Adobe launch high quality, free online Office suite

SOHO tools are developing fast. I will trial this and report.

Adobe’s Acrobat.com could be an Office killer; Will interface matter? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

On Monday, Adobe unveiled Acrobat.com, a suite that allows you to create word processing documents, share files, convert PDFs and hold Web conferences.

Simply put, Acrobat.com is the best looking online office suite on the block (Techmeme). Google Docs, Zoho and other entrants look fine, but don’t exactly stretch the imagination with the interface. Using Flash, Adobe’s suite, which includes Buzzword word processor, PDF converter and Web conferencing applications, is slick. Adobe’s online applications easily pass–and often top–what you’d find on the desktop. In fact, Adobe’s ConnectNow seems to be the killer app in the suite and could be a threat to WebEx.

Open Source Multitouch Overlay - Exciting and Multiplatform

Gizmodo does it again ... look at what they have found! Demo videos at link.

Multitouch Goodness: Full-Screen Multitouch Mac OS X Is Here (But Not from Apple)

It's not from Apple, but it gives a pretty good idea of what to expect from them, especially knowing that only one guy—Christian Moore—got this system running at full speed on a simple Intel-based MacBook. His Lux free open framework enables true multitouch interaction in Mac OS X. In fact, he says it can work under any platform and even a web browser, enabling complex user interfaces and object manipulation comparable to Jeff Han's magic walls or the Microsoft Surface anywhere. We talked with Moore about how it works and what to expect from it.

Creating Music online - it gets better

Free Music Studio Means No More Excuses | Listening Post from Wired.com

A new online facility tested by wired.com. See the report and an online demo. Wired said:

"Virtual instruments may be going the way of recorded music: free and online.

We've seen plenty of sites that let you make or mix music in a rudimentary way, but none that offer the deep feature set of Hobnox AudioTool. This free online electronic music studio lets you compose with two TB-303 Bass Line generators, Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines and two banks of effects pedals including three delays, crusher, detune, flanger, reverb, a parametric equalizer and a compressor. By clicking the mouse button, you can drag virtual cables between any output and any input to customize the setup."

Print large Versions of Your Posters

HowTo: Free and Huge custom poster for your wall » MakeUseOf.com

how to create, huge(up to 20 meters), awesome looking, rasterized wall posters using previously mentioned Rasterbator. It’s free and easy to use piece of software and the whole procedure won’t take you more then 5-10 min(not incl. poster printing and putting it on your wall). Enjoy!

powered by performancing firefox

Video player - just about any format

Different file types have different functions, focusing on fidelity, picture quality, compression, et al., but who really wants to clog up precious hard drive space by downloading a million different media players?

From Clipart Blog ...

That's where VideoLAN's open-source VLC media player comes in. It may not the most feature-packed or intuitive player, and without the user-made WinAMP-esque skins, it's not much to look at, but one thing's for sure, this scrappy little media player can play just about any format that you can throw at it. The list of files that this thing can handle goes on forever, including, among others, 3gp[6], ASF, AVI, FLV, MKV, MOV (QuickTime), MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, Wav, MPEG-2 (ES,PS,TS,PVA,MP3), AIFF, Raw audio, Raw DV, FLAC, 3ivx, Cinepak, DivX, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3[7], MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, RealVideo[8] , WMV, and Xvid files. It can also play your DVDs and VCDs. Not all of the different OS versions of the software support all of the aforementioned file support, but considering that VLC supports 15 different operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux, et al.), that shouldn't come as too large a shock.

VLC 8.6, introduced last Sunday, fixes a few bugs, and adds Windows Media Video 9 and Flash Video compatibility, among other things.
Found thanks to appscout

Just one more word on fonts

An interesting under-the-radar review by an expert - a little dated but many links still function, and helpful hints about "free" sites that have charges. I haven't seen any other sector that seems quite as bad for this sort of behaviour. font archives.

Crossover 6 Released for Mac & Linux

Just received from Crossover:
www.codeweavers.com

I am very happy to announce that we have shipped final versions of
CrossOver Mac 6.0 and CrossOver Linux 6.0.

Users of Intel based Mac systems can now seamlessly run many
Windows applications on their Mac without needing a Windows license.
Supported applications include Outlook, Visio, Project, Quicken, Steam based games
such as Half Life 2, and many more.

For Linux users, we have added support for Outlook 2003, World of Warcraft,
a range of Steam based games such as Half-Life 2, and a number of other
applications. Additionally, CrossOver 6 represents another major step
forward in the evolution of Wine, so most users will find substantial
improvements in the overall compatibility and behavior of CrossOver
as compared to version 5.

With the addition of games to our lineup, we felt that 'CrossOver Office'
was no longer an appropriate name, so we have also rebranded the Linux product
as 'CrossOver Linux'.

Lookalike fonts

Interesting for designers wanting a free font that is similar to a commercial one.

Which fonts look most like Helvetica? What's a good substitute if you can't find Staccato? Many times companies will produce their own versions of another font. Occasionally the names will be similar such as Lithos and Lithographic. But often the names are totally dissimilar as in Perpetua and Lapidary 333. This list will help you find many of these lookalike fonts, font aliases, clones, and close-match fonts. It's not a comprehensive list by any means, but it is a start and encompasses typefaces from many well-known sources including Monotype, Bitstream, Adobe, Corel, and Linotype AG.

Tag music with name and artist

Thanks to freemacware.com I've been finding some great utilities. Some run in Linux and windows.

One can easily have items in the iTunes library labeled “Unknown Artist” or “Untitled 1″. Sometimes this happens because the music was grabbed from P2P networks and wasn’t tagged correctly, or a CD was imported when there was no internet connection to grab the titles, artists, genre, etc. or radio was recorded.

iEatBrainz is the answer. It is an acoustic music tagger — it takes an acoustic fingerprint of each song and matches it against information from MusicBrainz.org. It is available from Jay Tuley.

Fantastic News - Looking Glass Desktop released for Linux and Windows

I've been waiting for this news since the first concept release. Linux desktops now come of age. The Ubuntu system has a version dedicated.





Sun's Looking Glass 3D Desktop Released - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

Looking Glass, which was first shown off in 2003 and released as an open-source project in 2004, allows users to run a Java-based desktop environment on top of Windows, or on Linux or Solaris. The software allows certain applications to be run in a "2.5D" environment, allowing them to be rotated in 3D space to maximize the available desktop space.

The interface also includes a launch bar along the bottom middle of the screen, similar in appearance to the Apple OS X's Dock.

According to the developers, Looking Glass includes several interesting features not included in either the Apple or Windows OSes: the ability to "fly" left or right to a new virtual desktop, or to use the "back" of a virtual window. Windows can also be organized on their "side," allowing a "bookshelf" view of the available windows.

Looking Glass Interface -- Shared Workspace View

Users can download the new Looking Glass interface from Sun's Web site.

powered by performancing firefox

testing performance of php vs perl vs perl cgi

Keith Winston reports on a test he conducted comparing the three typical open source tools. I expected php to perform well because it supports some pretty high performance sites in real life. The full report is linked, but the essentials are clipped here.

NewsForge | LAMP vs. LAMP

That said, the results of these tests show that for many common Web programming tasks, PHP (mod_php) has a slight performance edge over Perl (mod_perl), based on the majority of the HTML generation tests. In the MySQL test, PHP also edged out Perl. I suspect the MySQL results are a reflection of the database drivers more than the interpreters.

Both mod_perl and mod_php have an enormous performance advantage over standard CGI, as expected. Standard CGI not only doesn't scale very well, but gains no advantage from concurrency. Under load, it could bring a server to its knees quickly.

planned utility for youtube for Apple

I'm starting to include utilities for Apple - yes, we are planning for Vista, and Apple is a key pary of our response.

PhillRyu.com - Surfing YouTube with Class

InnerTube will include seamless support for exporting YouTube videos into an iPod compatible video. Right now it's a pretty complicated and time-consuming process ripping movies onto your iPod, and as a result, I'm pretty sure 90% of the videos loaded out there onto Video iPods are those purchased from iTunes Music Store for $1.99. Great for Apple, but not necessarily for the consumer. Now, you'll have the wealth of YouTube's vast archives ready for your iPod with one click. Snazzy

powered by performancing firefox

PhillRyu.com - Surfing YouTube with Class

InnerTube will include seamless support for exporting YouTube videos into an iPod compatible video. Right now it's a pretty complicated and time-consuming process ripping movies onto your iPod, and as a result, I'm pretty sure 90% of the videos loaded out there onto Video iPods are those purchased from iTunes Music Store for $1.99. Great for Apple, but not necessarily for the consumer. Now, you'll have the wealth of YouTube's vast archives ready for your iPod with one click. Snazzy.

powered by performancing firefox