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.
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
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
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