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5351

General Software Discussion / Re: Download Managers

« Last post by Darwin on June 14, 2007, 01:19 PM »

Yeah - I have a licence for Stardownloader Pro but like Hirudin haven't used it in a while (lots of sites have policies about cutting you off if you use a download manager, so I use it sparingly). Anway:

*.zip to Zip folder  With no prompting, So on a site you click the zip, it does not come up saying where do want to save this file, it just downloads stright away and puts into a folder called Zips
Definitely handles this in both the Free and the Pro versions

*.exe Files, has Prompting but allows me to chosse a catagory from list, for what folder i want to save it in, Not browsing my computer for the right folder.
Yes, though I am less positive than about the above.

Websites support, so if download from same website, the files will be saved to the website folder no prompting.
I don't think so, but have never needed this functionality.

Other points about Stardownloader to consider - development seems to be dead no updates in over a year, despite the promise of one last March.

Other downloaders that will probably do what you need are Neodownloader and Aaron's Web Vacuum.

5352

General Software Discussion / Re: The GIMP/PhotoFiltre/Paint.net/etc., thoughts...

« Last post by Darwin on June 14, 2007, 01:12 PM »

Yeah, Photofiltre is a great alternative, if your needs aren't "Pro". For now, the author is selling lifetime licences. I reviewed it here. I slam PaintShop Pro in my review, and still have issues with it's slowness, but it works well and I still find myself using it more than I thought I would.

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General Software Discussion / Re: teracopy: copy your files faster

« Last post by Darwin on June 14, 2007, 01:08 PM »

Ha ha... I was thinking of you as I wrote my previous post, Nighted. One more reason not to reinstall it!

5354

General Software Discussion / Re: The GIMP/PhotoFiltre/Paint.net/etc., thoughts...

« Last post by Darwin on June 14, 2007, 10:14 AM »

There truly is no Photoshop equal, but how many people REALLY need Photoshop, let alone its equal? I barely scratch the surface of PhotoFiltre and PaintShop Pro in terms of utilizing their features sets and doubt that most casual home user's do either. PaintShop Pro is overkill for me, Photoshop even more so. Not that I'm suggesting that everyone here is a casual user (I'm the Perry Como of digital photography software use, so may be "beyond" casual... Anyone who grew up in NA during the early to mid 70's will get the reference... or not, it's one of those days).

5355

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by Darwin on June 14, 2007, 10:07 AM »

PDF import into Endnote is only cumbersome if you have several thousand to do "after the fact". What you do is tile an endnote window and a file manager side by side. Then you just drag the pdf onto the title of its entry Endnote and it is automatically copied to the Endnote managed folder and a link created to it. It's not too cumbersome if you do it as you download/save pdfs. Of course, it would be preferable, if you are having Endnote manage the pdfs to save the pdfs directly to Endnote, but I've yet to see that as an option. Alternatively, you can simply have a link created that points to wherever you happen to have the pdf stored. This functionality was introduced several versions back... As I noted above, if I had had my head screwed on right I would have realised that having Endnote store the pdf's is silly given the size of even a small library of pdfs and that v.9 already did all that I needed...

The soft-link to your pdf's is preferable because it allows you to organise your pdfs - I had mine very organised - my folder structure goes: PDF - Journal - Year and in some cases Volume. All pdf's were saved with file names that reflect the title of the work (if I was starting again I'd put author name first, year of publication and then the title, but can't go back 7 years, sadly. Endnote just dumps the pdfs into it's own folder in a common folder under the library folder. So, Endnote libraries - Library Name.data - PDF. Fortunately, desktop search technology and/or Endnote's own system mean that nothing is far from "hand". I have found this sort of liberating because occasionally I'll just save the pdf with its default name (science.pdf or article.pdf or 012387.pdf) and don't have to worry about finding it again.

Now, to get to NoD5's point finally (if I am getting it) - it would be great to have an app like Endnote scan a pdf and extract the information from it to generate the Endnote entry. I know that this would SERIOUSLY increase the size, complexity and footprint of Endnote, but it would be useful. If free search agents can scan a pdf in under a second and catalogue its content, surely an app could extract data from it to insert into a database. Of course, this would require some sort of standardised formatting on the part of publishers and authors OR the creation of some sort tag that contains the info (a la mp3s). Fortunately, most publications now have a "download citation" feature and will auto insert everything into a new Endnote library entry. Sweet. Now if we could just save a pdf directly to Endnote...

Surfulater looks interesting - this kind of functionality is frequently requested for TexNotes/Do-Organizer, but it's been pointed out that this would significantly increase the size of the database. The developers have promised to consider it but so far nothing as come of it (at least with TexNotes - I've not really been following Do-Organizer's development). Anyway, my point being that this would be a useful feature. The issue is with portability - if one is not concerned about that, then it's not an issue.

5356

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the switch-02: Which Linux distro to choose?

« Last post by Darwin on June 14, 2007, 09:24 AM »

Raining here, too, Lashiec. We had a week of temperatures near or at 30 C at the end of May and now it's rain, rain, rain. Kind of comforting as it conforms to the stereotype of life in the Pacific Northwest! Summer is going to be HOT here (mid to high 30's where I am, over 40 in the interior of BC). I find your use of the term "enjoying" interesting as I find anything over about 27 too hot!

Anyway, I'm still enjoying the ubuntu experience. I'm not so thrilled about using wine. For some reason, apps installed this way are blind to the partition that contains my apps, or at least so far as I can tell. I'm not actually that concerned about wine at this point - more interested in checking out Linux apps - so haven't really pursued the matter. Will try to do so later in the day/week.

5357

General Software Discussion / Re: teracopy: copy your files faster

« Last post by Darwin on June 14, 2007, 02:11 AM »

Ah, thanks for that George. You've reminded me of something that "picked" me while I was using it - as noted by nosh, it does indeed take LONGER to copy small files. Like you, the vast bulk of my copies are of files, even blocks of files, that are under 10MB so I notice the slowdown. Good point about keeping it around for big jobs, though. I can't remember if there is an option to simply enable/disable it? Might be worth contacting the developer to see if it can be added, if not.

5358

DcUpdater / Re: DcUpdater - Coming Soon - Teaser Screenshot

« Last post by Darwin on June 14, 2007, 01:47 AM »

+1 for this idea as well 

I'd also vote for both options outlined by Carol as my usage is similar to lanux'

5359

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: A new name

« Last post by Darwin on June 14, 2007, 01:45 AM »

How about MouseTrap? It's late, the beer's cold... I couldn't help myself. I'll be embarrassed in the morning because I'll not be able to remember why in the h-e-double hockey sticks this was cute/relevant. Oh wait. Crap, I've already forgotten. Move along people, nothing to see here. Keep moving...

5360

General Software Discussion / Re: teracopy: copy your files faster

« Last post by Darwin on June 14, 2007, 01:39 AM »

Thanks for posting that, nosh. I've been debating reinstalling Teracopy to see if the problem I reported above is real or not, but keep coming back to the fact that I really don't have a burning need for it, so why bother... Anyway, your post has put that niggling notion to rest for me. Thanks!

5361

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 09:34 PM »

Armando is where I hope to get myself - weaned off paper and ink. That's the goal, anyway, and I hope to make it a reality. I must confess to finding it difficult to read anything on the computer, to the point that editing my own writing usually requires me to print it out at some point, even if I am going to submit it electronically.

5362

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Add an ability to sign in on the Home page

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 09:32 PM »

Thanks Chris! "Travelling in Europe" may be a bit misleading- I'll be taking part in the excavation of a Neanderthal cave site in Belgium so will be pretty sedentary, for the most part. *Hopefully* I'll be able to take advantage of my weekends off to visit some sites around Western Europe. I'll definitely be doing a flying visit to England to see my supervisor. I *should* also visit my 83 year old aunt, but don't know if I'll get up North (Yorkshire) - be well worth the trip though!

5363

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Add an ability to sign in on the Home page

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 06:41 PM »

I'd second, er, third (sorry Chris!) this idea - I'll be travelling in Europe for five weeks and will be logging into donationcoder whenever I can. www.donationcoder.com rolls off the fingertips more readily than www.donationcoder.com/forums/ To extend nowshining's original idea, it would be nice to have a login area on the homepage and have logging in re-direct you to a "My Donationcoder" page that is configureable like My Google or My Yahoo. You see, when you aren't respsonsible for coding this stuff pie in the sky is REALLY easy, which is my way of acknowledging that this might be asking too much...

5364

General Software Discussion / Re: What do you think of PCTools' Spyware Doctor?

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 06:12 PM »

I use SpySweeper and am generally happy with it - it took Webroot a LONG time to sort out the anti-Keylogger shield introduced in v. 5, but it's fixed now (for the longest time - months and months - it kept flagging about 30 WINDOWS processes as keyloggers and interupting me, rendering my computer almost uselessl, so I ran with it disabled until they fixed it. They've still not made the keylogger shield user-configurable in any way, which irritates me, but there it is).

I also run Ad-aware Pro on my wife's machine and am trying to decide if I should update to 2007 for $24 or not... Might review anti-spyware at the end of the year as both Ad-awarea and Spysweeper will need renewing then...

5365

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 05:55 PM »

I *try* to read them off the screen and am getting better at it, but somehow having a paper copy that I can write comments on just feels "right" 

PS this means that I've probably printed out 75% of my pdf collection. What I like about the electronic copies is that when I travel I have a reasonable library at my disposal without having to cart paper copies around and without it be essential that I connect to the web. Right, off to vote in your poll.

5366

General Software Discussion / Re: Xara Xtreme and Xtreme Pro upgraded to 3.2 - Proceed with caution: Info-rant!

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 03:51 PM »

Yup - standard version is just fine. However, the paid upgrade affects both standard and Pro versions (people are more p.o.'d about the Pro versin because it's only been out for six months with one minor update) and most peoples' money over at talkgraphics seems to be on the Standard "line" being rebranded as Magix Xtreme and dumbed down while the Pro line will remain Xara in name but have it's pricing structure changed to the Magix model and to a pricing point that will be considerably higher than it has been. Magix' model for pricing seems to be to release lots of updates that add bells and whistles and to charge for them. What I resent about this, and about what has happened with the Pro version already, is that this seems to me to be an excuse to get people to pay for bug fixes. Pro hasn't had any bug fixes -though there have been plenty of bugs in both it and the Standard version pointed out on the users' forum in the last six months and a lot of what is being released as the paid upgrade to 3.2 consists of bug fixes and functionality tweaks with a couple of new programmes thrown in to mask the bad taste it leaves in one's mouth...

5367

General Software Discussion / Re: does anyone of you believe in defragmentation programs?

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 01:24 PM »

Yes - I'd meant to underline the blurb above the radio button about checking with the manufacturer for compatability and see that I didn't... Right, off to do that now!

5368

General Software Discussion / Re: Xara Extreme Updated. Will People Purchase Upgrade?

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 12:35 PM »

X1 has been offered at least twice over the last year for $19.95 - I grabbed it the first time around...

5369

General Software Discussion / Re: does anyone of you believe in defragmentation programs?

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 12:30 PM »

It should do, urlwolf. It's an option though - go to Configuration - Advanced Configuration and select the "Removable Storage" tab...



EDIT: added screenshot - I'm a SnagIT fiend today (with apologies to mouser)!

5370

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 12:25 PM »

Heh, heh, heh - you guys are all right - using Endnote's pdf management feature (as introduced in v.X) is not worth it. I got about half way through manually attaching the relevant pdfs to their Endnote entries and gave up. I attach NEW pdfs to their NEW Endnote entries now, but otherwise have decided to leave well enough alone. I'll add hard links to older pdf's as I need them - ie if I happen to be using Endnote to find an article and it's not linked already I'll do it then, but my days of actually WORKING on moving my pdf library over are over ( ).

What seemed brilliant when it was announced (and prompted me to part with the upgrade price) in practice is ridiculous. I have 8 GB of PDF's - how important is it that the links to the pdfs follow the library from one computer to the next? This is hardly a portable solution. Give it two years, when 20 GB thumbdrives are $39.95, and I might rethink this but for now it was a cruel lesson in the value of critically evaluating a feature before opening my wallet! Anyway, the attraction of linking pdf's to their Endnote entries for me is that often I'll be reading a paper or a book and coming across a reference or references that I'd like to check out. My first stop is Endnote - if I have the pdf already and it's linked to it's Endnote entry, I can just double click the pdf icon and open it.

5371

General Software Discussion / Re: Endnote XI is released...

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 12:11 PM »

Another person with a gratis copy of Endnote! Colour me GREEN! Anyway, sadly, the interface in Endnote v.X is largely unchanged since version 3 (the first I used) and nothing in the screenshots I've seen of v. XI indicates that much has changed there, either.

Here's a screen grab from the manual for XI:



Here's the "what's new" page from Endnote, if you're interested in the changes introduced in the latest release...

The feature I'd been wanting prior to v.XI's release - a "quick search" bar in the toolbar, visible to the right of the screenshot above - made it in, but it's not worth $90 to me (by late fall this price might have dropped to the $60 range but even then I'm not sure I'm interested). Given that I'm more than comfortable hitting CTRL-F to accomplish the same thing paying to upgrade for this feature wouldn't really make sense.

What's the PhD on, bugis, and have you voted in the How many students are active here (instead of writing up?!)?

5372

General Software Discussion / Re: Safari 3 for Windows

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 08:40 AM »

On the other way, their PR machine could probably easyly turn the gaffe on something like "see, on Windows even Safari have security issues"!

Don't give them any ideas! 

5373

General Software Discussion / Re: Xara Xtreme and Xtreme Pro upgraded to 3.2 - Proceed with caution: Info-rant!

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2007, 02:30 AM »

Thanks for the plug, Tom! Sort of reminds me of the old Hendrix classic - "Are You Experienced?".

Anyway, Ken, starting a poll:

Just navigate to the main "General Software Discussion" board (assuming you want to place it there) and click on the far right option "Post New Poll". It's really easy to set up - the hard bit is coming up with the wording for the questions. All good fun!

5374

General Software Discussion / Re: Xara Xtreme and Xtreme Pro upgraded to 3.2 - Proceed with caution: Info-rant!

« Last post by Darwin on June 12, 2007, 11:31 PM »

Maybe it's time to start a poll?

5375

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by Darwin on June 12, 2007, 04:24 PM »

Armando,
"If I could find another reliable strategy which is sufficiently portable (I don't want to loose years of tags and annotation by just changing software or OS), I'd give it a try..."

Well you could do what I do with journal articles but for any other types of files also. That is, create a .txt file with the same name as the file you want tagged (but perhaps with "_tag" at the end) and put the tags and keywords in that .txt. I think any indexing search tool will find those tags and due to the same filename you then find the file you're searching for. If you have a consistent and unique format for your current tags in filenames that a script can isolate (like using [tag1 tag2 tag3] only for tags) then you could probably make a batch script that migrates to the ".txt system".

-Nod5 (June 12, 2007, 02:23 PM)

Just to note - this is possible with Endnote (pretty much any version) - you create your bibliographic entry, link to the pdf (either to its location your harddrive or you can have it copy the pdf to an Endnote managed location within the Endnote library you're importing into), and type out an abstract, keywords, notes, etc. into the bibliographic entry. It's all now searchable and linked within Endnote. As I mentioned before, this solution only works if you and anyone you want to share the notes with have Endnote installed...