StoryBook

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.

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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 Video Encoder

SUPER is a video encoder software for Windows. It is developed and distributed for free by eRightsoft.

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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

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.

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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/