Firefox 3 Beta 5

As Firefox 3 is in Beta, and for testing purposes only, (So they say) and I am not (consistently) a web developer, I will simply link to their blog post, and rant about it for a while.

• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• Release Notes

I can’t in good conscience review an unfinished product. It would go against everything I stand for! Actually, it would just bug me, and I’d have to review it again later. Don’t ask me about how I avoid reviewing every other minor release, I don’t know.

This is only sort of a cop-out from doing a real review. I want to put this in bright colors, but I’ll put it in bold instead: Read the release notes! I would feel bad about listing some of these features here, when the product is unfinished, and they are already listed so nicely there.

Now for the ranting part:
I am going to have a huge amount of trouble choosing between Firefox and Flock, now. I suspect I will switch back to Firefox, once the full version is released, but I’ll keep supporting Flock. The main reason for switching back is I haven’t found myself using a lot of the features in Flock, sadly. If a new version of Flock is built on Firefox 3, I suspect I’ll switch to that in short notice, honestly… I am not the most ‘loyal’ person, when it comes to my web browser.

Check out the release notes, if not the beta. I think you’ll find one or two amazing changes that you always wanted to see.

Join the flock! Join the flock!

The iGoogle of Web Browsers. Why download plugins and add-ons for everything you do? Just build Facebook, Photobucket, WordPress, Livejournal, Youtube, Gmail, Yahoo! and much more right into your browser! Bet you all never thought of that!

• www.flock.com

Actually, you may very well have thought of it. I have too, honestly. With all of my excitement over me.dium, I even thought it would be cool to have that built in, but alas. (At least the plugin is supported!) Flock is my web browser now, at any rate. At least for the next few days, until I get bored with it.

When I first installed the program, I was pleasantly surprised to find it automatically aim for ‘C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\My Documents’ instead of C:\Program Files. I have made a habit of doing this myself, (To the point where I have .\My Documents\Program files\ set up for all of my software) because I have a limited account. Now, where I can install in the root directory, and not have to worry about it… Well, Windows is just buggy.

The interface seems clunky at first, the numerous built in sidebars slightly confusing even. But once you start to get used to it, it easily grows on you. And even looks nice. Themes and skins don’t seem to be available just yet, however. Unfortunately, the toolbars don’t seem to remember how you arranged them, more often than not… Particularly the upper pane of the Accounts and Services sidebar expands itself depending on how many accounts you have…

As for extensions and addons, Flock has its own set, and as it is built on the Mozilla engine, most plugins from Firefox will work as well. ChatZilla worked, at any rate.

One of the nicest features so far is the access to my Gmail and Yahoo! accounts. Mailto: links go straight to your default webmail ap. (You can set that) And there is an option to use an external application as well, such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird.

Now, all the nice stuff being said, the project is v1.1, at the moment, and as far as I can tell they only released it to the public in 2007. So there are inevitable bugs. All of them, so far, are fairly easy to look past. I’ll let you know if I find any terrible ones…

And what browser would be complete without its flaws? The blogging feature, for example. In theory, it is very useful, and I believe that it will be incredibly useful in editing my personal blogs. Some function is lacking, however. WordPress blogs, for example, lack in Flock the Post Timestamp field, so you cannot schedule posts using the client.

And very unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be open source. Free, yes. Open source? No…

Check it out, anyway. Hope you like it.

me.dium drink, large fries

The internet gets boring after a while… You feel alone. There are literally hundreds of people accessing the same domain as you at any one time, thousands on the more popular sites… Or tens, on the less popular. me.dium puts that more into perspective…

• me.dium.com
• addons.mozilla.org

I’m quite late to the mark on this one, sorry. But as I never heard of it before, I figure there are probably people out there who haven’t heard of it either. And anyway, what kind of blogger would I be if I didn’t put in my two cents?

Me.dium is a brilliant idea, that I would like to see more people using. It is available to Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Flock. (I’ll be touching on Flock later in the week, don’t you worry)

Basically, it shows you where people who have sharing turned on are on the web, ‘in relation’ to you for lack of a better term. It does not make the web a physical realm, exactly, but it creates a small map of websites based on your browsing habits, and shows you the most popular ones. I’m not sure how well this works, as I’ve only been using it for two days. It seems to work so far, the only problem being that it only shows about seven at any one time…

Beyond that, it allows you to chat with the other users of the plugin. The chat device seems more like a forum, than an IM, but I haven’t tried it with friends.

Aside from the respectable list of supported clients, and the wonderful concept, there are many reasons it has caught my eye. The first one you might notice is that you don’t need to create an account in order to use it. You will be assigned a ‘Guest,’ and have the option of joining later. There is no reduced functionality as far as I can tell, except that you can’t add friends.

This leads us to my only real problem with it: You cannot join unless you are 18, or you lie in the process. I don’t honestly understand the reasoning behind this, especially as there are Guests anyway. But since the guests are no less useful, I can deal with this.

It, of course, does not show everyone on the internet. People can opt not to be seen by others at all, or just by their friends, and anyway it will only show those that have installed me.dium. Let’s hope it grows.

Well that went well.

It turns out, I honestly didn’t have enough time to start such a project as this, and anyway I’m not familiar enough with my software to be of any real help. So we’re changing formats! Only a little. We’ll now cover more than just open-source software, but also freeware, (as long as it’s good) add-ons, (plugins, themes, etc) and services. (You’ll see!)

This should help me get out a bit more activity. I’ll try to schedule posts more, too, so that I can have a few weeks to write stuff up. (I’ll post any news immediately, like this)

We’ll see how this goes. Sister project, Open Chess, is changing formats too a bit… That one might be a little bit more of a personal blog. There isn’t honestly that much free material on chess out there.

Nano isn’t that great

There are many open-source options, when it comes to source editors. As well as when it comes to just editing text — Source editors are equally as useful for this purpose, if you can ignore the syntax highlighting. (Or turn it off) But are they all as flexible as this?

• Notepad++

Notepad++

As is usual with such well-designed software, if I described all of the various useful features in Notepad++ here it would end up looking like the website. But I’ll briefly hit upon some of the better, and worse aspects of the program.

Advantages
For now I’ll focus specifically on just two of many: A tabbed interface, and plugins.

Editing multiple files is made incredibly easy with the tabbed interface. I have found tabs to be handled quite well, actually. There is no clumsiness to it, and it’s relatively simple to get the hang of. You can send tabs to ‘another view’, which in this case means you split the screen and send that tab to the other side. The screen can be split horizontally, or vertically, and right-clicking on the rule in the middle will allow you to rotate them. It is also possible to collapse on view, allowing the other to take up the full screen, although at that point it is necessary to drag the rule back manually.

And plugins are the other one. The two most obvious plugins, which appear with a small collection which are installed with the program, are a hex editor, and an FTP program. There are others; an Explorer plugin that opens a hierarchal list of folders on the left side of the screen, for example.

There are many, many other advantages to this program which I can only mention briefly here, and even then I won’t get them all:

• The files that are open when you close the program (Or the program is terminated) are opened automatically when you start it up again.
• ‘Levels’ can be collapsed, based on the language in use, to hide functions that you aren’t using, and you can hide lines that can’t be collapsed, if you wish.
• There is an ‘indent guide’ that shows you where tabs are, as well as the ability to make whitespace characters (spaces and tabs) and return characters (There’s multiple kinds, rather than a standard, if you didn’t know) visible.

Disadvantage
What review would be complete without the inevitable disclaimer? Luckily, there’s just one! (There may be others, but I’m hardly an expert with the program) There is no built-in help system. Documentation is taken care of entirely on the site, although there is a relatively complete manual available there.

Something to cross-post!

For many professional and semi-professional chess players, as well as some who simply play for the fun or as an educational aid, a database program for chess games can come in very handy. Lucky for them, there’s a free one out there…

• Scid (continued)

Scid (continued)
The name here might require a little bit of explaining. And while that may be better accomplished by the website, I’ll do my best to make it short. Scid itself stands for ‘Shane’s Chess Information Database’. The original creator, (Shane, one presumes) stopped developing and supporting Scid, and no one was allowed to take over the project. Scid (continued) is the newest version, although I’m not sure who it was taken over by. (If you can find anything on the site besides an email address, feel free to let me know.)

Scid is overall a decent, and useful program for the task it was designed for. My main concerns are with the interface: There are one or two bugs that will make themselves known, mainly with the database switcher window; And the program largely ignores Windows standards. At least, it seems such to me. Message boxes are the most glaring example. open and save are relatively standard, though. Most folks probably won’t care, but it is worth note, just in case.

Features, though. UCI engine support, PGN export… Natively, databases are saved in three files. One that stores games, one that stores tags with internal IDs, (Tags being PGN tags; White, Black, Event, Date etc.) and one that stores the actual names for the events and tags. It speeds up database searches, as well as preventing redundancy and allowing you to change a name value quickly for all games, rather than one by one or by a recursive process of any sort. (I haven’t looked at the source code myself, this is what I have read on the site and in the documentation)

There are many other nice features, (Exporting games to an HTML/javascript viewer comes to mind) but it would take far too long to go into all of them in any sort of detail, or even briefly.

Check it out.

Review? It’s the only one out there!

So, Yahoo. A nice, free, email address. Unfortunately, quite some time ago they removed free pop3 access… What to do now? Switch to Gmail?

Probably, but if for some reason you don’t want to switch, Just check out YPOPs!

• YPOPs!

YPOPs!
A review would be very limited, because it does simply what it was made to do: Provides a POP3/SMTP server for Yahoo! email. While the program was last updated in September, 2007, and the source file is even older, (August, ‘06) as is the Linux build, The program works, and is actively supported through the forums. Although, the only Linux build and source files are available from sourceforge, rather than the homepage.

One of the nice things is that it installs on limited user accounts for at least Windows XP. I tend to despise programs that don’t. Once it’s installed, it is easy to use, as far as I can tell. (It is unique, as I said) It was easy for me, anyway. And if it’s not, the website has instructions on setting it up with various email clients, such as Outlook Express, Thunderbird, IncrediMail, and about a dozen more… Check it out.

Look at me, I can name some

What good blog, collection, list, or encyclopedia of open source programs would be complete, without these three well-known programs?

Just the fact that they are well-known makes posting them here seem pretentious. But I feel that if I didn’t include these, someone (I’m not sure who) would form a mob and use the various hints about my location scattered over the internet to track me down.

• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• OpenOffice.org

Mozilla Firefox

500,000,000 Downloads… Need I say more?

Yes, actually. But all I have to say is that there is one minor bug I noticed with Firefox on Windows XP (Home addition, but I forget the details. Not tested on any other OS): Firefox upgrades separately for each user account, (as opposed to in one go) so when it’s updated by an administrator, every time you run it on a limited account you get an error. No updating things for limited users. Maybe not a bug, and if it is, maybe with Windows, but it is worth note none the less.

Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla’s answer to Outlook Express. I can’t say how it’s better, I haven’t used OE in some time. But I’ve found adding new accounts, removing old ones, and editing them to be very easy so far, and I’m sure I never had as much luck with other software. It can also read RSS feeds, and organize them nicely… I like to use Thunderbird for feeds more than Firefox’s live bookmark function, if only because I can view the entries as though they were emails, and they are saved locally.

OpenOffice.org

First, let it be noted that I have no more than a cursory knowledge of OpenOffice.org. I do not use it, but from what I have seen it is easily worth linking. And as I said, the blog would not feel complete without the program at least receiving a reference and a link. It’s a word processor that handles text and rich text, (of course) but it can also do spreadsheets, images, it functions as an HTML viewer in addition to just an editor, (It also apparently runs Java applets) among other things. I cannot begin to attempt a full description, I’d have to use it more often. Check it out.

Open source reviews, eh?

Yes, it is true. I, Zalethon, have created yet another blog.

I decided, after posting the umpteenth review of open source software to my personal blog, (boring, don’t bother unless you’re a friend) to create one here. I was originally going for blogspot blog, because I discovered I have an account there after a friend recently set up an account. But someone already had the name ‘opensourcereviews‘. (Alright, I admit, I stole it… But they weren’t doing anything with it. Maybe later I’ll steal their motto!) Also, wordpress looks classy.

Now, don’t expect this blog to be a marvel of modern reporting. I, in my infinite teenage wisdom, am only going to post reviews of programs I have actually used, and I’m not going to go hunting just so I can post reviews here. So updates will be irregular at best. I will try to stick with it, though, instead of just letting the site go to waste. It is a useful domain name… And I have already been annoyed by such stale domains as opensource.wordpress.com

Also, my definition of review is lax. In most cases I will, after getting a feel for the program for a week or so, post a few words about its positive and negative aspects, and a link.

Now that’s all out of the way… Later in my life, like when I get one, I might move this to an actual domain name, so that I can have forums and such. But maybe not. We’ll see.