2009-07-12T03:25:52Z 74412 0 It is very fast - faster than my extension-beladen installation of Firefox 3.5 - but nevertheless a little slower than bare-bones Firefox 3.5. That of course is the trade-off. A lot of the features that I have become accustomed to in Firefox through my various extensions are conspicuously absent. As for the interface, I am gradually warming to it, but unlike Firefox, it is not very customizable, so if I don't like it, that's just tough. Some features I like that are unique: the Task Manager, that allows you to see all the browser-related processes that are running and enables you to shut them down individually; the display on new tab windows the thumbnails of most visited pages, a list of recently bookmarked pages, and a list of most recently closed pages, in case one wants to reload them; and most to my liking, the ability to call up an "incognito" window, for browsing without leaving a history behind. The display of past visited and/or shut down pages can be added to Firefox through the Tab Mix Plus extension, though, but instead of having to open a new tab to see them, one can simply call them up by a right-click context menu - a more efficient and user-friendly implementation as far as I am concerned. As for the "incognito" feature, Firefox offers - new in version 3.5 - the ability to erase history by hour or by day, and an extension enables true anonymizing, the ability to browse through an untraceable IP proxy. One area where Chrome seems noticeably superior to Firefox is in stability. I've never experienced a crash or a freeze using Chrome. A bare-bones install of basic Firefox is reasonably stable. But all of its extensibility comes with the price of lessened stability. Anybody and everybody submits extensions and some really do cause more crashes and freezes. Read the user reviews, but basically, it's the wild west - caveat emptor. Am I switching to Chrome? Nope! Not yet! I use it sometimes when I want to do some immediate fast-and-dirty browsing, or when I want fast access to Gmail, but I still like the customization features of Firefox, and on a more philosophical level, I want to support open source software as much as possible. Chrome is based on an open source engine, but is itself proprietary to Google. Lastly, I use Linux quite a bit and while there is an excellent Firefox for Linux (superior to the Windows version IMHO), Chromium, a Linux version by Google based on the same engine, is still not ready for prime time. I really like being able to go from the Windows world to the Linux world and have a similar browsing environment in each. In short, it would take an awful lot to get me to switch; Chrome/Chromium will have to evolve a lot more and/or the Mozilla team behind Firefox will have start sleeping at the switch, letting Firefox fall technologically behind, in order to move me back to a proprietary product. Firefox's latest 3.5 release, with a much smaller memory footprint, lower CPU load, and much faster rendering times than previous versions, plus the addition of some neat new features and judicious refinements of old ones, shows no evidence that Mozilla intends to be caught sleeping any time soon. 2147483647 2007-06-13T05:16:01Z 34255 2019-11-12T12:13:09Z Google Chrome 19992 2009-11-30T12:15:27Z http://www.google.com/chrome http://wakoopa.com/software/google-chrome http://mallow.wakoopa.com/avatars/000/006/977/normal.png?1238578445 http://mallow.wakoopa.com/avatars/000/006/977/thumb.png?1238578445 10267 Google Inc. http://wakoopa.com/developers/google-inc Check what's happening on the web 1 Browsers http://wakoopa.com/categories/internet/browsers mac win Google Chrome is an open source web browser developed by Google. It builds on components from other open source software, including WebKit and Mozilla, and is intended to provide greater stability, speed and security than existing browsers, while presenting a simple and efficient user interface. 2009-03-14T04:27:26Z 47783 0 Adobe's Photoshop is the gold standard for image editing among photography professionals. And The GIMP is often touted as an open source Photoshop alternative. Mostly, it really could serve as such, but that is not to say that it is suitable for professional use. Continue reading for the reason why. Features: I would have given The GIMP 5 stars here except for one thing: No process color support (aka CMYK). Without support for CMYK, the standard color model used by professional printing houses, The GIMP is a non-starter for use by a working professional photographer editing images intended for press publication. For just about anyone else, it is more than powerful enough for just about any image editing need. Interface: It continues to improve with every version, but when describing The GIMP's interface, the word "intuitive" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. On the other hand, to be truthful, that word doesn't come to mind when I am talking about Photoshop either. With Photoshop, one eventually learns and becomes proficient. A Photoshop user, when encountering The GIMP for the first time, finds the interface layout to be confusing. But, to be fair, newbies with either Photoshop or The GIMP are equally confused. If one is used to Photoshop - from work, let us say - and one wants a powerful image editor for home use and can't justify paying from one's own pocket the sky-high price of Photoshop, can download a variant of The GIMP called GIMPShop. GIMPShop is simply The GIMP with an interface that duplicates that of Photoshop. There are easier-to-use image editing programs for sure, but from my experience,easy-to-use means giving up power and flexibility. If you want the power of Photoshop or The GIMP, you must bite that bullet and start reading some tutorials. Performance: Fine, once the damned thing initializes. It seems that splash screen stays there forever. Ubuntu Linux boots faster than The GIMP takes to initialize! The initialization seems to hang at the font loading stage. It appears to stall there - for as long as 30 seconds or so - and then, finally, it finishes loading and comes up, ready for use. The developers of The GIMP clearly are aware of this; in the fonts loading stage, there is a parenthetical stating "This may take a while." Frustrating - but once up, its performance is fine. It applies edits and filters smoothly and quickly. It is also stable - never hangs or crashes. So, 4 stars. Performance good, initialization maddeningly long. Price/Value: Superb. This program is good enough to pay real money for. Powerful, flexible, extensive online help, great support on the Web. Also, there are lots of plug-ins and extensions out there; one of them even makes it possible for The GIMP to use the gazillions of Photoshop plug-ins out there. Tons of capability out of the box, tons more through add-ons, lots of support, and totally free. Don't see how that can be beat. If full CMYK support were added, no one ever need drop $700 for Photoshop again. 27535088 2007-04-21T05:47:38Z 136 2017-05-31T08:27:21Z GIMP 5791 2009-11-28T04:21:11Z http://www.gimp.org http://wakoopa.com/software/gimp http://mallow.wakoopa.com/avatars/000/001/974/normal.png?1238514183 http://mallow.wakoopa.com/avatars/000/001/974/thumb.png?1238514183 1056 The GIMP Team http://wakoopa.com/developers/the-gimp-team 31 Image Editing http://wakoopa.com/categories/design/image-editing mac win linux GIMP is the 'GNU Image Manipulation Program'. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. 2009-02-19T02:44:10Z 42803 0 It's a good program; actually, a REALLY good program considering the price (free). I'm not crazy about interface though; icons are too small for my taste, and their design does not make it obvious what they do. If I had Window's ToolTips function disabled, I would have only trial and error to show me the way. And, at least to me, while its operation is simple enough, it is not particularly intuitive. For instance, it took me a couple of minutes to figure out that the little floppy disc icon at the upper left is how tag edits are saved. <DOH!> And it STILL doesn't seem quite right to do it that way. I keep expecting a prompt or a dialog box to pop up. THAT is the normal "Windoze" way of doing things. Secondly, applying tags is pretty slow going. FLAC tags seem VERY slow. While applying new tags to an opera CD I had just ripped, it was, left-click "Save," then "Go Make a Sandwich!" Of course, this CD had 35 tracks. I rip everything twice - first to FLAC for archiving purposes; second to MP3 for use in my car or portable. The slow tagging appears most obvious when embedding an album cover or commentary. ID3 tags go slowly, FLAC tags seem to take FOREVER! Thirdly, the "comment" tag appears to have an operational restriction, at least with cut-and-paste operations. I am used to being able to cut-and-paste editorial reviews into this space. If I select the track(s) to which I want to add commentary, then right click, then left-click on "Extended Tags...", then select "COMMENT", AND THEN left-click on the "Edit field..." icon, I can paste text of any length into the field. A lot of folderol if you ask me. Especially since there is a "Comment:" field in the Tag Panel which would seem to invite the logical conclusion that one could also perform that simple paste operation there, too. NOPE! No joy... For some quirky reason, that field will accept one paragraph and stop at the indent to the next. WTF???? Granted, not everyone uses this field as I do, but I think this qualifies as an honest-to-goodness bug, not a "feature." I downloaded and installed Mp3Tag because of the rave user reviews, but up to then, I had been using Tag&Rename by Softpointer, a company specializing in music organizing software. Personally, I still like Tag&Rename better. It was more intuitive out of the box and faster too (A LOT faster on FLAC tagging). What's more, it lacks the frustrating (at least to me) cut-and-paste bug I mentioned above. But Tag&Rename is not free; at $30 it is not even particularly cheap. Nevertheless, I still recommend that program over Mp3Tag on the grounds that it is more polished, without the flaws that make Mp3Tag more cumbersome to use. Tag&Rename is available for download as 30-day, fully functional expireware from Softpointer.com for those who want to see for themselves before they buy if it is worth the $30. I recommend Mp3Tag to people who balk at spending $30 for Tag&Rename or who don't mind the flaws I have mentioned. For myself, I will continue to use Mp3Tag for awhile longer and see if my opinion changes as I get more used to its quirks. 7743030 2007-05-02T16:05:05Z 1516 2009-12-01T02:50:29Z Mp3tag 1671 2009-11-28T15:06:46Z http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html http://wakoopa.com/software/mp3tag http://mallow.wakoopa.com/avatars/000/002/632/normal.png?1238515965 http://mallow.wakoopa.com/avatars/000/002/632/thumb.png?1238515965 726 Florian Heidenreich http://wakoopa.com/developers/florian-heidenreich Manage your audio and video 26 Management http://wakoopa.com/categories/audio-video/management win Mp3tag is a powerful and yet easy-to-use tool to edit metadata (ID3, Vorbis Comments and APE) of common audio formats. It can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words from tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more. The program supports online freedb database lookups for selected files, allowing you to automatically gather proper tag information for select files or CDs. Mp3tag supports the following audio formats: * Advanced Audio Coding (aac) * Free Lossless Audio Codec (flac) * Monkey's Audio (ape) * Mpeg Layer 3 (mp3) * MPEG-4 (mp4 / m4a / m4b / iTunes compatible) * Musepack (mpc) * Ogg Vorbis (ogg) * OptimFROG (ofr) * OptimFROG DualStream (ofs) * Speex (spx) * Tom's Audio Kompressor (tak) * True Audio (tta) * Windows Media Audio (wma) * WavPack (wv) Main features: * Write ID3v1.1-, ID3v2-, APEv2-Tags and Vorbis Comments to multiple files at once * Full Unicode support * Support for embedded cover art * Automatically create playlists * Recursive subfolders support * Remove parts or the entire tag of multiple files * Rename files based on the tag information * Import tags from filenames * Format tags and filenames * Replace characters or words from tags and filenames * Regular Expressions * Export tag information to user-defined formats (like html, rtf, csv, xml) * Import tag information from online databases like freedb or Amazon (also by text-search) * Import tag information from local freedb databases * Support for ID3v2.3 (ISO-8859-1 and UTF-16) and ID3v2.4 with UTF-8 * and much more ... 2009-01-26T00:21:20Z 38412 0 Features? Can play damned near everything out of the box. With the right plug-ins can play ABSOLUTELY everything. It's nearly infinitely customizable, too; at least for users who bother to learn it's arcane scripting language. Performance? Rock-solid stable, quick to initialize, light on memory and hard drive footprints and not a CPU hog, either. The only fault I've found is that it sometimes crashes or hangs when run in Linux through WINE. Price/value? Totally free; no adware, no spyware, no nagware to "upgrade" to a registered (translation: NOT-free) version. Quality software for free with no strings; how much better can it get? Interface? Here is the catch. Default interface is very spartan - to a fault - and ugly to boot. Unnecessarily ugly. Default interface doesn't even have a volume control. The controls that do exist are frustratingly tiny on even a medium-high-res (like my 1440x900) screen. Of course, it's possible to improve the look and usability fairly easily. And with a LOT of work, one can make FB2K look really dazzling, without making it into a resource pig like iTunes. For a sophisticated user, FB2K is arguably the best media player available at any price. But for an average non-geek user, FB2K is simultaneously too much and not enough; too much under the hood, not enough default interface. Not everyone needs to play "every damned thing" and not everyone wants to cope with what it takes to learn how to customize FB2K to suit their usability requirements. 111146483 2007-04-27T06:37:05Z 356 2017-09-17T22:06:13Z foobar2000 4294 2009-11-30T00:29:04Z http://foobar2000.org http://wakoopa.com/software/foobar2000 http://mallow.wakoopa.com/avatars/000/015/746/normal.png?1238703092 http://mallow.wakoopa.com/avatars/000/015/746/thumb.png?1238703092 270 Peter Pawlowski http://wakoopa.com/developers/peter-pawlowski Manage your audio and video 26 Management http://wakoopa.com/categories/audio-video/management win linux Foobar2000 is a freeware audio player for Windows developed by Peter Pawlowski, a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft. Featuring a minimalist interface, it also boasts many features for metadata support and high-quality audio output. The theoretical maximum sampling rate and bit depth for audio output are both far in excess of the capacities of even professional-grade audio equipment. To maximize the audio fidelity of consumer-grade equipment, it provides noise shaping and dithering. It features a number of official and third-party components which add many additional features. While the core is closed source, the author provides an extensive SDK under the BSD license. Since version 0.9, foobar2000 supports Windows 2000 and later releases only. Features: audio formats supported natively: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA; more audio formats supported through optional components, official or third-party; full unicode support; customizable user interface layout (new in version 0.9.5); advanced tagging capabilities; support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component; ReplayGain support - both playback and calculation; customizable keyboard shortcuts; open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.