Recommend software

[Enok]

The idea of this topic is to recommend software and extensions you've bumped into and found useful or good alternative to a mainstream program.

Here's my advertisement:

Foxit Reader is supa light and fast pdf-reader when you find that Adobe one crashing and jamming and eating your system resources all the time just to lower the huge loading time a bit. (7.0 loads its libraries to memory on Windows start-up if not disabled)

Foxit Reader doesn't work as browser plugin which may trouble some. It's single .exe-file that's it. Free for non-commercial use.

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php


HF!

[Mortis]

http://www.musikcube.com/

MusikCube is a media library -oriented music player.

The tagging/renaming features are the best I've seen in a player and it has great plugin support, it's effective and very intuitively designed. You can totally see how someone came out to make a player that answers demand.

HF!

[Armand]

7-Zip is an excellent packing/unpacking program! It is under the GNU license, so there's no cracking or such needed It's very light, simple to use and I love it.

# Supported formats:

* Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
* Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM and DEB

# For ZIP and GZIP formats 7-Zip provides compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
# Self-extracting capability for 7z format

The only downside is that it doesn't open .ACE, because that is a licensed format. I currently have WinAce installed to open the occasional .ace files, and use this for the rest.

http://www.7-zip.org/

HF!

[vrap]

Firefox is probably the loveliest program ever invented.


I was wondering, guys, if you knew of any small program I could use to edit sound files? I just want a simple program that I can use to cut up .mp3's , that is better than Sound Recorder and less expansive than Cool Edit or any of those big programs.

[nobile]

What about Audacity? I havne't used it much, maybe Rax can give you more details about it, but for me it's very nice and simple =) http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

[Mortis]

The hot news is that it seems CDex and Audacity might be merging in some way. I personally like Goldwave (http://www.goldwave.com), but you have to register it.

[vrap]

Thanks a lot for the suggestions, I'll check out Audacity when I can.

[Mortis]

New antivirus recommendation: ClamWin! http://www.clamwin.com/

It has recently been updated to no longer contain the cygwin layer which seems to have improved its speed and look greatly! I'm very pleased with it so far.

Here's the news post at SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=560056

Thumbs up!

[znood]

Avast antivirus! its free

http://www.avast.com/

[Mortis]

Dudes who uses ... or rather wants to use your bluetooth phone with your computer (with bluetooth) must check this software out. It's even better on a mac but, it now works with Windows. And be sure to post your feature requests to the forum, i got my request built into the 3.0.1 version which was really neat

http://www.salling.com/

Btw, it's me Smeagol... forgot i was guest

[nobile]

http://www.simplehelp.net/2008/07/21/15-portable-apps-to-help-troubleshoot-pcs/ I recently started using StumbleUpon, I must say it's a nice way to browse for new pages hehe, found this handy page I thought might be interesting for you guys
Some of the programs are actually already on this page!

[Mortis]

This thread is already pretty long, but I thought I'd like to add some more programs that I find incomparable! nobile's link, by the way, contains several tools that are very nice, including JKDefrag

CDBurnerXP is a very good replacement for Nero, with a sleek interface - granted it's compatible with your burner. ComicRack, on the other hand, is the best eComic reader I have seen so far, and is updated incredibly often.

[Mortis]

Here are a few good Windows XP feature additions:

Taskbar Shuffle
Folder Size for Windows Explorer

[nobile]

Here are a few browser-based programs that come in pretty handy. For some reason, Google Docs has never worked on this laptop, it just freezees and does nothing, but I'm glad to find a couple of others alike, I shall try them too http://www.smashingapps.com/2008/07/11/21-online-free-web-based-applications-that-you-probably-would-love-to-use-every-day.html

[Mortis]

Three file tools by Piriform Ltd:

Defraggler, CCleaner and Recuva. The first cleans up the registry, the second defrags and the last one recovers deleted files. All free though not open source.

[Dorden]

New antivirus recommendation: ClamWin! http://www.clamwin.com/

It has recently been updated to no longer contain the cygwin layer which seems to have improved its speed and look greatly! I'm very pleased with it so far.

Here's the news post at SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=560056

Thumbs up!

I tried this one once and the only problem was, the scan was really really slow, it took ages and actually I had to abort it since I didn't have the patience

[Mortis]

I tried this one once and the only problem was, the scan was really really slow, it took ages and actually I had to abort it since I didn't have the patience

You're right in that the program is slow, mostly due to its hacked-together nature... the UI is moderately poor and it performs less than stellar in terms of speed. Its primary appeal is in the fact that it is open source (a big plus in my view), though, so there probably won't be a change to the better any time soon The program is good for quick specific checks though

I don't think I'm yet to recommend Songbird, which has finally made its way to beta status now. It uses the same runtime environment as Firefox (XULRunner) and finally has Last.fm scrobbling support too - I know some of you value that quite a bit!

The new default skin that comes with the beta is a distinct upgrade over the previous one, and the feature set is pretty good - in fact, the only thing stopping me from changing over from Winamp 2.95 is basically the lack of a mIRC "playing now" add-on I understand the LiveTweeter add-on is supposed to do that sooner or later though.

[Mortis]

...in fact, the only thing stopping me from changing over from Winamp 2.95 is basically the lack of a mIRC "playing now" add-on I understand the LiveTweeter add-on is supposed to do that sooner or later though.

To follow up on this, LiveTweeter 2.3 supports writing currently playing song titles out to a text file now, so you can write a script to read from it. There's a tutorial for Songbird "playing now" for Pidgin too.

I can recommend the add-on Now Playing List for Songbird as well, and the previously mentioned Last.fm scrobbling of course. Finally, some of you might enjoy the possibility of minimizing to tray (I do!). The System tray support add-on, though not formally updated to work with the latest versions, still works if you manually edit the supported version, i.e.:

Code: Select all

<em:maxversion>0.6pre</em:maxversion> to <em:maxversion>0.8pre</em:maxversion>

[Armand]

To follow up on this, LiveTweeter 2.3 supports writing currently playing song titles out to a text file now, so you can write a script to read from it.

Thanks, that works great and was just what I was looking for

And to make it easier for those of us who don't remember mIRC scripting by heart add this line to the bottom of the list in Scripts Editor:

Code: Select all

/mp3 /me is now playing $read(C:\song.txt)


Also remember to enable the file writing from LiveTweeter's options in the Songbird add-ons menu.

[Mortis]

I've been using the Songbird nightly builds. Good stuff!

I also tried Pidgin after a long time and it seemed like a good all-around instant messenger. It has matured quite a bit and the overall look and feel is far more polished and less cumbersome than it used to be. It feels finished and I think that's a big compliment. I gave a shout to another messenger, Digsby, the latest newcomer on the IM market.

Sadly, its installer is very, very intrusive (it wants to add Google stuff, change around your bookmarks and forces you to register a Digsby.com account for syncing sessions even though you don't want to). The interface is surprisingly barren for a program that was hyped up as much as it was their logo is horrible. The best thing I can say about the program is that it feels like Miranda-IM lite...