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3201

Best E-mail Client / Re: Can you spell e-mail?

« Last post by zridling on May 22, 2005, 02:03 AM »

Both are acceptable, although I prefer email because it's simpler to write, and we all know its meaning.

3202

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Text Editor just for text (stay with me)

« Last post by zridling on May 22, 2005, 01:58 AM »

Exactly, and for now, UltraEdit more than fits the bill.

3203

Living Room / Re: "The Problem with Microsoft is..."

« Last post by zridling on May 22, 2005, 01:56 AM »

I misspoke. I meant to say fragments left in the Registry after an app is uninstalled. It truly doesn't make a noticeable performance difference, but it shouldn't be left there for me to wonder "What is that?" when I'm trying to find certain keys and values.

3204

Living Room / All else being equal... do you prefer an Open Source app?

« Last post by zridling on May 22, 2005, 01:53 AM »

All else being equal, do you prefer to use an Open Source application?
*(Please note the difference between an Open Source application and a freeware one.)

Some non-Microsoft OS vs. Closed:
__Firefox —— Opera
__OpenOffice —— WordPerfect
__MySQL —— Oracle
__GIMP —— Photoshop
__7-zip —— WinRAR
__KeyNote —— TexNotes
__Thunderbird —— TheBat
..............................................and so on.

3205

Living Room / Re: "The Problem with Microsoft is..."

« Last post by zridling on May 21, 2005, 03:54 AM »

I love what individuals build, though, to make Windows better. Each of us can think of a dozen programs off the top of our head that makes us go: "Why didn't Microsoft just do THAT?!" Someone mentioned in another thread why doesn't Microsoft offer FrontPage's code (tab) page as a freeware HTML utility? It's great, and that's a good idea to me.

One big gripe I have as a non-coder is Windows Registry. Why doesn't Microsoft offer a decent Registry editing tool, or something to actually remove the continuous crap dumped there? They don't want the idiots monkeying around with Registry, okay, fine. But the rest of us don't want the thing to grow and grow and grow. And I hate people who say: "It doesn't make a difference in performance if fragments are left in the Registry, so why should you care?"

ARRRRRGGHHH, where'd I put my Ronco flame thrower!

3206

Unfinished Requests / IDEA: Text Editor just for text (stay with me)

« Last post by zridling on May 21, 2005, 03:39 AM »

This is not really a "snack-limited" idea because it couldn't be done in a weekend, but it is a Long Tail idea. What about a text editor that just focuses on text creation, on putting words to screen, on writing?

Stay with me.

PROBLEM: Users, mostly writers, are dying for a true text editor; that is, an editor built to edit text/words. Many programs already do this, but they also do worlds of other things, e.g., think of UltraEdit and all it does — coding and all that. And there are tons of terrible, weak text editors to go around. There are even a dozen RTF word processors that are also very weak. But writers would kill to have a super fast program that has the file-handling power and customizability of UltraEdit but the speed of EmEditor. They could write their stories, columns, ad copy, text, in it, hit the copy button and drop it into any "container" program that one uses, such as OpenOffice, Word, Quark, whatever.

SOLUTION: Build a text editor that:
__(1) Allows for broad customizability, such as allowing proportional fonts (Courier New doesn't cut it for writing), document tabs, even an internal Explorer, etc... basically a stripped down UltraEdit with an updated interface;
__(2) Handles large files (coders don't see the need in this, but writers need it when working with volume-sized novels or serialized works);
__(3) Might include some text-handling abilities, such as justification (often, however, this type of formatting isn't called for in and text editor and is also lost when copying into the container program).

It's a thought, but if I could code, this is what I would build and I'd market it to writers around the globe. Being a text app, one does not have to worry about formatting and file format changes. If I created a .txt file in 1987, it would still be the same today as it was then, compared to a WordPerfect file, for example.

3207

Living Room / Re: Cool short videos for the weekend

« Last post by zridling on May 21, 2005, 03:17 AM »

My find is from VidLit, called Craziest. It will change the way you think of Scrabble forever!

3208

General Software Discussion / Re: Software for Mindmapping etc

« Last post by zridling on May 20, 2005, 01:10 AM »

Jeff, have you checked out FreeMind? It's in its early development but is darn simple to use.

3209

Living Room / Re: "The Problem with Microsoft is..."

« Last post by zridling on May 20, 2005, 01:06 AM »

[TANGENT]
I will also admit this: Since I've never coded for Windows, I neither know nor understand such frustrations. But I do like and depend on several Microsoft Office 2003 products, among them Word, OneNote, and Excel on a daily basis. When most people complain about Word's quirks, I sympathize to an extent, but often their complaints come down to a failure to understand three things: styles, templates, and breaks. Some folks never figure this out either because they don't have the time or don't have the patience.

If you want a nice history of Microsoft Office from someone who lived it and coded it, check out Chris Pratley's excellent blog and read the entries from January 2004 to April 2004. You might find the readers' attacks as interesting as Chris' explanations.

3210

Living Room / "The Problem with Microsoft is..."

« Last post by zridling on May 20, 2005, 12:52 AM »

In her latest newsletter, Karen Kenworthy made a mistake with her installer:

THE DEBUT OF A NEW PROGRAM IS ALWAYS A NERVOUS TIME, HERE AT THE SECLUDED POWER TOOLS WORKSHOP. IS THE PROGRAM REALLY USEFUL? WILL IT WORK CORRECTLY? WILL EVERYONE UNDERSTAND HOW TO USE IT? MORE IMPORTANTLY, CAN IT BE USED IN A MALICIOUS WAY? DOES THE PROGRAM, OR ITS INSTALLER, EVER UNINTENTIONALLY DO HARM?

UNFORTUNATELY, FOR A TIME LAST WEEK, THAT FINAL FEAR CAME TRUE. BECAUSE OF MY ERROR, THE INSTALLER FOR MY NEW PROGRAM, "KAREN'S ONCE-A-DAY," CORRUPTED SOME SYSTEMS. ON COMPUTER'S RUNNING WINDOWS 95, WINDOWS 98, WINDOWS 98 SE, AND WINDOWSME, THE INSTALLER IMPROPERLY REPLACED A FILE NAMED MSVCRT.DLL WITH A ONE INTENDED FOR LATER VERSIONS OF WINDOWS. AT BEST, THIS MISTAKE CAUSED ANERROR MESSAGE TO APPEAR, THE NEXT TIME THE COMPUTER WAS REBOOTED. BUT AT WORST — AND THIS DID HAPPEN — IT CAUSED WINDOWS TO CRASH WHEN REBOOTED. IN THOSE CASES, THE USER HAD TO RESTORE THE ORIGINAL MSVCRT.DLL FILE, SOMETIMES BY REINSTALLING WINDOWS. I CAN'T SAY HOW SORRY I AM FOR THIS MISTAKE....

I do not actually code anything, so I don't have firsthand knowledge (at most I can do webdev using HTML, XML, and basic CSS). However, I'm eager to know:
__(1) What has been your own frustrations when building applications on the Windows platform?
__(2) How much is Microsoft's fault and how could they make it better/simpler?

3211

Living Room / Re: Bitwise Magazine - please call by soon....

« Last post by zridling on May 19, 2005, 08:35 AM »

Here's three I'd like to see:





and of course,

3212

Living Room / Re: which hierarchical note program?

« Last post by zridling on May 19, 2005, 08:23 AM »

Nudone, although it costs $99, consider Microsoft OneNote. It's GREAT on a tablet, and you can drop photos into it and take all the notes you want — it's incredibly simple and seriously fast. I have over 6,000 "pages" in one of my OneNote setups and it's no problem.

The "busy-ness" of TexNotes Pro is its complexity. It's a great program and well-supported, and its interface can by customized for simplicity, but don't kid yourself: TexNotes Pro is an advanced program required a good measure of immersion to fully take advantage of its broad features.

Mouser guessed it: ACDSee 7 does have good note-taking abilities. Just right-click, select Properties to open a task pane that has a host of info and Notes section. Version 7 is great; version 6.x was bloatware, but users griped so much that they actually reduced the feature set in the current version and made the program really fast again.

3213

Living Room / Re: Review Day: Saturday -> Monday

« Last post by zridling on May 17, 2005, 10:11 PM »

I got a couple of hundred avatars (I like the trailer, too), but most of them are of Lucy Liu. I've also got an idea for coding program that involves ATM machines and remote-controlled spiders that will make us all stinkin' rich.

No wait, that was Bender's idea. I watch way too many cartoons.

3214

Living Room / Re: Review Day: Saturday -> Monday

« Last post by zridling on May 17, 2005, 02:58 AM »

Breaking the reviews into a introductory, capsule "Part I," describing each app would build excitement and feedback. I have to admit, I couldn't wait for this latest email review to be published because of what I knew would be completely different from what I know and do (with email). Like now, any feedback in the forums could build toward the second, conclusive "Part II" review. That's still over 20 topics a year (assuming you build in breaks for life events like taking a vacation, getting sick, trying to get someone to bail you out of jail, etc.), which would cover a large swath of the software landscape every 10-12 months.

3215

Living Room / Re: Bitwise Magazine - please call by soon....

« Last post by zridling on May 17, 2005, 12:03 AM »

Dang, and I was sooo looking forward to the article, "This Summer's Hottest Mousepads!

Love the rants and raves — right down my alley. Thanks for sharing Huw!

3216

Living Room / Re: Review Day: Saturday -> Monday

« Last post by zridling on May 16, 2005, 11:58 PM »

This is a good idea, but something I wonder is the commitment to a review every single week. That's a brutal schedule, especially since there is plenty of other contributing writers on the site between the blogs and forum activity. The amount of energy alone that it takes to sift through the features — or lack thereof — of so many apps within a category is mindblowing. Why not consider doing the current, extended reviews once a month or every three weeks, but having smaller, capsule reviews of 1-2 related apps in between?

The first reason I suggest this is, if you peruse the site right now, there is a significant amount of content available, and a newcomer would spend quite a bit of time reading to catch up on the reviews alone. Look at how the columnists' posts have filled out now. And the second reason I suggest it is burnout. Like any columnist or heavy duty blogger, they need to build in natural breaks to get away and reenergize their brains.

3217

Best E-mail Client / Re: ASRT 5/14/05 - EMAIL CLIENT

« Last post by zridling on May 16, 2005, 11:32 PM »

Jibz and mouser make good points, but unlike them, I don't have any important emails. So I admit that's not normal by any measure.

3218

Best E-mail Client / Email Client Review first impressions

« Last post by zridling on May 16, 2005, 11:26 PM »

Mouser, congrats on another great review. This email client review had to be really tough since you note how important a role one's personal preferences play in the decision. You start and finish with TheBat's weaknesses, but do a great job of dissecting the program's features and strengths. I like PocoMail over TheBat, but your observation was the same as mine: damn this is a noisy, busy interface, almost like a bad cola commercial. I tone PocoMail's interface down by deleting several columns and hiding lots of stuff. A long-time friend of mine, Ken Ufford, claims to have well over 100,000 email messages inside his current TheBat v3x setup, and like you, says he's never missed a message.

There are several keen observations in this review:
(1) "...a minor difference is usability can add up to a significant inconvenience over time."

This is why developers should use their own apps. If you work in an office as a secretary and you perform the same 4-step task 100 times a day, that's 400 steps, and that gets old fast, and wastes cumulative time by the end of the day.


(2) "Someone please tell companies to stop trying to combine things like mail programs and newsreaders and rss readers...."

Have you noticed how "cleaner/privacy" apps are rapidly expanding their features and raising their prices, making several formerly solid apps more tenuous.


(3) The "Are you happy with your email" questions are good criteria for evaluating current and future email client choices.

A highly accurate list.


(4) The last line of the review is hilarious: "If I ever release a program that has an exclamation point at the end of its name, please shoot me." Add Batch It! and SnagIt! Oy.

However, methinks thou art overly kind to Thunderbird, and in closing making it seem as though it is nearly as good as TheBat in your concluding section.

3219

Best E-mail Client / Re: TheName!

« Last post by zridling on May 16, 2005, 11:16 PM »

There are several bad naming conventions that drive me nuts, but the exclamation point is the worst, followed by attaching "zilla." Don't get me started on prices. If they continue to rise and the USD continues to fall, I'll be using freeware only in the future.

3220

Best E-mail Client / Re: ASRT 5/14/05 - EMAIL CLIENT

« Last post by zridling on May 16, 2005, 02:59 AM »

Just a question: Will this review include the major webmail clients such as Gmail and Yahoo? I mention these two because at 2+Gb, they're essentially unlimited email. I know Gmail does almost all of what Jibz listed above, but its filtering capabilities are almost unmatched. I'm not sure what percentage of people have a webmail account on top of their POP3 account, but when I travel, I don't have to worry what is where (or what is left behind on the home system), I just use Gmail and be done.

I'm different because in the past, most of my email time was wasted time. It's not much different now except I answer it 2-4 times a MONTH.

3221

Living Room / Re: just a bit of fun... what category are you?

« Last post by zridling on May 15, 2005, 12:41 AM »

This is an interesting question, Nudone, and it would be great if DCC came up with a new word or term. Off the top of my head, I played with other words, too, such as:

__Freediver -- One who dives deep to find good freeware and surfaces with a gem
__Freewheeler -- Not bad
__Freeman -- but what about the girls?
__Freepster -- has a bad political connotation, but I don't know what it means
__Freebster -- similar, but without the bad connotation above
__Free agent -- not bad, but trite
__Free Loader -- I like it, but it has an inaccurate double entendre
__Free lover -- well now, aren't we all?

Well, it was worth a try. I'd like to find the word, because it is my experience that freeware often fills a hole that shareware/commercialware lacks. And yes, I don't appreciate people who reactively rate freeware higher just because it is free. If the freeware app is good enough for your purposes, that's fine. But that doesn't make it the best imo. Photoshop may be the best in its class, but I still can't even come close to affording it. But Image Factory is! (http://www.colour-sc...ence.com/if/home.htm). (Otherwise, my site would be named "The Good Enough List.")

3222

Best E-mail Client / Re: ASRT 5/14/05 - EMAIL CLIENT

« Last post by zridling on May 12, 2005, 04:08 AM »

Here's some thoughts by Scot Finnie that have proved true to my experience:

Thunderbird Is No Firefox
A lot of you have been bending my ear with the suggestion that I try Mozilla's Thunderbird. I don't really make a habit of reviewing email software, even though I do write about the subject a lot. Why don't I review email products? Because I've learned over the years that my needs are a lot more demanding than most people's.

For example, I need an email program whose message rules can filter both incoming and outgoing messages. Thunderbird can only filter incoming messages. I need an email app that can pull dozens of email accounts into a single inbox and folder hierarchy. Thunderbird is primarily designed to handle multiple accounts in separate inboxes. It has a feature that allows it to merge those accounts into a single inbox, but Mozilla decided to protect us from ourselves by creating a default SMTP server that's designed to serve all of your accounts, and that frankly turns the whole program into a giant mess for experienced email users who are able to work with multiple SMTP servers. I also need an email program that provides true individual account controls (plus an "identities" or "personalities" feature, which lets you create multiple account-like entries for a single mail account). Thunderbird makes a stab at this, but it's fatally flawed, primarily because of the compromises already mentioned.

One other pet peeve. Many of Thunderbird's settings dialogs are modal. Once opened, they prevent anything else from being opened. That can be annoying when you want to copy and paste settings from one account to another, for example. I also had trouble getting ThunderBird's import tool to import the Eudora address book, even though it offered an option to do so. My Eudora installation uses the default locations for all Eudora files, but Qualcomm made a change a couple of years back on those defaults. My guess is that some Thunderbird developer was using an old version of Eudora when writing the import script.

After just 30 minutes with the finished product, my assessment is this: Thunderbird looks a lot like Outlook Express. In fact, it reminds me of a cross between the cult-favorite Calypso emailer from the 1990s (which is now being marketed and developed by Rose City Software as Courier) and Outlook Express. It's actually less powerful than Outlook Express (though OE has other severe problems) and more powerful than the original Calypso.

Frankly, all, you can do better than this. There's a product called PocoMail that might be worth a look if you haven't tried it. It has much of the power of Eudora with a cleaner interface more like Outlook Express. My only qualm about PocoMail has been that the product is updated sporadically, and reliability hasn't always been excellent.

Sorry to pour cold water on Thunderbird when I know so many of you are newly fond of it. The interface is very slick but I do not like Mozilla's underlying strategy. The very same approach is perfect for the Firefox browser. But the world doesn't need another light-weight email package — there are already far too many of them. What we need is something that can go up against Outlook, Outlook Express, and Eudora head on. Something with significant features that will give us a real alternative. It's clear to me that Mozilla is more than capable of creating such an email application. They just went in a different direction. As a result, I find Thunderbird to be a bitter disappointment.

For its excellent filtering abilities, I just use GMail these days, and if I must use a POP3 client, I use PocoMail. I love FoxMail for its sheer simplicity and easy setup.

3223

Living Room / Re: Wikiwax: cool

« Last post by zridling on May 12, 2005, 03:08 AM »

Love those active lists like that!

3224

General Software Discussion / Re: nice freeware blog - french but pictures are universal :)

« Last post by zridling on May 10, 2005, 04:14 AM »

Wow, those are some good screenshots he posts. There he is writing in French, but most of the software is English throughout. I could get by with a French-language version, but not Spanish. I accidentally hit the Spanish button on the ATM once and had to push all the buttons from place memory. Oy.

3225

General Software Discussion / Good video conversion app?

« Last post by zridling on May 10, 2005, 04:10 AM »

Anyone using a good video conversion app they'd recommend? I've been using VIDEOzilla which has worked well and fast for me, but am wondering what else is out there that others find useful.