Recently in Program Reviews Category

Yes, App of the Week is back, albeit temporarily, as I only have a handful of new apps to review.

Picture Finder is a Mac application designed to help you find pictures for entries in your Address Book. Address Book lets you store a picture or photo with each entry - which is useful if you have an iPhone as you'll be able to see the picture of the person who is calling you, for example.

Picture Finder queries the Gravatar service to see if a selected contact has uploaded an image to it, and, if so, lets you use this image as their picture. If they haven't, then you can instead select a computer generated image, such as a Wavatar, Identicon or MonsterID which is generated from the user's email address. Alternatively, you can have Picture Finder generate a QR Code or a picture based on the contact's name.

It's useful if most of your contacts are of the geeky sort who regularly comment on blogs and therefore have a Gravatar, or if you like all of your friends to be represented by cute cartoon pictures of monsters. If not, then this program is of less use.

This week's app is Speed Download - a download manager. I'm reviewing version 4 in this review, which came as part of a previous MacHeist bundle, however, version 5 has subsequently been released.

Despite having held a license code for some time, it's only been in the past few weeks that I've actually tried the app. However, it's become very useful over the past few days; we're having some internet trouble (which I believe is caused by our ISP, since it's worse in the evenings than in the mornings) and so having a download manager has been a great help, as it can auto-resume downloads when you get disconnected. It also claims to speed up downloads by making multiple server connections and downloading the file in pieces, rather than one continuous connection. Additional features include web browser integration and FTP support, and when adding a download you can choose to spoof a web browser user agent and provide a referrer URL if needed.

The interface of version 4 is good, if a little cluttered - there's a lot of buttons and options, and the preference pane especially has lots of options to configure - maybe too many. Download speed was good though - it did seem faster than Firefox but I didn't conduct any scientific tests.

If you have a dodgy internet connection, or the need to download large files, then I would recommend a download manager, so that you can resume partially-downloaded files rather than having to download them again from scratch. Speed Download is one such application, and works well for me.

If you have a large DVD collection and a large hard disk, then Handbrake may be for you - it'll let you convert your DVDs into movie files that you can store on a computer and play back when you please.

That's a simple way of putting it, anyway.

Handbrake will take most forms of video, whether it's a DVD or movie file, and convert it into a movie file in a different format. Many video formats are accepted as input, but at present it will only output MPEG-4 and H.264 video, in the mp4 and Matroska container formats. However, despite the restricted output formats, there's plenty of conversion options.

One of its nice features is its presets, for devices like the iPod Touch and Apple TV - these allow you to select settings which give optimum file size and quality for the device in question (i.e. there's no point doing a full H.264 HD video for an iPod Touch as it'll eat up all of your space on it and won't look much better than a smaller, lower resolution file). There's also good subtitle support - subtitles can be 'burned in' (i.e. they will always display) or added as text and displayed in supported clients. Chapter points can be preserved from DVD rips as well, and the video can have its black bars cropped out to reduce file size.

Conversion speed depends on the computer. On my old Mac Mini, which has a 1.42 GHz IBM PowerPC processor, it can take some 10 hours to rip a DVD film. On my newer Mac Mini, with a 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, it'll take under 2 hours when left idle.

While the interface isn't the most intuitive, it's still relatively simple to use. Handbrake is free, open source and available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, but VLC is required.

This week's app is Cyberduck, an FTP client for Mac OS X. I've been using it since I first starting using Macs in the summer of 2004, as back then it was one of the few free FTP clients out there. Those that were willing to pay used Transmit.

Cyberduck has come along since then, and nowadays supports a wide variety of protocols in addition to FTP - SFTP, FTP over SSL/TLS, WebDAV and Amazon S3. It has a simple interface with drag and drop support, integration with a number of external text editors, a transfer manager and support for Quick Look.

And that's basically it. It's a simple application but this makes it easy to use, and it's all wrapped up in the familiar Mac interface. And it has a cute rubber duck as its icon.

Cyberduck is free and open source, but donations are welcomed by the author.

This is the latest in a weekly series of applications that I use and would recommend. To break the stream of Mac programs, here's one for Windows.

IrfanView is probably one of the most versatile image preview applications there is. But to call it an image preview application is only scratching the surface of what this little program does.

It's very good at previewing images, no matter what format the image comes as. It opens a wide variety of image formats out of the box, and an official plugins pack adds many, many more. In other words, if it's an image, IrfanView will open it.

But you can do so much more. It's great for resizing images, and has resampling filters to retain quality when doing so. You can also blur, sharpen, pixelate or apply a wide range of basic effects to all or part of an image. And you can save the image in a wide variety of formats too. IrfanView can also do more advanced screen capturing than you can achieve by pressing the Print Screen key. And you can scan or acquire images from a webcam.

IrfanView is free, but Windows-only. I've had some success running it under CrossOver on a Mac, since I haven't found a suitable replacement for it on OS X (Preview doesn't count).

Once upon a time, Windows users all used Zip files, Mac users used StuffIt files and Unix users used GZip files. But compression technology has moved on since then, and we now have BZip2, 7-Zip, RAR and various other file formats spanning multiple platforms and operating systems.

Thankfully, programs like The Unarchiver exist to open the myriad of different compressed file types. The Unarchiver supports an almost unparalleled range of formats, including some obscure and largely defunct ones. I've yet to come across a compressed file that The Unarchiver hasn't been able to open (apart from a couple of SitX files a few years ago which it now mostly supports).

The Unarchiver works in a very similar way to OS X's built-in decompression support, but as well as adding compatibility with many more file formats, it can also do smart things like opening the decompressed file's contents in Finder - handy when you've just downloaded something. It's also very fast in my experience.

The program is free, and open source.

This is the 5th instalment of a weekly look at an application that I have been using and would recommend to others.

Lighthouse is a very useful little application which makes up for Mac OS X's lack of support for UPnP - a network technology that allows your computer to talk to your router. This comes in most use when running programs that need to be able to receive connections from an internet, such as servers, peer-to-peer clients and instant messaging clients.

Lighthouse sits quietly in the notification area and does most of its user communication using Growl. It has built-in support for a number of programs like Transmission and iChat and other programs can be added easily. When these programs are launched, Lighthouse will tell your router to open the relevant ports on your firewall to allow these programs to communicate - and then close them when you quit the program.

Besides this, Lighthouse lets you easily copy your router's IP address to the clipboard and can tell you when it loses contact with the router - a sign that you have a problem with your network.

I've actually been using Lighthouse for a couple of years and it's been great when downloading updates for World of Warcraft, or when conducting video chats on iChat. It's a wonder why Apple didn't include support for UPnP in OS X, but Lighthouse does an admirable job of filling in. It's shareware and costs USD $13 to buy.

Amazingly I've only mentioned AppFresh once or twice on this blog, which is a shame as it's a rather useful little program. Run it, and it'll tell you which of your applications are out of date and need updating - and, it'll even update them for you.

Applications are sorted into 'Up-to-date', 'Out of date' and 'Unknown' - AppFresh can't always get information about some programs. Much of its data comes from the i use this web site, but AppFresh also integrates with the Sparkle framework that an increasing number of programs now use to update themselves.

AppFresh will also manage your i use this account for you, and will even offer to install applications which you've said you use but haven't yet installed - great when moving to a new machine. It will also check for Apple system updates as well as third-party applications.

Currently AppFresh is a developer preview, so while it's free to download at the moment, it's possible that a 1.0 release may carry a charge. And it's always worth ensuring that you have adequate backups in case a program update goes awry. But I've been using AppFresh for over a year now without any major issues.

Some applications are very complex. Others are so simple that they basically just do one thing. CapSee is one of the latter.

Accidentally hitting Caps lock halfwAY THROUGH A SENTENCE IS VERY ANNOYING, especially when you're a relatively quick but not very accurate typist like me. CapSee sits in your notification bar, waiting for you to hit that much-maligned key. When it does, it will display a notification in the middle of the screen, in the same bezel style that Mac OS X does when you change the volume for example. Hopefully the visual cue will be enough to make you realise your mistake before you inadvertently end up with a sentence thAT IS PARTLY IN CAPS.

CapSee is available for Macs running Leopard and Snow Leopard, and is completely free.

This is the second in a weekly look at an application I've been using lately and come to like. All of them will run on Mac OS X but some will be cross-platform.

It should be no secret by now that I like using Twitter. I've been a user for almost 3 years, sending my first tweet in late spring 2007. Twitter can be used quite well from the web but it's real power comes from its API and the multitudes of applications which can make use of it. Tweetie is one such application - it began as an iPhone application and made the move to OS X last year.

Considering there are so many Twitter clients out there, what made me choose Tweetie? Firstly, it has a free version, which is supported by a few ads in your Twitter timeline (these are obvious and less frequent than I expected) and an occasional nag screen asking you to upgrade. Paying $19.95 removes the ads and the nag screen but doesn't provide any extra features. It's also built natively for OS X, unlike a number of others which use Adobe AIR - while this does allow them to run easily on Windows, OS X and Linux, in my experience AIR apps are quite slow and memory-hungry. Adobe have promised improvements to AIR so this may change.

Tweetie also supports multiple Twitter accounts - useful if you have a personal account and an account for your business, for example - although I personally don't make use of this. The interface is very Mac-like, and it includes Growl notifications for new tweets which are useful if you want to be distracted whenever new tweets are received. It also has built-in search and you can view a Twitter user's feed in the app by clicking their userpic. Support for URL-shortening services and TwitPic/yFrog is built-in too.

Tweetie's use of animation makes it feel very smooth and slick, and it seems like the best-designed Twitter application I've used so far. It's light enough to run at all times, and can be run just as a dock or notification icon.

It's not perfect - it doesn't support the new Retweet mechanism yet (so when you retweet it still posts 'RT' in front of a new tweet by you) and doesn't show trending topics. There's also no geolocation features, although this is of limited use for a desktop client.

I recently switched to Tweetie after having used EchoFon for Firefox, which I now can't use due to bug 533535 in Firefox 3.6. But Tweetie offers much better features so I'm planning to stick with it. The Twitter client arena is very crowded but Tweetie sticks out as a very good application.

This is the first in a weekly look at an application I've been using lately and come to like. All of them will run on Mac OS X but some will be cross-platform.

For this inaugural App of the Week post, I'm going to look at Squeeze, a file system compression tool for OS X. Normally it's a very reasonable USD $9.95, but right now you can get it for free at MacHeist.

Squeeze brings to OS X a feature that has been in Windows NT-based OSes for quite some time - file system compression. This allows you to compress certain files transparently - they will open and work like normal files, but are compressed and so take up less disk space than they would normally - as opposed to compressing them in archive formats like Zip and Rar. Both NTFS, the Windows file system, and HFS+ which is the Mac file system support this type of compression but OS X doesn't allow users to compress files like Windows does. Enter Squeeze.

Squeeze adds a preference pane and a small notification bar application which allows you to select folders to compress. The notification bar application quietly watches those folders ensures that any new files that you save also get compressed.

The space savings are, at best, modest - many files such as MP3 tracks and JPEG images are already compressed and so applying additional compression to them isn't going to make them much smaller. Also, while I haven't noticed it myself, if the system has to regularly access compressed files this may result in a slowdown due to the extra processor power required. It's therefore probably best that you stick to lightly-used files and not your System folder, for example.

It could do with one big new feature, which is to find seldom-used files and present them to the user as candidates to compress. The Disk Cleanup Wizard in Windows does this and it can claw back significant amounts of space from files which are not used very often, with little or no performance degradation. Also, Squeeze only runs on Snow Leopard - if you have an older version of OS X then Squeeze isn't for you.

At $9.95, this makes for a very good value way of getting extra disk space without needing to add an extra hard drive, or upgrade. It's a simple tool that does what it needs to do very well.

(Full disclosure: I got Squeeze for free as part of the MacHeist promotion)

Yesterday, Flickr released a new version of their Flickr Uploadr. Since version 3 the Uploadr has been based on XULRunner, the technology with powers Firefox, Thunderbird, Miro, Songbird and TomTom's GPS desktop software, which means that it's possible to install extensions.

There doesn't appear to be many extensions out there - in fact, the only one I've found is Image Preview. But there must be a whole load of possibilities for extending the Uploadr - geo-tagging, basic photo editing (cropping/resizing), tag suggestion etc. And I'm sure someone will come up with a way of changing the theme.

VirtualBox 2 is out. VirtualBox is Sun Microsystems' entry into the Virtual Machine market, and competes against Parallels and VMWare. Unlike the others, it is free and comes in an open source flavour.

Since I have been using Parallels for some time, and VirtualBox is free, I thought I'd give it a spin on my MacBook, using Mac OS X as the host operating system. Parallels is excellent for running Windows Vista (and presumably XP), but its Linux support has been a little lacklustre and the past 2 releases have not supported Ubuntu 8.04 despite being released after Ubuntu has been released.

For version 2, quite a bit of work has gone on to make VirtualBox fit into OS X better, and it shows - though it still feels like a port, it looks very much look a native Mac application and it's very easy to get going. Since I only have 1 Windows Vista license and I'm already running it in Parallels, I decided to try it with Ubuntu 8.04.

And it seems to work well. Plus, VirtualBox's 'Guest Additions', software for the guest OS which enhances support, work for Ubuntu 8.04 - unlike Parallels Tools which only work for older Ubuntu releases. They also go further; not only do you get dynamic screen sizing (the display area adjusts depending on the virtual machine's window size), seemless mouse pointer integration and time synchronisation - there's also clipboard synchronisation and an attempt at desktop integration, which resembles Coherence mode in Parallels, but it works under Linux as well as Windows. However, it's a bit buggy and I had some rendering issues while trying to use it.

Other down points? There's no importing from other disk formats - so if you already have virtual machine set up in Parallels you can't use it straightaway in VirtualBox (although if you can find a tool that converts the disk to the VMDK format you may have some luck). And PowerPC Mac owners are out of luck as VirtualBox is Intel-only, although running an Intel VM on a PowerPC machine would be very slow anyway.

That all being said, VirtualBox is a strong contender, and you can't argue with free. For many, this will do everything that they demand from its commercial rivals, without costing a penny.

Apple's introduction of Universal Binaries - programs which can run on both PowerPC and Intel architectures - was, on the whole, a good idea: consumers didn't have to ensure they had the right version or know what type of processor their Mac had. But the big disadvantage was that this meant including compiled code for both architectures, which basically doubles the size of each application.

Enter Trimmit. Trimmit will cut your applications down to size by safely removing the architecture that isn't needed by your computer. So, if you have an Intel Mac, it'll cut out the PowerPC code, and vice versa. It will also remove various junk files and debug symbols, compress any TIFF images included in them, remove any language translations other than your own and do some general cleaning.

To give you some idea of the potential space savings, I ran it over Microsoft Messenger:mac and decreased the application size from 24.3 MB down to 11 MB. Similar savings where made with other programs.

Obviously an application like this is not without risks - some programs run integrity checks to ensure they haven't been modified and will refuse to run if they have had their guts stripped out. Others may work in strange ways. Trimmit thankfully backs up all programs that are trimmed but it's worth verifying that they work after their surgery. There's also not a lot of point running it on programs that you update frequently as you'll have to run Trimmit each time you update, potentially decreasing any space savings.

But for those stuck for hard drive space, Trimmit may offer some welcome relief.

Today Apple released QuickTime 7.2, which finally, finally, finally supports video playback in full screen mode, without the need to buy QuickTime Pro. In other words, it does something that Windows users have had for years in Windows Media Player without additional expense.

Admittedly programs like VLC have brought this feature for free but it's nice to see it finally available 'out of the box', as it were.

Oh yeah, and it fixes some critical security issues so you'll probably want to update it anyway.

(This post brought to you in association with half a bottle of £2.89 Rose d'Anjou from Lidl)

Those of you who read up on Mac software may well know that Parallels Desktop has been updated to version 3.0. It's not a free upgrade but those with version 2.x can buy the new version for a reduced price - I paid around £20 but the price has gone up since.

While it introduces some nice stuff for Windows users - ability to right-click on any file in OS X or Windows and have it open in an application on the other operating system, and hugely improved 3D performance - there's also some improvements for those of us running Linux as guest OS in OS X.

Firstly Ubuntu is now on the list of supported distributions. This isn't huge - you've always been able to run Ubuntu as 'Other 2.6 kernel' - but it's nice to see it recognised. But Parallels also now provide Parallels Tools for Linux (like the tools that exist for Windows) which makes the experience of running Linux in OS X much nicer.

You don't get the fancy coherence mode, like in Windows, but you'll find that the Linux desktop now fits the window without scrolling in windowed mode, and should appear as proper full screen in full screen mode without the need to configure it - a welcome feature for those of us with widescreen computers as you don't get the thick black borders around the desktop. Also, you can move the mouse in and out of the window without needing to capture and release the keyboard and mouse, so it feels much more natural.

Since running Windows is what Parallels is most used for, it's understandable that most of the improvements are there, but it's also nice to see some improvements for Linux too. Let's hope for Coherence in future release.

I have a new favourite FTP/SCP client for Mac, in the form of MacFusion. It's a GUI frontend for MacFUSE, which itself is a Mac port of FUSE, which allows non-native files systems to be mounted in user space, apparently.

What this basically means is that you can use MacFusion to mount FTP and SSH servers as if they were removable disks in Mac OS X, so you can browse them using Finder (or indeed any program) and drag and drop files on and off the server as if it were any other folder. You can even make it run at startup and have it mount the connections then, so they're always available while your computer is turned on.

It's not the easiest program to install - you have to install MacFUSE from Google first, which requires a restart, and then MacFusion - but once you've set some servers as your favourites the whole thing is very transparent. In future it should also support WebDAV and other file systems too.

I have a new favourite screensaver: Fenêtres Volantes. It takes your open windows and makes them fly around in a somewhat random fashion while you're away from your machine. It's a bit hard to describe but there's a flash animation showing how it looks on the site.

The best part is what happens when you move the mouse or press a key to go back to what you were doing - the windows all quickly dive back to their original positions. It's as if your computer has been cheekily rearranging your windows while you were away and then has to put them back when you return to avoid getting noticed.

The screensaver is Mac-only (sorry Windows and Linux people) and is free, but donations are welcome. It replaces my previous favourite, Toaster Clone, a clone of the retro flying toasters screensaver from the early 90s which is available for Mac and Windows users.

Isn't it weird how the real need for screensavers has now all-but disappeared with systems such as APM and ACPI and the move to LCD displays, but they're still popular as ever?

Back in August, I spent $5 on a program called Disco. At the time the actual features of the program were kept secret, so I was basically spending $5 on a program without knowing what it actually did.

Fast forward to the end of last month, and I got my hands on my copy of Disco, which turned out to be a CD writing program. Though it's still in beta, there's a few comments I'd like to make about it.

• It's small. My screen resolution is 1280x800.... and Disco only uses a small portion of that. Admittedly one of its nice points is its minimalism, but the interface doesn't expand much even when you drag a whole load of files onto it. In fact, you'll only get to see 6 files at a time, which means that if you want to burn a disc with lots of files you potentially have a lot of scrolling to do.
• It's a bit bland While the black-and-white look is consistent throughout the program, it does take the biscuit when it's spread to the Preferences panel (which is also ridiculously small and cramped). It would be nice if this used the look that preference panels in other OS X apps use, mostly for ease of use but also just because it'll make thing a bit brighter and not like a goth art student's bedroom.
• It makes the widgets look weird The close/minimise/maximise buttons have even been changed to shades of black and grey, just to make the program more depressingly dark, and the buttons and tickboxes are not standard OS X ones either. It's all a bit 'form-over-function' which I don't like.
• It's a bit too transparent Quite a few windows use transparency, which would be nice if they were a little more opaque. If you have any programs open behind Disco, then they'll show through, to the point at which it makes the text in Disco hard to read. This would be fine if you could turn the transparency off, or adjust the level, but you can't, leaving users to squint at the text.

Those are the criticisms. As for the compliments, on the whole I really like the program and there are some very nice touches. The animations make the program more fun to use (something that most, but not all, OS X applications manage), and compared to most CD burning programs I've tried it's far easier to use, with a minimal step-by-step process. That said, it's got some nice power user features too, such as selecting what format you want the CD to be burned as and the ability to write CD images, and the use of the motion sensors in Apple laptops is a nice touch.

Disco shows a lot of promise and I hope that some of these niggles are addressed. On the whole though I really like Disco and would have paid far more than $5 for it.

Update: A new beta of Disco has been released which allows the transparency to be turned off. This addresses one of the issues I had with it, now for the rest :) .

Here's an indispensible program for Mac users who work with archives - The Unarchiver. It's a bit like StuffIt Expander, except it's open source, faster, supports more formats and doesn't require you to sign your life away give your email address to the developers. In fact, you could get rid of StuffIt altogether, but The Unarchiver doesn't support the propietary .sitx format which is (very) occasionally used by people, so you'll still need it for that.

It also beats OS X's built-in zip support by allowing you to have it open the folder automatically after the files have been extracted. All in all it's a good little application, found through Cool OS X Apps.

Though the developers are doing their best to keep it off major news sites, Adium X 1.0 is now in the Beta phase. Adium is the awesomely cool multi-network instant messaging client for Mac OS X, and this version brings several major changes.

Firstly, it no longer uses libgaim (the networking code from Gaim) for its AOL, ICQ and .Mac support, and instead uses Joscar, an open-source Java interface. You may think the developers are mad for switching to Java instead of something compiled in C, but actually there's little difference in performance and Adium now starts up faster. Joscar also offers a more complete AOL experience, with working file transfers.

The user interface of the main contact list has seen a refresh, and there's a way of setting a user icon across all connections, rather than each one individually. An Xtras Manager lets you manage Adium add-ons and there's better integration with iTunes.

There's no voice and video support with this release - support for Google Talk's audio feature is in progress but it'll probably be some months before it makes it into the application, and in any case Google Talk doesn't even support Jingle yet despite Google coming up with it in the first place. Though Mac OS X has a rich media layer in the form of QuickTime, no-one has yet been able to leverage this to provide multimedia chat on any of the other networks, even though Trillian uses QuickTime on Windows for its video and audio chat features.

It's still a solid release, and I've yet to experience any bugs. Well worth the upgrade.

It has appeared somewhat belatedly, but football fans can follow World Cup matches using the Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard, a little applet for Windows XP that lets you choose a team and monitor its progress in the competition. It doesn't do much else but it looks nice, and you can make it partially transparent.

What is interesting is that the first step of the install asks you what country you are in, and, if you select the UK, it changes from being Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard to Microsoft Football Scoreboard, which is a nice touch. Should keep anally-retentive Brits like me from complaining anyway :) .

Note that you need to pass a Windows Genuine Advantage check to be able to download it, like you do with other MS freebies such as Microsoft Match-Up which is a Solitaire-esque game.

Monolingual is a tool for Mac OS X that lets you remove unwanted languages from the operating system.

One of OS X's strengths is the fact that it's delivered with many different languages out of the box - with Windows, you are stuck with the language of the OS. It means that on OS X you could have one user who has his interface in US English, another in British English, and another in Simplified Chinese. Which is pretty cool.

The downside is that all of these extra language files take up a lot of space. When you consider just how many languages OS X ships with (Tigrinya, anyone? Or Sinhalese?) you're looking at hundreds of megabytes for something you may not use.

So here's where Monolingual comes in. It goes through your applications and strips out any languages that you tell it to. The process can take a while, especially on slower Macs, but even when I used it relatively conservatively (i.e. keeping all of the English derivatives plus French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Welsh) I managed to save over half a gigabyte of space on my HDD.

You can go even further, by removing unwanted keyboard layouts and unneeded input methods - handy if you're not Chinese or can't imagine a Chinese user wanting to use your machine.

There's also a relatively new feature that lets you remove program architectures - effectively allowing you to 'de-universalise' universal binaries by removing the architecture that you don't need. So if you have a G4 Mac Mini like I do, you could remove the Intel architectures of programs. Judging by how much bigger universal binaries are over their single architecture cousins, this could also save lots of space, but I was too scared to try it.

Monolingual is free and open source, but donations are welcome.

AppZapper is a program I've been meaning to get around to reviewing for some time now, however, a major new version (1.5) was released yesterday so I felt now was a good time.

AppZapper's aim is to make uninstalling applications on OS X as easy as it is to remove them. You may think that uninstalling applications is simply a case of moving the program icon to the trash, and in some cases it is, but often you will also leave behind all of the program's settings and various other data associated with the program that is no longer needed, which obviously uses up hard disk space.

AppZapper works by finding all of the related files and folders of a given application, and lets you remove them as well. It has a drag and drop interface - either drop the program onto the AppZapper icon itself, or you can launch AppZapper and a drag and drop screen opens which you can drop programs onto. You'll then be asked what bits of the program to remove, and then it will send all of those bits to the Trash, while making a satisfying zapping noise. It can save quite a bit of space - in the screenshot above I was able to free up an extra 60 MB while uninstalling NeoOffice using AppZapper.

A new feature in version 1.5 is ZapGenie, which scans all of your applications and shows you when you last used them, thus making it easier to find and zap any programs you no longer use. It turned out that I had lots of old iPod Firmware installers that I no longer needed - these took up around 200 MB of space.

And it's not just limited to applications - AppZapper can also remove unneeded preference panes, plugins for Safari, QuickTime and iTunes, and screensavers. It also has some safety features - it won't let you remove core programs needed for the operating system to run, or programs you are currently using - however these can be turned off if you're feeling daring. You can also maintain your own 'safe list' of programs that you don't want to be removed by anyone.

AppZapper is shareware, but it costs a mere $13 for lifetime upgrades, and you may even be able to get a discount. If you try a lot of Mac OS X software it may be worth having to free up the space taken up by applications you no longer use.

Recently I've been playing around with a couple of tools which can extract files from downloadable install packages, such as those created with NSIS, InstallShield, Windows Installer or NSIS. The tools are Universal Extractor, which supports most install packages (with the exception of NSIS) and 7-Zip, which as well as being quite a good general-purpose zip utility will also open NSIS packages, plus some Windows Installer and InstallShield packages - note that you'll need the latest beta version to enable some of the functionality.

Why would you want to do this? Sometimes installers don't work for no apparent reason, so you can extract the files and install the program manually yourself. Or you may have a copy of a program that you don't need, but would like to install the fonts that it ships with - you could extract the fonts from the installer package and install them manually without installing the whole thing.

Mac users needn't feel left out - if you download a program which has an installer package (as opposed to just an application in a disk image), you can right-click the package and choose 'Show Contents'. You don't need to install any extra software, though Pacifist is a shareware tool that adds many extra options.

As you may know I'm beta-testing Windows Live Messenger (no, I don't have any more invitations, sorry), and just recently a new build was posted which has seem so more major changes to the interface. ActiveWin has screenshots of the earlier builds.

The new look is far more consistent with MSN Messenger 7.x, and though it retains the ability to search for contacts in the buddy list window it loses a lot of the big new features in previous builds. Tabs are now always in the window instead of floating outside it, and the quick link icons no longer appear under highlighted contacts. It also feels less chunky and looks better on smaller resolutions - on my 1024x768 laptop screen I could at least see most of my contacts. The big advertising banner is still there, of course.

The new icons for the windows also appear to have disappeared in favour of the old icons from MSN Messenger - not sure how I feel about that because I liked the new icons and they matched the Windows Vista / IE7 look much better. It may be an XP thing though and the icons in Vista are different.

Overall I do like the new look - it matches in with the clean look of the other Windows Live projects, and feels more trim. I'm guessing a lot of the feedback from the earlier beta builds was that the new look was too much of a departure and that Microsoft were fixing something that wasn't necessarily broken.

Stability wise I've had no problems - Greg has experienced some crashes but I've not been able to reproduce those here. I haven't yet used the voice or video features yet, but I was able to play Minesweeper Flags with one of Hari's housemates with no problems. Memory usage is a bit high but equivalent to a reasonably trim installation of Thunderbird or Firefox; moreso than Trillian Pro with 5 network connections though. There are also lots of references to 'Messenger 8.0 Beta' so I'm not sure if the 'Windows Live Messenger' name is final, however all the branding is all for Windows Live.

Update: Greg's got his own review here, which, if anything, proves that the discussion shown in the screenshot actually happened.

The long-awaited first release of Songbird, the XUL-based cross-platform music player, is now out. It's only a 'User Preview' though, in that the essential features work but there's still a lot of work to go before it's ready for widespread use; hence its 0.1 release number.

I'm going to do a reasonably detailed review of the application. As the application is still very much in its infancy, there's not an awful lot there right now though.

I tried out Opera 8.5 Beta for Windows Mobile. It's shareware with a 45-day trial, and I imagine the non-beta will be $29 like the other mobile versions of Opera are. If I carry on using my PDA for much longer it may be a worthwhile investment as it's a big step-up from Pocket IE, which is based on Internet Explorer 4 and doesn't really work that well with pages that haven't been optimised specifically for mobile devices.

incidentally, although I have a stylesheet for handheld devices, Opera ignores this and tries to render the normal one with is designed for 800x600+ resolutions, which means it looks a bit screwed up. Opera does, however, allow you to 'zoom' pages, and at 50% this site actually looks okay. WIth my eyesight, 75% seems okay for almost all pages and it does do a much better job at rendering normal pages than Pocket IE. Its user agent is essentially the same as Pocket IE but with Opera/8.5 [en] on the end of it, so presumably most web statistics packages will detect it as Opera, like they do when Opera is in IE-spoofing mode.

The interface is nice and simple too. Ever since Opera for Windows Smartphone came out I've been waiting for this and I'm not too disappointed.

When I first heard about Google Pack - a software suite of Google's own programs plus other related apps - I didn't think I'd actually use it. But actually it's quite good.

I actually do use quite a number of the programs - in fact, Google Talk, RealPlayer, GalleryPlayer and Norton Anti-Virus are the only ones I don't use - and it will keep the programs updated for you. Admittedly some of those have built-in updaters but it'll be handy to have a 'one stop shop' for updates like on some Linux distros. Microsoft's launch of Microsoft Update, which updates Windows and Office in one fell swoop is a start, but it would be nice if it could also include third-party software.

It'll be especially useful for my parents computer, as it means I won't have to spend so much time ensuring that all of their programs are up to date. Furthermore, it was able to detect the existence of several programs like Google Earth that were already installed - hopefully it will also install updates for that automatically now. That said, it didn't pick up on the Google Toolbar for IE nor Mozilla Firefox.

The interface is nice and intuitive too. All in all I'm pleased with it.

There are new versions of Skype out for Windows and Mac users. The Windows version 2.0 adds support for video calls with other Skype users, amongst changes to the interface. On the Mac, Skype 1.4 gets an updated interface with some fancy new effects and the ability to pause iTunes if you receive a call, as well as call forwarding. It doesn't have video calling yet though.

On both platforms, you'll see that the Skype icon is now light blue - previously it was red on Windows and light green on the Mac. The PocketPC and Linux versions haven't yet been updated though, and none of the versions supports talking to users of other networks like Gizmo yet.

I'm giving µTorrent (pronounced 'micro torrent') another spin today. I'd tried it briefly a few months ago, but with the switch to OS X I haven't been in Windows much.

I have to say that I'm very impressed. It has a good, uncluttered interface, plus some more advanced features like a distributed host tracker (useful if the tracker that you are using goes down) and bandwidth settings for individual torrents. I have few qualms about making this my default BitTorrent client.

Previously I've been using Azureus on both Windows and OS X. Azureus is good because it's powerful and it uses Java, thus making it cross-platform. The bad thing about Azureus is that... well... it uses Java, which is pretty slow at the best of times. µTorrent and Azureus do essentially the same things, except µTorrent is a streamlined chipmunk and Azureus is a 800lb gorilla. With two torrents going and the main window open, µTorrent is using almost no CPU at all and less than 6MB of RAM (and only around 10MB of virtual memory) - Azureus would need several times that and could easily bring less powerful systems to their knees. Alas, µTorrent is currently Windows-only - an OS X port was being developed but this seems to have been abandoned, and there's currently no Linux version.

Still, it's great to see software being written with efficiency in mind. Even though computers are getting faster all the time, it's good to see programs that offer good performance on older hardware.

Google Talk looks interesting. It's primarily a VoIP client like Skype and Gizmo, but also has a standard instant messaging mode. On the face of it, nothing special.

Where it stands out is that it integrates with Gmail (so all Gmail users already have a Google Talk account and their Gmail address book appears in their contact list), and that its chat function uses the open Jabber network so that users can talk to users of other clients like Gaim, Adium, iChat and Trillian Pro. Google actually advertises this as a feature.

That said, it's Windows-only at the moment, and I haven't yet been able to try it - especially as the university firewall seems to block Jabber traffic.

Update: Download Squad has a review. Key points:

• Dead simple interface, with good integration with Gmail
• "SIP support is coming soon and are in talks with Skype, AOL, and Yahoo! concerning interoperability."
• Only a 900KB download

And allegedly iChat users can use voice chat with Google Talk users, so every Mac user with a recent copy of iChat is instantly on board. Funky.

Update II: Michael Robertson on Google Talk. Michael is one of the people behind Gizmo and SIPphone, and he's pleased. He reckons this could see the beginning of greater interopability between IM and VoIP networks.

About 18 months ago I waxed lyrical about Media Player Classic - an open source clone of Windows Media Player 6.4. But now I've found a new favourite media player in VLC. Here I'm reviewing the latest Beta - 0.8.2-test2.

Like MPC, VLC is open source, but VLC is "more" open source than MPC because its codecs are open source too - MPC just uses the standard DirectShow codecs that every other Windows application uses. This probably comes about because VLC is cross-platform and MPC is Windows-only.

Both play back DVDs but VLC has its own libraries. These libraries let you get around the region encoding on DVDs (so a Region 2 drive bought in the UK can play a US Region 1 DVD) and also lets you skip the usually unskippable DVD intros that appear before the DVD menu. Let's face it, once you've seen one copyright warning, you've seen them all.

Despite being cross-platform, VLC is much more efficient in terms of CPU usage. Programs with high CPU usage are a problem for my computer, with its tired cooling system, so this is a definite plus point for me.

VLC also has a skins mode, and comes with two interfaces - the standard wxWindows interface that makes it look like a standard Windows application, and the brushed-steel Mac OS X-esque theme which I've used in the screenshot.

Negative points? The Preferences window is a bit of a usability nightmare since it includes almost every option under the sun - although this beta version is an improvement over 0.8.1 it could still do with simplifying, in the same way that Firefox's preference dialog is much simpler than that of Mozilla. Previous versions have suffered problems with playback - the video has been too pixelated or stuttery, but this beta version seems to solve those.

All in all, I think it's a great little program. The screenshot, by the way, shows the end of this week's episode of Doctor Who. Next week's looks utterly awesome.

Asa Dotzler has a review of the new MSN Search Toolbar, which adds tabbed browsing to Internet Explorer 6, meaning that IE users can finally experience the joys of tabbed browsing.

Asa is pretty negative about it in his review, but then he is a Mozilla developer and so you could accuse him of being biased. So I downloaded it myself. And, alas, Asa's right - it does suck. Having the whole window refresh and the taskbar flicker every time you switch tabs is very annoying.

Let's hope that IE7 improves on this. But for now, if you're using IE and want proper tabbed browsing, Get Firefox (or Opera).

There's more from Ed Bott, who, on the tabbed browsing front, seems to mostly agree. He likes the search tool, though.

Microsoft Word Viewer 2003 is a pretty useful application to have if you're a Windows user who doesn't have Microsoft Office, like me, for instance. Although I like OpenOffice.org, it takes a long time to load up, whereas this loads very quickly and is fine for viewing and printing Word documents that I often get as email attachments.

It's also got support for printing multiple pages on one sheet, something which my printer driver does not natively support. Before I would have to export a PDF with the pages printed side-by-side and then print that, but this makes it somewhat easier, and means I save on paper.

There are also viewers for Excel and PowerPoint, though the latter just displays the presentation in slideshow mode.

A new beta of VLC has been released. It's got some interesting new features, including support for Apple Lossless Audio Codec, PNG and Dirac, a Tivo demuxer, support for Samba and client-side support for SSL and TLS.

You can download binaries for Windows and Mac OS X here.

VLC is worth getting because it allows playback of DVDs from any region, not just the region that your drive is set to. It's also open source and supports lots of different formats, although I still tend to prefer to use Media Player Classic.

Google Web Accelerator actually works. I downloaded it and tried it out on a few sites and they seem to work much, much faster on my connection than without the accelerator enabled. It also has the advantage that anonymises your browser session when communicating with sites.

The catch? Well, there's that privacy thing. I'll quote Cory Doctorow here:

Xeni blogged Polymorf's note about the new Google Accelerator being useful as an anonymizer, but of course you're not anonymous to Google, which knows about your search history (if you've got cookies on), your email address (if you register for Groups, etc), your friends (if you use Orkut), your email (if you use gmail), and even has your credit card (if you use AdWords or Answers). Anonymity from everyone except Google is nice, but it's not really anonymity, given how easy it would be to subpoena information from them (everyone knows where Google is), and given how much info this allows Google to collect and correlate on you.

During installation, as well as agreeing to the usual license agreement you also need tick a box that says that Google may be able to collect personally identifiable information from you if you use the software. It is explained adequately though without lots of boring legalese, instead sticking to three bullet points.

If having all your base belonging to Google worries you then you may want to avoid this, or at least have it off by default (you can also specify specific domains that aren't sent through it's proxy system and it doesn't work with HTTPS sites). But it is a useful anonymising service if anything.

What it will do is really annoy the company behind OnSpeed, who charge £25 a year for a very similar service.

Today I used SkypeOut for the first time. Although national rate calls after 6pm only cost 5p for us (we're on One.Tel, they're quite good), I wanted to make a long-ish call before then. Although it's a bank holiday I have no idea whether weekend rates apply today so I was either going to pay no more than 5p or around 2.7p per minute.

SkypeOut works like pay-as-you-go phones - you buy credit which then translates into talktime and then top-up when your credit is low. There's no monthly fees, though topups only last for 6 months and the minimum you can top up with is €10. Or specifically €11.50 if you live in an EU country since you have to pay VAT on top.

Once you've bought credit you'll find that calls are pretty cheap - around 1p/minute to landlines in most countries including the UK and 16p/minute to UK mobiles. A 23 minute call to my parents on their landline cost €0.41, or 28p - less than half what it would have cost normally. If you make lots of international calls then it really comes into its own - it's the same price to call the phone on my desk as it would be to call Ben in Australia, on the other side of the world from me.

Sound quality was about what you'd expect from a normal phone call, and each end could hear each other clearly enough. The only slight complaint I had was that I could hear the echo of my voice at the other end on a delay of around 1 second. But then this often happens on international calls so you may well be used to it.

One big advantage for me was being able to use a headset instead of a phone handset, thus keeping both hands free for typing. Not having to dial the number in each time is also quite handy but that's probably me just being too lazy to enter the numbers into the handset's memory.

Overall I was very pleased with the service. With a bit of luck it'll be saving me money in the future.

If you're a Mac user who isn't upgrading to Tiger rightaway, you can download QuickTime 7 now as a standalone package. Windows users will have to wait as 7 is not yet ready; 6.5 is the latest available version right now.

If you are a Mac user who is upgrading to Tiger and who uses Apple's Mail program, be aware that it may be slower than in Panther. Since only a small handful of people have got their hands on Tiger so far it may be that this is a one-off but we'll see.

There's been a new version of the extraordinarily useful IrfanView image program released today - 3.97. It adds support for four new image formats, better compression of PNG images and better support for users with multiple monitors, amongst other improvements.

I've been using IrfanView for a few years now and would describe it as indispensible. As well as allowing you to view almost any image format under the sun it also lets you do slideshows, basic image manipulation and much more. And it's freeware to boot, although you can donate, of course.

If you've never tried this application and you're running Windows I'd encourage you to give it a go.

It's amazing how many settings MSN Messenger 7.0 has forgotten in the upgrade from 6.2. During the install last time I told it that I wanted my home page (that's my home page) leaving as it is, and that I wasn't interested in yet another toolbar. Yet when installing it this time they were all ticked again. Maybe it thought I'd have changed my mind since... In any case, having it respect my previous choices, or at least offering a 'Select None' button, would make the experience nicer.

I've been using Google Desktop Search for a day now, and have a couple of observations to make:

• Integration with the browser is seamless; when you do a search from the quicksearch box in Firefox, it will also show results from your computer in the results. All Google pages also gain a 'Desktop' tab to run the same search on your own computer.
• It's very fast, although the index of my HD is around 120MB. Each user has a separate index.
• There is a slight incompatibility with internationalised builds of Firefox. Every time the search app starts, it checks for a file called google.src in the searchplugins subfolder of the Firefox application folder, and if it doesn't exist, it is recreated. This file exists by default in the en-us builds, but not necessarily in others; in the en-gb build there's a google-uk.src file instead which means Google searches are sent to google.co.uk instaed of google.com. This means that you end up with two Google entries on the quicksearch menu in the browser.
• The Trillian Pro plugin only indexes conversations made from when the plugin was installed - old conversations are not explicitly indexed. They do, however, appear as the contents of text files and may be included in search result pages but their display isn't as intuitive as it could be.
• Viewing cached copies of files strips out all formatting.

Google Desktop Search is now out of beta. It allows you to use Google technology to search files on your hard disk.

Originally I wasn't that impressed when I first tried it, but this new version is much better. Previously, if you used Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and AOL Instant Messenger almost exclusively, you'd be fine - anything else and you'd be stuck. This was the situation I was in - I didn't use IE, nor Outlook Express or Outlook.

But now, there's native support for Mozilla programs, including the standard Mozilla Suite as well as Firefox and Thunderbird, which means it can search your browser's cache and history, as well as all of your emails. It can also now index PDF files, music, video and images. But that's not the best bit.

There are now plugins which mean you can hook in even more applications. Some are already available now, including Trillian Pro, OpenOffice.org and Microsoft HTML Help, all of which are programs I use.

John Battelle has more on this, including Google's APIs which now mean that application developers can add Google into their applications.

HTMLProtector is a program for Windows that lets you 'protect' your web pages to stop people copying the content, source code or images. It goes somewhat further than the usual trick of disabling the context menu, and offers lots of options to boot. Here's a sample page - you might want to view it in IE in Windows for full effect.

I've been a fan of Microsoft's 'Alt-Tab Replacement' PowerToy for Windows XP for some time now. It replaces the standard alt+tab task switcher with a nicer dialog which shows a thumbnail preview of the application.

However, it was quite a bit slower at appearing than the standard dialog, which is why I'm pleased to find TaskSwitchXP. It offers the same enhancements as Microsoft's own program, but appears almost instantaneously and is more configurable - you can set transparency levels, alter the font and so forth. It's also open source, and integrates with the current Windows theme, including Royale.

Thanks to Chris G for letting me know that Google has just released Picasa 2, a new version of their photo editing tool that they acquired last year. It's really worth the download - it has a superb auto-adjust mode called 'I'm Feeling Lucky' which can instantly fix bad photos, like the one above which was taken using the flash in a very smoky environment. It's also good for managing photos, such as categorising and tagging them. My father would really like this.

(It's Windows-only, I'm afraid)

So, here's my review of Ubuntu Linux.

The first beta of Microsoft's long awaited anti-spyware tool is now available as a free download.

I downloaded it and had a quick play around. Here are my first impressions:

Pros:

• Very easy to use
• Simple, attractive interface
• Catered for both inexperienced and more competent users well, by explaining problems but also including specific details like infected files and registry keys
• Lots of features, moreso than Ad-Aware and on a par with Spybot Search & Destroy
• Fast

Cons

• Interface is a little more complicated than it could be
• False positives - I got three, one due to an incompatibility with SpywareBlaster, and the other two due to Shareaza which it thought to be parts of eDonkey and Grokster (which both bundle adware).
• ...not much else, really.

Based on these first impressions, I'd say that I'm very impressed with this beta release. I'm not about to replace Ad-Aware and Spybot with this, rather it'll become a third weapon in my anti-spyware arsenal. Microsoft have a good product here, in my opinion.

Eugh. Stuffit Expander is a piece of crap.

For the unitiated, you need StuffIt to open .sit archives which are apparently common on the Mac platform. It's been made largely obsolete by the cross-platform .zip format but some people still use it and StuffIt seems to be the only program for Windows that can open them (any suggestions of alternatives welcome).

StuffIt Expander is a freeware tool that allows you to open the contents of .sit files. It doesn't let you create them; for that, you need to pay for one of the commercial StuffIt programs (this is probably why the .sit format isn't very popular). I encountered a .sit file which contained a font that I wanted, and since the file wasn't available in any other format, I had to download that and then install StuffIt Expander to be able to do anything with it.

Except you can't download StuffIt Expander on its own - you have to download a trial of one of the commercial StuffIt applications which will then expire after 15 days (15 days! That's all!) and leave you with just the expander bit. So rather than downloading a small bit of freeware you have to download some monstrous 10+MB file that's largely useless after 2 weeks anyway. Fine if you're on a fast connection but on a 256K connection it takes a while and would be even worse on dial-up. In the end I used a slightly older version from a cover DVD from a computer magazine.

On installation, this program will then make itself the default program for a range of archive formats, then ask you whether you want it the default. I didn't want it to be the default for anything - all I wanted was to be able to extract the contents of this .sit file and then be on my way - so I deselected all the checkboxes (there was a 'Select all' button but naturally no 'Select none'). But then instead of restoring my file associations it left them all unassociated, so I had to manually repair them - a task that Windows XP makes easier than in previous editions but still not the easiest of tasks.

This program could have been so much more useful, had it just been a simple application for expanding .sit files. Instead, it tried to be a jack-of-all-trades and just annoyed me.

Mac users, if you're reading this, please, do not be tempted to use the .sit format. The sooner it dies off the better.

I've downloaded OpenOffice.org 2.0 Snapshot and installed it on my laptop. While it adds some nice new features, one thing that instantly struck me was the much-improved interface - it now feels like a proper Windows application and not just a port. In fact it feels more Windows-like than MS Office 2003 does, which is dreadfully ironic.

Here's a full size screenshot (185KB) which shows off the new interface. You'll notice that the toolbars are now draggable and more closely match the behaviour of MS Office, and that it defaults to just 2 toolbars instead of 3. Many more are available though. The icons have been polished up and look more professional.

The interface isn't all that has changed though. The big new feature is the addition of OpenOffice.org Base, a database application designed to compete with MS Access. I didn't have much of a play with this but it did look very intuitive and could give Access a run for its money. Under Windows, it now uses Windows Installer.

I'm sure I'll come across more new features as time goes on, but to summarise, this looks like a very promising release and will give Microsoft's Office team something to lose sleep over. There are builds for Windows, Linux and Solaris, but sadly no Mac OS X build.

It appears you can now download Trillian 3. Previously you needed to be part of the tester team, or a Pro user - now it would appear that now the free version is available for everyone.

I've only used Trillian Pro 3 Alpha but if that's anything to go by then it should be very good. I've had a few problems with TP3 crashing on shutdown but recent updates have prevented this from happening and the program now seems to work fine.

While I'm on the subject, check out Trillian Anywhere, which seems to give instructions for creating a fully-working build of Trillian that can be run from a USB pen drive, like Portable Firefox. Very cool...

Update: Here's a piece from Cerulean's blog about it. Looks like the final release of 3 is not far off now :) .

Considering that Trillian Pro 3 is currently only in Alpha, I was expecting the new video chat functions to be terribly clunky and crash the thing.

But actually it seems pretty much flawless - I had quite a long chat with a friend of mine who was using the normal MSN client with no major problems. There was an issue with video invitations - if I invited him and he accepted there was no problem, but if he invited me and I accepted the connection would fail.

I haven't tried it over the other networks that support it (currently AIM and Yahoo) but if this is anything to go by it should be fine :) . Kudos to the Cerulean Studios developers.

incidentally a new alpha of Trillian Pro came out a few days ago, which sort-of fixed the only major issue I've had with it. Now, instead of crashing on shutdown and then hanging, it crashes on shutdown and then quits. Other than that it seems to be fine and I've been using it quite intensively over the time that I've had it.

When I wrote about Trillian 3, I didn't realise that the Pro version was actually available to all paid users already via the Members Area. Anyway, I've downloaded a copy and had a bit of a play with it.

Update: 0.44d is now out. It fixes a bug for Windows 98 users. Users of other OSes don't need to update.

There's a new version of eMule out - version 0.44c. Mostly bugfixes and a some visual alterations. If you want to guarantee to have a huge queue of people downloading from you for the next few days, download it and put it in your shared files folder. Of the 158 in my queue the vast majority want this file. Here's the ed2k download link.

incidentally if you're still using KaZaA, especially KaZaA Lite (which doesn't include the improved hashing system in KZ 2.6), you may want to give eMule a try as its eDonkey2000 network recently overtook KaZaA's FastTrack network as the most widely used P2P system (not including BitTorrent). Shareaza, the program I use, is also worth a try as in addition to eDonkey2000 support it also connects to Gnutella and G2 and can act as a BitTorrent client. Both are open source.

This is a bit late, since it was actually released over 2 weeks ago, but IrfanView is now up to version 3.95. I know quite a few of you use IrfanView and may not be aware of the update.

Probably the biggest new feature is improved image rotation - whereas previously you could only rotate images by 90 degrees, you can now rotate them by specifying a custom angle, like 22.5 degrees. There's also the usual bug fixes.

For those who don't know, IrfanView is a great image viewer which also lets you crop, resize and perform basic touch-up options on images. It supports just about every image format under the sun, along with various text, video and audio formats too. It's freeware (for private, non-commercial use) though donations are welcome.

My new favourite media player has been updated. The update mostly adds support for the new iPod Photo (if they ever do a Mini version of that I'd so want one), but will also let search for duplicate songs (go to Edit, Show Duplicate Songs), get notifications when new music by your favourite artists arrives in the iTunes music store (good business tactic) and will now let Windows users minimise the iTunes main window to the notification area. Trust me, this is probably the one big thing that bugged me about iTunes and I'm very glad Apple have fixed it. To turn it on, go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced tab, 'Minimise iTunes to System Tray'.

incidentally, Apple have got it wrong. It is not the 'system tray', it is, as Raymond Chen explains, the 'notification area'. Even though 'system tray' is what most people call it.

The new version of FeedDemon rocks so much that it deserves its own full entry here.

First, a bit of background: I started using FeedDemon when it was in its pre-1.0 beta stage, as it was the only RSS reader I truly felt comfortable with. It was fast, feature-rich and easy to use. Then, when it hit version 1.0, I bought a license and have been using and upgrading it ever since. I even ran the betas of 1.1.

Then a few weeks ago my laptop hard drive died, taking Windows and everything on it with it. Needing my RSS fix, I turned to Bloglines because it was web-based - I was using Knoppix at the time and couldn't install programs because they'd be wiped as soon as I rebooted. Bloglines was actually very good to use so I stuck with it, and it also allowed me to read feeds when I was away from my machine.

Then Nick Bradbury messes everything up and releases a beta of FeedDemon 1.5. He could have called it 1.2 but the changes easily justify the 1.5 version number. You can integrate your Bloglines and NewsGator Online Services accounts (with 1.5 beta 1a) into FeedDemon, so you get the go-anywhere convinience of Bloglines with the advantages of a desktop aggregator. Based on Arvind's experiences it appears to be easier to migrate from Bloglines to FeedDemon 1.5 than FD1.1 to FD1.5 as I had no problems. There's a help guide to the new features if you need it though.

While this is the big new feature, there's a lot of other new features that are very welcome and also deserve a mention. These include:

• Favicons turned on by default (previously this required a registry hack)
• A 'Next Channel Group' button
• News items that have been updated are now highlighted in a different colour - previously updates didn't show up at all
• Prompting if a feed returns a 410 (gone) status code
• Ability to export channels from all groups into one OPML file
• ...and much more

I was about to give up using FeedDemon as it was no longer useful to me - now it's a perfect complement. It also fulfils the request I made in my RSS on the go article, albeit in a somewhat different (but better) way than I'd proposed.

iOpener is a Windows tool based on hymm, the DRM unlocker for files bought in the iTunes music store. It takes the hymm code and wraps it in a somewhat more intuitive interface. You can download it from the hymm site.

To use it, all you need to do is:

1. Open iTunes
2. Open iOpener
3. Close iOpener again once it has done its work

It's that simple. iOpener searches your music library for locked files and unlocks them, storing a backup of the original stored file. I tried it out with the free song of the week in the UK store ("Make Everything Change" by Wire Daises - not bad, actually) and it seemed to work fine.

While I think Apple has made the best balance between freedom and controlling piracy of all the online stores (bar the un-DRMed MP3s at Wippit), I'd rather play it safe and have an un-DRMed backup of the file, just in case something bad happens like a hard drive failure...

If you have an Epson printer, you may find the SSC Service Utility to be a useful download. It lets you reset the ink counters, clean individual cartridges (instead of all of them at once, thus saving ink) and swap out cartridges even if they're not empty.

It's free and supports most Epson printers - it certainly seemed to work with my Stylus C42.

I found this in today's LangaList Plus Edition, which is very useful and well worth the extra money. If you're interested in any aspect of computing I'd urge you to subscribe as I've got quite a bit out of it over the past couple of years.

This is just a heads-up for those looking into IrfanView 3.92, the latest version of the utterly brilliant freeware imaging tool. When you install it, it now asks if you want to install the eBay Toolbar - a BHO for Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer which lets you search eBay. Some sources reckon this is spyware, and indeed Spybot Search & Destroy will detect and remove it, but others say it isn't. What it may do is pass on details of any eBay searches you do to eBay's advertisers along with your IP address (from what I read here).

Although I have previously withdrawn endorsements for programs after they became spyware-infested, I will make an exception here, since:

• I can't be sure that it really is spyware
• Removing it using its uninstaller is painless and effective
• It is optional (although ticked by default)
• Irfanview is so damn useful

I've found a couple of Shareware apps that I thought were rather cool and that I'd like to share with you.

The first is BetterJPEG. It lets you do various lossless actions to JPEG images - that is, manipulate the image with little or no re-encoding. Every time you save a JPEG image its quality gets progressively worse, since it's a lossy format (the same is true with MP3 and every other lossy audio and video format) - so this is welcome. Certain things, like rotating and resizing the image can be done losslessly, and apps like IrfanView already offer features like this. But what's clever is that if you need to edit only part of an image, it will just re-encode that bit, rather than the whole image. While it's not entirely lossless, you loose a lot less than you would otherwise. Its features include red-eye reduction, datestamping and captioning. It can also edit EXIF data, again, without needing to re-encode the image. It costs $20.

The second is iChatUSBCam, and is aimed at Mac users who want to be able to do video chat but don't have much money (so Ken, this isn't for you ;) ). It lets you use any USB webcam with iChat, which means you need neither Apple's expensive iSight camera nor a Mac with a firewire port, which older models lack. You can get new USB webcams for around $30, and the software only costs $10 to buy - an iSight camera will set you back $130. This was found via Engadget.

Since I don't really need either (and don't own a Mac), I haven't actually tried either of them, but they sound cool.

Oh darling, you must download gaybar2000, it's like so totally rad, okay?

Erm, yes. It seems that someone is rather annoyed with the developers of foobar2000, so this somewhat camp clone has been created. Not only has the web site been altered but the program too. Ooooh, get you!

incidentally, if you already use foobar2000, other than the novelty value there's no point in downloading it as it actually has less features than the official version. It seems to exist as a protest as opposed to a legitimate competitor.

And note how I wrote that without mentioning the phrase "I've got something to put in you!" at all. Oh, wait...

[Via Winamp Unlimited]

Winamp is probably the most popular music player for Windows. I really like it, particularly version 5 of it which is much nicer to use than any of the previous versions.

But what came before Winamp? Well, surprisingly enough, DOSAmp. It wasn't a particularly nice program - you ran it from the command line with the file you wanted to play as the parameter. It only played back MP3s (whereas Winamp, through plugins, can play every format you can think of and many more you can't) and it used the PlayAMP decoder so sound quality wasn't all that hot even then. But the download was only just over 100KB.

I managed to run it on this machine using DOSBox, but couldn't get any files to actually playback without it failing. If you have a proper DOS environment you may have more success - you can download it from ReallyRareWares and see for yourself. It hasn't been updated for the best part of 7 years and is no longer supported, but it's a nice bit of nostalgia, I guess.

While we're talking about Winamp, Winamp Unlimited is a great site for news about the player. There's an RSS feed too.

Update: For some reason, the DOSAmp screenshot isn't showing up in my copy of Firefox (0.9.1). It appears in every other browser I've tried - Mozilla included - and the page validates so it would appear it's a bug in Firefox's rendering. Odd.

Update II: Never mind. I have some crude ad-blocking and it thought it was an advert.

I don't know if any of you actually use floppies anymore, but in case you do, you may be interested in SmartFormat, a DOS tool (which also works in Windows) which lets you format 1.44MB floppy disks to have a capacity of 1.72MB. It also lets you format disks that have bad sectors right at the start of the disk, which would normally turn them into drinks coasters.

It does actually work - I formatted a rather old floppy with 42k of bad sectors (which were admittedly at the end of the disk) and managed to get 1.70MB of usable space (technically 1.62MB if you count it properly).

Still, I can't think of the last time I copied files onto a floppy for someone, but if I ever have to then at least I can give them 20% more stuff. Found in today's Langalist.

The last time I posted screenshots in an entry, I ended up generating over 500MB of bandwidth in one day, so 3 is your limit this time. You'll need to read the extended entry to view them.

The program I'm reviewing is DOSBox, a DOS emulator specifically designed for running old games on newer machines. It's open source and available for Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD and even the Amiga. It works pretty well, although it may require a little configuration. I was able to get Lemmings, Lemmings 2 and Theme Park working flawlessly on it, with Worms able to start (but I couldn't load a level) and Zool not really running at all. Lemmings 2 actually plays better in DOSBox than it ever did on our 486, probably because DOSBox offers virtual support for a large variety of sound cards.

I haven't tried it with Day of the Tentacle or Sam & Max because I already have those working through ScummVM which I reviewed in March. But it's certainly nice to be able to play those games again. Lemmings 2 rocks.

This morning, I've come across a couple of interesting programs that I'd like to share with you.

The first is PDF Creator, which, as you might imagine, lets you create PDFs. Like most, it adds itself as a virtual printer, however, this one is entirely open source and is released under the GPL. Previously I'd been using CutePDF Writer, which works fine but doesn't give you many options and isn't open source.

PDF Creator does have plenty of options to configure, and as far as I can tell it's able to output much smaller PDF files - my CV, for example, is only 15KB when created with PDF Creator, compared to 37KB when created with CutePDF Writer and 60KB with OpenOffice.org's built-in export function. What's even more impressive is that the MS Word version is 26KB, so it's even smaller than that (although the source OpenOffice.org file is still only 11KB).

It uses an optimised version of GhostScript, if it interests you.

The other interesting program I found was WebZipExplorer. It's an unzip tool, but it can read zip files directly from the internet and then only download the files in the archive that you want. So, say there's a 600MB archive and you only want one 1MB file from it, then you can use this program just to download that 1MB portion and not the whole file. A cool idea, although I haven't yet had chance to download and run it yet.

Oh wow, I didn't expect this.

Shareaza, my favorite P2P client, has just released version 2.0, and instead of being simply freeware it's now open source, released under the GPL.

It's also now got a web interface (like eMule) which means you can control it from any web browser, performance improvements and new graphics. Apparently, one of the graphic designers is Kid, the same guy who designed the interface for Trillian.

I'm pleasently surprised by Opera 7.5. The new theme and the re-jigging of the advert banner means that the toolbar takes up much less space at the top of the screen and the the browser feels much less cramped. It also feels more like a Windows app, and the menus feel less cluttered and more logically laid out.

One feature I like is the Navigation Bar. It's like the link toolbar in Mozilla but includes a 'Newsfeed' button - click on that, and up pops an RSS reader view that lets you browse through items in the feed. Cool.

While I still love my Firefox, this is a very nice alternative.

You may have seen this article about a new paid-for ZoneAlarm with a virus scanner. Well, the free version of ZoneAlarm was also updated, and brings with it a couple of interesting new features:

The latest release candidate of FeedDemon 1.10 is available for download. You may remember that late last year I made a list of features that I wanted FD to have, so I'm going to go through and update you on progress.

So, after a little over an hour waiting for it to download, I got a chance to try out iTunes 4.5 for Windows. I last used it on my older computer back in October when it was at version 4.1, and I had a few gripes with it. I'll go over those gripes again for this version.

Scoble announced that MSN Messenger was available, so I went to download it. Note that you will need IE to download it - the link on the Messenger site wouldn't work in Firefox. It's a little over 5MB to download, which is a little smaller than in the past, thankfully.

The first annoyance appeared before I'd installed it. You may remember my review of MSN Messenger 6.0, where I complained that there was a 'recommended' option to set MSN as my home page. Well, now, MSN wants to be my default home page, my default search engine, and wants me to install the MSN Toolbar too (see full size screenshot). The latter two are enabled by default - how many people will ignore this and find that their browser suddenly looks and works differently? Worse, this puts Messenger only a couple of steps above browser hijackers - a real shame considering how much work the Internet Explorer team has put into limiting the damage that hijackers can cause.

But anyway, new features. The first is instantly noticable if you have friends who aren't online but have MSN Mobile accounts, because they now appear as online in a yucky yellow colour with a mobile symbol. This is probably a good idea as I hide my offline contacts, so it means I can send messages to those people more easily.

If you don't like it, there's a new menu option that lets you group mobile contacts together, so they go into a separate group which you can also hide.

The second new feature is 'Fun & Games' in the conversation windows. I think this used to be 'launch site' but it's now been replaced with something more meaningful. Unfortunately, I'm writing this at around 10am when most of my buddies are either in lectures or still asleep, therefore I had no opportunity to test this out.

While this is only a minor update, the new features are nice additions. No doubt you will get bugged into updating so you might as well. But watch out for the 'MSN wants to take over your browser' screen when you install it.

If you publish large PDF files on the web and want to make them a little smaller, you may like to take a look at the free PDF Compress tool (at the bottom of the page).

I couldn't get particularly good results from it - in fact, in most cases the file was ever so slightly larger than before, but it could strip off a few bytes in some cases. I guess it's one of those tools where your milage may vary, but it's worth keeping just in case it does make a file significantly smaller.

It also lets you edit metadata, so I suppose that's a redeeming feature.

So a friend of mine encourages me to download Skype. At first I decide not to, since it's something I probably won't use - instant messaging is usually fine and works on narrowband without any problems. But then this Guardian article came around, and I thought 'what the heck'. And now I have to say I'm impressed.

The software is nice and easy to use - anyone who's used IM for a while should have no problems, and the sound quality is excellent - argubly better than using a phone. Admittedly both parties had reasonable connections but even when we were downloading stuff quality was good enough, and it was able to cope with temporary reductions in bandwidth. Unlike other VoIP services, it's free, encrypted and decentralised too.

So, it gets my recommendation. Note that I meant to write this last Thursday but I haven't really had the time.

It's been about 10 weeks since I first recommended Media Player Classic to you, and since then, the program has seen a number of updates. It's now at version 6.4.8.1, which adds support for saving frames as JPEG files, new formats and faster decoding for existing ones should you have a high-end processor. Around two new versions are released every month so you may like to subscribe to its RSS feed. For now, you can download the latest release from here.

After reading an overview of what's new in IE from jeffdav, one of the IE developers, I realised I'd missed another change in IE. Sites can no longer automatically prompt you to install software - you have to click on a link to be able to download it. Otherwise, the prompt is blocked, like ActiveX components and popups are.

• An automated download prompt being blocked

As you can see, that screenshot was from Sourceforge. A great many download sites serve up downloads in this way (Download.com, Snapfiles, MajorGeeks... many others) and to be sure of not alienating their users they'll probably need to change.

The download prompt has also changed, with the emphasis on ensuring that the user really wanted to download the file. The warning will always show if you are downloading files which can be executed, including .msi files (though not .zip files), but can be optional for less harmful types like Word documents. The bottom part of the dialog also offers advice about whether the file is safe or not.

• Prompt for downloading an executable file
• Prompt for downloading a Word document

Notice how the default button is 'Cancel' - that way people cannot accidently download a file should a dialog appear.

The download process itself hasn't changed - Firefox's download manager is still fields ahead of it. You can't pause or resume downloads, nor can you restart failed downloads. And it still uses a separate dialog for each download and doesn't store a history like Firefox does.

All in all, the improvements are welcome, but there's going to be pressure on several site owners to modify their sites so that their files will actually download. And the improvements to the actual download process could have gone further.

You can read the original SP2 review here, which includes the other changes to IE. Tony Schreiner also has some useful information about new features in this release of IE.

Since yesterday's review and the comments I made on Saturday, I'd like to clarify a few things:

MSN Messenger

I don't think the problems have anything to do with the latest version of the MSN client or SP2. Yesterday I was using the same version (6.1.0211) on a Windows 2000 machine with no problems, although this machine did have a much better internet connection than my own computer does. Furthermore, I tried accessing MSN using Miranda IM (new version released on Saturday) and I had the same problem - it was connecting but couldn't retrieve my contact list.

The problem has been intermittent - if I keep trying I do get logged on eventually. I will try again at home in a couple of days where I can also use Trillian, though a quick scan of the Trillian forums didn't bring up any problems. I have a feeling this is because Trillian can remember your contacts, so if it can't get your contact list it can still work.

Performance Issues

The slowdown on startup didn't appear to be an issue this morning - it booted up at the same speed as it always has. So, in short, installing SP2 hasn't impacted computer performance noticably in any way.

McAfee VirusScan

One problem I have encountered is that since installing SP2, McAfee VirusScan hasn't been able to update itself, coming up with an error about the Common Framework Updater system. I'll re-install it to see if it fixes itself.

Update: A re-install didn't fix it. If any of you guys can help me here, I'd appreciate it. The Event Log gives me this message when I try to update:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {D3580208-D4E1-46D4-876C-B45A328AF25A} to the user ANNABELLA\Neil SID (S-1-5-21-2402929114-2812750092-2978350642-1005). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

I'm not currently missing out on any definitions but ideally I'd like this to get fixed. Remember I'm using XP Home, which does have the Component Services tool. It's just that I have no idea how to use it...

Update II: Matthijs, in the comments, offered the solution. Go to Admininstrative Tools and open Component Services. Expand the Component Services branch, then Computers, My Computers, DCOM Config. Right-click on FrameworkService and choose Properties. Click on the Security tab and under 'Launch and Activation Permissions', select 'Use Default'. Click OK, close the Component Services window, and Updates should work again! Thanks a lot Matthijs.

As for Messenger Plus causing the MSN contact list problems, I've never had it on this computer - you can read the reason why here. But this hasn't affected me for a couple of days so maybe it's working again. Still odd that there's no word from Microsoft about this though, it looks like a lot of people are having the same problem as me.

Now that I've been using XP SP2 for a bit longer, I'd like top present a fuller review of what's new.

If you're a bit depressed about the new Sam and Max game getting cancelled, then this might cheer you up. If you own any of the old LucasArts games (we're talking around 1993-1996 here) then go and download ScummVM. It's an open-source, cross-platform virtual machine program that will let you play your Scumm (Script Creation Utility of Maniac Mansion) games on modern OSes with the latest hardware. So now you can throw out that old Windows 98 PC and play them on your Windows XP machine, or your Mac, your Linux box, your BeOS box, your Solaris box, even your PocketPC/Palm, your Amiga or your Dreamcast.

There's a full list of supported games - you need the original titles, but if you don't have them there's also a selection of demos out there. Although I have Sam and Max Hit The Road and Day of the Tentacle at home, to test it out I had to resort to using a downloadable demo. It works fine, although you do have to enter commands into the command line to run it.

In the end, I decided to give McAfee a try, on the premise that I can always uninstall it and use something else if I didn't like it. It's the Enterprise edition, so it comes without the noddified fluff that the home edition is bundled with, and I was able to not install things like the OnAccess scanner, which I probably don't need - maybe I didn't make it clear but I really just wanted a scanner that I could update weekly and then do a quick scan, or a program that can scan a suspicious floppy or email attachment on an individual basis. Again, if I was setting up a system for someone, I would always enable email and active scanning, but I can probably do without them on my own system.

So far, so good. I have a weekly scan of most files (executables, scripts, Office documents, that kind of thing) and then a monthly scan of all files, and updates set to happen weekly just before the weekly scan. It's quite quick and hasn't put any extra load on the system, nor does it annoy me by constantly reminding me that I don't have OnAccess scanning installed. Updating is also nice and straightforward, although there was an initial hurdle to overcome - it defaults to updating from the university's own servers which weren't working at the time (this was about 10:30pm on a Saturday night, remember), but fortunately over locations are provided and once I'd found the option to change the default I was off.

All in all, it's looking good so far.

Interesting trivia: On Thursday I used a floppy disk with this computer for the first time. The only reason why I know that is because it's an external one, and when I plugged it in to use it, Windows had to install drivers for it. This is bearing in mind that I've had this machine since the end of October.

Does this program look familiar to you? It may well do, because it's rewrite of Windows Media Player 6, except it's open source and released under the GNU GPL, and doesn't have the annoyances of MS's original. The interface is similar but a little more up-to-date and XP friendly, and comes with some more advanced features.

But probably the best thing about this player is the range of formats it supports. It'll play just about anything you throw at it, whether it's an MP3, an Ogg, a WMA, even a QuickTime file. And with Real Alternative (which Media Player Classic is bundled with), you can add RealMedia files to that list, negating the need for RealOne Player, which has to be enough reason to download it in itself.

You can also (probably) ditch QuickTime while you're at it, since MPC doesn't take an age to load, doesn't annoy you with an 'Upgrade to QuickTime Pro' popup and lets you view movies in full screen. Unless you have iTunes installed in which case you'll need to keep it.

Media Player Classic is available on its own from SourceForge but I'd recommend also installing Real Alternative and then deleting RealOne Player, since you won't want to use it anymore. Anil found Real Alternative about the same time as me, and came to similar conclusions, so you needn't just take my word for it.

As I've previously said, I've wanted to post a list of features for the next version FeedDemon (1.1?) that were missing from 1.0 but should be included. I've waited a bit to allow Nick to get the final release of 1.0 out of the door, but since that's done, here goes.

One advantage of having a newsreader like FeedReader is that you can subscribe to a whole load of RSS feeds for sites that you find interesting but cumbersome to check every day. One of those is FileForum, and they bring news that Release Candidate 8 of Winamp 5 was released yesterday.

Wait a minute. Winamp 5? What happened to 4?

A lengthy trawl of the Winamp site finally unearthed this FAQ. Basically Winamp 5 is Winamp 2, but with more of the features from Winamp 3 - the logic being 3+2=5. It's a good idea - Winamp 3 was good on paper but in reality it was far too slow and bulky. Which was why after it was released there were subsequent releases of Winamp 2.x.

Anyway, the new program looks pretty cool - it's certainly fast enough and has all the features that it used to have, plus some more. It also comes with the nicer version of Nullsoft's installer, which is a plus because the old one looks very dated and ugly.

K-Meleon is a web browser I haven't tried yet, and, seeing as version 0.8 was released yesterday, I thought I'd give it a spin.

K-Meleon is tecnhically a Mozilla-derivitive, since it uses the Gecko rendering engine to display pages. However, unlike Firebird, Mozilla and Netscape it has a native Windows interface rather than one that is generated using XUL. It's not the only browser to do this - Camino does it on Mac OS X, and Galeon and Epiphany do it in Linux. The theory is that by using a native interface, not only does it look like a proper Windows app, but it should be faster since it doesn't need to use the rendering engine to render everything, just the pages.

Alas, that isn't the case. K-Meleon is in fact slower on my machine than the entirely XUL-based Firebird. It's also rather ugly - the look is very much like IE 3.0, complete with the strange squiggly toolbar background. It looks terrible in Windows XP as a result.

There are some advantages however; it's a smaller download than Firebird and is much more customisable, and it comes with an installer, which until last week Firebird was lacking. But I much, much prefer Firebird to K-Meleon.

Had Firebird not been around, I could have maybe lived with these shortfalls. But with FB development having progressed so well I'm afraid K-Meleon just doesn't cut it anymore. That said, a more Luna-friendly interface and a few speed enhancements and I may not be so critical of it.

Meanwhile, while on the subject of Mozilla-related thingamibobs, there's a new Thunderbird build out for Windows. It's so new that mscott has yet to post to the MozillaZine forums about it, but it seems to run okay.

You probably know by now that Apple iTunes is now available for Windows. Admittedly, only XP and 2000 users get to join in the fun - if you use 95, 98, Me, NT or Server 2003, then you're seemingly out of luck. But I'm an XP user so I'm okay.

To sum up, here are the pros and cons of the program:

Pros

• Looks gorgeous - the main window is only slightly different from the Mac version and with ClearType font smoothing enabled it looks like a dream. Dialogs use proper XP visual styles too, so they look nice.
• Quite intuitive to use
• Built-in crossfader (although longer fade times would be nice - I usually have mine set to 30 seconds whereas iTunes only allows up to 14 secs)
• Will attempt to play all music at the same volume. A very nice touch.
• Sound enhancer looks interesting
• Doesn't occupy that much disk space.

Cons

• CPU and memory usage - while playing in the background it can sometimes demand as much as 33% of the CPU on my machine (which meets the minimum requirements for the application). Constantly needs at least 6MB of memory and typically more like 10MB. Peak memory usage was not far off 40MB.
• Also, it seems to leak memory quite badly.
• No support for Ogg Vorbis. Why not? It's a free, open, cross-platform format.
• 20MB download - takes at least an hour for us poor souls on dial-up. That could easily be reduced if BloatShield InstallShield wasn't used as the installer and if QuickTime 6.4 wasn't included - a lot of people already have QuickTime and it could easily be downloaded separately. Without those two it could have been a mere 10MB, if that, by my reckoning.
• Installs a variety of services for CD-RW and iPod support. Great, but I have neither, and they're only using up memory. What's worse is that they have to be disabled manually. Also, both iTunes and QuickTime install background helper apps without asking whether I wanted them, and QuickTime magically forgets that I don't want its helper app whenever I update it.
• Help could be made a bit more accessible, like providing context-sensitive help in dialogs and putting a link on the Start Menu.
• Added: Thanks to Dave's comment I remembered another few gripes. The first is that you can only resize the window using the handle in the bottom right - you can't drag any edge of the window like, well, any other Windows program.
• The maximise button doesn't maximise, it only switches it between 'full' and 'compact' - if you want to maximise it you have to enlarge it using that annoying handle...
• Macs may only have one button-mice (a silly thing in my mind) but most PCs have at least two buttons, usually three and perhaps more. Introducing a context menu would make the program so much more useful.It does have a context menu, my mistake. But it could be made much more useful.

I am quite impressed at iTunes but I think it has some way to go before I'll use it in favour of dBpowerAMP, my current favourite. Support for Ogg seems to be quite a glaring omission in both the PC and Mac versions, considering that almost all players now either support it natively or through a plugin.

Thanks to Miranda IM, which has improved considerably since I last tried it, I'm now contactable via AOL (totalxsiva) and Jabber (totalxsive [at] jabber.org) again, along with MSN. As I've said before, I can only use IRC and Jabber with Trillian on this connection (probably due to firewalling by the university), so I gave up and went back to the official MSN 6.0 client. I'm still using that for MSN connectivity since it won't work through Miranda, and ICQ seems to fail too, however a new MSN plugin was released yesterday so I'll have a play with it. There's no Yahoo support as yet, it seems, due to Yahoo changing their system a few days ago.

Considering that Miranda only needs around 1.5MB of memory to run idle, I'm happy to have it running since it won't impact performance.

Update: Still no-go with the new MSN plugin but I got ICQ to work by setting it to connect to the ICQ servers using a random port number. Now I just have to work out who everyone is - in Trillian it uses the nickname specified by the user and can be manually customised, whereas Miranda just seems to use the number. All I know is that Chris (Pirillo) has the really short one...

If you're using Windows, get yourself a copy of DCOMbobulator. It's a free tool that disables DCOM, which is what MSBlast and its friends use to spread. It should be more effective than patching your system (although you should do that too), since it in effect 'closes the door' completely. Probably around 99.9% of users don't need it running and it will improve your system security.

As with all of Steve Gibson's tools, it's small and relatively simple to use, with plenty of help available.

Despite the fact that this isn't a program review, I've put it in the Program Reviews category because it's a program that I need to review at some point.

The program is Privoxy, which looks like an cross-platform, open source version of The Proxomitron (which isn't being developed anymore). I use the Proxomitron from time to time for blocking my referer and user agent strings when browsing certain sites, particularly when dealing with certain sites while editing at the ODP (in short, I don't want a spammer to know how I've found their URLs so that they can't block or mask them). It's also quite funny to see how sites react to a user agent of "I'm not telling you!" :).

Anyhow, if it's as good as The Proxomitron then I'll be impressed.

While looking at P2P clients that support the Gnutella2 protocol today, I came across MLdonkey. It certainly looks like an interesting peer to peer project, since it supports 8 different protocols, including Fasttrack, the protocol used by KaZaA.

Unfortunately it only runs on Linux, FreeBSD and Darwin (the underlying Unix distribution in Mac OS X) - there is no Windows binary available, although you can install it on a Linux box and use a Windows terminal emulation application to access it across a network connection, for example. Three such programs, all with GUI interfaces are linked from the MLdonkey home page. Apparently it's not too happy with Cygwin either, before someone suggests that.

It's certainly interesting though. Shareaza is still the best multi-protocol P2P client, in my opinion, but it doesn't support Fasttrack so the range of files available is somewhat restricted. Neither Shareaza nor MLdonkey seem to support the network used by WinMX, which is my other P2P weapon of choice, mainly because of the lack of spyware and the fact that the program doesn't grind my system to a halt like KaZaA Lite does.

Talking of which, WinMX hasn't had an update since October last year. Strange...

Trillian Pro 2.0 Beta is out. I'm using it now, and it seems alright so far. I can't say much because it's released under a non-disclosure agreement, but I can say that you can now contact me via the Jabber network under the name 'totalxsive'. I should be on there all the time now, too.

EraseTemp is a wonderfully simple program for erasing your temporary files. I've used it in the past but it got lost when I reformmated this thing over Easter.

It's improved since, and now has the ability to check for updates on the internet. It lets you know what is actually deleted (unlike some utilities) and now tells you how much space you saved, in my case 7MB.

While it's not worth running it too frequently, as an occasional way of clawing back disk space it's unbeatable. The program is quite small, although you do need the .Net framework to run it.

The first release candidate of OpenOffice.org 1.1 is out. I'm waiting for the final release, but with features such as the creation of PDF and flash files, built-in support for UK spelling, many new import formats and better Java integration I'm very tempted.

OpenOffice.org users may also find ZipGenius useful. Apart from being argubly one of the best archive utilities on earth (beating WinZip on every count apart from speed), it has the ability to optimise OOo files so that they take up less space. The savings aren't huge but you may find a use for it. Read more about it at NewRecruit.org - I'll have a full review once I've had chance to meddle with it a little more.

Although millions have downloaded the leaked copy, MSN have released the official preview of MSN Messenger 6.0, and you can download it here, like I did.

SharpReader 0.9.1.1 was released this morning. It's the first time I've upgraded since April, so there's quite a few new features. I'm particularly impressed with its ability to group common posts together, even across multiple weblogs.

It also supports gzip and deflate encoding, which leads me to this question - how many other feed readers support these formats? And, if I was to enable gzip encoding on my RSS feed, would this break any of the clients? Any answers are welcome.

At one point in the past, I got quite involved with Inno Setup - actively contributing to the newsgroup and doing my best to promote it as the best way to deploy applications. That was forcefully ended when my addiction to the newsgroup resulted in a monstrous phone bill, yet since getting broadband at home I haven't got back in there. But we still use Inno Setup in X-Setup because it uses the standard Windows wizard dialogs, and it's argubly the most powerful free installer there is.

Anyway, a new version - version 4 - is in beta testing now, though admittedly it has been since April but I've only just come across it this morning. It has many features backported from Martijn Laan's IS Extensions, including Pascal Scripting and multiple language support (so you can deploy one installer with several languages).

No doubt when we finally get X-Setup 6.4 out of the door (we're working on Windows Server 2003 support) we'll be using this.

My P2P weapon of choice at university - Shareaza - has a beta of the forthcoming 1.9 version available. At the moment, it can only access the legacy Gnutella network along with the newer Gnutella2 network, but with this new version, support for the eDonkiey2000 and BitTorrent networks is being added, and all 4 systems can be searched symiltaneously. In my review of the program back in January, I said that the program's only real weakness was the lack of available files, so this is good news.

Although it doesn't go as far as including support for the WinMX Peer Network and the ubiquitus FastTrack network used by the evil KaZaA, it's a step in the right direction. The combination of an attractive interface, low memory footprint and lack of spyware has already won my heart - hopefully a network improvement will win over my mind too.

Useless fact: I've said the word 'network' 6 times in this post.

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows has a review of Longhorn, the next big Windows release after XP. The review goes into a lot of depth and explains many of the new technologies that are involved.

Having read the article, I can say that some areas are quite impressive. The new display system, for example, looks very good, with improved transparency, smoothed edges to application windows and such like, but without the performance hit that such features require at the moment.

However, I am a little concerned about 2 things:

1. Reliance on NTFS. Although FAT and FAT32 will still be supported, Longhorn will need to recide on an NTFS drive. Although NTFS is a superior file system, FAT is more open. Indeed, I use FAT on my hard disk because I can access my files in either Windows or Linux.
2. The hardware specification. A 64MB 3D-accelerated graphics card capable of 32 bit colour and a minimum of 1024x768 resolution is required, but 128MB is recommended. To put the into context, the total memory in my laptop, running XP Home, is 128MB - that's RAM and graphics memory combined.

But then Longhorn isn't due out for 2 years yet - 2005 is the current estimate for release but delays are inevitable. By then, I imagine most computers will be capable of running it.

There was no word of Microsoft's Trusted Computing Initiative and the concept formally known as Palladium, but it will be interesting to see if that is included. There was also no mention of a new version of Internet Explorer, which I would like to see released, preferably with fixes for some of the rendering bugs that I come across now and again. Still, the article is worth a read and it does offer screen shots.

Today, I've been playing around with a trial version of TextAloud MP3, to see how good it is. For someone, who, apart from a mild astigmatism, has near perfect eyesight, its only use is as a toy, or for times when I really cannot be bothered to sit down and read something. But, I imagine if you are visually impaired, it may be quite helpful.

It is like listening to Stephen Hawking's daughter (ie the voice is very wooden and generated), but it does have novelty value, and you can add more speech packs. It does cope surprisingly well with some obscure words, though sometimes it pronounces them slightly wrong. But I'm impressed.

To compare its output, here is the text, available as a TextAlound MP3 file and a file where I have read this myself. And yes, that is my own voice.

Important: MSN Messenger Plus now contains the Lop.com spyware. I therefore withdraw my endorsement of this utility and recommend that you do not download and install it. See this SpywareInfo.com article for more information. Thank you.

Like me, Stephen Desroches, another B&B Gnomie, is searching for the Perfect RSS Reader. He seems to be impressed by FeedReader, unlike me who was annoyed by its lack of support for the increasingly common content:encoded extension (it's why I provide a separate RSS 0.91 feed). However, its small footprint, both in terms of HD space and memory, impressed me, along with the fact that it's free.

I've never really used many of Stardock's products, but I've found the free version of Cursor XP to be quite good. It adds some very nice new animated cursors (I'm using the Pro-Tools set - the 'busy' animation is very cool) and a little bit of extra functionality, including more flexible shadow options and image changing when you hold the button down. And unlike most of Stardock's output, the basic version is freeware, though there is a paid-for Plus version.

Downsides? It's using another 2MB of memory, which probably could be used for something more useful. But I'm generally impressed.

minotaur, the Mozilla-based stand-alone mail client, finally reached the stage where a public build could be released this week (which, by the way, can be downloaded from ftp.mozilla.org). It's only at version 0.1a, and currently only available for Windows, but it's a start.

So, Winamp 2.9 is installed (after I downloaded it yesterday). Like the existing Winamp 2.8 it comes in 3 flavours: lite, standard and full - I went for standard as full merely adds Windows Media support.

So, in brief, the new features:

• Video playback - now you can play AVI, WMV, MPEG-4 and various other formats in Winamp, with a skinnable video panel
• Media Library - brought in from Winamp 3.0, allowing you to use Winamp more as a jukebox
• Digital Audio Extraction - allows better CD playback of CDs and the possibility of CD ripping using the Disk Writer plugin
• The usual bug fixes and minor tweaks

Although 2.x skins will work with this new build, they won't work with the media library and video panel, since these weren't included in the older skins.

So compared with dBpowerAMP (my current audio player), what do I think? Well, it's certainly quick at launching (a few seconds, whereas Winamp 3.0 takes nearly a full minute), and the media library is a nice touch, but I still don't like it. It seems cluttered, and was unable to get data for a lot of my music (its Ogg Vorbis support appears to be rather patchy). The 'Thinger' never got added either, which I liked from 3.0. So it's an improvement, but not enough for me to switch.

You can now download Winamp 2.9 Beta, if you like.

"But wait", you may be thinking, "what about Winamp 3.0?". Well, from what it seems, Winamp 2.9 aims to bring some of the features of 3.0 to the 2.x platform. 3.0 hasn't been popular - it's slow and bloated, and many (like me) have stuck with 2.81, the latest version from the classic branch. So 2.9 seems like a compromise between the two.

I'm downloading it now - I'll let you know what I think soon.

Important: MSN Messenger Plus now contains the Lop.com spyware. I therefore withdraw my endorsement of this utility and recommend that you do not download and install it. See this SpywareInfo.com article for more information. Thank you.

Well, OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 installed pretty much without a hitch, which is good. What's more, I finally managed to find this: the Dictionary Installer. It's a clever little program that downloads and installs non-US language dictionaries - great for British people like me who like our colours, centres and aluminium.

It also has French and German, and other languages. I wish I'd had this when I was doing my French coursework - of course to do this in MS Office would require buying a language pack. Err... not likely. In fact, German comes in at least 6 different flavours, depending on which dialect you want. Neat.

By the way, I'm aware that the blogrolls aren't working at the moment. I think this is a problem with BlogRolling, but we shall see.

After stumbling across a thread on the Lockergnome forums, I came across a program called Excelsior JET, a program that converts compiled Java programs into Windows 32-bit portable executables. What's more, the 'personal edition' is free for personal, non-commercial use, which is all I'm going to use it for.

To round off a day full of posts about new programs, here's what I have to say about Shareaza. It's a P2P client, as recommended by SpyWareInfo since it doesn't include any annoying parasites.

The program itself is impressive - dead easy to use, but powerful at the same time. The user interface is wonderful, looking like a proper XP application, and even has the ability to be skinned. It comes with a few sample skins with more available from the web site.

The sting in the tail? The network. Shareaza is a Gnutella2 client, which does mean that it is able to iron out most of the problems with the old Gnutella system (such as rampant virii), and I can give it kudos for that. But it's so empty - I couldn't find any of the songs I wanted, even though most are readily available on my current favourite, WinMX.

It's a shame - Shareaza is such a nice program to use, whereas WinMX's interface looks as if no-one has touched it since 1996. Admittedly the last major revision did improve things slightly but it's still butt ugly. Gnucleus, an open-source Gnutella client for Windows, seems to suffer the same problem - nice UI, shame about the network.

Important: MSN Messenger Plus now contains the Lop.com spyware. I therefore withdraw my endorsement of this utility and recommend that you do not download and install it. See this SpywareInfo.com article for more information. Thank you.

Since yesterday, I've been using FastCache from AnalogX to try to boost my net performance. And I have to say I'm impressed - it cuts a good couple of seconds off every page, and this is on broadband; when I'm back in Bradford on that evil 56k connection things should be even more rosy.

It even provides a stats page; here's mine:

So it's saved me 3 minutes after just one day. Not bad. I can get to like this program.

And while I'm on the subject of free software, the latest version of X-Setup, 6.3, has been released. This is one of the programs I contribute to, and includes some new plug-ins for Mozilla, plus other new plug-ins and updates. Currently only the full version is available for download but a patch for 6.2 users will probably come in the new year.

I've given Spybot a spin, and although I do generally prefer it, it did crash when I asked it to fix a few minor problems. But it is certainly much faster and more thorough than Ad-Aware was, and it will also remove cookies and log files for those who are super-paranoid. I'll try it again sometime. And, if you're interested, I didn't have any spyware installed. Phew.

In boredom, I wrote a small VBScript document that wrote a file with the words to '10 Green Bottles', except you could set the initial number. Using 7500 as the initial number, I ended up with a 1.24MB text file, with the first 7500 lines of the song...

Anyway, as an experiment, I applied various compression methods to the file to see which one could make it the smallest. Here are my results:

(added RAR, GnomeZip and BZip2)

No, I couldn't believe it either. I've always had good results from 7-Zip, particularly when using the 7z format. What annoys me is that 7-Zip is open source, released under the LGPL. Anyone could use this code in their own programs; so why do they not bother?

The performance of BZip2 also impressed me, though I was expecting more from the RAR format; even when optimised for text files, it still only equalled the performance of ICE. This is especially poor as WinRAR is Shareware and is one of only a handful of programs able to create RAR files. In all cases the compression was set to maximum.

The performance of the ICE format, which is apparently optimised for text files, is promising, but is still beaten by 7z.

Despite my generally negative comments against emacs last week, after Monday's lab session I decided that maybe it'd be a good idea to have it on my Windows partition. So, I downloaded it (all 12.7MB of it!), unzipped it (all 40+MB of it!!!) and ran it. And whaddya know? It's only version 20.

You see, in the labs, we have version X21 for Linux, which is much better. You get a toolbar and syntax highlighting. And it integrates with JRE, so you can compile and execute Java applications and applets from within emacs. The Windows version, at least on my machine, does none of this. It has now since been removed, and the space assigned to...

...Phoenix. This new browser has been getting a lot of buzz lately, and having used it, I can see why. Firstly the interface is very clean; it uses a derivation of Mozilla's Orbit theme by default, but also supports XP's visual styles, so visually it looks nicer. The toolbar can be customised to add more or fewer buttons too.

Speed-wise it is noticably faster than Mozilla, but unlike Opera it still has the very capable Gecko browser core. In fact, if you're used to Mozilla or Netscape 6.x or 7.x you'll have no trouble adjusting to Phoenix.

Overall? I like it. A lot. In fact, it's already my default browser. As for stability, it appears very stable, even for 0.4 release. Get it now.

Spoon has finally released a CD writer to go along with his range of audio products (it's been on the cards for months now). It's still in early beta and can only write audio CDs at present, but expect more features to be added in due course. And at the moment, it's free :).

You can read the release notes and download it from http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=37644. I haven't tested it yet because this laptop doesn't have a CD burner. Or a firewire port :(.

Trillian 0.74 has been released, though I'm having a hard time downloading it - the web site seems to be too busy. Cerulean Studios have also released Trillian Pro 1.0 - a commercial version with more features (such as video conferencing, subscription channels for popular websites etc.). It costs $25 - I may consider it.

The security vunerability, which had a number of people running around like headless chickens a couple of weeks ago, has been fixed in this release. The UI has also been changed - it no longer uses the IM network logos to signify each network and instead uses more generic icons. I personally liked the old way, but it was probably done due to copyright or something. All chat windows now have a hide button, which is a nice new feature, but other than there aren't any new features - it's mostly a maintenance release. And it still rules.

WinMX 3.3 is out, and it looks very good. The display engine has been given a good arse-kicking, so it now renders much much faster, and seems to be less resource-hungry too. Auto Find Sources is now implemented, so every 15 minutes the program automatically looks for other users with the same file, and if it finds any, adds them to the download, so that the file downloads quicker (in theory). And, best of all, it fully supports Ogg Vorbis! :)

If it interests you, I'm using yaXamp as my current WinAMP skin - it gets 5 stars from Nullsoft staff and just about everyone else. Including me.

So, Winamp3. I've had a tinker around with it, and while I do like some of the improvements, here's my for and against for upgrading (from 2.8):

For:

• New, better skins
• Supports video
• Has a media library
• Skins now cover all dialogs and menus, not just the main window
• Built-in crossfading
• Can co-exist with Winamp 2.x

Against:

• Much, much slower at loading (30 seconds as opposed to 5 in Winamp 2.8)
• Old plug-ins and skins won't work (at least at the moment)
• Currently only full download available
• Some options have been removed (changing the tray icon, for example)
• Seems to require more system resources

So, was it worth upgrading? With hindsight, probably not, since I still use dBpowerAMP as my main player (which is still quicker at loading than Winamp 3), and it is much less efficient (sadly). But as the two can co-exist, even in the same folder, I don't really see the need to remove it as yet.

As they say: "Everything's worth a try once"

The 'Which File Sharing Client is it anyway?' debate continues. MODatic, a friend of mine from the dBpowerAMP forums and webmaster of MODatic.net, was the first person to use the new Comments feature (other than for testing) to point me to Gnucleus, a free, open-source and spyware-free Gnutella client, which also forms the basis of the post-FastTrack versions of Morpheus. So, I gave it a try.

The interface is nice - it has native support for Visual Styles in XP, and it isn't nearly as cluttered as WInMX. Downside? Barely any files that I wanted were available. So it was back to WinMX, which is now up to version 3.22. This new version apparently has bug fixes and "massive" network improvements, but is still as butt-ugly and cluttered as ever, even with a manifest file added to make it use the newer Common Controls library. But, at least I can get the files I want, and in a file sharing program, I guess that's the important thing. I just wish KaZaA wasn't so bloated or had so much spyware.

And if you're interested, dBpowerAMP Music Converter Release 9 Beta 5 is out - it's scheduled to be the last beta before the final release 9 on July 4th. New features over Beta 4 include a 'Time Elapsed' indicator on the conversion screen, to go with the 'Time Remaining' counter, offline FreeDB support and support for alt presets when using the Lame encoder. These presets give a big boost in quality (while still using the same file size) so they're well worth using.

Just uncovered a rather cool program - SoundEngine. It's a very professional program for tweaking wave files... and it's free! I've had a little play around with it, and you can do plenty with it. I'd certainly recommend it to people who need to do audio tweaking and stuff.

So AudioGalaxy has all-but bitten the dust. It's a pity, because I really liked the way it worked - you could queue up songs, even if they were offline, and then get them when the user that had them appeared. It was certainly miles better than Napster ever was.

Of course, it is still there, but none of the artists I want are on there - they're all blocked, of course. I've even gone as far as removing the AudioGalaxy Satellite software from the computer, since there's argubly no way that it will return to a state of usefulness. Darn the RIAA. Darn them.

So, like a number of others, I've migrated to WinMX. It's more like Napster than AudioGalaxy, which, I suppose, is the reason why I'm less keen on it. It's ugly, and you can only download what is available right now. It's also incredibly slow at searching, probably due to its decentralised nature. But it's better than nothing I guess, and it is completely spyware free (probaby because the company that makes it doesn't need to pay for lots of bandwidth). KaZaA has overstayed its welcome on here, so that has now bitten the dust - finally my Ad-Aware scans come up clean (Ad-Aware 5.83 was released on June 20th - get it now from www.lavasoft.nu). I refuse to support a company that effectively installs trojan horses on your computer - if I wanted the b3d projecter, I'd have installed it myself, thank you very much.

Speaking of WinMX, the latest version, 3.21, was released today. I couldn't connect 3.2, so I had to upgrade - I don't know whether other people have found this.

Also, I mentioned Blogatelle's Test Archive Of Death a few weeks ago. Well, I'm mentioning it again, since it has moved (along with the blog itself) to blogatelle.com, and has acquired a new, lighter design. Though interestingly it didn't have the Evil Test that I did yesterday on it...

It seems Chris has taken note of our bandwidth problems and made a change to how he presents the download links in the Lockergnome Windows Daily, as of today - from now on there will be no direct download links, so that subscribers have a chance to download from mirrors, and visit the site and support its advertisers.

I'd like to make a software recommendation - StarDownloader. It's a free download manager (that contains no spyware or advertising) that supports download acceleration, resuming and scheduled downloads. If you like it, you can donate to it. Thanks to MODatic for recommending it to me in the first place.

Argus is a great program, but there are a couple of things that are bugging me about it. One - there's no option inside the program to make it start on bootup (though I can quite understand why you'd want this disabled). And two - its forgetfullness. Every time you run it, you have to enable scheduled snapshot, and then import the caption (which in my case is a time and date stamp). If Argus 2.1 is ever released, those are features I'd like to see.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm having trouble with a CD-RW written by MS's built in burning app. It's worst than I thought - a good percentage of the files are damaged, so I may well need to wipe it and start again with Nero. In fact, where I can, I've been taking the original CDs and re-ripping them - although MP3 technology hasn't progressed much I'm now using Ogg Vorbis more, so some of the longer songs get encoded in that, and it certainly does make a positive difference. At 160Kbps, the quality is barely distinguishable from the original, which will be good when I go to university - I don't intend to take my 100+ CDs with me.

Someone in the #odp chatroom forwarded me this. Darn, why can't my laptop be like that?

While trying to find out the latest updates on the world cup, I cam across Mini Motty, a free desktop toy from the BBC. It's a cartoon version of legendary football commentator John Motson, who updates you with football news (bookings, red cards, goals etc) for five teams of your choice. It lets you select team from the World Cup, and the English and Scottish football leagues. It's quite cool, actually :)

I like Norton. I like it a lot. It seems to work fine on this machine, and the interface is great. Though in 12 months time, when the free updates expire, I'll probably move to AVG, like on the other machine.

I've also just got myself a copy of Apple QuickTime 6 Public Preview. No big improvements over 5.0, but it does support more file formats, including MPEG4. And, it appears to be stable.

Just updated to the latest version of w.bloggar - 2.03. It seems to be a little faster now.

And Microsoft have released Plus! XP SP1, which I've downloaded. I do have it installed, but don't use it much.

I should check out the Bloggar homepage more often - it's been updated to version 2.01 and comes with loads of new features. And a much nicer interface. And it pings to Weblogs.com, too :).

After bringing my March post about spam back from the dead, I found out what I was doing wrong with BSM. I was using a non-existant email server - you actually have to use one that exists. Silly me. So now it works, though I don't get that much spam anyway so I probably don't need to use it just yet.

There's something different about this post. It's coming from Bloggar - a Windows GUI for Blogger. It's quite a basic program, but it does its job, and it at least reminded me to update the archive template - it should now match in with the rest of the site. Will I use it in preference to the Blogger website? Perhaps. It does have the advantage that it isn't an IE Window which can somehow become used by something else, therefore causing me to lose quite a bit of typing. But having said that it isn't the most efficient program out there. But my first impressions are good, nonetheless.

It's official - I have been wooed by Trillian. Chris has been plugging it a lot in his Lockergnome newsletter - I'd tried it once but wasn't so sure about it. This time around, I'm much happier. You can use my MSN address (totalxsive at hotmail dot com - don't spam me please), my Yahoo! address (sashworld) or my ICQ number (149181635). I actually only signed up for ICQ today and immediately I got a message from a random person called Linda. Just in case you're interested, I don't accept messages from people I don't know, unless they introduce themselves from an entity that I know (ie "Hi Neil - I found your blog and think it is superb/excellent/amazing" - delete as appropriate :)). And anyone who spams me will suffer the consequences - that's why I use my alternative email address on ICQ.

My sound has disappeared again, though it has held out for 3 days, which was when I last rebooted. It has been recurring a bit more since I accidently put the sound card back in the wrong port - ah well, can't be bothered to move it. Besides, playing a CD using the good ol' analogue system still works (ie playing directly to the sound card from the CD-ROM drive) so why bother :).

Only a week to go now until I invade Paris - my Euro notes arrived today from Marks and Spencer (they seem to have the best rate of exchange since they don't charge any commission). I have 3x€20, 4x=€10 and 2x€5. I think the €10 notes look the best, but I like the idea of having different sized notes for each denomination - it will certainly benefit blind or partially sighted people who rely on touch to deduce what value each note is worth. Now all I need to do is spend them, and get a few Euro coins :).