you deselect it, there is no turning back. This is funny as it shows that the developer could make it similar to the Path/Pen tool but surprisingly or mysteriously, they didn’t and they choose to go the lame and annoying old-school way. Even the vertical scrollbar also works funny. You may scroll smoothly using the mouse scroll button but when you drag the scroll control button, the document remain static until you release the mouse button to see how much you have scrolled. This is the most unacceptable aspect of this software considering that we are no longer in the days of Windows 9x.
Truly, this software is more towards the fun compared to other free tools like Artweaver. Not really recommend but it’s worth a try.
Get Paint.NET here:
http://www.getpaint.net/download.html
Artweaver is a free digital painting software for Windows. It has been around for about a year and is currently in version 0.5.
Artweaver is one of the best available alternative for Microsoft Paint, as it offers more brush control as well as layering capability, great for those who like to paint separate and manageable elements. The interface shares much similarities with Photoshop, especially the Tools, Preview, Layers and Color palette. The Brush control window somehow offers much more control compared to Photoshop. Even the layer blending mode also matches Photoshop capabilities, if not better.
Artweaver has its own layer-enabled file format, Artweaver Document (*.awd) and it also can handle Photoshop’s *.psd files well without a glitch. However, opening a large (1024×768) PSD file seem to take a long time as if opening it on Photoshop itself, despite this program’s small footprint (approx. 25 MB when installed). Upon creating 10 layers, it only occupies roughly 70 MB of system memory, compared to 150 MB required when opening the same file using Photoshop CS4. The software didn’t crash during the test although there seems to be some minor bugs that preventing the document window to be resized once in a while.
Artweaver is truly a painter tools since it offers nothing more but a full set of brushes to meddle with. There is no path/pen tool to be expected; a common disability often found in free graphic software or rather a mistake that should have not been committed by any free graphic software developer. It is quite a shame for such good graphic software does not have this tool but given the great effects achievable using the brushes alone, any artist have to bear with this unavailability.
Overall, Artweaver is good though it might be better if the developer could incorporate the path/pen tool. It works great for those who have graphic tablets like those of Cintiq or Wacom. For those who only have the mouse would find it hard though.
Get Artweaver here:
http://www.artweaver.de/index.php?downloads_en
Since September last year, Google has released a brand new web browser to compete head to head with other rivals in the browser war. Named Chrome, the browser is made open-source, making it playing on an even field with Firefox. As of time of writing, no OS X and Linux version is available, however, being open-source, we can expect them real soon. OS X user should not complain much though. Even their good 'toyware' like iTunes and Safari took years to be ported to Windows. Not to mention the mouthwatering GarageBand that every Windows users can only dream of.
Every second people write something new about Chrome in their blog or website, with numbers of followers and fans keeps growing everyday. We already heard something like "Chrome is the new Firefox" or "Today is the day for Chrome".
Is Chrome really a new Firefox? Unlike Firefox, Chrome's interface for now is not really customizable despite the neat, clean and user friendly appearance. User will be found to be unable to place the navbar buttons to their liking. Some people also prefer the status bar to be shown at the bottom of the browser window. It is useful to display the loading progress as well as some other information. In Chrome, there is no way to show the status bar, except the autohide tooltip that displays the URL upon mouse hover on links. The built-in task manager is indeed cool, but only if it works as intended. It is supposed to avoid browser crashes since tabs are running as separate tasks. However, from the 'crash test' session. any attempt to close unresponsive tabs will definitely close the browser too.
The default start page looks pretty much similar to Opera, except instead of 'Speed Dialing', it shows thumbnails of recently closed or most visited sites. Bookmarks and history search also shares the same page. Bookmarking however may become a bit tricky process in Chrome, unless you are familiar with the Ctrl+D shortcut key. You have to open a blank (start) page first by opening a new tab. Then, to bookmark a tab, you have to drag it to the bookmark bar located on top of the start page. Seems easy but it skips the usual step to manage the bookmarks as found in other browsers. Bookmarking should have been easier via right-clicking rather than go through these hassle.
CSS radius border element also not smoothly rendered. They look choppy, perhaps due to no antialiasing? Anyway, pages load really fast in Chrome, fast enough to make it faster than other browsers, if not the fastest. Tabs can be converted into separate windows or vice versa, which is very nice. Download progress by default are displayed in a 'bottombar' on the page users are downloading from, and can be closed without interrupting it. Just like Opera, downloads are shown in a tab, but too bad it offers too few controls. However, it is interesting to be able to search for your particular download should you lost in the list. Google really have incorporated their powerful search ability into this peace of software.
Speaking of download, installation of Chrome is the most non-friendly ever since there is no official offline installer available, just like Yahoo! Messenger. This is really troublesome for users behind proxy and firewall. 'Unofficial' offline installer is available but even if the users managed to install it, they still need the installed GoogleUpdate to update Chrome. Therefore, users behind proxy-firewall will need to constantly look for more updated Chrome offline installer elsewhere.
I personally have started using Chrome since September last year, thanks for the info I got from reading the CHIP Malaysia magazine. Chrome is not really a new browser. It is based on the existing open-source project named Chromium (http://chromium.sourceforge.net/) which has been around for quite some time. In other words, Chromium is like Linux where anybody who know programming may alter or modify the original codes and then claiming that it is theirs. Nothing bad is happening here since being open-source means it is legal (or rather encouraged) to do such thing to the existing codes. That is what explained in GPL since the first version of that license.
Having using Chrome for about half-a-year, I came to conclusion that it is still immature compared to another open-source browser, none other but the much loved Mozilla Firefox. One major issue is the unavailability of standalone offline installer. Google has explained why they don't provide the offline installer but in this new age of internet, such excuse is... NOT EXCUSABLE. Other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and even IE don't have any problem with offline installer so why bother to be different in this case? Anyway, Google DO provide the downloadable offline installer, that is if you know the trick of how to reveal it via your browser (any browser).
Since the official version 1.x, Chrome default installer has offered proxy support which was unavailable prior to that version. It was also why Chrome received much criticism in the past months for being failed to include such support, which many software developers think as "a mistake that should have not been committed by an experienced entity like Google". Proxy support is very important, especially for office workers where the connections are always behind the proxy+firewall.
Chrome installation is one of the most annoying software installation routine I've ever encountered. Even compiling and installing Linux's software packages are far easier than this. The previous versions (prior to the official version 1.x) need to be installed online and I who are behind proxy all this time felt left out. Luckily I managed to figure it out on how to trick the browser I was using (Firefox) to download the offline installer and thus overcame the obstacle. According to Google, it is illegal to offer the offline installer or reveal the trick to download the offline installer, but even I want to have a piece of the cake too, can't I? That's how 'difficult' it was to install Chrome. Pretty annoying ain't it? The only fast thing about Chrome is, like what you said, is the execution of Java/Javascript apps. The rest is still on par, if not better than Firefox or Safari. Opera is still the king of the hill in terms of loading speed though. In terms of user-customizability, I still highly recommend Firefox. Even a long-time IE user will still feel at home with Firefox upon the first switch, despite its clean and uncluttered interface. On top of that, user can even alter the placement of the navigation buttons/icons. More than that, Firefox was made customizable with tons of plugins ever since its very first version. That said, Chrome is almost nothing compared to Firefox in that term. I am not totally against Chrome though. Being an open source software, it would be just a matter of time for Chrome to improve, but no matter how things are about it, Chrome seriously need to be improved right away, if not very soon in order to steal the heart of loyal Firefox fans. That is why I still use Chrome and Firefox side by side until right now.
Get Chrome for free here:
http://www.google.com/chrome
We have reviewed the Flock browser before and now we feel it is time to review the mother of all Firefox-based browsers, the original Mozilla Firefox browser. We have been a long time Firefox user, ever since it's initial release in November 2009. Currently Firefox is in the version 3.5, with the version 3.5.3 being the latest stable release by the time of writing this article.
The current Firefox is originally descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, which was born upon the release of the source code of the Gecko web rendering engine used in the legendary Netscape browser. Even today Firefox still uses the engine since it complies to most current web standards. In fact, Firefox also implemented some of the features that would eventually become standards.
Firefox is among the first few browsers that features tabbed-browsing, which has been around since its very first version. Actually tabbed-browsing feature was available in Mozilla Application suite as an extension and with the advent of Firefox, the feature is made built-in for the people who developed it think that this is a must in any web browser. Indeed it is a must and it is hard to imagine any modern web browser without it.
Simply put, it is also hard to write an article covering all Firefox features, for it will span thousands of words. Therefore we will highlight only a few of notable features that sets Firefox apart from the rest of other browsers. Firefox has the reputation of being one of the safest browser available. New updates constantly available thanks to the ever increasing supports and contributions from the Firefox developer community. If only Linux can be updated in a similar manner we believe many people would embrace it too.
Other most notable feature on Firefox is its page loading speed. By default it is already fast enough to beat many other major browsers in page rendering and with a little tweak it can be the fastest of all. Yes, user-customizability is another Firefox's killer feature. So far, apart from Firefox derived browsers, we never seen any browser as highly customizable as this one. There are tons of plug-ins (extensions) to extend it functionality plus loads more themes to replace the default look and fell, if that is what you are into. Not to mention that power user may delve into its internal configurations for some extras, just like what people are doing with Windows Registry.
At this moment we have almost no complain for Firefox except for its one band reputation; being the memory hog. Yes, one running Firefox instance with certain amount of extensions installed may hog your system memory up to 100MB, even without displaying any page, hampering your PC performance. Even after closing it Firefox does not instantly give up the memory and may take some time to clear everything before it is completely 'shut down'. This is getting worse by the fact that Firefox runs only on single processing thread, though multi-threaded version has been planned for the future. Luckily since Firefox is highly customizable, there are tweaks to compensate this problem if you really need to get rid of them. Our advice is, only install the extensions you really use and Firefox will work just fine. Spread Firefox!
Download Firefox for free here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html