Choosing a newsreader is a very subjective matter, but here is the one I like to use (and have used for a long time). RSS Bandit is an RSS and Atom feed reader, allowing you to subscribe, organize and read newsfeeds. It also allows you to merge feeds from multiple sources into a single page for easier browsing.
Main features include:
- Organize feeds in categories;
- Integrated search
- Comments viewing and posting;
- Import and Export Feeds;
- Customizable views;
- Many others;
Many customization options like:
- Update Interval (for each feed);
- Custom display formatters;
- Fonts and Colors;
- Treatment of attachments and podcasts;
- Various browser security restrictions (Images, JavaScript, ActiveX, etc.);
- Item expiration policy;
Overall a very attractive newsreader, deserving a look by anyone looking for the right newsreader. Adding feeds is very easy – I usually just drag the link from the browser and drop in RSS Bandit. Strongly recommended.
HTTrack is a software that helps you to mirror whole or partial web sites to a local directory, so you can view them offline. It features many settings to control the download and crawling as well as how to build the local site structure.
It can follow links inside java script or flash and can be used with POST requests of forms. Here are (IMO) the most important features:
- GUI and Command line version to be used in scripts;
- Support for multiple simultaneous connections
- User definable filters for file type, location, size, structure depth, etc.
- Resuming interrupted downloads
- Quick updating of already downloaded sites
- Speed limitations for the transfers
- Support for different structures for the downloaded sites (sub-folders, single folder, etc.)
- Support for mms:// URLs
Overall a very useful piece of software, which proves its worth every time I use it.
YPOPs! is a free application, that provides free POP3 and SMTP access to Yahoo! e-mail. It provides a gateway, which converts the POP3 requests from your e-mail client to requests to Yahoo! web-mail. In other words you can use Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook, Eudora, or any other POP3 e-mail client to get and send your e-mails.
You can also set it to empty the Bulk and Trash folders on exit. It can also put your sent e-mails to your Yahoo! web-mail sent folder. It is very easy to configure and work straight after the installation.
JAlbum is an awesome web album generator, that creates web albums from set of digital pictures. At first when I found out it is written in Java, I was skeptical about the speed it will generate the albums with. I was wrong! It is a very nice application with very reasonable speed. Here are the features I liked the most:
Support for Skins
Skins (a.k.a. themes) define the look and feel of your gallery. Extensive Skin Repository is available with skins from multiple authors. Of course you could make your own, but there are plenty to choose from. Several skins are installed “standard” with the program. There is support for skin-related options in the GUI, depending on the skin. My favorite skin BluPlusPlus has myriad of customization options.
Create Album from Folder Structure
It is very nice that JAlbum creates the album structure, based on the input folder structure. This way as your photos are arranged in folders and subfolders anyway it is very easy to create an album out of them. If you need folder thumbnails in the album, make sure to select a photo for a thumbnail in the JAlbum GUI. Also worth mentioning is that when you update an existing album, you could select to only process the files that are new, which considerably speeds up the generation process.
Familiar Explorer-like Interface
The user interface is arranged as Windows Explorer with a folder tree on the left and thumbnail view on the right side. Supports dragging and dropping files. You can easily organize a large number of images.
Image Manipulation
You can set it to extract metadata from the images (IPTC, EXIF, etc.) like camera, aperture, shutter speed, and others. Image filtes can be applied for watermarking, rotating, adding borders, etc.
The program actually supports any kind of file, not just images, so you can include along with the photos PDFs or Word Documents for example.
Web Publishing
JAlbum can directly upload the generated album to an ftp site or use the integrated web server. When uploading to an ftp site and you are updating your album, you can select “Smart Upload” and JAlbum will check which files are already on the server and will not re-upload them.
Here are several of screenshots.
I looked around for some time for a freeware to convert PowerPoint documents to flash (.swf) for publishing to web sites and have found only three alternatives. Both have their pros and cons, but I will just list them and not go into much details.
To test I have picked a 12 slide presentation heavy with graphics and animations. Here is what I think:
AJSoft PPT2SWF – offers a very basic user interface and very few options. Quality and dimensions can be set. Be careful not to switch to other applications during conversion, because it will capture the topmost window for some reason. I couldn’t quite make it work with transition effects either. Overall I would use this one if all other options are exhausted. The generated .swf was quite much bigger than the presentation itself.
authorPOINT Lite – Most options of the three and most polished user interface. The UI was very intuitive, even though it needs some more work on the import dialog. authorPOINT supports slide notes and titles, presenter’s logo, batch conversion for queuing multiple files (a very useful feature since the conversion may be slow). The produced flash presentation is very nice looking and you can choose from several different templates for the presentation and the presentation contains a Print button. The generated folder with files was about twice as small than the .ppt file and took about 25% of the time it took PPT2SWF. Very nice application and strongly recommended! This would be my first choice when I do a conversion.
Speechi Light – Installs as a add-on to PowerPoint and creates it’s own menu. There are no settings at all in the light version. Just a simple Print to Flash. It generated the smallest set of files about 20% of the .ppt file size and was the fastest. The quality of the generated view is very good, but it has the large Speechi logo in two places in the presentation. It would be my second choice if authorPOINT didn’t work. Another annoyance is that in order to download and install you must register with their web-site and activate the product after installation. Generated content on the left.
My conclusion is that authorPOINT Lite is far ahead of the other two in both capabilities and options for generated content.
Choosing a newsreader is a very subjective matter, but here is the one I like to use (and have used for a long time). RSS Bandit is an RSS and Atom feed reader, allowing you to subscribe, organize and read newsfeeds. It also allows you to merge feeds from multiple sources into a single page for easier browsing.
