Mozilla Songbird

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.

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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 Portable Web Server

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.

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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 dictionary software

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.

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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