Any Unix-friendly dude or lady will tell you that Wget packs a ton of power for such a small terminal command. It can grab different versions of the same file on a regular basis, crawl through web sites to mirror content as many links deep as you’d like, grab the newest MP3s or Flash video files from a popular web site, and stretch it as far as your data-trading imagination can stretch. And with WinWget, a free wget graphical interface for Windows, you don’t need to learn how to append a half-dozen options and switches in the right order and capitalisation. Read on for a look at a couple of examples of how WinWget can expand your downloading power on Windows.
Flickr’s streaming videos are concise, higher-quality than similar vid-sharing sites, and hard to download using web-based converters. Orbit Downloader, the runner-up to our readers’ five favourite download managers, can grab the FLV file from a Flickr video and drop it wherever you’d like, and the software’s maker has posted a short tutorial on how to pull it off. Orbit doesn’t seem to work with Chrome all that well, but users of IE, Firefox, or Opera should have no trouble getting their files. How to Download Flickr Video Free [Orbit Downloader via Webware]
Don’t like Firefox 3′s built-in download manager’s default behaviour? The Mozilla Links blog points out five configuration tweaks that can customise it. Our two favorites: in about:config set browser.download.manager. showAlertOnComplete to false to remove the taskbar pop-up notification of a completed download. Also, on Windows, you can keep downloads from cluttering up your My Recent Documents folder by setting browser.download.manager.addToRecentDocs to false. For more on about:config fun, see our useful Firefox 3 configuration tweaks. Tweaks for Firefox 3 download manager [Mozilla Links]
You download hundreds of files to your computer on a weekly—and sometimes daily—basis, a practice that can take forever and has the potential to turn your organised filesystem into a cluttered nightmare. Here’s the five most popular tools our readers use to manage, organise, and speed up their downloads.
Firefox/Thunderbird (Windows/Mac/Linux): If you download a lot of files through your browser, chances are Firefox’s default download manager doesn’t really impress. Luckily there’s DownThemAll, the free Firefox extension and download manager that makes managing, speeding up, and supercharging your downloads a breeze—and today, DownThemAll has updated to their 1.0 release (after over a year without a major release). The new DownThemAll boasts more stability, increased performance, an updated interface, along with a few new features. DownThemAll is free, works with virtually any Mozilla application. If you’re new to the download manager, check out our guide to DownThemAll. DownThemAll [Firefox Add-ons via DownThemAll]
