26 software downloads you shouldn't miss this week
As we reach the end of June, commercial developers are busy preparing software for a Q3 launch, so we’ll be entering a lean period for key, new releases. This doesn’t mean it was a quiet week; far from it. TechSmith released Camtasia 8.0 for Windows and 2.2 for Mac. This powerful screen-recording tool will enable you to produce professional-level presentations for just about any audience.
If you’re seeking an image editor to complement your screen recording toolkit, look no further than the free GIMPshop 2.8. This is effectively the popular GIMP, wrapped up in a different and user-friendly interface. The various K-Lite Codec Packs are a collection of codecs you can use to play video and audio content on your PC. Although it’s becoming more of a challenge to find videos that won’t play on your PC, there are still plenty encoded using a compression format that was more popular in the early part of the previous decade. Download K-Lite Codec Pack 8.92 Basic, the Standard pack, Full or Mega, which also contains a number of conversion tools.
Microsoft Surface can win you over
People can't stop talking about Microsoft Surface. It’s a very hot and disputed topic. Some critics say that the tablets (there are two) will fail, while others are enthusiastic. There's heated discussion about price, too.
For me and many others like me, Surface is the only tablet that can be used for more than common tasks -- certainly not Apple's iPad. Windows is a very powerful platform, and most professionals need it for work. I want to tell you why you need Surface.
Apple's patent case against Motorola is over
One thing I have to say about US District Judge Richard Posner, he doesn't mince words. He's direct and cutting. If only there were more jurists like him on the bench. Cut he did today, in an order slicing Apple and Motorola to bits -- but the fruit-logo company he turned to mush. In a 38-page opinion and order, the judge effectively ended Apple's patent lawsuit against Motorola. Apple can appeal, but it's finished presenting before Posner.
"It would be ridiculous to dismiss a suit for failure to prove damages and allow the plaintiff to refile the suit so that he could have a second chance to prove damages", he writes. "This case is therefore dismissed with prejudice; a separate order to that effect is being entered today". Ouch.
Live Capture grabs the grub from your PC's screen
Most PC users need to capture an image of their screen from time to time, and Windows’ ability to grab the full screen and active window will usually be enough. Opting for a specialist screen grabber can give you considerably more options, though, and the open source Live Capture is a particularly good example.
The program allows you to draw a rectangular (or freehand) area you’d like to capture, for instance. It can grab the contents of a fixed area of the screen. There’s an option to grab a program menu, and the Window Control Capture tool makes it easy to grab specific elements of a window: a toolbar, say, or the folder tree in Explorer.
Ahead of Google I/O, Android is the tortoise winning the race
The annual Google developer convention I/O will take place next week. Like Apple's WWDC and Microsoft's TechEd, it is the big summer event where the world is given a look at each of the respective companies' plans for the coming year.
Google is expected to announce a lot of staggering new stuff, like its own branded sub-$200 tablet and its own Cloud platform to rival Amazon Web Services.
Rackspace exec says Amazon Web Services is doing it wrong
The rift between Amazon and its cloud competitors got a little wider on Thursday after Amazon Web Services' dominance in the market took center stage at the GigaOM Structure conference in San Francisco. Rackspace president Lew Moorman called for an open alternative to AWS, and warned the service is creating vendor lock-in.
Rackspace and Amazon are becoming increasingly bitter rivals as competition in the cloud heats up. Moorman's company is one of the leading participants in OpenStack, an open-sourced cloud standard. Amazon does not follow cloud standards, and that has lead to the development of OpenStack rivals such as CloudStack.
Flipboard finally brings its magazine-like news reader to Android
Flipboard, the social newsreader with a stylish magazine-like design, has emerged from beta and is now available free for all Android devices, including the Kindle Fire (although it’s optimized for smartphones rather than tablets). Editor's Note: It's not compatible with my ASUS Transformer Pad 300 -- curses.
The app lets you build a magazine made up of topics that interest you. Categories on offer include News, Technology, Flipboard Picks, Design, Photography, Politics, Sports, Style, Film, and Travel. Content is pulled from a range of quality sites like the BBC, Wired Magazine, and USA Today, and fully localized. American readers will see something different from British or Australian users.
Menu Uninstaller Lite makes removing apps a whole lot easier
Uninstalling a program within Windows can take a little work. You might have to head off to Control Panel, find the “Uninstall a program” applet, wait for it to display (which can take a few seconds in itself on some systems, as Windows calculates “disk space used” figures and more), then find and double-click your unwanted application.
Menu Uninstaller Lite could make your life a little simpler, though. Once installed removing any program is as easy as right-clicking its shortcut, selecting the new Uninstall option and confirming your decision. Menu Uninstaller will then find and launch its regular uninstall application, which will remove it as usual.
Prepaid wireless gets some respect
It is time to sing the praises of prepaid wireless in an economy that is still uncertain. Too often we fall victim to 2-year contracts because one of the big-five US carriers offers the latest in smartphone technologies at a seeminglylow price. You only feel the pain 6 months or a year down the road when the newest Android or iPhone releases and you are still stuck in your contract.
We all remember the days when prepaid was not the choice to make if you wanted a top of the line phone. Carriers like Virgin Mobile or Boost offered great plans with more minutes than most of the big five. The problem was the phones were horrible. Sure, they covered the basics -- you could talk for hours, text, and if lucky, you had some type of a data package to check emails. The phones were not glamorous in form or function and they lacked the service that consumers got from AT&T or Verizon.
Enterprise IT will kick Microsoft Surface to the curb
What a week! Just when I thought Microsoft could never be as cool as Apple, bang! Here comes Surface (no, not that Surface) to shatter my preconceptions about the weather in Seattle and its effect on product innovation.
Surface is sleek, sexy, and, dare I say it, kind of cool. It’s got this rockin’ kickstand thingy at the back, a neat-o magnetic keyboard/cover and is made from some cutting-edge alloy straight out of a Star Trek episode (specifically, Voyager -- DS9 would never stoop so low). In short, Surface has all the ingredients of an iPad killer. But while it may achieve some success in the consumer space, enterprise IT shops won’t touch it with a 3-meter pole.
Use ImDisk to mount ISO images as virtual discs
One of the plus points of Windows 8 is that it can natively mount an ISO image as a virtual disk, allowing you to browse it without requiring a physical disc. If you’d like to have that ability right now, though, there’s no need to wait -- the free ImDisk provides capable ISO handling and a whole lot more.
If you’d like to take a closer look at an ISO file, for instance, then right-click it, select “Mount as ImDisk Virtual Drive” > OK, and in a few seconds the image will be available within Explorer as a new virtual drive. (The program supports NRG images, too.)
What will it take to make Linux popular?
In a recent interview Linus Torvalds, the mastermind behind the Linux kernel, said that the operating system is not as popular as Windows on consumer PCs because it doesn’t come preinstalled. Manufacturers sell the computers they make with an operating system on board, which most of the time is Windows. Why can’t it be Linux instead?
According to Net Applications, in 2011, sales estimates have Linux at roughly 1.5 percent usage share on desktop and laptop computers. Windows on the other hand was evaluated at 92 percent in the same estimate. The discrepancy in sales points out few of the issues that Linux has to overcome in order to reach a broader market adoption, but it can also provide a solution.
Local Website Archive easily saves the pages you need most
When carrying out research online you may often find important pages that you’d like to save, and of course you might do this by simply clicking File > Save from your browser. The results can be a little messy, though, with files and folders scattered everywhere, and reviewing the pages later might be difficult.
Local Website Archive tries to help by storing the pages for you. There’s no need to worry about file names or folders -- the program can handle all of that -- and when you’re done you’ll have a neatly presented archive of pages, which is far easier to browse and search.
Google seeks to save 3,000+ languages from extinction
English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin… How many different languages can you name? At a guess, probably no more than about twenty, which sounds bad when you consider there are an estimated 7,000 languages being spoken every day somewhere on our planet. The vast majority of these are, of course, virtually unknown, and used by a very small portion of the world’s population.
In fact, according to National Geographic, the 3,500 smallest languages are spoken by just 8.25 million people, and the tiniest of these native tongues are teetering on the brink of being silenced forever. It’s believed that one language dies every 14 days -- as its speakers switch to more common alternatives -- and nearly half of the world’s languages are expected to have been wiped out within a century.
Stupid IT mistakes make AWS outages even worse
The massive outage that struck Amazon Web Services last week proved the cloud service is becoming an increasingly vital part of the IT infrastructure of many companies. For better or worse AWS is becoming a standard in the cloud, and its own fortunes are tied to that of some of the biggest web services out there.
Quora and Pinterest are just two services that rely on AWS in part or in full. When Amazon's cloud goes down, these sites will too.
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