Messages

351

General Software Discussion / Re: Symbolic Links in Vista - Like a playlist, but for anything!

« on: July 09, 2007, 06:01 AM »

Yeah... but it's so easy to make one (I mean, currently the hardest part is typing the path) I'm sure it would be super easy to make buttons and toolbars and stuff. I bet someone could make one for Directory Opus using only the button editor.
[edit]Took out stuff about DO and size reporting...[/edit]

-Hirudin (May 10, 2007, 03:49 AM)

Dopus already has support for creating symbolic/hard/soft links and junction points. What I've done is to go to "Settings -> File types", double click on "All files and folders", open the "Drop menu" tab and press new. Type a appropiate name for the action (I've named mine "Create special link(s) here...") and paste the following into the text area:
Copy MAKELINK=auto

Now you can create symlinks by a simple right-click drag-n-drop with and file or folder. About as easy as it can get

-Dirhael (July 09, 2007, 04:28 AM)

I presume thats only with Opus 9 on Vista?

-tomos (July 09, 2007, 05:37 AM)

Well, I wouldn't know if it works on Dopus 8 as I only have 9 installed right now, but I do know that you can create junctions and hardlinks in both XP and Vista (and possibly Win2000) with v9. Not sure about symlinks though (I think that's Vista only), and of course XP have no way of tracking junctions etc. but otherwise it does work.

352

General Software Discussion / Re: Symbolic Links in Vista - Like a playlist, but for anything!

« on: July 09, 2007, 04:28 AM »

Yeah... but it's so easy to make one (I mean, currently the hardest part is typing the path) I'm sure it would be super easy to make buttons and toolbars and stuff. I bet someone could make one for Directory Opus using only the button editor.
[edit]Took out stuff about DO and size reporting...[/edit]

-Hirudin (May 10, 2007, 03:49 AM)

Dopus already has support for creating symbolic/hard/soft links and junction points. What I've done is to go to "Settings -> File types", double click on "All files and folders", open the "Drop menu" tab and press new. Type a appropiate name for the action (I've named mine "Create special link(s) here...") and paste the following into the text area:
Copy MAKELINK=auto

Now you can create symlinks by a simple right-click drag-n-drop with and file or folder. About as easy as it can get

353

General Software Discussion / Re: converting divx to dvd?

« on: June 17, 2007, 03:31 PM »

The simplest one I've ever tried has to be VSO's ConvertXtoDVD. Not freeware though. Another option is Nero 7, and even though I think it's a bit bloated it is really easy to use.

354

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the switch-01: My journey from Windows to Linux

« on: June 06, 2007, 05:50 AM »

I think the main reason I never quite manged to switch over to *nix is the font rendering. No matter what distro or what settings I use, they never feel or look quite right compared to Windows or OSX. Secondly, it's the issue of multimedia. GNU Linux has a lot of amazing music and video players, but some codecs are not as fast as some of the Windows alternatives (mainly a problem with h.264 HD content), and getting 5.1 surround sound setup correctly is a pain in the back end if you don't have just the right sound card. I'm hoping that KDE 4 will be the solution for me, as it will come with a brand new audio interface. If they get that one right, and also solves some of the font issues (though that's more of a X issue) I might be tempted to switch over full-time.

355

General Software Discussion / Re: Lightweight alternatives to FeedDemon

« on: May 29, 2007, 06:23 PM »

Well, I would recommend you to check out Newzie. It's a great feed reader, has a really good interface & doesn't take much resources to run. If you like that, you might also want to check out their *fantastic* Ziepod if you listen to a lot of podcasts. Both programs are freeware, although there is a "+" version of Ziepod available (which is what I use).

356

General Software Discussion / Re: Outsourcing web design

« on: April 28, 2007, 05:40 PM »

I haven't tried it, but I look upon it like I do with food. Yes, you can get your food dirt cheap and fast in your local supermarket or fast-food chain. While this is enough most of the time, sometimes you'd love nothing more than a exquisite meal perpared by a really good chef. A meal where everything just fits together perfectly, leaving a lasting impression

357

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« on: April 28, 2007, 12:14 PM »

As long as your application doesn't use any GPL'd code, there is absolutely nothing illegal releasing it as commercial software on whatever platform you choose (and I would think that Zend, the guys that actually made the core for PHP, would know a whole lot more about potential licensing issues than you or I do). You argue that by being ready for prime time, the OS has to be ready for absolutely everyone. Well guess what, neither Windows nor OSX is ready for absolutely everyone so by your standards there is no OS in existense today that is [ready for prime time].
If you instead argued that Windows is the best fit for more people that Linux currently is then yes, I would agree. If it was the perfect fit for everyone however, there would be no such thing as Linux, BSD, Mac OS etc.

EDIT: Just to add a few more examples on non-GPL software on Linux:

 - Adobe Flash Player/Plugin
 - PHP (Open Source yes, but not released under a GPL license)
 - Sun Java (they recently GPL'd it, but for years in was commercial software)
 - Apache (again, open source but not GPL)

You will have absolutely no luck trying to convince me that those are illegal just because they aren't released under a GPL license.

358

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« on: April 28, 2007, 11:06 AM »

Claiming that Linux is not ready for prime time in general is insanity, because it is all a matter of how you use your computer. It's not ready for everyone sure, but for many others it really is and have been for some time. Oh and regarding your claims that the GPL somehow prevents developers from creating commercial software for the platform, well my Linux version of Zend Studio would seem to indicate otherwise.

359

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« on: April 27, 2007, 07:26 AM »

Finally, a 64-bit version - umm, there's been 64-bit XP and Win2003 for quite a while? (and previous windows as well, although not x86 64bit )

-f0dder (April 27, 2007, 07:19 AM)

True, but the problem is that you have not been able to actually purchase it in stores. At least with XP, you had to contact Microsoft to get hold of a copy if it wasn't bundled as a OEM copy with your PC.

360

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« on: April 27, 2007, 06:14 AM »

The package management in any Debian-based distro is far superior to both Windows and other operating systems

How can it be superior if it doesn't even exist in windows?
I'm not sure if apt is that much better than Gentoo's portage or fedora's yum or freeBSD's pkg_add, etc,.. but it sure is better than nothing at all!

-Gothi[c] (April 27, 2007, 06:02 AM)

Hehe, fair enough Portage is very good as well as you said, but I just don't think it's reasonable to expect your average user to have the patience to compile all his/her programs. I was just about ready to throw out the PC last time I tried compiling the Mozilla package as it just went on and on...and on. Other than that, it's excellent. In fact, everyone should probably install Gentoo at least once from scratch if they want to get to know more about how GNU Linux really works.

I wouldn't say that Yum is on the same level as apt though, as in my experience is just doesn't handle dependencies as well as apt. Unfortunately, that have been my experience with all other RPM based distros as well, which is why I now mainly stick with Debian-based ones.

361

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« on: April 27, 2007, 05:56 AM »

I don't quite agree with the author of that article on some points. Don't have the time to go into much detail right now, but the ones that stuck out the most for me was:

* Installation
- "Ubuntu has a slight edge" -- Really, just a slight edge? He doesn't even mention the fact that you will be installing the OS directly from the live CD, which means that you can be browsing the web etc. inside a working environment while the OS happily installs in the background. Compare this to the static nature of a Windows installation, I'd say that Ubuntu has more than just a slight edge there.

* Software installation
- A tie? Surely he must not have really tried Ubuntu for any extended period of time? The package management in any Debian-based distro is far superior to both Windows and other operating systems, simply for the fact that the applications are available with just a simple click no matter who the vendor is (well, non-commercial software anyway). Most importantly though, having software handled by a package manager in that way also means that keeping your OS and 3rd party apps up to date is a breeze as both are handled by the same thing ensuring that you never have to hunt around various websites to get the latest versions (imagine Windows Update, only here it handles everything you've ever installed on your system).

There are a few other problems with the article as well, most notably the fact that his conclusions doesn't really match up with what he actually writes in the various categories. Anyway, I like both systems (well, actually Kubuntu + Vista) and will continue dual-booting as both have things the other one doesn't.

362

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: April 27, 2007, 05:31 AM »

I'll see if I can write up a list sometime during the weekend. I own licensed copies of both programs (+ Total Commander... yes, I'm a file manager addict ) so it shouldn't be to much of a problem making a comparison.

363

General Software Discussion / Re: Anybody Have A Reason Why I Should NOT Purchase RegExBuddy This Week?

« on: April 23, 2007, 07:21 AM »

I bought it (RegExBuddy) a few years ago, and today I don't really know what I'd do without it. I've tried several of the alternatives, but none of them came close to matching its features. The best one by far (though the GREP functions is a close second) is found on the "use" tab, where you can get your expression "converted" to a whole bunch of languages. This is great, as not everything uses a Perl-compatible syntax (which I am most comfortable with). Well worth the price in my opinion

The only minor issue (and it really is minor) I have with it and all other JGSoft products is the interface. It gets the job done, but I don't like how they insist on using custom styling on tabs etc., instead of using the standard Windows widgets.

364

General Software Discussion / Re: Got my Ubuntu disk,got two hard drives,can i dual boot off of a seperate drive?

« on: March 14, 2007, 09:39 AM »

While it's not freeware, I'd recommend you to check out BootIt NG. It's what I use to tripple-boot XP, Vista & Ubuntu. It works perfectly, and the main advantage by doing it this way is that I can hide the different partitions/disk depending on what OS I choose to boot. This way, there's no chance of any OS installation messing things up, as they all think their respecive partition is the primary boot disk
Oh, and in addition to being a boot manager, it also comes complete with partition managment (like Partition magic etc., only not installed in the OS) & disk imaging. Best $35 I've ever used on a single application

365

General Software Discussion / Re: Watch a panel discussion about browsers

« on: March 09, 2007, 05:39 AM »

That was actually quite interesting, thanks for sharing!

In particular, I'm liking what I hear about browsers implementing native support for videos, seeing as I agree with Håkon Lie about plugins being a bad thing. After all, who haven't encountered playback problems when moving from platform to platform? The day we are able to get rid of WMV, RM & QT etc., things will get a whole lot easier from a users standpoint.

366

General Software Discussion / Re: nostalgia hour: old software you loved

« on: March 03, 2007, 05:59 AM »

Norton Commander & QEMM-386 are two of the first applications that comes to mind on the PC platform. Good times

I'm not in the habbit of sticking with outdated applications though, so I can't really think of any really old ones that I still use.

367

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Vista goes gold

« on: January 21, 2007, 08:52 PM »

The one thing that annoys me more than anything is that they've stripped out the possibility of joining a domain with all but the business versions of Vista, just like they did with XP. This means that the home editions is out of the picture for many of us that would like to take our home PC's with us to work. You can't really go for the regular business editions either, because many of us would like to have the media centre functions, and those are only found in Home Premium and Ultimate. What alternatives does that leave us with? None really, as Ultimate is the only one that have both functions. Why Microsoft, why do you guys keep doing this to us?!

368

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Ad Muncher: keeps the brain intact while surfing the Net - beats AdBlock!

« on: January 15, 2007, 08:44 AM »

I just have to agree with brotherS and the rest of the Ad Muncher users on this forum, it really is a great tool. Over the last few years, I've noticed a tendency with online newspapers and gaming sites getting infested with advertising to the point of being almost unusable. The solution to this for me, before discovering Ad Muncher, was using a ad-blocking hosts file. As many of you know, that method has some serious limitations and in the end I had to give it up. After that, I tried out the Proxomitron and while it packs some serious power, I found that it just wasn't worth the effort to keep the lists up to date & working. I can imagine the pre-made lists you find over at the CastleCops forums are great if you mainly visit English websites, but none of them really took good enough care of many of the Scandinavian websites I visit. In the end, I grew tired of it and moved on. Then came Firefox and adblock/-plus. At this point, I had been using Opera for many years, but the promise of proper, and easily maintainable, ad-blocking made me test the waters with the now famous ferret. While I really liked the adblock extension, I did not really find myself comfortable with the Firefox browser itself. So, I moved back to Opera like I've always done in the past. Now I do love the browser, but it does lack proper ad-blocking (even with the content blocker built into v9 of the browser, it's still nowhere near a complete solution yet), so I went out hunting around the web. By chance, I happened to stumble upon the Ad Muncher entry over at Betanews and thought it looked interesting, so after a very quick (less than 0.5 MB) download I started browsing like my life depended on it. After all, I had no intention of paying for the software if it didn't take care of the websites that are important to me. The same week, I paid for and registered the application. It had everything I'd ever wanted from an ad-blocker. The default lists are very very complete, and has handled just about every single non-English site I've ever visited as well. It also impressed with the speed, and it also allows me to configure anything related to the filtering with a few simple mouse clicks. When you also consider that it works with just about any application connecting to the web, with the same rules applying to all of them without having to setup anything, it's hard not to be impressed.

As for my statistics so far, it has saved me close to .5 GB since my last re-installation of Windows (I forgot to backup my config file, so the old stats were lost). While the program isn't free, I feel that I've received more than what I paid for it after being stuck with a 56k modem during this Christmas. The ads on many websites are a pain with a broadband connection, but those times when you're stuck with dial-up the web is just about unusable without proper content filtering.

[Select]

Ad Muncher Usage Statistics for v4.7 Build 27105/1459
Adverts removed by Ad Muncher:  55,883
Approximate bandwidth saved:    436 MB
Counter started:                november 28, 2006

369

General Software Discussion / Re: Goodness! Is there NO Win utility to do "DIR /S/B C:\ZZZ\*.JPG > RESULT.TXT"?

« on: January 07, 2007, 02:46 PM »

Ok, so I played around a little with Dopus, and made a button for you that should take care of this. Just copy the code below to your clipboard, open a lister, go to tools -> customize and right-click on any toolbar where you'd like the button to be and choose paste.
When using it, you'll first be asked what filename filters you'd like (e.g.: *.avi), and then present you with a "save-as..." dialogue. Simple & easy

[Select]

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<button display="both" effect="gray">
<guid>{42389041-894C-478A-926F-ACD0E6033C15}</guid>
<label>Print list of files in directory</label>
<tip>Print the name of files in the current directory, and any subdirectories, to a file of your choosing</tip>
<icon1>122</icon1>
<function type="batch">
<instruction>runmode hide</instruction>
<instruction>dir /b /s {dlgstring|Enter filename filter (e.g.: *.avi)} &gt; {dlgsave|Save results} </instruction>
</function>
</button>

370

General Software Discussion / Re: Goodness! Is there NO Win utility to do "DIR /S/B C:\ZZZ\*.JPG > RESULT.TXT"?

« on: January 06, 2007, 10:59 AM »

Hi Veign,

Thanks for the seeker link!

I just find out D.Opus actually can do what I want. After the search result is up, from the menu Edit->Copy Filenames->As full pathname (to the clipboard) then paste to notepad and save as a txt file.

I don't understand why the above is designed in that way? Why can't it simply offer a way to save search result to file in the "find panel" 's user interface or something like from right-click menu?

-tslim (January 05, 2007, 02:32 PM)

You don't need to open notepad at all actually. Just do all the steps you currently take until the filenames/paths are copied to the clipboard. After that, just right-click a empty space in a lister and select paste (or press ctrl+v) and Dopus will create a new text file (by default named "Clipboard text.txt") with any text you might have on the clipboard.

Oh, and the same thing can be done with images as well

371

General Software Discussion / Re: My favorite software! What's yours?

« on: November 21, 2006, 09:00 AM »

1. Directory Opus
- By far the best file manager available, and well worth the asking price. Excellent support & the application just feels "right." It handles most of my image-management-, S/FTP- & global hotkey-needs in addition to the excellent file handling. The search functions are among the best I've ever seen, rivaling even most of the dedicated search apps. Probably the worlds most customizable application, something that just adds to the value. My only issue with it is that the license is a bit restrictive, but that's not really related to the program itself.

2. [url=http://www.ghisler.com/[/url]Total Commander[/url]
- The second best file manager, that complements Dopus well with its large collection of file-system plugins. My only real problem with it is not the application itself, but rather the fact that it's a pain in the read-end to actually buy/register it. Buying applications online should never be as hard as this, ever! Also, the program itself could use some more options to configure its core functions, as there is no reason to force me to press "yes, I'm sure for the 1000th damn time that I want to delete this folder, even if there's a system file in it!" Other than those issues, I mostly love it

3. Find And Run Robot.
- I have barely touched the start-menu since I installed this. It's fast, easy to use & in general makes my life easier. I like that!

4. Zoom Player WMV Professional
Watching videos without Zoom Player is a pain. While it's not for everyone, I absolutely love the filter-management features, and the full-screen navigators in the latest 5 betas are excellent. Really makes it easier to watch videos from the PC on the old 'tube'. The only thing it needs to be perfect is internal subtitle parsing so that you could have re-synced them using hotkeys, instead of having to open the Directvobsub interface.

5. Foobar 2000
- After discovering Foobar 2k, all other audio-players got uninstalled. There's no need for anything else when you already have the perfect player right here. It's fast, has excellent unicode handling (which is more than you can say for WMP & WinAMP ), handles any format I throw at it, it's playlist-centric & I can customize it to do just about anything.

6. True Launch Bar
- Quick-launch toolbars the way it should be done. The fact that it supports plugins only makes it better, as today I wouldn't dream of not having a media toolbar for controlling my audio player of choice.

7. Taskbar Shuffle
- Why this function never was implemented in Windows is a mystery, but who really cares when there's excellent freeware applications that makes re-ordering taskbar items as easy as this?

8. Opera
- This is exactly how a browser should be made. About as close to perfect as such an application can be.

9. Ad Muncher
- The best ad-filtering utility available. Really, it's brilliant. Just looking at the stats since my last OS installation makes me smile

Ad Muncher Usage Statistics for v4.7 Build 27105/1416
Adverts removed by Ad Muncher:  46,690
Approximate bandwidth saved:    364 MB
Counter started:                oktober 28, 2006

10. Faststone Image Viewer
- I think I've tried close to all available image browsers, but this is what use when I have to do more with the image than Dopus can take care of. My favourite feature is probably the superb wallpaper functions and the full-screen browser/editing functions. If not for the fact that it uses one of those terrible skinned interfaces (it's really bad, without any option to use the Windows default), I'd give it a close-to-perfect score.

372

General Software Discussion / Re: Total Commander 7.00 public beta 1 is available

« on: November 02, 2006, 12:37 PM »

Just tested it, and like what I'm seeing. No longer is Total Commander one of the ugliest file-managers available, although I'd still prefer it if it would use my Windows icons for files/folders instead of bundling its own custom ones. Whether or not I'm buying the application depends on how the final version turns out, but as I just bought Dopus a couple of days ago, I can't see myself switching back to TC anytime soon.

373

General Software Discussion / Re: Utility to rename taskbar buttons/window titles?

« on: November 02, 2006, 12:26 PM »

Sounds very fair to me actually By the way, seeing as you're here now, what about a feature like the one I mention in this post?

-Dirhael (October 30, 2006, 04:07 AM)

I'm not sure what exactly are you calling "a feature". Please explain your task, the desired way of its achievement, and what do you miss in the current version of Actual Window Manager. Thanks. (BTW, you may post a feature request at our forum; we consider all the requests and implement many of them.)

-Actual Tools (November 02, 2006, 04:53 AM)

Sorry, I should have explained it a bit better.. To better explain, consider the following scenario: I'm using an application like, let's say, Notepad++. The window captioning in this case is "Notepad++ - C:\path\to\open\file.txt" . Now, as this application let's you open several files in the same window (MDI), the window captioning will change depending on which "tab" you have open, yet the "Notepad++ -" always remains. Renaming the window with Actual Window Manager would in this case not be very useful seeing as if I renamed it to "C:\path\to\open\file.txt" and changed to a tab with a file named e.g. "anotherfile.txt", the window title would still say "C:\path\to\open\file.txt". This wouldn't really be of much use, as all it would do is to make things even more confusing.
This all leads me to the feature request; the option to strip out just parts of a window captioning, either by specifying a literate string to remove, or even better, using a regular expression. In my example above, all I would want to remove is the "Notepad++ -" part, but let the rest of the captioning change as usual.

Hope that explains it a bit better

374

General Software Discussion / Re: Utility to rename taskbar buttons/window titles?

« on: October 30, 2006, 04:07 AM »

I've owned an Actual Tools license in the past, and I must drop a warning that you are only buying 3 months of support & future versions when you buy this product.  A very not-so-fair deal in my opinion. 
But still a well written & supported program, with good features.

-vegas (October 27, 2006, 06:55 PM)

Please could you specify where did you get such information? Currently we provide the free lifetime support for the registered users and the free minor upgrades. Do you still consider these conditions "not-so-fair"?

-Actual Tools (October 30, 2006, 02:51 AM)

Sounds very fair to me actually By the way, seeing as you're here now, what about a feature like the one I mention in this post?

375

General Software Discussion / Re: Utility to rename taskbar buttons/window titles?

« on: October 28, 2006, 05:16 PM »

Thanks for posting the solution!  One of these days I'll learn AutoHotKey....

-tim254 (October 28, 2006, 04:46 PM)

It's not really that hard to get started with, but I think it'll be a long time until I fully understand it all. It's just one of those applications that once it's installed, you can't really imagine how you ever managed to live without it. I originally installed it as I have a Swedish keyboard, and while I really like it, I needed to have the Norwegian versions of the letters ÄÖ (ÆØ) without having to change the layout itself. That part was very easy to do, but I almost forgot I even had it installed until I needed to get this thing done