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26

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your music player of choice?

« on: August 06, 2007, 10:02 AM »

(How many threads like this do we have here?)

-Lashiec (August 06, 2007, 09:43 AM)

My guess: more than enough.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What's your music player of choice?

« on: August 06, 2007, 09:16 AM »

BTW Music IP looks pretty cool. I've definitely been on their site before but lost track of it. What's special about it? I might have to check that out.

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General Software Discussion / Re: RSS feed for updated software?

« on: August 06, 2007, 09:10 AM »

I thought of that, actually. Adding one master update feed and then creating a "watch" for just the items I'm interested in. The only thing that is not too elegant about this is that I will still have the main feed updating and distracting me. FeedDemon can do the filter/watch thing, of course, and you can also add multiple words to one filter so all it would take is a single filter. I might actually do that. It's a great idea, simple, and what's great is that it lets me edit very quickly what I want to watch for and what I don't, much unlike when you have to handle what titles you want to bed notified about through a particular software portal itself. Softpedia has always been buggy as crap with their software list.. they probably still have not fixed it. I'll have to log in at Softpedia and Betanews to kill all my "software subscriptions", then apply this feed idea. What it lacks in elegance it makes up for in simplicity, speed and flexibility.

Thanks for the suggestion..

And upon some consideration, I have concluded that the feed + custom watch solution is far easier to handle than using RSSMix, for example, though I do much appreciate you mentioning it, twinkler. In another instance, it may well come in very handy.

In fact, using RSSMix you could create the de facto "elegant" solution to this problem. You'd subscribe to exactly one feed and that feed would only show exactly the items you want to know about. Damn it.. saying it like this is causing me to reconsider whether the solution I picked is the best one after all...

I'll think about it

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General Software Discussion / Re: What's your music player of choice?

« on: August 06, 2007, 08:55 AM »

Seems a lot of you like all-in-one solutions, meaning software that will handle playback of both audio and video content. Personally, I prefer to use specific tools for specific tasks. I'm not a fan of jack-of-all-trades solutions, in other words.

Besides, none of the suggested all-in-one players have native Last.fm support.

For video, my current favorite is GOM Player. It has codecs built-in and plays just about anything I throw at it. It's even better than VLC, and I've never liked VLC. It seems to be very popular in general, but I've always hated VLC's interface. I still don't understand who came up with the idea to code the progress bar the way it's implemented. Click on a spot to jump to it while playing video, and it will jump, but hardly anywhere near where you clicked. It seems to arbitrarily jump in predefined increments, so you never really know just where it will land. This has always struck me as very strange behavior, not at last because it is different from just about every other media player I've ever used.

I was a big fan of musikCube, but its development came to a halt quite a while ago and has been stuck at v1.0. I haven't checked their site in ages, but I really don't like using software that is out of development. Otherwise it would be just about the best music player I can imagine.

I've used XMPlay before and must admit that it is a very fine audio player. It's impressively light on resources, (not that I have to worry about that anymore with my new machine, heh, but it's always a plus) and quite full featured.

I like what I see with VUPlayer but have not tried it yet. It's default UI looks rather ugly, but if it will let me do the things I want to do, that's ok.

ALSong is another cool option that I've always wanted to try out. Now even more after reading the comments about the great way it implements the playlist.. but if that's the only thing to set it apart from the rest of the pack, I'm not sure that point alone will convince me of its greatness.

The whole point of trying to find an alternative here lies in the player an alternative is being sought for: iTunes. As such, solutions such as WMP11, Realplayer or WinAmp don't really make sense, seeing as how they are all big multimedia apps that are clunky and often have a "heavy" feel attached to them, just like iTunes. The ALSong, VUPlayer, Foobar, XMPlay and the other similar players seem much closer to the solution.

BTW, I've tried Foobar on multiple occasions, and while I thought the idea of making such a highly customizable player is cool, I always ditched it after a while because it forced me to do far more customizing away from the defaults than I cared for. Foobar is like Firefox. It's ok by default, but to make it great you have to customize the living crap out of it. Not a huge fan of that.. I like the product I use to be solid out of the box and to be efficient and easy to use as well as full-featured right from the start. I can't say I find Foobar fitting that bill (nor does Firefox AFAIAC).

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

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General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« on: August 05, 2007, 10:15 PM »

Unlike many noobs out there, btw, I also leave UAC on. Everybody comlains about how annoying it is, but frankly, you get used to it. It's not like you have to deal with it often.. and it makes sense to have it. It's a smart security measure, and something both OS X and Linux have had in place for years, albeit in different ways. When you make changes that affect the system, both Linux and Mac OS will ask for your password. Vista takes that concept further and asks you to confirm certain sensitive actions on the system by giving your ok. Nothing wrong with that and it provides added security.

It's a feature everybody loves to complain about. What everybody fails to see is that security isn't all fun and rainbows. If you want solid security, you might have to pay for it a bit in the currency of convenience. I'm up for the deal and can't say I'm bothered.

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General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« on: August 05, 2007, 10:12 PM »

Unless of course an app you use hasn't converted yet...there really isn't any reason not to.

-wreckedcarzz

Give me a reason in favor of upgrading? I don't see any reason to. Vista or Linux or Mac OS X? dunno if one disease is better than the others.

-f0dder (August 05, 2007, 03:41 PM)

If I'd have to give you one reason, it's FAR better security. Vista is MS' most secure OS ever. I don't use AV or a software firewall on my Vista box so far. I know I'm asking for trouble, but I know what I'm doing, for one, and secondly I trust Vista to protect me sufficiently. I don't see where I could get a virus from. All my mail is done through GMail, so it never even gets to my PC. The only thing is that I don't have any real software firewall protection, but I'm also behind a router... dunno. I feel safe

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General Software Discussion / What's your music player of choice?

« on: August 05, 2007, 12:14 AM »

Well?
I currently use iTunes because I'm tied to it because of my iPhone. I just realized, however, that just because I have to have iTunes to sync the computer with the iPhone, I don't *have to* listen to music on the PC using iTunes.

I also use Last.fm and their app works fine on my system except for one thing: to start, it requires an ok via UAC. Now, since it launches itself automatically as soon as I start iTunes, I have to "approve" Last.fm's launch each time I do so. Pretty annoying!

The ideal solution would be to find a player that has native Last.fm support, and while they're out there, they're not very easy to find. I know Albumplayer has native support, but that's shareware and not what I'm looking for anyway.

So, what do you use as your music player? Secondly, if you know of any players with native Last.fm support as well as Vista compatibility, let me know.

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General Software Discussion / Re: RSS feed for updated software?

« on: August 03, 2007, 07:21 PM »

It wouldn't be an app.. really. Well, I suppose you could make a web-app of it. If you think about it, this technically already sort of exists. There's gotta be SOME service out there that lets you add a bunch of feeds and will then all be combined into a single super-feed. I think I've read about it too. Ah well. It would be too tedious..

Here's an idea: a web-app that can pull data from Softpedia, Betanews, Tucows, Majorgeeks etc.. and that consists of an app database. Users register and log in and can search and browse apps with pretty icons, then add them to their "tracked" list. This list generates an RSS feed you can subscribe to. Of course you could build a mini social network around this, though I'm not sure if that would be worth the effort.. pretty good idea overall, I think

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General Software Discussion / Re: Mapping websites

« on: August 03, 2007, 03:45 PM »

Thanks Curt
Just grabbed it. Not installed yet.

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General Software Discussion / Re: RSS feed for updated software?

« on: August 03, 2007, 01:16 PM »

filehippo makes this easy. at the bottom of each page for a program there are two rss buttons, one of which is for updates on that specific program. for example, at the bottom of http://www.filehippo...download_rocketdock/ is a button linking to http://www.filehippo...load_rocketdock/rss/.

-twinkler (August 03, 2007, 11:58 AM)

Ok, yeah, but I'm not looking to add 100 feeds to FeedDemon today. I need ONE feed that will tell me about all the software udpates I'm interested in. In *one* feed, because that's the only way it makes any sense.

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General Software Discussion / Re: RSS feed for updated software?

« on: August 03, 2007, 10:54 AM »

Hahah.. you essentially said the opposite of what you were trying to say . It's all good though.. well there goes that. The ability to *select* what updates I receive is crucial. That's a deal-breaker for the mentioned feeds. Too bad!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Mapping websites

« on: August 03, 2007, 10:48 AM »

Hi,
something like
http://www.visualcom...ity.com/vc/index.cfm (Beautiful)
or as Java Applet
http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/
or as offline Tool?
http://www.conceptdr...web_site_mapping.php

-crono (June 19, 2007, 02:12 PM)

The referenced offline tool, Conceptdraw, seems to come closest to what I was looking for. The screenshots don't show a whole lot, but it might be worth a shot.
I'm quite surprised how hard it appears to be to find a utility like this. After all, it sems this would be perfect coding practice for someone looking to solidify an understanding of recursion...

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General Software Discussion / Re: RSS feed for updated software?

« on: August 03, 2007, 10:39 AM »

Sorry, I should have said this in my first post: the RSS links from the Major and Snap are not limited to your choice of programs. The version on the picture is from the very old RSS Popper - RSS news to be delivered right into the mail inbox.

-Curt (August 03, 2007, 10:28 AM)

By "not limited to your choice of programs", do you mean you can specify which programs you'd like to be notified about when updates hit?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: August 03, 2007, 10:22 AM »

Something really strange happened to the colors in my DO9. Suddenly, all files and folders had turqouise backgrounds and pink letters. I didn't set it up that way and had to manually mess with changing colors in the settings. Quite the pain.. I was looking for an option to revert settings to default in the prefs and could not find that. Is there a way to do that?

-moerl (August 02, 2007, 06:00 PM)

Open up Properties for dopus.exe. Is it digitally signed by GPSoftware?

-Nudel (August 03, 2007, 03:26 AM)

I'm at work now, but will check when I get home.
And thank you, cthorpe! Much appreciated

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General Software Discussion / Re: RSS feed for updated software?

« on: August 03, 2007, 10:21 AM »

Sweet suggestions, folks! Thank you. I'll probably go with the RSS option, as that's far more portable than something like Appget, but eventually I may check that out too.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: August 02, 2007, 06:00 PM »

Something really strange happened to the colors in my DO9. Suddenly, all files and folders had turqouise backgrounds and pink letters. I didn't set it up that way and had to manually mess with changing colors in the settings. Quite the pain.. I was looking for an option to revert settings to default in the prefs and could not find that. Is there a way to do that?

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General Software Discussion / RSS feed for updated software?

« on: August 02, 2007, 05:46 PM »

I'm really puzzled by the fact that I've never thought about this before.. I'm someone who reads 40 newsfeeds regularly in Feeddemon on Windows, in the Newsgator beta web-reader at work and with the Newsgator iReader on my iPhone. I freaking love RSS . And yet to be notified of new software releases, I still subscribe to lame, 1990-esque email notifications from sites like Softpedia and Betanews. Does anyone know of a site that will let you select software titles you use and then generate an RSS feed where the posts are updates to the titles you use?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best jukebox that is NOT iTunes?

« on: August 02, 2007, 12:00 PM »

Funny, how the OP (me!) ended up taking the iTunes train. Not so much by choice but rather by necessity. iPhone doesn't like anything but iTunes :/

I don't mind it so much. It just feels and performs like a bulky piece of software, and something that plays my music should not feel bulky. It should be fast, light, pretty and useful.

iTunes covers the latter two adjectives and fails miserably in regards to the former two. I have no major complaints so far, however. It runs quite fine on my new box under Vista.

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General Software Discussion / Re: User settings storage debate

« on: August 02, 2007, 11:33 AM »

One thing I never understood is why setups ask me if I'm installing just for myself or for "all users". Why the hell would I care? They need to default to putting application settings into user profile folders by default and skip this question entirely. What advantage could I possibly have from having settings stored for "one user only", which I assume means storing them in the program's install folder?

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General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« on: August 02, 2007, 11:23 AM »

Happy Vista user here

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Developer's Corner / Re: Free alternative to Dreamweaver/Expression Web

« on: July 12, 2007, 02:48 PM »

Did you check out HTMLKit? A ton of plugins as well for that.. 

-mitzevo (July 10, 2007, 11:51 PM)

I did not, but I will! Thanks.
I grabbed MS' Expression Web off the web but have not even had a chance to install it yet. Quite honestly, I'd rather work on my raw XHTML/CSS skills before diving into a whole web content creation suite. Still, it's nice to poke around and see what's out there.

I'm almost done with my Head Rush XHMLT and CSS book . Can't wait. Ordering Head Rush AJAX after that.

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General Software Discussion / Mapping websites

« on: June 07, 2007, 04:44 PM »

I'm looking for a tool, web-based or not, that will take a URL and then generate a visual, tree-like/mindmap-like visual representation of the site's hierarchical structure.
Here's quick update.. it doesn't have to be purely visual. If it can give me a nicely laid out directory listing or hierarchical outline type auto-generated site-map, that's cool too

Ideas?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: May 07, 2007, 05:13 PM »

It's strange a 9.0.0.1 update was mentioned, yet when I check for updates in my 9.0.0.0 that I have installed, I'm told that I have the latest version running already.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: May 07, 2007, 05:11 PM »

I have to say DOpus 9 is the best version ever, easily. The preferences have been cleaned up TREMENDOUSLY. For someone who spent quite a while in the preferences in v8 trying to figure shit out and just never knowing if I had everything set the way I liked it.. v9 is just beautiful. New icons everywhere, a far better structure with a tree on the left that auto-collapses as you move to a different section in the prefs (just like in UltraEdit) and overall better and clearer language. Also.. has anyone tried the filter search in the preferences? That's gotta be the best implementation of preferences filter search I've ever seen. It finds all instances of the word for you and even highlights it everywhere it appears with this read, semi-transparent box with round corners. It just kicks ass.
I had my doubts about DOpus this time around.. I loved v8 but just hated dealing with the million tons of clutter in the preferences that I found made it very hard to make the right choices in setting the Opus up the way you like. Now all that crap is gone and everything is cleaned up and beautiful. I'm very, very impressed. I have not even checked out all the sweet new features, hell I don't even know what's new anymore.. I'm just happy DOpus is kicking so much ass again. Seriously. I'm a licensed XPlorer2 customer too, but I always found XPlorer2 lacking somehow. I could never quite point my finger at what it was.. but I had this feeling. One thing that I never liked is how in the preferences, they'd say "you can tweak more stuff in this settings file". How user-friendly is that? I know only the most advanced of users would probably even consider looking in that config file.. but come on. If you're going to give me options, give them to me in an accessible way.

DOpus does this too, except in a much friendlier way. You can access a longish list of all sorts of additional settings, but that list is integrated into the preferences directly. You can view and edit it right there, which is just the way it should be.

So.. can anyone point out what you find to be the most notable changes from v8? I just installed it late last night and have had no chance to really check it all out.

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Developer's Corner / Re: Panic's Coda

« on: May 01, 2007, 07:19 PM »

You have a point. Definitely. But in the end the users are the judges. If that product MS comes up with is actually a quality product, then why not let it out and compete? If it sucks, you know people are going to stick with the developer's product that introduced the innovations in the first place

That's an overly negative view too. I'm liking Microsoft more recently. My opinion of them has shot up ever since I bought an Xbox360, which is one fantastic piece of gaming equipment. I'm happy with Vista too so far. Happier than I've ever been with XP. They're doing good work recently, simply put, and I don't see what's wrong with that