topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Friday March 29, 2024, 9:38 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - allen [ switch to compact view ]

Pages: prev1 ... 10 11 12 13 14 [15] 16 17 18 19 20 ... 46next
351
General Software Discussion / Re: Your most used SPECIAL programs
« on: August 01, 2008, 03:43 PM »
The criteria in the thread eliminate most of my software... what's left? Hmn... I love PowerGrep, E-music download manager, Amazon Unbox and have been more impressed than I expected by Adobe Air; some cool apps have been made for it.

352
Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?
« on: July 31, 2008, 04:44 PM »
I have Opera Mini 4.1 installed on my Sony Erricson phone, i'm in search of alternative browser is there any alternative for it?

This thread is about Opera for the desktop, you'd be better off starting a new thread if you're shopping around for a new mobile browser.  That said, you'll be hard pressed to find better than opera for mobile devices, there's nothing that even comes close.

353
Living Room / Re: Please share your favorite search engines.
« on: July 29, 2008, 10:31 PM »
My favorite "alternative" search engine is Clusty. I find it especially useful when searching for more obscure things that I'm harving a hard time otherwise honing in on.  It's powered by VivĂ­simo. It draws from multiple search engines, including web/blog/wiki/news. Custom tabs can be created to customize what is used.

Most importantly, it "clusters" all of the results, essentially dropping them in folders allowing you to view a selection of the total results by category.  Attached is a donationcoder search, showing how it broke it down into reviews, discussions, et cetera.

clusty.png

354
Living Room / Re: Cuil search engine
« on: July 29, 2008, 10:23 PM »
Second, I am not jumping on every product on the market. But the level of negativity and pro google comments sounded little childish to me

On the contrary, praising/standing by a proven product seems less childish to me than naysaying them to side with a new and unproved/untested product for the sake of bucking trends.  More to the point,    I don't believe it's fair to praise an admittedly stumbling new product, asking us to lower expectations because it's new, while dismissing those who praise a time tested product.  My initial impressions of cuil were that it was, in every way meaningful to me, inferior to the search engines (plural) I prefer.  If praising the search engine that has served me best for years is childish, then I may as well never praise another product that works for me again.  But what, pray tell, does that make going to the defense of a product you can't have run more than a handful of searches in?

That isn't to say I don't feel you should give Cuil a fair shake, after all competition in the market place is a necessary thing and I'd be glad to see a superior search technology rise up. But Cuil has not struck me as that technology in any way shape or form. Granted its privacy agreement rings a chord with some... for me it's not a selling point. I'm OK with trading my usage habits and interests for a service that does what works for me.

Yes, Cuil is new--but they didn't come out saying pardon us, we're new.  They're coming out with an aire of superiority, hyped as a google killer.  I judge them by what they claim to be, not by their age.  If they going to come forth with that degree of confidence, I expect to see that level of delivery.  Were their promises more modest, I'd be far less critical.  No way to curb potential fans faster than to immediately disappoint them and send them home disillusioned. I expected to be amazed by my initial queries with this "superior" search. I wasn't.  The bottom line is, if you can't play with the big leagues, don't outright challenge the holder of the pennant.  Work your way up through the leagues, building up your momentum and your fan base as you go.

355
Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?
« on: July 29, 2008, 09:49 AM »
With all due respect for Opera fans, the new FF3 ahsomethingamigger brings bookmarking to a whole new age.
I have around 1,000 bookmarks and i find this new url box enhancement along with Foxmarks backup service to be an excellent solution to an essential part of surfing.

Opera 9.5x has all that!  :P

After using it a bit, I've found the "Awesome Bar" to be surprisingly effective... Opera has autocomplete, but FF3 effectively searches all my browsing history when using the address bar.

Still not enough to make me give up hope, Opera is full MDI with unmatched keyboard support . . . it's wonderful in terms of usability. But if I want to clip stuff in Evernote, I have to open Firefox or IE (Not Evernote's fault, Opera doesn't support rich text to the clipboard, no two ways about it). . . probably the biggest Opera issue for me right now.  That and Gmail constantly hangs. (Supposedly fixed in the latest beta build, but I'm not seeing it "fixed" in my personal experience.)

356
Living Room / Re: Cuil search engine
« on: July 28, 2008, 09:03 PM »
As near as I can tell... they've (allegedly) trippled google's web page index (Right, sure...) and have reverted back to the search technology of the 80's, using meta tags?, to search through it.  My suspicion when I read the about page was that it would return a convoluted mess of useless results.  My initial tests seem to confirm that.

I don't know that "the perfect" search engine could unseat google's multi-faceted momentum.  And this thing is not, by any means, the perfect search. I'm not even convinced it's a valid search.

When I can't find something on google, I go to clusty for a second opinion.  Unless Cuil is really awesome, and they just forgot to turn on their super-ness for launch, I can't imagine there's any place for them on the Internet. I mean, really--who would use them?

357
Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?
« on: July 27, 2008, 08:56 AM »
Yes, posting to the official forums seems an exercise in futility.  I sometimes think Opera should discontinue its desktop browser and focus wholly on mobile browsing, where they are indeed king.  While I'd be sadened to have them go, having the Opera option forcibly removed from me would be a great relief, I think.

Developers, of virtually every AJAX toy out there, insist they won't support Opera because Opera makes up so little of their web traffic, but how much of that traffic *would* be Opera if Opera was supported? They block people out, then "observe" that those people aren't using it.  Frustrating.

I don't know of any way to transfer all of your passwords over, but if you need to back them up for reference, Pass Scape's Opera Password Recovery ($27/Lifetime) works great.

358
Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?
« on: July 27, 2008, 08:46 AM »
That is *exactly* the problem, though--one has to choose either allegiance to the browser and thereby lesson your options in terms of what you can do online... or you can have access to the entirety of the Internet in a browser you like less.

I used to just stick with what the browser could do, but more and more I'm leaning toward the belief that what's on the Internet is more important than the tool you use to access it. It's your destination, not your ride.

359
Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?
« on: July 27, 2008, 05:45 AM »
As much as I love Opera, no... I can't live with just Opera. I really don't like Firefox, have always found Mozilla's interfaces to be clunky and unappealing and I loathe tabs.  Unfortunately, almost every new web app is JavaScript intensive... JavaScript that isn't Opera compatible.  Virtually all of Google's apps have issues on Opera, backpackit, plurk... Almost any major AJAX intensive website.  Don't know/care who to blame on the matter, whether it's opera, the developers it matters not. The point is, if you want to use opera *and* these things you have to settle for an inferior experience, as at least a few things won't be working right (if at all). Then there's Opera's lack of rich text clipping support... so external applications used to clip/save data just get plain text.

For these two reasons, I find myself using FF or IE more than Opera -- not by choice, mind you, but what else can one do?

360
Its software with 'personality', I can easily imagine it being on the Mac.

I haven't tried it, not having a mac, but I believe Writeroom is the same idea.

361
My current hands-down favorite is the oddly named Write Monkey.

It's beautiful. . . I haven't written anything "creative" in years, so likely have no use for it but were I to find myself writing again I think it'd be in that program.

What I wouldn't give for a Windows Mobile version of it!

362
My mistake, 56 MB.  I wouldn't be so astonished by the update if not for the size... people are stupid and shit when their spell checker misses some words (words I wouldn't expect to be in there anyway...), Microsoft addresses it. But 56 megs... ungh. Where's the checkbox to indicate "I applied the workaround."

363
Any software that isn't "a work in progress" is considered to be abandonware. Most people ditch applications that aren't in active development (I'm often prone to this as well.).

That said, I wanted to share this--it's 53.6 Megs of absolute wtf?!

SYMPTOMS
In Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008, when you check the spelling of English language text in an application that uses the English dictionary, all the following words cannot be recognized and are flagged as being misspelled:
Friendster
Klum
Nazr
Obama
Racicot

One example of an application that uses the English dictionary is Windows Mail.

Consider the following example scenario:

You compose an e-mail message in Windows Mail.

In the Options dialog box, on the Spelling tab, under Language, you select English.

You type a word that appears in the previous list.
In this scenario, this word is flagged as being misspelled.

Note This issue also occurs if the application uses the German dictionary.

Seriously... I mean, really. I mean...

WORKAROUND
To work around this issue, add the word to the dictionary. To do this, perform one of the following actions.

Note  These two actions apply to Windows Mail only.

Right-click the flagged word, and then click Add to Dictionary.

Click Add to Dictionary in the Spelling & Grammar dialog box.
When you add the word to the dictionary, the word is added to the Custom.dic dictionary file.

But it's still going to nag me about this update (listed as type: important!) . . . where's the "I applied the workaround button"?

MSN Support Page

364
Downloading now... this looks like an incredible solution for my desire to have a local backup of my gmail and my inability to settle once  and for all on an e-mail client.

365
I quite like the layout.

366
Living Room / Re: Show us your (physical) desktop
« on: July 16, 2008, 10:31 AM »


Too many wires.

367
Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window
« on: July 16, 2008, 10:11 AM »

The view west, it's a field of Broccoli which will be fully of mexican season workers later this summer. Quite an operation.


Out back. It's quiet, except the hours I'm mowing.

368
ankama games started with an MMO and did ok :)

Huge undertaking, indeed but would be awesome.

Yes, but I think Ankama also had a $1,000,000 budget to make Dofus with.

Really? Hadn't heard that... thought they were just a bunch of restlass web/flash developers.

369
ankama games started with an MMO and did ok :)

Huge undertaking, indeed but would be awesome.

370
Living Room / Re: June 4 Podcast
« on: July 02, 2008, 06:22 AM »
Especially now that I actually have an mp3 player that can be auto fed them, meaning I don't have to remember to download :)

371
Living Room / Re: Just needed to clear my 666 post count
« on: July 01, 2008, 04:53 PM »
v666.png
It cannot be undone!

372
Living Room / Re: June 4 Podcast
« on: July 01, 2008, 12:22 PM »
Saw activity in this thread (and mistook June 4 for 08 not 06) and got excited thinking the podcast was back.  Alas.

373
Personally, I love the elephant -- and find the it's corner-turned ear, in the manner of a notebook page, rather ingenius.  I actually shelled out for a year to get the Elephant T-shirt--though try as I may I'll never exceed the 40MB/mo limit of the free account. . . guess I'll consider it a donation. (Plus, the removal of ads from the public/published notebooks I have)

I can't tell you how many times I'd installed and tried Evernote 2 but never cared for it, meanwhile I've found that despite my initial reservations my data life pretty much revolves around EN3 now.  Stark contrast with the norm, which seems to be love for EN2 and hate for EN3.  As my cell phone is always on me, I am constantly texting notes/reminders/etc to my Evernote inbox -- being able to do so and then access them next time I'm on my computer, or any other computer with Internet access, is awfully convenient.

I wish there was some portable solution for my palm, but then there'd be issues of storage--which is where EN3 is really brilliant. With everything web based, storage isn't a consideration. Assuming you have a smart phone or other such device. . . Alas, I do not, but Evernote might be what pushes me off the fence on that issue.

I guess I'm of the school of thought that prefers their data sitting in the Internet vapors, I haven't carried a USB storage device in a couple of years now.  I find it's much preferable [for me] to just use a web browser.  I'm not particularly security concerned. As far as the data goes, it feels safer for me on the Internet than in my pocket.

As far as the speed of uploading notes, I really haven't had any problems with that -- and I have a really, really lousy ISP.  Granted my notes are mostly text with just the occasional image intersperced, not graphically heavy or weighted down by PDF's.

I do agree with you that the software itself seems a bit clunky.  The interface of the web version isn't all that intuitive (I hate having to hunt down, drag and drop tags in order to tag notes) and the desktop client has a gigantic, ugly, unhidable toolbar.  There are a number of issues, it definitely feels beta.  I originally stated I didn't care for EN3, but I've in fact been using it every day from that very day.

374
General Software Discussion / Re: Evernote Beta now Open
« on: June 30, 2008, 09:44 PM »
Heh, this is true--there were a few on the boards complaining about this.  It seems they should at least give you the opportunity to pay shipping.

<xenophobia>
Shame on you for not being an American.
</xenophobia>

375
Living Room / Re: Simply Google
« on: June 30, 2008, 09:42 PM »
Granted, this is a lot easier to point someone to than explaining how to use Google. A page like this would make more people intelligent searchers, and at the very least that saves them time.

I've always felt that if you couldn't figure out how to use the tools at your disposal, you didn't deserve to find what you were looking for.  If not for over-simplification for those not inclined to figure things out for themselves, the Internet would be a much bigger place.  It'd be more like DonationCoder and less like teh kidz chattin it up wit a/s/l and lolzors.

I for one, want the Internet to become harder to use!

Pages: prev1 ... 10 11 12 13 14 [15] 16 17 18 19 20 ... 46next