Surfin teh Interweb

Back when Apple first released Safari for Windows, I posted about 10 things that were broken about it. Now that Apple has released the first non-beta version (3.1) let's revisit that list:

1. Can't add custom search engines.
2. Double clicking on the tab bar to create a new tab doesn't work. Fixed!
   
3. Ctrl-Enter in the address bar doesn't autocomplete to www. .com. Fixed!
   
4. Middle clicking on a tab doesn't close it.
   
5. Can't close the last tab.
   
6. Grabs IE and Firefox bookmarks by default but doesn't display them in the Bookmarks menu. Doesn't grab Opera bookmarks.
7. Doesn't use the standard RSS icon.
   
8. Doesn't follow Windows UI conventions. Cannot resize using any border. Fixed!
   
9. Breaks Fitt's Law! There is a one pixel hole in the maximized Safari at the top right corner. Moving the mouse to the top right corner and clicking closes the maximized window underneath Safari! Fixed!
   
10. Complex font rendering broken e.g. Devanagari. Fixed!
    

Overall, Safari has shown some incredible progress on Windows! Good job Apple! Now if only it supported Adblock Plus or something like it.

Labels: browser, freeware, safari

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Here's a list of some new freeware that I found useful.

WinSplit Revolution
An intuitive, keyboard-based window arranging utility. Essential if you have a large widescreen monitor. (I just got a Dell 2407-HC at work!)

TeraCopy
A Windows file copying tool that supports pause-resume and error recovery.

doPDF
A PDF printer for Windows that doesn't depend on Ghostscript. A leaner (1.29MB only!) and faster replacement for PDFCreator.

ASAP Utilities
An Excel add-in that lets you do stuff like deselect cells from selection, apply formula to selected cells and a lot more.

Recuva
A tiny file unerase utility. Leave copy on a USB stick so you can run it without having to install.

Labels: freeware, software, tips

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Opera 9.20 is out and it features another great innovation from the Opera developers: Speed Dial.

And yet, in spite of Opera being faster, leaner and slicker than Firefox, I'm still forced to use Firefox as my default browser. Let's explore why:

Broken Tabbed Browsing
Opera fanatics love to point out that Opera was the first mainstream browser to feature tabbed browsing. Unfortunately Opera's tabbed browsing model Just Doesn't Work™. Here's how I use tabbed browsing in Firefox (or IE7 for that matter.)
1. Visit Digg.com
2. Scan through the front page and middle click on the stories I'm interested in to them open them in background tabs.
3. Select the tab for the first story I had opened and read the story.
4. Close the tab by clicking on the little X on the tab.
5. Firefox takes me to the next tab i.e. the next story I had wanted to read. IE7 does the same. Opera unfortunately takes me back to the Digg.com front page i.e. the parent tab. Which is downright stupid.

Sadly there is no real way to fix this. You can install a custom button which does "Close page & Switch to next page", you can change the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-F4 to do the same, you can even set up a mouse gesture to do this. But for some stupid reason you cannot assign this to the little red X on each tab or even to the middle-click on each tab. And I'm so used to browsing this way that change is not possible. In fact, I shouldn't have to change. Programs should change to behave like users expect, users shouldn't have to change their behaviors for programs.

Lack of a "Safari" style RSS reader
The Opera RSS reader uses the each-RSS-item-is-an-email model. I prefer the Safari (or IE7) each-feed-is-a-rendered-page model. Firefox let's me chose either using appropriate extensions. (I have to admit that this isn't that much of a problem since the arrival of web-based RSS readers like PageFlakes and NetVibes.)

Lack of an easy way to emulate IE/Firefox keyboard shortcuts
"Ctrl +" for zooming in, "Ctrl -" for zooming out, "Ctrl 0" for zooming 100%, "Ctrl Enter" for "www. .com" completion, "Shift Enter" for "www. .net" completion, "Ctrl Shift Enter" for "www. .org" completion, entering search terms in the URL bar for an I'm Feeling Lucky search. This is stuff I'm used to. I'm aware that I can customize Opera to do all this, but perhaps there should be a simple one-click way of doing this. Again, programs should change to behave like users expect, users shouldn't have to change their behaviors for programs.

That's all the rants I have for Opera. This a huge improvement over my earlier list, and I can see that Opera is now a lot closer to being the perfect browser. All Firefox will have to do to be the perfect browser is to be as fast and as memory efficient as Opera. Tough order.

Labels: firefox, freeware, opera, software

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RIA is short for Rich Internet Application which are supposed to be the Next Big Thing™. And I downloaded my first one yesterday. It's the New York Times Reader. Here's some information about it:

• It downloads the latest edition of the New York Times for offline reading.
• The biggest difference from the New York Times website is the high quality of the fonts and excellent overall reading experience. It feels like reading a real paper.
• There's a fantastic full-screen mode.
• It uses Windows Presentation Foundation, which is a part of the Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework. If you haven't already installed it, it's a 50MB download. Luckily you only have to do it once. If you're running Windows Vista you already have it.
  
• It's in beta and free service expires on March 27th after which you pay $15 per month.
• There are annoying animated ads. This is my only real criticism of the whole thing. I don't mind static ads, but the animated ones are really annoying.

Though it's sad that the free version reader will expire on the 27th, I was quickly able to find similar readers from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Forbes and The Daily Mail UK, all of which are completely free (minus some soul-sucking registration.)

I expect the RIA market to quickly heat up, now that WPF is beginning to take a hold and Adobe has just released the first Apollo runtime.

Speaking of Adobe, I was poking around on their website and noticed that you can download a standalone version of Flash Player which includes debugging capabilities. Very useful for analyzing or just playing those downloaded SWFs without having to start a browser.

Labels: flash, freeware, RIA, WPF

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Windows only: Donationware program Explorer Breadcrumbs adds a breadcrumb toolbar to XP's Explorer windows similar to what's currently available in Vista.

Hat tip to LifeHacker!

Labels: freeware

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Sun just released Java SE 6 and you should download it now!

Why?

• Subpixel antialiased fonts - Finally, Java applications won't look like crap
• Gray Rect Fix - Finally, Java applications will feel faster
• And many more...

While you're at it you could also uninstall previous versions. (I wish Sun would at least ask during installation if you want to uninstall previous versions...)

Labels: freeware

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Here's a list of applications that I've installed so far. This list will grow as I add more stuff. Update: List was updated on Sept 4, 2007 - some entries were deprecated and some URLs were fixed.

(Ubuntu blocker: Program that prevent me from switching to Ubuntu Linux completely)

Archivers

• 7-Zip - For 7z, zip and all other archives
  
• WinRAR - For rar archive creation and fast decompression
  

Video Tools

• AviSynth - Versatile frameserver (Ubuntu blocker)
• DivX Web Player - For watching videos at Stage6.com
• GSpot Codec Information Appliance - For codec identification including identification of special codec features like GMC and QPel (Ubuntu blocker)
• Media Player Classic - For watching most videos
  
• QuickTime - Just for the codecs. MOVs are watched using MPC which uses the codecs
  
• VideoLAN - For watching anything that Media Player Classic fails at
  
• VirtualDub - AVI creation (Ubuntu blocker)
• VirtualDubMod - More AVI creation (Ubuntu blocker)
• XviD - MPEG4 codec par excellence (URL updated)
  

Audio Tools

• Burrrn - Convenient CD creation with CD-Text (Ubuntu blocker)
• Exact Audio Copy - Ripping CDs (This is going to take such a long time!) (Ubuntu blocker)
• foobar2000 - Playing and managing music (Ubuntu blocker)
• Lame - mp3 encoding
• Last.fm - Music playback statistics and recommendations
  
• WaveGain - For normalizing volume before burning CDs for the car
  
• Winamp - Playing and managing music when I'm bored of FB2K (Ubuntu blocker)

Download Management

• FlashGet - This was recently made adware free and now I can't recommend it enough. (Be sure to get the Classic Version v1.73)(URL updated)(Ubuntu blocker)
• GrabIt - Usenet
• QuickPar - PAR2, SFV and MD5 verification. If they add SHA this would be a complete solution
• µTorrent - Programs like this prevent me from switching to Ubuntu (Ubuntu blocker)

Security

• GNU Privacy Guard - Used solely for verifying downloaded binaries
  
• Tor - Anonymous browsing for fun and profit
  
• Vidalia - Anonymous browsing for fun and profit
• WinPT - GUI front-end for GNU Privacy Guard
  

Instant Messaging

• Google Talk - For the burgeoning number of contacts in GMail and Orkut
  
• Windows Live Messenger - My primary IM and also because it rocks. Update: Not my primary IM any more. (Ubuntu blocker)
  

Browser

• Adobe Flash Player - The only indispensable browser plugin
• Mozilla Firefox - My primary browser
  

CD Burning

• Nero Suite - This came with my external DVD burner. Useful but very close to being classified as bloatware
  

Imaging

• CDisplay - Simple little image viewer that supports reading Zip and Rar archives
  
• Picasa - Fantastic image management software
  
• Paint.NET - Fantastic image processing software. Goodbye GIMP forever. (Ubuntu blocker)
• XnView - For everything that Picasa doesn't do, like slightly more advanced image processing, convenient wallpaper resizing and working well without a database

Utilities

• Adobe Acrobat Reader - PDF viewing. Version 8 is fast as hell. (URL updated)
• CCleaner - For occasional registry and disk cleanups. Hopefully I won't have to use this too often
• Command Here PowerToy - When Explorer doesn't cut it
• PDF Creator - For printing to PDF from any Windows app.
  
• PureText - For pasting plain text instead of rich text without the trip to Notepad
  
• Sysinternals Utilities
• Autoruns - For monitor and controlling startup activity
• Contig - For defragmenting single files which the Windows defragmenter cannot handle
  
• Page Defrag - For defragmenting unmovable files
• Process Explorer - For monitoring running processes and much more
• Process Monitor - For monitoring running processes for thread, file and registry activity
• TCPView - For monitoring open TCP and UDP connections
• TweakUI - For those tweaks that make Windows liveable
• WinDirStat - Disk usage analysis using tree maps. More polished solution than the pioneer SequoiaView
  

Editors

• Programmer's Notepad - When you need a kitchen knife
  
• Vim - When you need a battle axe
  

Antivirus / Antispyware

• Kaspersky - After watching computer after computer at work turn to molasses after installing Norton Antivirus 2006, I decided to look elsewhere. I was considering Active Virus Shield, a stripped-down AOL-branded freeware version of Kaspersky before I got Kaspersky 6 for free (after rebates) at CompUSA. It's fantastic!

Interesting, everything in that list except Nero and Kaspersky is open source or closed source freeware.

Labels: freeware, setup, software

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While applications like Nero Burning ROM and Sonic Easy CD Creator are the Swiss army knives of CD burning and reading, here's a list of small utilities which do only a few things each but do them well.

Burrrn
Burrrn burns audio CDs. That's all it does but does it so well that it deserves a download. It can decode mp3, aac, ogg and more, it has built in support for ReplayGain so you can burn CDs that will not fluctuate wildly in volume from one track to the next and it creates CDs with CD-Text so that you can see the track details on most modern CD players.

Exact Audio Copy
Exact Audio Copy is a well-respected program which can rip audio from damaged CDs which other CD rippers like iTunes and Winamp can't handle. While the interface isn't quite as intuitive as the competition, the startup configuration wizard is pretty good. The HydrogenAudio wiki page has some great documentation on how to correctly configure and use it. If you really want to be geeky and ensure that you are getting perfectly copied CDs you can download the AccurateRip dll and compare your results with hundreds of other geeks who submit their results to the AccurateRip site.

ImgBurn
ImgBurn burns CD or DVD images. While this might seem a trivial ability as most other CD burning software can do this, ImgBurn can handle many possible disk image formats apart from the usual ISO and has many other advanced features especially for DVD video burning. The recently released version 2.0 also has the capability of creating disk images from files stored on disk.

Isobuster
Isobuster is to data CDs what Exact Audio Copy is to audio CDs. This program can successfully recover data from scratched, incorrectly burned and otherwise defective CDs. As an added bonus you can also use it to mount disk images and extract data from them. Quite useful if you need just a few specific files from a disk image and don't want to waste a CD burning it. Isobuster has a shareware pro-version ($25) which adds data recovery from UDF CDs.

Labels: freeware, software

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Firefox while usually very intuitive, has some strange gaps in functionality which make certain tasks unnecessarily difficult. Here's a list of tiny extensions which fix it. In alphabetical order:

Clear Private Data Button
Adds a button that lets you clear private data. This is the same functionality as the menu item Tools -> Clear Private Data... Useful for compulsive cookie clearer's like me.


Context Search
Lets you right click on a selection and search for it using any of the installed search engines instead of the currently selected ones. (Tip: You can add many useful engines from the Search Engine Page and Mycroft.)



Paste and Go
Steals the feature from Opera. Lets you right click the address bar and Paste and Go instead of Paste and manually clicking the Go button. As a bonus also adds a Paste and Search item if you right click on the search bar. (Yes, we know we're lazy!)


Searchbar Autosizer
Automatically resizes the search bar depending upon length of the text typed in.


Search Button
Adds a button just like the Go button to the right of the search bar. Useful when there's already some text in the search bar but you don't want to take your hand off the mouse to hit Enter. (We really are very lazy!)


Search Plugin Hacks
Adds a very useful feature. Lets you delete search plugins. Just right click on a search plugin you want to remove and delete it.


Translate
Lets you translate entire webpages via an item in the Tools menu and snippets of selected text using the content menu. Translation is done using Babelfish.


(After installing the Clear Private Data Button and the Search Button you'll have to add them to your toolbar manually. Do this by right clicking on the toolbar and selecting Customize... and dragging the buttons to the appropriate locations on the toolbar.)

Quite a lot of the functionality that these extensions bring is going to be a part of Firefox 2, so they'll be unnecessary then.

Tags: Firefox, freeware

Labels: firefox, freeware

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Windows Explorer while usually well behaved, has some odd quirks which make things unnecessarily complicated.

For instance, unbelievable as this may seem, there's no way to sort files using extension. There is instead a generic "Type" which lumps all kinds of files together depending upon the application they are registered to.

In the folder below, there seems to be no way of sorting to differentiate between the mp3 and ogg files.



The solution is to install this Explorer extension. It neatly adds a "Ext" column. (In the Explorer menu, select "View -> Details" to popup the dialog below.)



Now we can sort by extension, and all is well in the world!



This sort of thing also strengthens my theory that Microsoft is filled with excellent programmers (They designed a file browser so beautifully that you can write an extension for it with relative ease) but overeager user interface designers. This problem should never have happened in the first place.

Labels: freeware, tips

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Seeing as how the best coding font has been found, grumpy coders who don't like having anything to do with number one are busy looking for the second best. The top three contenders are:

• Andale Mono: Designed and released to the web and the removed by Microsoft, it's currently available at CoreFonts.
  
• Monaco: By Apple, never intended for us poor PC folk, the enterprising can find it using Google.
  
• Consolas: Brand new font by Microsoft, with hinting only for ClearType, so it works well only if you have subpixel rendering on. Available as a giant 4MB installer, which is strange as the font itself is about 250KB.
  

Honestly, I would have just continued to use good old Lucida Console, if only it didn't have the dreaded 0O (zero - oh) problem.

Labels: freeware, programming

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A good coding font has a lot of requirements:

• Differences in O and 0 (that's o and zero)
• Differences in l, I, 1 and | (that's L, i, 1 and the pipe)
• Letter and line spacing not to cramped and not too spaced apart
• And in these days of internationalized coding, a large character set

Well, the Gnome foundation released the Bitstream Vera fonts which contain the excellent Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. DejaVu fonts are based on the Bitstream Vera fonts but add more characters.

Here's a screenshot:

Labels: freeware, programming

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