CyberNet News » Freeware

Growl Becoming a Must-have App on Windows?

Ryan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:37:43 +0000

Windows-focused
Having bought my first Mac about a year and a half ago one app that I quickly started to love was Growl. It brought a universal notification system to the operating system that any application could make use of, and the cross-program uniformity made the OS experience that much better.

Then came along Growl for Windows, which was something I took a quick liking to once the Prowl iPhone app was released. I wasn’t sure what kind of future Growl had on Windows since we had already seen other apps like Snarl start to fade out despite being updated regularly. It just didn’t catch on for me.

Growl, however, has become something I’ve installed on all my Windows machines. The notifications are clean and prominent, which can be a combination that is tough to come by. Not to mention the fact that there are also a variety of themes available. My favorite is definitely the Smokestack theme pictured above.

The new version 2.0 that was just released supports images in the notifications, can tell an app when a notification is clicked, can forward of notifications to an email address, and much more. And, of course, we can’t forget about the rapidly growing list of supported apps:

Autotest – Get informed when your tests pass or fail.
Emacs – Send and receive Growl notifications from within emacs.
Firefox – Alerts you when Firefox has started, finished, or failed downloading a file.
Feed Monitor – Alerts you when RSS and Atom feeds are updated.
Foobar2000 – Get notified when playing starts, stops, or is paused.
Gmail – Gmail Growl keeps you updated on new mails in your Gmail Inbox in a fancy way.
Google Reader – Get notified of new feed items in Google Reader.
Google Voice – Alerts you to new voicemails, text messages, call recordings, and more.
Google Wave – Get notified of new Waves.
Growlbook for Facebook – Get notifications for friend requests, messages, pokes, invites, and more.
iTunes – Alerts you to the currently playing track in iTunes.
Irssi – Alerts you when your name is highlighted, you receive a private message, and when someone joins/leaves a conversation.
jWeatherWatch – Get the current weather and forecasts for multiple locations.
Last.fm – Alerts you to the currently playing track on the Last.fm website.
MediaMonkey – Alerts you to the currently playing track in MediaMonkey.
Outlook – Get notified of appointment reminders and when new mail arrives.
OWATray (Outlook Web Access) – Get notified of new Exchange mail without having to keep an OWA browser constantly open.
Pandora AIR – Alerts you to the currently playing track in the Pandora AIR application.
Pandora Website – Alerts you to the currently playing track on the Pandora website.
Pidgin – Get Growl notifications for all kinds of Pidgin notifications.
Postbox – Alerts you when Postbox receives new mail or RSS updates.
Powershell – Send Growl notifications from your Powershell scripts.
SageAlert for SageTV – Get notified for all kinds of SageTV events.
SkypeToGrowl – Get notified of incoming Skype calls.
Songbird – Pops up a notification when the currently playing track changes.
System Monitor – Get notified of system-type events like low disk space, battery life, USB devices inserted & removed and more.
Thunderbird – Alerts you when Thunderbird receives new mail or RSS updates.
TV Browser – Get reminded when your favorite TV shows are starting.
Trowl (Twitter) – Get notified of Twitter mentions, DM’s, and friends’ tweets.
Twitulater – Get notified of new tweets and much more.
uGrowl (uTorrent) – Get notified when torrents are added, start, or finish.
Visual Studio – Get notified of success or failure when builds complete.
Vuze (Azureus) – Notifies you of completed downloads.
Witty (Twitter) – Get of new tweets, @replies, and direct messages. Sends summary notifications if you get too many updates at once.
Yawcam (Motion Detection) – Get notified when your webcam detects motion, and then view streaming video of the activity.
Yip – Transform any Fluid or Prism notifications into Growl notifications.

It’s tough to say how this app will pan out in the end, but I think it has a really bright future. Let us know in the comments whether you’ve given it a whirl, and how you feel about it.

Growl for Windows Homepage (Freeware)

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Regular Expression Generator and Tester

Ryan — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:51:18 +0000

Windows only
I always find myself using regular expressions (a.k.a. regex) in my programming because they are often the best way to parse out bits and pieces from blocks of text. Ever since I discovered the online RegExr that has been my tool of choice, but sometimes it’s nice to have a dedicated application. Programs like RegexBuddy are awesome, but aren’t free.

When I came across an app called The Regulator I was pretty surprised to see that the developer wasn’t charging for it. Sure it didn’t look as powerful as RegexBuddy, but I had yet to come across a regex program that you didn’t have to pay for. So naturally I jumped in and started using it.

Basically, I’ll say that it isn’t really anything to die over, but the fact that it’s available offline is really a nice touch. You can enter in your regular expression, and then there’s a box where you can place the text that you want to test it with. Or, one of the nice features is that you can also provide the path of a text file that you want to have loaded in and run against the regex you generated. I’d say that it has all of the basic functionality you’d expect from a regular expression tester.

And then I saw that the developer had also created another rather interesting app called ReguLazy. This program, which is also free, tries to generate regular expressions for you. It took me a few minutes to understand how it works, but this can be helpful for anyone new to regular expressions. It will basically let you highlight blocks of text, right-click on them, and choose whether you want it to allow a string of numbers or letters (along with their corresponding length). The downside… this definitely doesn’t let you generate advanced regular expressions, and so it’s probably not something more advanced users will find useful. This animation should give you a better sense of what it’s used for:

The Regulator Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)
ReguLazy Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

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Quickly Add Media to iTunes When It’s Not Running

Pieter — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:59:45 +0000

Windows; Mac
Sometimes, Apple sneaks in new features into their software without ever making a big deal out of it. When iTunes 9 was released, they made it possible to add files to iTunes without even launching the app. The secret to this trick not as far-fetched as you might think…

The key to this feature is a subdirectory of the folder where iTunes keeps your data. Depending on your OS, your iTunes library has a different default location:

Windows XP: \Documents and Settings\your username\My Documents\My Music\
Windows Vista and up: \Users\your username\Music\
Mac OS X: /Users/your username/Music

Once you’ve found your iTunes library, look inside the iTunes Media (or iTunes Music) folder to discover a directory called “Automatically Add to iTunes”. Anything you put in that folder will be added to your iTunes library next time iTunes launches. If iTunes was unable to recognize the type of a file you dropped in that folder, it will be moved into a subdirectory called Not Added. Most of you will probably use it strictly for MP3s anyway, so you should be safe.

Taking it a step further: downloading MP3s straight into iTunes using Firefox
If you’re a huge MP3 downloader, you can set up Firefox to automatically download MP3s to the “Automatically Add to iTunes” folder. You can do this by installing Automatic Save Folder and configuring a default download location for MP3 files as shown below.

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How to Reduce Firefox’s Memory Usage

Pieter — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:47:15 +0000

It’s a common problem among Firefox power users: you’ve been surfing the web for some time and all of a sudden Firefox’s memory footprint goes through the roof. And although Mozilla’s developers do their best to ensure that Firefox is stable, many people play a part in the browser’s memory leaks without knowing it. So how do you get Firefox to run smoothly again?

Do you really need that Firefox extension?
In my opinion, Firefox’s support for add-ons is one of its most valuable features, but there’s a catch: the longer Firefox has been installed on your hard drive, the more extensions you install and the slower Firefox becomes. That’s why it’s not a bad idea to uninstall extensions you don’t use. If you want to keep a certain extension around just in case, disable it to prevent it from being loaded on startup.

Disable all unnecessary plugins
Aside from your extensions, there are some hidden memory eaters in Firefox that you may want to get rid off: plug-ins you didn’t even ask for. Common plug-ins you might want to disable of include Microsoft Silverlight, Java, Google Update, QuickTime, RealPlayer and Adobe Reader. If you disable the latter, you won’t be able to view PDFs in your browser. Instead, you’ll be prompted with the standard download dialog. Unlike extensions, plugins can be disabled/enabled without restarting your browser.

Reboot Firefox with a hotkey while saving your tabs
Rebooting Firefox is one of the most effective ways to lower its memory footprint. Originally intended for use by extension developers, QuickRestart does just that. Just press Ctrl+Alt+R to reboot Firefox while conserving your currently opened tabs.

Use Safe mode
Vista Rewired suggests using Firefox’s Safe mode in situations where you just need the basic browser. In Safe mode, all your extensions are disabled. You can find a shortcut to Firefox’s Safe mode in its Start Menu folder. Alternatively, you can launch it with the -safe-mode parameter. Visit Vista Rewired here for more details.

Hack: save Firefox’s state on your hard drive when minimized
In 2006, Ryan wrote about a way to have Firefox save its state on your hard drive when it’s minimized. This involves creating a setting of the boolean type in Firefox named config.trim_on_minimize with value true. Although this might free up some memory when Firefox is minimized, it may cause a slight delay when you restore Firefox’s main window. If you want to activate this hack, check out the how-to here.

Start with a clean slate
For that extra speed boost, you should consider starting out with a clean Firefox install. To do this, you’ll need to delete your entire profile folder. If you’re not sure where to find this folder, you might want to read Mozilla’s explanation here. Unless you don’t mind your bookmarks being wiped, ensure that they are backed up. Also note that this will not only delete your bookmarks, but also your extensions, your settings, your saved passwords, your history and so on. That’s a lot of data you’re throwing away, but obviously that’s the reason why wiping your profile is so effective.

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Access SkyDrive in Windows Explorer

Ryan — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:46:20 +0000

Windows only (32/64-bit)
I love the fact that Microsoft gives users a free 25GB of storage for files through SkyDrive, but I think they’re able to do that because they don’t provide an easy way for people to upload things. That way most people will never come close to hitting their 25GB limit, but that may change with the free SkyDrive Explorer app.

As the name implies this will make your SkyDrive account accessible right there in Windows Explorer… exactly what I’ve been wanting. From there you can drag-and-drop files into any of your SkyDrive directories, or copy down files that you’ve already uploaded. Once you’ve uploaded a file or folder you can then right-click on it to grab the URL that can then be used to send to other people you want to share it with. This is perfect for sharing music or photos with friends and family! It’s fast, simple, and makes it so that you never even have to visit the SkyDrive site.

Here’s what you can do with SkyDrive Explorer:

View the structure and contents of folders in SkyDrive
View files information (type, size, creation date in GMT format)
Create new root folders and subfolders
Copy files into the storage
Delete files and folders
Copy files from the storage to the computer
Copy folders and subfolders from the storage to the computer keeping their structure
Use Drag & Drop for files operations
Rename files and folders
Create links to SkyDrive folders on your computer
Copy URL of the selected object(s) to the Clipboard

The one downside is a limit of the SkyDrive service itself… and it’s that you can’t upload files larger than 50MB. What would be cool is if a future version of SkyDrive Explorer would automatically split files up into 50MB chunks! It’s an awesome app even without that functionality though.

SkyDrive Explorer Homepage (Windows only; 32-bit or 64-bit; Freeware)

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CyberSearch 2.0.2 Released

Ryan — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:23:47 +0000

For those of you using CyberSearch I thought I’d let you know that I just released version 2.0.2 that resolves almost all of the issues users were reporting with Firefox 3.6 Beta 1. The main reason I wanted to let everyone know is that Mozilla hasn’t approved CyberSearch 2.0 yet, which means you won’t receive an update notification in the browser. If you want to update to the latest version you’ll need to head on over to the CyberSearch homepage and install it from there.

I’ve also rolled up several bug fixes in this release, and one simple feature that I meant to include with the original release but never got around to fully implementing it. It’s so simple that I wouldn’t be surprised if you used it without even realizing it. What is it? Pressing the Escape key when you have a result selected should repopulate the address bar with your search phrase. This should be natural for most people… you use the keyboard to highlight a few results, decide they aren’t want you want, and press the Escape key to “cancel” the selection.

I’m trying to make this as user-friendly as possible, and since the release I’ve received over 300 emails that include feature requests, bugs (mostly reports from Firefox 3.6 Beta users… thanks everyone!), and a lot of “thank you” messages. A majority of the feature requests I’ve gotten are great ideas, but won’t be implemented because they stray from my original vision. For example, I’ve received numerous requests to offer the same search functionality in the search box instead of the address bar. The whole goal of CyberSearch is giving you the tools you need to drop the search box all together. So don’t be offended if I don’t agree with your ideas… right now I feel as though I’m teetering on the edge of having something so complicated that no one will want to use it. For that reason I’m very selective with what gets added, and also because CyberSearch currently has over 100,000 users (123,000 at its peak) that I have to take into consideration.

I think I’ve been able to personally respond to every email, but if I haven’t by now feel free to shoot me another one.

CyberSearch Homepage

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CyberSearch 2.0: Bing Support, Search Details, and More

Ryan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:48:08 +0000

I’ve been working on a new version of CyberSearch for a little while now, and I’ve been trying to come up with ways to add all of the most requested features. It wasn’t until about August 2009 that I started to get inspired to work on the extension again, which is when we all of a sudden saw a huge surge in downloads that has remained constant ever since. In the last 3 months we went from getting about 300 downloads a day and 10,000 active users to an astounding 3,000-7,000 downloads a day and almost 90,000 active users. I believe the rapid increase has been coming from the fact that we’re now a Mozilla “recommended” add-on, and as some users have pointed out to me our add-on sometimes shows up in the add-on management window within Firefox. So a big thanks to Mozilla for giving me the motivation to push out a new version, because without them the CyberSearch growth graph probably wouldn’t look like this:

CyberSearch 2.0 is almost a complete rewrite of the previous version, and I did that for performance concerns. Since I wanted to add more features I knew I had to squeeze every last ounce of juice out before I could move on, otherwise I could have ended up with something sluggish enough that people wouldn’t even want to use it. To put it in perspective… CyberSearch 2.0 actually does about half the number of computations that CyberSearch 1.0 did for each search that is performed.

As far as new features go we’ve got quite a few! The first thing is Bing support. You can now create keywords that use either Bing or Google, which is pretty cool if you think about it. That means you can make one keyword that searches Bing, and another that searches Google. If you don’t like the results that one search engine shows just try using the other… and all you have to do is change the keyword. The real reason I wanted to add Bing support, however, is because they have some API functionality that Google doesn’t offer. Thanks to Bing you can actually create keywords that will do conversions/calculations using their Instant Answer technology, or lookup the spelling of a word. You can do this all from the comfort of your address bar.

Next up: search descriptions. This is undoubtedly the most requested feature. You wanted some way to view the descriptions of all the search results just as if you were at the search engine page. I struggled with this for awhile because I didn’t want to try and cram the descriptions into the Address Bar menu which is already cramped, and could require a lot of scrolling to see all the results. That’s when I came up with the idea to use the area behind the menu for this! That way I have a large amount of space to work with, and am able to display way more details than I originally anticipated. For example, if you’re using a keyword with the Google Local service just press the arrows on your keyboard to highlight one of the results. You should see the background behind the menu dim down, and location details will appear… including a thumbnail of a map for where that place is located (as seen in the screenshot above)! All of the different types of searches provide you with customized details (video searches show the duration, book searches provide the ISBN number, blog searches show the publication date, etc…), and screenshots of them all can be found on the CyberSearch homepage.

Those are the two main highlights of the extension, but that doesn’t mean that’s all that changed. You’ll also find little things throughout CyberSearch 2.0 that should make your life a little easier. Things like a “snapback” button in the address for pulling up the last search phrase you used, or the ability to import/export your configuration and keywords so that setting up multiple machines with CyberSearch is a breeze! These were all your ideas, and hopefully they are exactly what you wanted.

When I describe my extension to people they often ask if it’s similar to Google Chrome’s “omnibar,” which is the name for their browser’s address bar. It eliminates the need for a search box just like CyberSearch does, but it isn’t nearly as powerful. Just watch this 3-minute video I put together and tell me if Chrome can do this:

The next thing I want to try and work on is localization so that CyberSearch supports other languages/countries, but it will probably be a little while before I can get to adding any big features like this again. If you find any bugs please report them so that I can try to get them fixed right away. Thanks again for all of your support and feedback!

CyberSearch Homepage

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Free WinX DVD Ripper Platinum

Ryan — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:08:33 +0000

Windows only
Coming across some free software is nice, but what’s even nicer is finding an app that you typically have to pay for that’s available at no cost for a limited time. Do you like the sound of that? If so you may want to check out the currently free (until the end of October) WinX DVD Ripper Platinum that is being given away compliments of Techweenies.

This software is perfect for anyone who’s looking to convert those DVD formats into a format that can pretty much be played on any device. It includes a lot of pre-configured profiles for things like the iPhone, Zune, and more to minimize the amount of tweaking you have to do.

Rip DVD to popular video formats as AVI, FLV, WMV, MPEG, MP4, etc
Rip DVD to popular portable devices including iPhone, iPod, PSP, PDA, Zune, Mobile phone, etc
Support automatically detecting, connecting and transferring converted videos to portable devices
Rip DVD audio into MP3 music file
Support grabbing screenshot from DVD video
Enable to remove or choose subtitles for output videos
All video/audio parameters adjustable for users optimizing video quality
Supper fast ripping speed, up to 300%-500% real time
Best video/audio quality
Easy to use and 100% stable

And here’s a more complete list of supported input/output formats:

Input formats: Normal DVD, CSS protected DVD, region 1-6, Sony ArccOS, Commercial DVD
Output formats: AVI, WMV, FLV, MP4, MPEG, iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, PSP, PDA, 3GP, Zune, Music, XviD, DivX, JPG, BMP

The software normally runs $25 (which appears to be an “on sale” price marked down from $50). What I love is that the version you download through the giveaway page doesn’t require a serial number or anything like that. Just install it and you’ll have the full version. And you can reinstall it on your computer whenever you want.

I’d say you should grab it before October 31st regardless of whether you plan on using it right away. That way the next time you have to rip a DVD you’re not stuck scrounging around for an app that can do it.

WinX DVD Ripper Platinum Giveaway (Windows only; Free until October 31st)

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winLAME: Another Free Audio Converter

Ryan — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:57:01 +0000

A few weeks ago we wrote about a free audio converter that was pretty nice, but when installing the app it tries to also put a bunch of third-party software on your machine. I made sure to point this out, but our readers stepped up and mentioned several other apps that are both free and clean. One of them, called winLAME, was recommended by Ian and really caught my attention. Not only is it free, but it’s also open source.

There were a few reasons why I really liked this app. First, it already has support for Windows 7. Second, it has presets for people looking for no-brainer audio conversion in addition to custom settings for people looking for more control. It’s basically a four-step process: Select your input file(s), select your output settings, choose from one of the quality presets or customize the advanced settings, and then let it go to town. And not only can it convert your audio files, but it can also rip CD’s.

Here’s a more complete list of features and supported formats:

Encoding and decoding of many audio formats, including:
- .mp3 via LAME mp3 encoder (encoding) and MAD (decoding)
- .ogg Ogg Vorbis
- .aac via libfaac/libfaad
- .wav, .aiff, .au, .voc and many more, via libsndfile
- .wma via Windows Media Audio codec
- .flac via FLAC library
Uses LAME features, including:
- high quality and optimized mp3 encoding
- nogap encoding of continuous-mix-cd’s
- optimized 3DNow! and SSE routines
- ID3 v1 and v2 tagging
Easy-to-use wizard-like user interface style for easy encoding setup
CD Audio extraction (aka. CD ripping), including freedb support
Presets for fast settings setup
User interface translations to english and german language
Batch Processing
Detailed HTML Help File
Easy install- and uninstall process
Small size

If you’ve got some audio files to convert this is one app that I highly recommend downloading.

winLAME Homepage
Thanks Ian!

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How to Save a DVD to Your Computer

Pieter — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:29:30 +0000

(Click to Enlarge)

Looking for a way to back up your old DVDs onto your hard drive? Want to watch your purchased DVD movies on your iPod? You’re certainly not the only one. For some reason however, developers are not very keen on developing tools that do this. Luckily, HandBrake has stepped up to the plate with a free tool that lets you take control of your media.

When starting HandBrake for the first time, you might get a little overwhelmed by all the knobs and buttons, especially if you’re not familiar with the audio/video codec lingo. Don’t worry, HandBrake has got your back. It comes with a truckload of presets, each of which with its own purpose. By using these, you don’t have to mess with video settings as long as you know what you want to do with your video. For example, you can convert your DVD to video formats that work with gaming consoles (Xbox 360, PS3 and PSP), the Apple TV and the iPod/iPhone. There’s also a “Classic” preset in case you have no idea which preset you should pick. Keep an eye on your hard drive though, because some of these presets can quickly make your videos take up a lot of space. In my test, the Classic preset used about 40MB for a five-minute video.

HandBrake also gives you the option to rip the DVD subtitles (if available) and embed them into your video. If you’re in the market for this feature, check the Audio/Subtitles tab.

(Click to Enlarge)

There’s one more thing you want to pay close attention to: the aspect ratio. Unless you know for sure that the DVD you want to rip is entirely in widescreen (16:9), you have to intervene before you let HandBrake have a go at your DVD. Otherwise, it will cut off the top and bottom border of the screen when encountering 4:3 video. Depending on your OS, you have to take a different approach to tackle this issue.

Windows users – On the Picture Settings tab, look for the section called Crop and set the Top and Bottom to 0.
Linux users – Click on the preview image at the bottom of the window. In the window that opens, look for the cropping options and set Top and Bottom to 0.
Mac users – Same as with Linux, but instead of clicking a preview image you have to look for a ‘Picture settings’ button.

Once you get that out of the way, you can hit the Start button and go grab a cup of coffee. The ripping process may take a while depending on the speed of your DVD player and the horsepower in your PC/Mac.

Also, remember that you should only use HandBrake for backup purposes or to exercise your personal use rights. Keep it legal, kids.

HandBrake Homepage (Windows, Mac, Linux; Freeware)

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