Description: Favthumbs is a web service that can show del.icio.us bookmarks from any public account as thumbnails or iTunes-style carousel display.

If you use del.icio.us or if you like to browse other people’s public bookmarks on del.icio.us, Favthumbs can make browsing these a much more enjoyable experience. What it does is scan and capture del.icio.us bookmarks collections as thumbnails, and then makes these available in a stylish, sleek looking interface.

This service employs the same principle as Homepage Startup in that both are designed to display pages of bookmarked sites as thumbnails which then can be used as home pages. Here are more notes on this program:

• Del.icio.us accounts: Favthumbs can display any public del.icio.us bookmarks (the URL used will be Favthumbs/name where “name” is the delicious account name. You can optionally provide your Del.icio.us password and retrieve any and all bookmarks that might not be shared publicly.
• Thumbnails: can be resized using a slider. Each thumbnail is captioned with the site name and description. Although the service was able to grab thumbnails for the majority of my bookmarks, for some it simply displayed a blank white rectangle, an “image coming soon” message, or a partially-rendered thumbnail. If you are lucky and all of your thumbnails are rendered adequately then that is great; if not and you end up with a lot of white thumbnails it can reduce the attractiveness of the whole thing considerably.
• Carousel view: this is similar to the iTunes carousel view. A good idea but was less than smoothly animated in my browser window and I must admit to personally prefer the simple thumbnail view to this.
• Tags: del.icio.us tags are displayed on the right hand side of the screen and can be used to filter the displayed thumbnails.

The verdict: such a simple, brilliant idea I am surprised that del.icio.us itself does not provide something like it. Because of this I am now seriously thinking of reviving my otherwise dormant del.icio.us account and using it as my primary bookmarking service. Recommended.

Version Tested: the site as of Aug 12, 2008

Go the Favthumbs page.

Description: Png2swf is a free program that can convert PNG files into an animated flash SWF file. It can process a number of PNG images serially into a SWF file or otherwise batch-create SWF files out of individual PNGs.

If you need to convert PNG images to flash animations or if you need a simple, quick way to create flash SWF animations or banners this program can be extremely useful. Here are some notes on this program:

• Input: can use PNG images as input, preserving their transparency. You can use a single image or multiple images that will be displayed in succession within the resulting SWF.
• Transparency: the transparency in the original PNG (if any) is preserved in the SWF.
• Quality: reducing the quality factor can significantly reduce file size; this operates in a similar manner to what you would expect from JPG compression.
• Delay: when using multiple images in succession it is possible to set delay between them either through the delay field in the program dialog (in seconds) or the FPS field (frame per seconds). The program seems to respond to whichever value you entered in the two boxes that is the largest. Also note that it seems to readily accept fractions of a second if that is what you want.
• Batch operations: it is possible to create a SWF from each PNG in the list rather than a single animated SWF.
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Description: Totally Free Burner is a CD/DVD burner with a nice, minimalistic interface and an excellent range of features.

A nice surprise, this one. Totally Free Burner offers a set of features that will cover most people’s CD/DVD burning needs. It also offers a sleek design and nice look-and-feel as an added bonus. Here are more notes on this program:

• Automatic data verification: for all burning operations.
• Bootable: can create bootable CDs and DVDs (see image to the right).
• Technical specs: an impressive array of configurations supported; “all current hardware interfaces (IDE/SCSI/USB/1394/SATA)”. Multi-Session or Disc-at-Once mode for all formats; any combination of UDF/ISO9660/Joliet bridged file systems, and UNICODE support.
• Burns Audio CDs: supports mp3, wav, ogg and wma files. Does not rip audio cds (use the free BonkEnc or Exact Audio Copy for this).
• Burns disk images: supports ISO and BIN/CUE. Burns images on the fly without first staging locally on your hard drive.
• Burns video CDs: from Mpeg1 VCD files.
• Burns DVDs: for both data and video DVDs. For the latter it can burn from local DVD files or ISO. Supports using UDF format, for compatibility with hardware DVD players.
• Drag and drop: [updated Aug 14, 2008] as of the just released ver. 4.0, supports drag and drop files and folders (a good thing, since adding files and folders individually through the two seperate dialog buttons is not very practical.
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Description: taskTome is a personal information manager that comprises a monthly planner, task list, notes module, and a money-management module. It offers a good set of well-thought-out features while maintaining a clean, intuitive interface.

If you need software to help you organize your appointments, tasks, notes, and/or finances without being overly-laden with features and complications then taskTome is probably what you are looking for. taskTome allows you to use any or all of the four components that it has on offer (Planner/tasks/notes/money), or otherwise to disable any component(s) that you do not care to use.

One thing that I will say about this program is that all four components are very competent in their own right, and all of them manage to offer just the right amount of features/sophistication to make them very useful while still maintaining a very straightforward interface with no learning curve to speak of. Here are more notes on this software:

• Monthly planner: offers a month-view (no week or daily views, but these somehow don’t seem necessary). You can add an event by right clicking “add event”. Events can be set to repeat at regular intervals and, if so, can be set to expire at a certain date. The event page itself offers rich-text editing options as well as a spelling checker.
• Tasks component: you can set (1) priority, (2) user-specified category, (3) date, and (4) status, and sort by any of these fields by clicking on the column headers. A task with a set date will appear in the monthly planner page, which is great. Other features: spell-checking, adding comments to individual tasks, a search box for finding tasks.
• Notes component: offers tabbed notes browsing, rich text editing, spell-check, and searching within a note (although not across all notes). You can also embed objects such as MS Office files, images, etc. in your notes. Notes are individually saved in taskTome’s own format, but can be exported. The bottom line on notes: an OK component, but will not compel you to migrate from your current notes program if you have one.
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Description: DExpose is a replacement for the Alt+Tab application switching funcitonality that emulates the Mac Expose window-stacking style.

A colleague of mine recently asked me about a good alternative to the Alt+Tab application-switching function in Windows XP, and I pointed him to the two Vista-style 3D-layering apps that I previously reviewed on this blog (Shock Aero and Winflip), as well as the uber-simple SmartTab, which is almost the opposite of those two in its complete lack of eye candy, but is still one of my personal favorites. None of these were quite what my friend was looking for; he did not care about the Vista style app switching but wanted more bells and whistles than the minimalistic SmartTab provides.

This made me think that it probably is a good idea to post DExpose on this blog, an application that displays open apps and windows Mac-style in a stacked "thumbnail" display, and varies the size of its presentation according to the number of windows displayed and the overall available screen area (see screenshot above). Here are more notes on this program:

• The look and feel: once invoked by a hotkey, both minimized and maximized windows become animated and fly into position on a preview screen (see screenshot). It really looks very cool, and can be performed in slow motion by pressing the appropriate hotkeys.
• Two modes of operation: you can DExpose all windows, or you can focus attention to one of the DExpose windows (using the arrow keys or mouse) and "maximize" that window while still in the DExpose "suspended animation". You can also use a hotkey to simply "DExpose" the currently active window, though I’m not quite sure what practical purpose that would serve.
• Other functions: pressing F11 can minimize all windows, while pressing it again afterwards will maximize them again. Unfortunately, this seems to conflict with the F11 function in Internet Explorer, and I had to switch it off (there was no way to re-define the hotkey in the version I tested).
• Invoking DExpose: F9 or F10 to DExpose all windows or a single window respectively (also Win+W and Win+Shift+W). Or you have the option to define your own shortcut keys, including using Alt+Tab, which I am guessing is probably what would make sense for most people.
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Description: Minimem is a free program designed to reduce the memory footprint of individual applications selected by the user. It runs in the background and will handle as many processes as requested.

If you’ve ever encountered a program that simply uses too much memory, Minimem will almost certainly be able to reduce it’s memory expenditure for you; just point Minimem to said app and watch its memory footprint magically decrease to a fraction of it’s original usage. It really is that simple (and really quite impressive to see).

Now that you know that Minimem will do this, a number of questions arise: is this a good thing to be doing? How is Minimem able to accomplish this? Which applications are a good fit to optimize using Minimem? This review will attempt to answer (or at least explore) some of these issues.

My experience with Minimem: to test this program I set it optimize the memory usage of four programs which I knew consumed too much memory (or memory than I thought they should). These programs were: Internet Explorer, Digsby, Outlook 2007, and VolumeTouch. All I had to do was run Minimen and select the programs I wanted (see image to the right) And although Minimem consumed approximately 20 megs of memory itself, the overall “savings” was in fact many times that number. See the screenshot above for a before and after. (Note: whether or not these apps were a good choice for using Minimem is another story).

How does it work?: according to the Minimem website “it optimizes memory by removing as many non-necessary memory pages as possible from the selected processes.” It will do this every 30 seconds by default, although this time interval can be tweaked by the user. The applications can then load these memory pages back if and when it actually needs it; meanwhile, if it does not, that memory is made available to other applications that might need it.

When is this a good idea?: I am assuming that (a) there are instances where “optimizing” a program’s memory footprint using Minimem is a good idea, and, alternately, that (b) in many cases there is in fact a very good reason why a program might hold on to memory pages and not unload them, and using Minimem to force it to do so is therefore not a good idea. The following are situations where I think that you might use Minimem to very good effect:

• Programs that have problems with memory leaks: such as Firefox v2 (and maybe v3?). These programs tend to hold onto pages in memory past the point that they should, and get increasingly larger and top heavy without needing to be. You might need to observe your programs and/or do some research on the internet to identify these, though. As a rule of thumb any program that grows exponentially and becomes unwieldy the more you use it might be a good candidate). The authors recommend using Minimem with browsers, office applications, and word processors.
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Description: Debut Video Capture is a free video recording software that can capture video and audio from any USB device, and can also record anything that is displayed on-screen such as a video that is playing or a user’s visible on-screen activity. Supports a wide variety of output formats and encoders.

I was recently faced with the need to make videos of a user (me) interacting with a site that we’ve created at work. This presented me with the opportunity to do some research and find a good screen-recording program; the last time I’d posted something like this was the Krut Computer Recorder way back in April 2007, but since then there seems to have been a proliferation of good free options. I decided to post this program because it is simple and straightforward, extremely easy to use, and offers a good number of output encoders and formats. Here are more notes on this program:

• Input sources: you can record any input coming from a USB video input device (including a videocam with USB input). You can also record your visible screen or a sub-section of the screen.
• Defining an area of the screen to record: is extremely easy; click on the "select a desktop rectangle tool" and draw a rectangle anywhere on screen. Debut will only record that area and any visible events that take place within it. Alternately you can click the "capture the whole desktop" button to record the entire screen.
• Output: can output in a variety of formats, including AVI, WMV, ASF, MPG, 3PG, MP4, MOV, and FLV). You can use a number of encoders which the program - I believe - installs (including DV video), as well as any encoders that you might have installed on your system (e.g. I installed an Xvid encoder and was easily able to use it to encode video screen captures with Debut).
• Editing output: you can resize the output video on the fly while recording and/or change the framerate to something that you set manually.
• Video effects: you can apply a number of filters on-the-fly (black and white, negative, sepia), and also have the option to change output color settings (brightness, contrast, gamma).
• Text annotation: also supported is adding an on-screen text message that is present across the entire video. You can choose it’s on screen placement, alignment, whether or not to use a background color, font, font-style, and font size, etc. The program also allows for variable date and/or time stamping.
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Description: Miestas is a free point and click flash adventure game that features artsy, hand-drawn graphics and a jazzy soundtrack that combine together to create a dream-like game environment.

I stumbled on this game and decided to post it for the following reasons: (a) its’ nice atmosphere and game experience, (b) that you can get into it quickly and pretty much solve it within an hour or so, and (c) that it looks like art, which I like very much.

If you’ve played any games in this genre before you will instantly know what to do: you can control your character using the arrow keys and interact with the environment using the space bar; the only prerequisites for figuring out how to solve the game are lots of experimentation and, at times, thinking outside the box.
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Description: DK Finder is a desktop search program that employs a sophisticated indexing algorithm to deliver lightning fast search results. It is primarily designed to find files on your system but can also search for keywords contained within files. The program can also perform a number of excellent file-related operations on search results that go beyond moving and copying to include group-operations, advanced filtering, and exporting results as a collection of shortcuts.

Searching for files on a computer is something that everyone needs (or needed at some point or another). Most people have used the search that comes with Windows which, unfortunately, is sub-par to say the least in terms of performance. Then there are programs such as Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search which, in my experience are resource hungry widget-engines in disguise that have the ulterior agenda of "integrating" your desktop with the internet - which might sound ok, until you find that the desktop search program has taken over your system. (Needless to say Google Desktop did not linger for a long time on my computer before I uninstalled it).

Alternately, I would venture to guess that 99% of most people’s desktop search needs revolve around finding files on a computer and filtering results quickly. If this is what you are after I present you with DK Finder, a small, lightning-fast, and powerful desktop search program with some nice features. Here are more notes on this program.

• The technology: DK Finder is an "indexing" search program that scans your hard drive(s), ’learns’ what’s there and stores it in an index. This means that you will need to perform periodical partial "smart reindexing" at times to keep it up to date.
• Filtering: is one of the strongest aspects of this program. A name filtering box allows you to specify multiple criteria simultaneously, including (/) and (-) for "or" and exclusion, respectively (see image to the right). You can also filter by size and date and/or by keywords inside the files themselves, and finally you can click the column headers to sort your results. Rather powerful and very cool.
• Performance: search results are almost instantaneous, however, the initial indexing when you first install the program will typically take a few minutes; subsequent reindexing, however (i.e updating the index) will typically take a few seconds (an average of approx 5 seconds on my machine, but this will vary). You can also run a full low-level indexing/re-indexing in the background.
• File operations: this is one of the most interesting aspects of this program. Aside from the usual copying/moving operations, DK Finder has the ability to create and save shortcut collections for marked files that can be saved into a folder.
• Where to search: because performing a search provides (almost) instantaneous results, narrowing in on a location for your search scope is done through the filtering function (see above). However, you can specify the folder locations on your hard drives which you might want excluded from the indexing process.
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