Sleipnir is a web browser that's popular in Japan and pretty much unheard of in the rest of the world. The Windows-only browser lets users choose between the rendering engines used by market leaders Internet Explorer and Firefox. But Sleipnir is more than just a pretty front end for either browser. It's a standalone tool that provides users with a huge number of customization options.
Fenrir, the company behind the free browser, has been making an English language version for a while now, but Computer World reports that the company is stepping up its efforts to promote the browser outside of Japan.
Here are a few of the things that make Sleipnir worth checking out:
If you install the optional Gecko plugin, you can switch between the Firefox and Internet Explorer rendering engines with the click of a button. You can do something similar with the IETab add-on for Firefox, but Sleipnir includes this functionality out of the box.
When you select text, a box shows up on screen letting you search for that text on the web or translate the text from English to Japanese and vice versa. You can even plot a highlighted address on a map.
Google has finally pulled back the curtain on its so-called Wikipedia killer, Google Knol. We first heard that Google was looking at launching a user-editable encyclopedia-style web services late last year. But to be perfectly honest, a lot's happened in the last 7 months and we kind of forgot about it. Now that it's here, we're not entirely sure it's fair to call it a Wikipedia-killer.
Knol provides a place to find information about topics ranging from lung cancer to toilet clogs. What makes it different from Wikipedia is that while any user can suggest alterations to articles, the original author gets to decide whether or not to include those changes. In theory, this will help prevent people who don't know what they're talking about from ripping apart an article from an authority on a topic. In practice, since anyone can write an article on any topic, whether they know what they're talking about or not, it could be even harder to find reliable information on Knol than Wikipedia.
Knol's saving grace might be that users can write multiple articles on the same topic. So if you think you know how to build a better mouse trap than the 20 other writers who have published their own methods, you can write your own article. Readers can then rank stories so hopefully only the most accurate and/or helpful "knols" will find their way to the top of the pile.
Creating a Knol is fairly straightforward. You just sign in with your Google account and start writing. You can also import documents create in Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF or TXT file.
Ever wonder which site provides a higher ratio of internal to external links, Engadget or Download Squad? Want to know if there's a hidden message in the headers of a web page? URl-info can help.
Here's how it works. Visit the site, enter a URL, and hit go. Pretty simple, eh? What you get is some basic information about the web page, including the server operating system, what kind of web analytics the site uses (although the only one we managed to detect was Google Analytics on a handful of sites), and a list of images and internal and external links on a site.
If you click the Images tab, you can scroll your mouse over the URLs of images to see thumbnail versions. The links tab provides a list of links and a nifty graphic showing the ratio of internal to external links. In other words, you can find a whole bunch of information you never really needed. But if you have nothing better to do with your day than try to dig up some stats about your favorite web sites, this is the tool for you.
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has big dreams for Linux. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's been following the progress of Ubuntu, which releases a major update every six months and keeps getting more and more user friendly. But user friendly is just the beginning. Shuttleworth wants Linux to be prettier too. In fact, he's calling on open source developers to make desktop Linux more attractive than OS X within 2 years.
Shuttleworth's remarks came yesterday at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, or OSCON. Open source developers have been making great strides in this area recently. Many Linux distributions include support for Compiz desktop effects which add a bit of visual bling to the desktop experience while also making things like switching virtual desktops a bit easier. And the developers behidn the KDE desktop environment have scrapped the Windows-like interface of KDE 3 and replaced it with a whole new paradigm in KDE 4 -- we're note entirely convinced that KDE 4 is easier to use than KDE 3, but it's certainly prettier.
On the other hand, it's a bit funny to hear Shuttleworth talk about making Linux more beautiful. After all, Ubuntu is frequently mocked for its default dull brown color scheme. But the operating system and its user interface are already extraordinarily customizable.
What do you think? Is it possible for desktop Linux to become as "beautiful," and user-friendly as OS X within 2 years? What would it take? And keep in mind, it's not like Apple is going to just sit still while Linux developers are working on the challenge. Who knows what the Mac OS will look like two years from now?
Orca Browser is a web browser based on Firefox 3 which offers a bunch of features that you'd only get in Firefox by adding plugins and tweaking your browser settings. Orca is made by the same folks who develop the Avant Browser, which is based on Internet Explorer.
So what does Orca offer that you won't find in the standard version of Firefox 3? First up, it's fast. Like ridiculously fast. Like, if you thought Firefox 3 rendered web pages more quickly than Firefox 2, you an't seen nothing yet fast. If that's not enough for you, there's also a service that lets you save your passwords, bookmarks, RSS feeds and other configuration settings online. That way you can sync your settings between Orca browsers installed on multiple machines.
Orca is also extremely customizable. You can adjust the toolbars and other elements of the browser with just a few clicks. And Orca comes with about 20 skins preloaded, making it easy to change the color scheme. The only major problems we see is that Orca des not support Firefox 3 add-ons, and that the browser is Windows only.
Have you ever wondered what Comic Sans, Times New Romans, or Futura fonts would look, sound, and act like if they were people? Yeah, neither have we. But after watching the video above, we can't believe the thought had never occurred to us. This video from College Humor probably qualifies as the funniest thing we've ever seen. At least today.
The short film also raises some serious issues though, like who the heck comes up with the names for these fonts? And has anybody ever used wingdings for anything? Why exactly is that font taking up space in Windows?
It's 2am and you really, really, really need to get in touch with your significant other to let them know how sorry you are about the thing you said earlier that night. But you're a bit tipsy, and they're probably asleep and you don't want to wake them up. So what do you do? Make a call that goes directly to voicemail of course. Because nothing says "I'm sorry babe," like a rambling voicemail message. And that's where slydial can help.
Slydial lets you make a call to any landline or cellphone number in the US and go straight to voicemail. Just call 267-slydial (that's a Pennsylvania area code, in case anyone was wondering), and while listening to the somewhat amusing, somewhat offensive introduction, just enter the number of the person you want to call. Slydial will play a rather obnoxious ad and then connect you to the voicemail. The person you're calling will then get a missed call and/or voicemail message, but their phone will never ring. It's sort of like sending a text message. But with voice. And without the SMS fees.
If you want to avoid the obnoxious advertisement part of the equation, you can also register for an account and pay $.15 per call or $4.95 a month for unlimited calls. You know, in case you like to leave a *lot* of voicemails, but can't stand actually speaking with people in real-time.
Online music sites Pandora and Last.fm do a great job of providing you with streaming music you might like based on your listening history. But what they don't do a great job of us letting you listen to any song you want at any time. That's because music labels actually want you to do things like you know, go out and buy the songs.
But in this new information age, practically any song you could ever want to hear has been uploaded to one web site or another. All you need to know is how to use search engines like Google to find them. And that's where music search engines/players like SeeqPod come in. The site doesn't actually host any audio, it just provides the means to play audio hosted on other sites. So while the music may kind of sort of be illegally hosted, SeeqPod isn't violating any laws.
Favtape combines some of the best features of Seedpod and Pandora and Last.fm, with a whole lot of muxtape thrown in for good measure. Here's how it works. You visit Favtape.com, enter your Pandora user profile or your Last.fm username and Favtape will find your favorites and/or bookmarks. It will then create a playlist out of those songs by tracking down the music from other sources online.
The upshot is that you should get a playlist with up to 10 songs that you've already said you like, and you can hit the play button to listen at any time without any of the limiations imposed by Pandora or Last.fm. The downside is that sometimes Favtape will think it found your song when in fact it found another song with a similar file name. See that BNL link above? Yeah, when we clicked play we got some song we'd never heard before and didn't particularly much care for.
Want to watch your DVD collection on your iPod, iPhone, PSP, Smartphone, PDA, or Zune? DVD Catalyst is a simple Windows application that can rip a 2 hour movie from your DVD and apply video compression so that the file fits on your portable device's storage card and still looks halfway decent on your mobile screen.
DVD Catalyst offers one-click DVD ripping and encoding. Just launch the program, select your portable device, slide a DVD into your disc drive, and click the little green button. The program will choose the best resolution, bit rate, and other settings for you.
Up until recently, only a commercial version of DVD Catalyst was available. But now there's a free version with a limited feature set. If you want advanced features like the ability to set 2-pass conversions, split videos into multiple parts, or adjust the volume and framerates, you might want to shell out $15 to $20 for a full version. But if you're looking for a quick and easy way to cram a few dozen DVD movies on your iPod, DVD Catalyst Free might be all you need.
If your computer is running slowly or a program has stopped responding, you can fire up the Windows Task Manager, identify the runaway process, and kill it. That works fine when the process is clearly labeled with a name like firefox.exe or digsby.exe. But what do you do with rapimgr.exe or hpqste08.exe?
ProcessQuicklink is a free add-on for Windows Task manage that helps you figure out which program a process is associated with. Because the last thing you want to do is kill the wrong process and reboot your PC when all you wanted to do was stop your media player from blasting music at you.
Once ProcessQuicklink is installed, you'll notice little information icons next to each process int he Task Manager. Click on any icon and you'll be taken to a Uniblue Process Library web site where you can read more about the process in question. It'd be nice if the information was instantly available without opening a new web page, but we'll take what we can get. ProcessQuicklink does save you the few seconds you'd otherwise spend typing a process name into Google.
Windows Explorer keeps getting a tiny bit better with each new Windows release. But for some reason Microsoft refuses to offer one thing that many other file managers have had for years: a two-pane window. If you want to copy files from one folder to another, you need to open two separate Explorer windows.
There are a whole slew of free replacements for Windows Explorer. But one of the new kids on the freeware block is AccelMan, a utility that you used to have to pay for, but which was recently set free. Make sure to download and install the registry key from the download page or you'll just get a 30 day free trial.
In addition to a two-pane window, AccelMan has a ton of powerful features, including:
A built in media player with a playlist manager
A file viewer that will show images, PDF, Office, and other documents
The image viewer includes basic editing capabilities
Install TrueType Fonts without using the Control Panel
Compress and extract files in 15 formats including ZIP, RAR, TAR, ACE, and GZIP
Built-in file splitter
Hexadecimal editor
AccelMan is also extraordinarily customizable. There are about a dozen different schemes to choose from, or you can tweak the interface yourself and save a new scheme.
3 out of 4 doctors recommend reading Download Squad every day. But if you've been a bit too busy to keep up, here are a few of our favorite stories from the past week. Read them over and call us in the morning if you don't feel better.
Lesser known weapons to trick out your malware arsenal You probably know all the big names in antivirus, anti-spyware behavior. But just because companies like Norton, Symantec, McAfee, Spybot, and AdAware get all the attention doesn't mean they're the only games in town. We have a roundup of some of our favorite anti-malware applications you probably haven't heard of, but should definitely check out.
10 tools to pimp out your FriendFeed Apparently we've been feeling all listy this week, because in addition to a list of anti-malware tools, we published a list of 10 tools to spruce up your FriendFeed page. Whether you want to filter the info that shows up in FriendFeed, or to read FriendFeed on your mobile phone, we've got you covered.
VLC Media Player 0.9.0 pre-release adds Last.fm support and more VLC is already one of the most full-featured video players around. And it happens to be free and open source to boot. This week the developers pushed out a preview version of VLC 0.9.0 with one new killer feature: integrated support for streaming music service Last.fm.
Ask DLS: Web browsing for the color blind Between 8 and 10 percent of males have some degree of color-blindness, but surprisingly few web designers take this into account. If you have problems distinguishing colors on web pages, you might want to check out the Colorblind Web Page Filter, which attempts to adjust the color scheme of any web site to make it easier to read based on the type of colorblindness you experience.
Opera Mobile 9.5 beta released Opera is doing its part to keep Windows Mobile users from throwing jealous glances at their iPhone-owning friends. Opera Mobile 9.5 beta hit the streets this week, and it offers a Mobile Safari-like drag, drop and zoom interface, super-fast page rendering, and other features to make browsing on a handheld device just a little bit more pleasant.
There's no shortage of music recommendation engines. Whether you want to find music from artists that sound like Madonna or Meat Beat Manifesto, all you have to do is hit up Pandora, Last.fm, or a similar site and pop a name in the box. If the web site starts playing a song you like, you give it a thumbs up, while a thumbs down should help the software avoid playing music that makes you want to throw up in the future.
But one thing that Pandora and Last.fm have in common is that most of the music they play comes from major label artists. If you want to find music from independent artists, you might want to check out StumbleAudio. The web service uses a music recommendation image engine much like the other sites. But all of the artists are independent acts, which means they're either unsigned or signed to smaller labels.
If you find an artist you like, you can flip through the tracks on their album and listen to full length audio streams. Or you can click on the links on the side of the page to purchase digital downloads or physical CDs.
StumbleAudio currently features over 120,000 artists and 2 million songs. We found the recommendations were decent, but not exactly spot on. For example, the service claims it was able to find 388 artists that sound like the Allman Brothers. As far as we can tell, it actually found about 5 or 10 southern rock/blues bands, and a few hundred artists that sound nothing at all like the Allman Brothers.
Flock has released a second public beta of Flock 2, a web browser based on Firefox 3. What sets Flock apart from Firefox is the integration with a ton of social networking services including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, PhotoBucket, and more. There's a blog editor for updating your web site from the browser, and a media bar for viewing images and videos shared by your friends without navigating away from your current web page.
Flock has always been based on Firefox, but what sets Flock 2 beta apart from Flock 1.x is that the beta version is built on Firefox 3. That means you get a redesigned location bar, a new bookmark manager, and a new rendering engine that helps most web pages load faster.
The Flock team has addressed over 175 bugs that were found in the first beta of Flock 2. Aside from bug fixes, there aren't many new features in Flock 2 beta 2. But the browser is based on Firefox 3.01, which means it also includes some important security updates. So if you're using Flock 2 beta 1, we'd recommend upgrading.
IrfanView is a light-weight, but powerful Windows tool for viewing and editing pictures. Version 4.20 is out, and it has a slightly new design, a bunch of bug fixes, and some new features.
At its heart, IrfanView is an image viewer with some editing functions thrown in for good measure. Nobody will mistake it for PhotoShop anytime soon. But you'd be surprised just how much you can do with this free utility.
First of all, IrfanView can handle pretty much any image file type you throw at it. But second, it includes a ton of basic options for editing images, including cropping, resizing, rotating, and applying effects like sharpen, blur, and red eye reduction. Version 4.20 includes a ton of updates, including improved relative zoom, an "auto crop borders" feature which removes outside lines of the same color, and a shiny new icon set.
3 out of 4 doctors recommend reading Download Squad every day. But if you've been a bit too busy to keep up, here are a few of our favorite stories from the past week. Read them over and call us in the morning if you don't feel better.
