Recent Posts

36951

Best ScreenCaster / Re: what an outstanding review.

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 07:15 AM »

nudone i can't thank you enough for your posts prior to the review - they also make a great addendum to the review.
shangnyun, the ability to put urls in movies seems supoer important - i hope you'll keep us up to date here on which programs you discover can do it.  sounds like something definitely worth suggesting to the developers.

36952

UrlSnooper / Re: spaces in filenames?

« Last post by mouser on June 06, 2005, 08:01 PM »

good point about file save menu, i will do that as well, and post when post are updated; hopefully in a week or so.

36953

UrlSnooper / Re: spaces in filenames?

« Last post by mouser on June 06, 2005, 07:49 PM »

thanks for the bug report, ill put that on the todo list, shouldnt be too hard too fix as long as there are double quotes around them.

36954

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

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 06:16 PM »

its very hit and miss.
i know there are some phpbb tools for converting forum data frm some formats into phpbb format, but i'm not sure how well they work, and given the issues with users registering, its probably quite hard to do it properly.  i would not count on being able to transfer users and posts - it's probably asking for trouble to try to do it.

36955

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

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 04:33 PM »

what i can tell you is how i settled on simple machines forum (smf) after some serious agonizing and experimentation.

first, phpbb is good and has a large community behind it.

i was looking for an alternative for 2 reasons; first, there have been some well known exploits of it and i have friends who had their phpbb boards hacked.  it may be that all board software is in a similar situation and just doesnt get the attention that phpbb does, so this isnt an asserttion about which one is least secure, but it was enough to cause me to look elsewhere.

the other real reason was that i wanted a forum which could support good hierarchical nesting of subsections.

that led me to invision or smf.  i really love how smf handles child boards, though i have to warn you that we did quite a bit of tweaking to get smf working and looking to our liking. phpbb (at least last i checked) does not have a nice support for nested child boards.  though out of the box it may be a more attractive board than smf.

i have heard the same thing as you regarding vbulletin from people in a position to know; so if you have the money and are ok with the support license, it may be the way to go.

i was also quite happy trying invision, another commercial board, but ultimately decided that open source was a better match for us, especially since we wanted to be able to modify the software ourselves.

i have been extremely pleased with smf - it has exceeded my expectation in terms of stability and flexiblity.

36956

Cheat Sheeter / Re: New Program Idea: Cheat Sheeter

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 03:21 PM »

no no, your idea is new, the idea of a "caption button"

i was actually thinking of it being in tray and not on screen until called up by a hotkey, or alse a bar docked to the side of a screen when you want help info constantly on screen but not overlapping other windows, BUT
your idea of a "caption button", in the window titlebars is a great one, especially since you could use a differrent color or something to indicate when there is a cheat sheet available for that app.  really nice idea.
also opens up other bonus things that could be put inside such a button; the menu for the cheat sheets could be put in there too, really nice idea.
ill add the first major functions first - and we can add this idea of captionbar button later.  definitely something that should be done.  nice idea.

36957

Best ScreenCaster / Re: Opinions?

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 01:06 PM »

this is really a tough one..

we may have to do a split award or something..
different winners for different purposes..

camtasia needs to get some recognition for being the only one of the bunch that can truely claim to do high speed smooth desktop capture, while at the same time doing an excellent job of producing flash output.

but for those who like to do a lot of annotation and interactive stuff, or who want to be able to do small captures by manually taking screenshots, then the flash based tools may be more appropriate...

im going to experiment more by creating more real movies with annotations and captions and see.

36958

Best ScreenCaster / Re: Opinions?

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 12:44 PM »

well i think you and i basically started out in the same place which is:
we expected the apps designed for flash capture to produce MUCH SMALLER files and MUCH BETTER quality.

when the reality seems to be that the full motion flash capture apps and video capture apps (camtasia) are producing very similar results in terms of size and quality.

the surprise is that the flash capture apps are producing flash files that are so large, and that camtasia is able to produce flash files that are so small; the result is very little difference.

there are some advantages and disadvantages to having the files in the different formats.
a strong advantage of capturing video is:
you can capture in very high quality, and downsample and resize, etc for final output depending on target.
the flash capture apps dont capture at a high enough rate to make truely super smooth output the way camtasia can.
the flash capture apps have more flexibility in doing things like interactive stuff, changing mouse position, etc.

the other thing that these experiments make clear is that there really is still a use for these manual click-to-capture-screen tools (like wink), because the difference in file size can be 100k vs. 2mb.

this is clearly going to be a nail-biter of a review..
im still doing some more detailed tests of advanced features.  i need to play with these apps more.

viewletcam is also impressing me.

36959

Best ScreenCaster / Re: Opinions?

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 11:56 AM »

i have to admit camtasia is pretty damn sweet..
going to have to run more tests on various features.

36960

Cheat Sheeter / Re: New Program Idea: Cheat Sheeter

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 11:53 AM »

in case i wasnt clear, im agreeing to set it up exactly as you say, with the additional option that you will be able to dock the main info window into the toolbar if you so desire.

36961

Cheat Sheeter / Re: New Program Idea: Cheat Sheeter

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 11:52 AM »

i was going to at first reply in this way:

my intention is that you will be able to make cheat sheeter a very thin bar docked to side of screen or rolled up, or minimized on tray and it will open up into full window when you ask it to show you something.

so i already agree with 90% of what you are suggesting.

however your focus on the idea of it launching OTHER APPS, like movie player, mshelp file, etc. has some real merit to it, and would suggest a slightly different approach to the program than what i have been planning.  and i think your approach might have merit...

there are some advantages to having the main window part of the toolbar application, in taht you could dock the whole thing to edge of desktop, and various things, so i think i am going to find a way to leave that in place; i think its also quite possible that for many people, they will want just one little window, not 2 things floating around.

but i can definitely see the appeal of having a tiny thin bar at top of screen which opens child windows on demand that would show movies, help files, html pages, etc.  and so i will add support for this.

i thinkits just a matter of saying this:
the main program can run as a tiny thin toolbar.

the program will have a built in custom web browser which it can use to render html cheat sheets, and which it can control specially.

this html browser can be displayable EITHER as docked into the tool bar and shown on request, OR undocked as a separate little window.
additionally, the program will know how to launch other documents if the cheat sheet set wants to show movies/helpfiles/pdfs, etc, which are not embedded onto an html page.

in summary, cs will be runnable as a toolbar; it will beable to launch external windows exactly as you say to display arbitrary info.
it will also have a special built in html web browser which it will have extra special control over which will let me do some special things; you can use this special browser either as something docked into the toolbar, or as an external mini window, OR in fact you could choose to not use the built in browser panel at all and tell cs to use a separate external browser (though i supsect that will have some disadvantages such as cs not having good control over where that window appears on screen etc.)

i think this is going to be a really fun community project.. i am thinking that there are going to be tons of suggestions for features to add, etc., and i look forward to working with you guys to make it a fun and unique kind of app.

36962

Best ScreenCaster / Re: Opinions?

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 10:33 AM »

ive got a lot more to do, but here are is some info to save people some time.

there are really only a couple of contenders to win the award at this point:

1. Macromedia Captivate
2. Camtasia
3. BB Flashback
4. ViewletCAM (this is not viewlet builder, it's their other app, i missed it in part1).

nudone could you try viewlet cam if you get a chance, i was pleasently impressed by it!

the other apps are just not good enough for capturing full screen movies easily.

wink will of course win best freeware though it has a long way to go before it can compete with these big guys.

i will talk about the other apps not in this list a little, but these are the only four real contenders.

i agree with you nudone about finding it hard to think of a case where you would need to move cursor..
the only time i have used it is if i have spliced out some section of the demo, and needed to move mouse in order to keep the continuity which would otherwise be broken because of the sliced out stuff.

to me, all of my biases tell me that camtasia is not the way to go; i just think of this tool as not using a video file codec for recording this stuff and that i want a storage of screens and movements. but i am trying to keep an open mind and i definitely prefer your continued thinking on the matter to help me make up my mind.

36963

Official DonationCoder.com Reviews / Re: Should I Review Free Whois, Traceroute, & Finger Apps?

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 02:15 AM »

ok i set up a section called Member Mini-Reviews for such reviews;
i think its a great idea and i hope others will follow your lead and write their own.

as soon as you have more than 1 or 2 mini reviews, i will create a special child board for you if you still want it, but i think its kind of nice to think of all member reviews being in one place so its more convenient for people who want to go read user reviews, so they dont have to go to different places.

i will make an index web page for the reviews and there we can specifcally highlight which reviews are by who and make a link to your column, your reviews, and any extra web pages of info.

36964

Cheat Sheeter / Re: New Program Idea: Cheat Sheeter

« Last post by mouser on June 05, 2005, 01:50 AM »

just playing with various interface ideas..

36965

Official DonationCoder.com Reviews / Re: Should I Review Free Whois, Traceroute, & Finger Apps?

« Last post by mouser on June 04, 2005, 09:31 PM »

whenever you post to your blog, it will show up their and on the columns page, as soon as you post it, whenever you post it.
there is nothing that enforces the every other week, sunday thing., and posting every sunday (reviews every other sunday?) would be welcome.

however so far we have stuck to our original idea of having columnists that go on specific days; your day is sunday.  posting on other days would slightly interfere with that, and i like how the way it is now where we know on a given day whose column to expect - i think it's kind of fun, so we should figure out a different solution if we want to do reviews more frequently.

the blog approach also means that only columnists can write reviews, which is not the best.

i will look for some open source community reviewing software, i know i have seen some.  on the other hand, one might wonder if the best solultion wouldnt be to set up a section in the forum for posting reviews?

the advantage of using the forum for posting reviews are significant:
lets anyone comment and write reviews; everyone already has an account.
the audience at the forum is probably larger than for the blog.

why don't we just use the forum for posting reviews?
i can set up a special child board either in this section or in "software in the wild" section  (maybe there would be better since its not as cluttered with child boards already).

and what i can also do is, make a page on the main site outside the forum, that lists all user mini reviews
so that visitors to the site who dont normally visit the forum will see the list of mini reviews and easy links to them.

what do you think?

36966

Living Room / server being rebooted briefly this evening

« Last post by mouser on June 04, 2005, 09:21 PM »

from our hosting company: "the server will be rebooted on Sunday June 5th, 2005 at 0500 EDT (GMT -4)."
they are upgrading the OS.

hopefully should go smoothly; everything is backed up in case it doesnt

36967

Official DonationCoder.com Reviews / Re: Should I Review Free Whois, Traceroute, & Finger Apps?

« Last post by mouser on June 04, 2005, 09:03 PM »

whatever you post to your blog column will show up on the columns page, and if you wanted to do a review on one of your sundays, that would be one nice way to do it, and of course your columns are archives forever, so that might be the ideal way to do it.  assuming you dont plan on doing more than 1 review a week that would seem like a nice approach, and people would enjoy reading a mini review on your blog day.  you can also post direct links to the blog entry for the review in this section (or software in the wild section) so people can make sure they don't miss it.

another really nice thing about that approach would be that people could offer comments on your review through the blog column features.  i think thats probably a good solution, especially since your intention was to do a column every other week anyway..

if you were to add pages manually by ftping them to your web space, then you would have to manually make sure not to overwrite old files, and make an index for people to see the list of reviews etc. so thats probably not what you want.

the blog approach definitely seems best to me.

however, if we had more people who wanted to write mini reviews, i could make a separate special blog, or install one of the other content management systems more specifically designed for community reviews, which would allow other people to post reviews and comment on them, without it messing with the basic approach of daily blogs.

36968

Official DonationCoder.com Reviews / Re: Should I Review Free Whois, Traceroute, & Finger Apps?

« Last post by mouser on June 04, 2005, 08:32 PM »

well i like the idea of hosting user-written mini reviews.
let me just put some template files together..
you've also got some web space and ftp login because you are a columnist so you could always just write it however you want it and we could just link to it, but it might be nice if we started a real section for user-written mini reviews, all with a common basic style, so you might want to hold off writing any html formatted stuff until then.

i'm open to suggestions about the best way to do it...
i guess part of it probably would depend on the length and thoroughness of what you want to do.

for example, if you just want to write a paragraph or two saying, here is a program i like, then that would be suitable for a forum post or blog post.
if you wanted to write something more substantial, then we should definitely think about starting a place where we can collect such mini reviews that you or others might right, as it will probably be something that would be nice to have a place where people can go for such reviews.

alternatively we could set up a forum section for such reviews..  maybe a child section of this board.

alternatively, since you are a columnist now, we could set up a web page like "DragonRider's Reviews" where you could maintain your own mini reviews..

i'm open to suggestions, however you decide to do it, it sounds great.

36969

Official DonationCoder.com Reviews / Re: Should I Review Free Whois, Traceroute, & Finger Apps?

« Last post by mouser on June 04, 2005, 07:09 PM »

oh i see, you were talking about a big full review - i misread it as you asking if you shouldnt just do a small blog column recommending a good one.

ok let me think about this, there are tons of options, we could do a full big review on the subject - maybe like a review of those full big network information toolsets (ie tool suites that have ping, whois, traceroute, etc).  that would actually be very useful, or if you think that there isnt enough subject matter to make a full big review with award, etc., then we could do it as our first mini-guide.

either way, the new two-week process makes it a bit easier to do guest reviews.  when tenseiken did his guest review of ftp servers, he and i talked constantly on irc and worked collaboratively editing the review.  with the two-week process its a bit easier since you could write the main review and then we would have some days to all chip in and make suggestions, etc.

as with tenseiken's review, i would expect that i would be doing substantial editing of the review to round it out, etc. just to give the review some consistency with our other reviews, but the bulk of the review would be done by you.  i can send (or upload for all) the basic review template html files - you can just edit that html file in writing your review.  or else send it to me as plain text for me to format.  i can also help recompress and format images and make a screenshot gallery if needed.

when would it be due.. depends if we do a coding snacks weekend next week or not..
after monday when this review is done ill post again with more thoughts and files.

36970

Official DonationCoder.com Reviews / Re: Should I Review Free Whois, Traceroute, & Finger Apps?

« Last post by mouser on June 04, 2005, 04:18 PM »

absolutely would be great know some good freeware ones; i don't know myself which tools work.
and might be nice to give just a short how-to for newbies?

36971

Best ScreenCaster / Re: Opinions?

« Last post by mouser on June 04, 2005, 03:44 PM »

i'm going to spent the rest of saturday writing the review draft. then ideally that would give us at least all of sunday to get your feedback and dissenting opinions, etc.

36972

Best ScreenCaster / Re: Opinions?

« Last post by mouser on June 03, 2005, 10:52 PM »

fantastic! really really nice summary.
i had the same qualms with macromedia captivate audio recording, but haven't had much to compare it with yet, so i will give some special focus to the issue of editing audio.

really really helpful to read.

btw:

it's also difficult trying to compare the only totally free product against programs that cost around $300. there appears to be a massive gap in the market just waiting for someone to release a lower priced alternative to the current crop on offer.

i could not agree more.
i was telling zaine, these companies are going to get murdered by the next version of wink, or another freeware alternative if they keep up with this $200-$400 price range.  if they were smart, one of these good one would price their app at $50 or $79 and grab the market.  its just bad markering imho, and/or the poisonous nature of capitalism.  its a shame that wink development has stalled for now..

36973

General Software Discussion / software for memorizing info

« Last post by mouser on June 03, 2005, 10:44 PM »

a while ago the issue of software to help memorize info came up.
i just stumbled on this: http://www.super-mem...o/supermemo2004.html
looks a big busy, but full of features.

36974

Cheat Sheeter / Re: New Program Idea: Cheat Sheeter

« Last post by mouser on June 03, 2005, 10:18 PM »

if there are any css experts out there..
this project could benefit from trying to figure out a set of styles and method of presenting information, such that
we could have the same html page of information, with dif style sheets that were suited for
a tall narrow sidebar docked to side of screen
vs.
a wide but short bar docked to top of screen
vs.
full screen

in other words, im interested in a way that the same info could be rendered using dif css styles, to make the same info look good in those different modes, so that we could use the same html info pages in dif modes of viewing.

does that make sense?

36975

Living Room / xtort.net - nice freeware listing site (+more)

« Last post by mouser on June 03, 2005, 05:02 PM »

got a nice email from the person who runs http://www.xtort.net, a nice freeware listing site that has a good rss2 feed and lots of extra stuff.

looks like a really nice site worth visiting regularly.