Your copy of Firefox 3 will give you the old “update available” notification soon—or you can hit the Help menu and choose “Check for Updates” instead—to get version 3.0.2, which gives you a slew of security updates and bug fixes related to keyboard shortcuts (on Mac) and web page layout.
No matter how hard Apple strives to make Microsoft look uncool, one fact remains: Microsoft owns the desktop. No matter what you do or where you go, somewhere or another, you’re working with Windows. So when you hear that Microsoft will strip built-in email, photo editing, and movie making programs from Windows 7, you have to wonder: What’s Microsoft giving you out of the box besides Internet Explorer, a web browser you’re going to use once to download a better one?
Windows only: Microsofts’ Image Composite Editor is a free application for stitching several pictures together into one panoramic photograph. We’ve already shown you how to stitch photos into panoramas with free software or with Photoshop’s Photomerge tool, but the dedicated Image Composite Editor won’t cost you a dime, is dead simple to use, and works really well. I tested its chops with a quick panorama of my (messy) desk, and it stitched everything together quickly, with no effort on my part. For a one-off tool with very specific goals, Microsoft’s done this one right. The Image Composite Editor is freeware, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0.
Image Composite Editor [Microsoft via Life Rocks 2.0]Google Reader adds a few minor features today: sharing and friends features in all non-English languages, the ability to add tags when you add notes to an item, and my personal favourite, the ability to auto-sort a folder of subscriptions either alphabetically or in “My Order” (by regular drag and drop). Hit the Options link on the bottom left to reorder your subscriptions.
iPhone only: Considering that voice dialing has been a standard feature of even the cheapest phones for several years, the lack of any sort of hands-free voice dialing on the iPhone is frustrating. Cactus Voice Dialer is a free voice-dialing application based on an open-source speech recognition engine called PocketSphinx. Since it’s speech recognition, there’s no set up required. Just call a number by saying the contact’s name and—if necessary—which number to call (e.g., “Adam Pash’s mobile”). Cactus isn’t the only voice dialing app available in the App Store, but it is currently the only free voice dialer as far as we can tell (VoiceDial, for example, is a whopping $US15). For as young as it is (and the lack of price tag), I’d say Cactus has a lot of promise. If only Apple would allow apps to tie to special buttons, like double-click home. Cactus Voice Dialer [iTunes Store via MakeUseOf]
Despite iTunes’ success, most people—especially those averse to DRM—still don’t buy music there. The last thing we need, then, are shortcuts to take us from our music library to the iTunes Store with a single errant click. Since you can no longer disable these links in the iTunes 8 preferences, weblog The Glitch highlights how to tweak iTunes 8 in both Windows and OS X to remove the track arrows that—when clicked—take you to the iTunes Store. All it takes is a simple Terminal command in OS X or editing the iTunesPrefs.xml file in Windows. I still prefer to keep the links around, but I remove their iTunes Store functionality and instead point them at my own library. (E.g., clicking the link next to an artist will filter all songs by that artist.) Here’s how that works.
If you prefer sticking to the speed of the command line whenever possible, weblog CatsWhoCode details how to use Ffmpeg—the cross-platform command-line tool that runs in the background of most popular media conversion tools—to convert video, audio, and images to just about any format.
Today marked the launch of the first phone that runs Android, an open-source, Google-designed operating system that runs web-savvy applications on a touchscreen-based phone. We didn’t have an agent at today’s launch of T-Mobile’s G1, but luckily our brothers-in-arms Gizmodo are all over it. We had some pretty high expectations for Android, and it seems to deliver on most of them, with a few caveats. Let’s take a look at what Android can do, and what it might mean for your phone when (or if) it arrives down under.
JavaScripter Parand Tony Darugar wanted an easy way to scroll through a long page with large images on it. Though the ScrollMonkey Greasemonkey user script can do it, to avoid installing an add-on he put together a ReaderScroll bookmarklet. Drag and drop the bookmarklet onto your toolbar in any browser, then if you hit a page with lots of images, click it. Daruger explains: The script does a very simple thing – it brings the next image to the top of the browser window so you can see it. You hit “j” to see the following image and “k” to go back to the previous.
Here’s a good example page of Olympics photos to try it out on. For more bookmarklet goodness, check out our top 10 useful bookmarklets. ReaderScroll: Google Reader Style Image Navigation With J-K Keys Bookmarklet [Standard Deviations]
Windows only: Free media file converter FormatFactory is a handy all-in-one utility for taking one kind of audio, video, or picture file and converting it to another. The interface is a dead-simple drag-and-drop affair, and it’s meant for running batches of files through converters—FLVs to Windows Media, MPEGs to iPod-friendly video, DVDs to DivX files, etc. You won’t get a lot of options for quality control, compression rate, or other tweaks, but for some folks, that’s really a benefit. FormatFactory is a free download for Windows systems only.
FormatFactory [via Red Ferret Journal]
