Glimpses of some topics taken from Slashdot again. “SlashDash” will be the title i refer to my digests or, whatever.
Google Pack allows you to download essential software bundled, google’s and non-google’s. Amoung the non-google’s is Lavasoft Adaware, Firefox, Adobe Reader, Norton Antivirus 2005 special (6months free), Trillian. An new addition I see for google’s software is Google pack screensaver. You can customised what to be bundled. The installer can help you update, download, install and remove components.
Link: http://pack.google.com/
Discussion: http://slashdot.org/articles/06/01/07/1053232.shtml?tid=217&tid=185
Side Notes:
Yahoo seems to have a product similar to this. Its called Yahoo Central.
Gmail continue to have new features: sign up thru mobile phone, integrated rss reader, auto saving and uploading of attachments.
try Google Reader “Beta”. A fast, cool ajax application where you can add feeds subscriptions and more.
Fox Reader - a free, small and fast alternative to your adobe reader (1MB+ only)
Yahoo Widgets “Dashboard”.
Link.
Slashed.
Yahoo has release a widget engine (sort of Dashboard in MacOS X 10.4 “Tiger”) free for both Windows and Mac platforms. It was previously known as Konfabulator until Yahoo acquired them. For more information and links about the technology, and the debate between it and Mac’s dashboard see wikipedia.
For some reasons you should like it. Its sort of dreams released for some although it isnt perfect. Try the HUD (Heads up display) by hitting F8 (some sort like Mac OS X’s Exposé?)
Drag your widgets around, and try adding more.
Side Notes:
There are plenty more widget engines around. For linux you have GDesklets, SuperKaramba.. Commercially you have DesktopX, and I expect to see one in windows vista. Free versions for windows includes Google desktop2,
- AveDesk Small and memory efficient widgets engine for windows.
- dotWidget Free and opensource widgets engine done in VB6.
- Kapsules Widget engine done in C#.
- Konfabulator Windows and Macintosh compatible widgets engine.
- Litestep Freeform GUI for Microsoft Windows.
- Microsoft gadgets
- Samurize
Of worth mention is Kapsules, one of the nicest and best engine which runs on windows scripting engine and .NET. You use a variety of scripting languages for implementing widgets (including php, python, c#, vb..). Other than the common widgets- notes, weathers, search, is a snow widget, which reminds me of dreamrenderer. In terms of functions(you can even clone widgets), UI, availability of good widgets, its on par with Yahoo’s widgets.
More Side Talk:
My brother recommend DIGG which is something like or a competitor to slashdot. I would say both would draw their own crowd, with professionals staying at slashdot, although old fashioned. digg on the other hand seems to reach out the the young, geeky generation. Web design a little like mozilla home page, and navigation and inner workings would remind you of a programmer’s blog.
After all the gmail hype, still loyal to yahoo mail but wish there are improvements? There’s a firefox extension/greasemonkey script which “ajax-ifies” yahoo mail. You would be able to expand all mails from the front page, reply on the same page, and download attachment with 1 click.
Something about “winamp” in linux you got XMMS. For music software, I started with real jukebox long ago, then switch to sonique then now qcdplayer and foobar player. As with relatively simple software which dont boost too much features yet, its power is in its plugins. A concept I have known to myself, I fail to realise that on xmms at first.
When I uncovered it, there were search plugin, alarm clock, stereo enhancer, skins, visualisations so on.. Of something that caught my attention was Tone Generator. Enter a frequency as an url and a tone will played. On searching the topic, it is what makes your dial tone and key press sounds (try this applet). Whats more interesting is, according to “The NCH Tone Generator” you could try these lists of tone frequencies - Frequency List 1and List 2 to see if its help improve those various health conditions.
Happy slashdashing.
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