One of the most interesting features available in Free Download Manager, an open source software for Windows, is that you can preview ZIP archives and select the files you want to download. This can be useful if you only need a README file from a big archive or if some of the files are unnecessary.

Last year, Google released a mobile app for iPhone that lets you search many data sources from a single location: web pages, local businesses, contacts. A similar application is now available for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and it's called Quick Search Box.

Nicholas Jitkoff, Quicksilver's creator, is one of the developers. The application is a powerful box that works as a program launcher, address bar, Google search box, desktop search box, calculator and weather gadget. The source code includes modules that integrate data from Google services like Google Bookmarks, Gmail and Picasa Web, so the application has the potential to become the central point for accessing Google.

"For the last year, we have been working on a new, open-source quick search box. Today, we are releasing our first developer preview for the Mac. This Mac version is much more experimental than its iPhone sibling, Google Mobile App, and through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come," explains Google.



Quick Search Box is also a feature of Google Desktop, but it's unfortunate that Google didn't integrate more data sources. My favorite Windows Vista feature is the ubiquitous search box. Some interesting alternatives are Launchy, an extensible application launcher for Windows and Linux, and Mozilla Ubiquity, an experimental project that makes web applications more useful. All of them are powerful command-lines that expose information from your computer or the web.

Secunia is a respected security service provider that tracks vulnerabilities in more than 20,000 applications and operating systems. To find information about the latest vulnerabilities, you could subscribe to Secunia's mailing lists, but if you want to know whether there are known security issues for the software installed in your computer, install Secunia Personal Security Inspector.

The Windows application scans your computer and it lists the insecure programs, information about vulnerabilities and links to the patches. In most cases, Secunia provides direct links to the latest updates, so they are easy to download and install. To find more information about security problems and to list all the software from your computer that needs to be updated, switch to the advanced interface.


Secunia collected data from 20,000 users of the software and found at least one vulnerability in 98.09% of the cases. "By insecure program it is understood, that there is a newer version of the program available from the vendor that corrects one or more vulnerabilities, but the user has yet to install the secure version. A vulnerability in a program can be exploited by hackers to anything from compromising a PC, to automatically install trojans/viruses, to sniff out private information (passwords, credit cards information, etc)."

Not all applications include auto-update and users have to manually update to the latest versions. Google is one of the companies that thinks it's important to update software without any user intervention, that's why most Google software has an auto-update feature or is integrated with Google Update.

Secunia's software focuses on updates that solve security problems. More comprehensive solutions for updating your software include UpdateStar, FileHippo Update Checker and Appget, but none of them is very reliable.

When you read an article, you often find concepts or names that aren't properly explained, but it's inconvenient to interrupt your reading and use a search engine to find more information. KallOut is a Windows application that addresses this problem: whether you read the document in a browser, a word processor or in a PDF reader, you can select some text and obtain some useful information in a mini-browser.

KallOut lists many search engines and reference sites from which you can choose, but it also suggests good options. For example, if you select "DMCA takedown", KallOut suggests an article from Wikipedia, for "Flickr" KallOut points to Flickr's homepage, while "NY" is linked to Google Maps and geotagged photos from Flickr.



The software displays search results, maps, videos, Wikipedia articles, definitions, translations - all without opening a new page. For now, KallOut supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, Microsoft Office 2003/2007, Adobe Reader, WordPad and Notepad.

Internet Explorer 8 introduced accelerators, a similar feature that already has a public API and an impressive gallery, but KallOut is not limited to Internet Explorer, it's easier to use and it requires less clicks.

When you uninstall a Windows application, the uninstaller doesn't remove all the files and registry entries created by the application. Sometimes the developers were too lazy or they thought those files might be needed if you reinstall the application. The end result is that your computer loads slower because your registry contains more entries and the hard drive stores unnecessary files.

Revo Uninstaller is a software that lets you completely uninstall programs and it's easier to use than the built-in "Add or remove programs". You can search for a program or locate it in a more intuitive way: enter in the Hunter Mode, open the program you want to uninstall and drag the target to your program's window.


After finding the program, Revo Uninstaller analyzes the program's data, launches the uninstaller and shows you a list of leftovers (files, folders, registry entries related to the application). The application does a pretty good job at identifying them, but you should still check the results before selecting everything. "Even if you have a broken installation, Revo Uninstaller scans for an application's data on your hard disk drives and in the Windows registry and shows all found files, folders and registry items so you can delete them."


Revo Uninstaller also includes a junk files cleaner and a way to remove the history from browsers, Microsoft Office and some Windows application, but CCleaner is a better application for this.

I've written before about Enso, a very interesting project that lets you perform tasks from a command-line that interacts with the user interface. The software comes with some basic commands (like launching programs, performing calculations), but it can be extended with other commands. Enso has recently launched in beta some plug-ins that add new commands.

Let's say you need to translate into French some text from an email message you're composing in Gmail. You'll have to select the text, open a new window or tab, go to Google Translate or other translation service, paste the text, choose the option to translate from English to French, click on a button, select the translation and copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the text. The new translation commands for Enso let you perform the same task much faster: select the text, trigger the command line (press Caps-Lock), type the first letters from the command ("translate to French") and the translated text will replace the selected text. Of course, you won't get a more accurate translation, but at least you won't lose the original context and get distracted by other tasks.


The search commands let you select some text and type the name of one of the supported search services to launch a new page with the corresponding search result. This is faster than using your browser's search features or extensions like Hyperwords because you don't have visually identify the right option from a long list. Unfortunately, these commands defeat the one of the main purposes of Enso: don't lose the context. An alternative way to implement them would be to use APIs like Google AJAX API to display search results without leaving the page. In fact, my favorite use of this API is a tool called Linkify that allows me link to a search result by selecting some text from a textarea and choosing one of the search results displayed in a small sidebar.

There are also commands for controlling music players or to convert LaTeX markup into a nice mathematical expression. Of course, an API would make it easier to build many other plug-ins for Enso.

For now, Enso works only on Windows 2000/XP/Vista and the main program costs $20 (there's a 30-day trial), while all the plug-ins described above are free. I think a better approach would be to pay for some additional commands and make the main program free. When you can find a lot of great software like Google Desktop, Launchy, Quicksilver, Foxytunes, I'm not sure many people are going to pay for Enso.

The software comes from a small company called Humanized that promises "to provide you with the most humane software we are capable of making". Great interfaces, easy to use software, simplicity - I've heard these things before (I wonder where?).

"Some tasks—for instance, teaching a child arithmetic—are intrinsically pretty complicated. But some aren't. Setting the time on a wristwatch, for instance, shouldn't be that hard; on old analog wristwatches, it basically involved pulling out a knob, twisting it until the watch showed the correct time, and pushing the knob back in again. But on newer digital wristwatches—ones that claim to be more powerful and feature-loaded than their analog counterparts—it involves pressing a series of buttons in a hard-to-remember, often unforgiving order. Most people dread setting the time on their digital watches, and for good reason."

LetMeType is a small Windows tool that extends the concept of autocomplete at the operating system's level. The application runs in the background, monitoring everything you type in any input box and creating a database of frequent words and 2-grams. When you start typing a word, LetMeType displays a list of the most probable words that start with the letters you've just typed and you can select one of the options.


The program lets you select different values for the length of the words, and for the minimum probability of a suggestion. This works well especially for long or complicated words.

The interface is not very user-friendly, but program has been open sourced and you can improve it. It would be nice to combine this with Google Suggest and to make it less annoying by only making suggestions when the user requests it or when the next letters/words are obvious.

Blogger Backup is a small open-source Windows tool that, well, backups the posts and comments from a Blogger blog. You'll have to enter your Google credentials (and your only protection is that the software is open source and you can check the code), select the blog you want to backup and decide how many posts you want to save.

The format for exporting is Atom, so for each post you'll get two files: one for the actual content of the post and one for the comments. There's also the option to save all the posts in a big Atom file.

Once you have all these files on your computer, you could write a tool that imports them to a database or use Blogger's API to recreate the blog. In fact, this tool also uses Blogger's API to get the feeds.


Another way to backup your blog involves manually downloading a page that contains all your blog posts and using an extension to get the photos from these posts.

{ via Digital Inspiration }

Enso is a new kind of software that wants to bring the power of command line to the normal computer user. Every program installed on your computer has a set of features, but most of them work only locally: you need to import the data, process it and then export it to the initial program. You need to translate a text, so you have to select the text, open a translator (or go to Google Translate), paste the text, translate it, copy the result and paste it in your text editor. Wouldn't be nice to select the text, press a key or enter a command and have the translated text in your editor? Enso wants to make this and any other similar feature possible.

"Having to change programs to perform simple tasks -- such as make a quick calculation or look up a definition -- it breaks your concentration, takes you away from the task at hand, and wastes valuable time," said Aza Raskin, president of Humanized and son of the late Jef Raskin, creator of the Apple Macintosh. " Humanized's Enso applications are designed make common computing tasks easier and faster to perform, without breaking focus or forcing the user to switch applications. Enso takes Jef's legacy from vision to reality, revolutionizing the way we use computers the way the Macintosh did back in 1984."

Enso can be seen as a feature launcher. You press Caps Lock and then enter the command that modifies the select data. The program autocompletes the command name, so you only have to type the first letters. Then release Caps Lock and you have the result.


Select a text in any program, enter the google command, and you get the Google results instantly.

Other useful feature is launching programs, which works similar to Launchy. Enso stores all the programs from your Start Menu and lets you access them by typing open followed by the first letters from the program's name. You can also attach short names to files by selecting them and typing "learn as open", followed by the alias.

Another cool command is go. Just type it and a list of the names of all the open windows will appear. It's much easier to switch from Firefox to Open Office, especially if you have a lot of programs that clutter your taskbar.

For now, Enso is a shareware that costs $24.95, works only in Windows and offers limited functionality. But it's also a wise idea that could improve your productivity dramatically if you could write your own commands or download other people's commands.

The video below, which has almost 90 minutes and is titled "Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop", explains more about this and the author's philosophy on software. Instead of building bloated software, Aza Raskin suggest to build services available at the OS-level, for any other application. "Web applications are often more usable than their desktop-based counterparts because each one does one thing and does it well. Desktop applications used to be the same way, but over time -- as applications grew to support the users in the long tail -- each became a complex portmanteau of all possible features."

<a href="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-6856727143023456694&amp;hl=en">Link to the video</a>.

URL Snooper is a free Windows software that lets you monitor your network connections and see the addresses of all the files that are downloaded to your computer and all the addresses from HTML files.

The program was created to identify the URLs of audio/video streams. "Many links to streaming audio and video that you come across on the web are hidden behind JavaScript or ActiveX scripts. Because of this, it is sometimes very difficult to figure out the actual URLs that correspond to the streams being played."

But the software is also useful if you want to see the files downloaded by a program you've just installed. Or if you're wondering why Google Desktop needs an Internet connection. You can see in the screenshot above that Google Desktop connects to google.com to read a list of localized domains, the files for the Safe Browsing feature and to download information necessary for the gadgets (weather, news, etc.).

Stellarium is a free software that renders the sky from a configurable position. The application, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, creates an immersive environment thanks to the 3D full-screen rendering and the realistic photos. Stellarium lets you see stars, constellations, planets, nebulas and is a great way to learn their names. You can search the name of a planet or star and the application even auto-completes it for you.

You're the master of time, so you can make it run slower, faster or even stop it; you're the master of space, so you can change the position to anywhere you want; you can also control the events by running or recording scripts that simulate eclipses or other astronomical events.

It's very refreshing to use it as a virtual telescope that teaches you to look at the sky and to understand more from its mystery.


Related:
Celestia, space simulator
Google Earth, as seen by a Googler

I was complaining in a post from January that Google Pack could be a very cool package if it had an API that allows it to check a wide variety of software for updates. Google Pack only includes Google's software and a small list of other free applications like Firefox, Adobe Reader, RealPlayer.

Filehippo, one of the best sites where you can download high-quality software, launched Update Checker, a small utility that scans your computer for installed software and displays a list of updates. While the software doesn't require installation, it doesn't check for updates periodically and must be manually launched. Another inconvenient is that you have to manually download and install the updates.

The software is in beta, so it wouldn't surprise if it adds these features in the next versions.

SIW (System Information for Windows) is a free* software that shows a lot of information about your computer. Most of the data can be obtained by running different tools included in Windows, but this program displays everything in one place.

You'll get information about the operating system and the installed patches, the software licenses, drivers, Windows services, codecs, open files, saved passwords, hardware information (motherboard, CPU, memory, video card, ports) and some useful tools (like Eureka, that reveals passwords from some applications).

The software doesn't require setup, so you can copy it to your USB drive and use it when your uncle Dan says there's something wrong with his computer. You can export all the data in different formats and use the program from the command-line.

* The software is free (as in "free beer") for personal use.

gTrans is an interface for Google Translate. The free Windows application doesn't require installation, so you can use it from your USB drive.


gTrans sits in the system tray and lets you enter a text and a pair of languages. My favorite feature is "translate from clipboard": if you select this option, every time you copy text in the clipboard, gTrans translates the text for you.

Update. There's also a very nice Google Desktop plug-in that translates a text while you type it:

The moment I opened GOM Player, I realized that's how a media player should look. Ok, maybe the colors and icons aren't great, but nobody's perfect and you can always change the skin.

GOM Player, the most popular media player in South Korea, is free, has a simple interface and includes many advanced features. The player includes many codecs (DivX, XviD, MP4, AC3), so you don't have to download them. It's also possible to watch incomplete AVI files or play media files while you download them.

There are options that improve the quality of videos (the player is optimized for TV OUT), boost sound.

It's not better than VLC or MPlayer, which are open source and cross-platform, but it's easier to use.

"Mercora's mission is to catalog and organize the world's music and make it universally searchable and legally listenable." Sounds familiar?

Mercora is a radio network that lets everyone create a radio station and stream music in a P2P fashion (people can't download music). You can invite your friends and listen to their music, search for an artist and find all his albums or just choose a genre. Mercora lets you discover similar artists, read biographies and add comments.

The software, Mercora IMRadio, has a social side, as you can log in with the username/password for an instant messaging client (Google Talk included) and invite your contacts. You can create a profile, interact with other users, share photos and much more.

Regarding copyright, Mercora says: "you can webcast any music that you own legally. These recordings must originate from an authorized source (either created originally by the artist or record label that owns the copyright), and are not unlawful copies that have been downloaded illegally or obtained from an unauthorized third party."

Mercora IMRadio is a freeware for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It uses an open source format for streaming (OGG Vorbis) and it depends a lot on network connection speed, so you may notice buffering problems.

Related stuff:
Vibe Streamer - personal MP3 server
Hype Machine - music search engine
Winamp moves to the web

The new version of the best free mobile browser is out. Opera Mini 3.0 includes a feed reader, makes it easier to share photos, has support for secure connections (SSL) and it's optimized for AJAX web pages. In addition to being slick, fast and easy to use.

You can test it using this Java emulator on your computer or just point your mobile phone to operamini.com to download it.

Opera Mini does a much better job than Google's transcoding and tries to keep the browsing experience intact, so you'll see a single page instead of multiple smaller pages, most of the time.

PortableApps Suite is a sort of Google Pack with portable versions for important software. You can get Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Gaim, ClamWin Anti-virus and more in a single download and then copy these applications to your USB Flash drive. There's even a replacement for Start menu that lets you launch the applications.

Universal Extractor is an application that lets you extract files from all kinds of archives and installers. You can use it to extract resources from Windows Installer files, Inno Setup and NSIS executables, InstallShield packages, MHTML files, Microsoft Compiled Help files, any archive type that can be extracted with WinRAR (rar, zip, ace, cab, 7zip, etc), CD-ROM images, Linux packages and more.

I find this useful because it provides a consistent way to see files that contain other files. You may need to extract the files from an installer to create a portable version of an application (like this portable IE7), to read the help file before installing it or to get a file. Instead of using the command-line and different small utilities, you can try Universal Extractor, an open-source Windows application.

Celestia is a space simulator that lets you travel in our universe. You can explore the entire solar system and even go beyond our galaxy. Celestia doesn't just show you the sky, it lets you view the universe from any point you want. If you are familiar with Google Earth, it will be easy to use the program.

You can capture images and record videos, so you can use the program for your school projects. The program is also useful to learn information about planets, satellites and stars.

If Google Earth has Sketchup and 3D Warehouse, Celestia has Motherlode, a repository for 3D models and textures.

Celestia is open-source and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. After running the program for the first time, go to Help / Run Demo and select the full-screen mode.