Tag: OSS

Banshee has been one of the top Linux media players for ages, and now the venerable audio and video app has officially made its way to Windows. The first alpha release of Banshee for Windows is now available for download, and it's exactly what you would expect: it's very true to the Linux experience, and it's got a few kinks which still need working out before it's ready for prime time on ...

LibreOffice -- the Document Foundation's fork of OpenOffice -- has come a long way since the project was first announced in September 2010. Today, the Foundation has announced that its first stable release, LibreOffice 3.3, is ready to download. Among the many changes you'll find in version 3.3 are the arrival of new import filters and improvements to existing ones -- key features when you're ...

BleachBit -- the open source system clean-up utility for Windows and Linux -- has added several new features to its latest version that make it an even better tool for removing unneeded files files from your computer. Support for Google Chrome and Chromium has been greatly improved: BleachBit can now remove everything from DNS prefetch data, to autofill history and DOM storage. Support for HTML5 ...

Popular cross-platform video conversion app Handbrake has updated to version 0.9.5 and added some very important new features. Handbrake now supports Blu-ray ripping -- but you will, of course, still need a decryption app like DVDFab. The new version also adds more device presets, batch scanning, and the ability to edit entries in your conversion queue. Adding files on Windows has gotten easier, ...

It used to be that when I watched a movie with VLC, halfway through the movie the screen would suddenly black out. Too late, I would realize that the screensaver kicked in because I hadn't touched the mouse for a while. It was so irritating that I simply disabled my screen saver. I think VLC specifically addressed this issue, but I'm sure it still happens with other video players. Mouse Jiggler ...

Rsync [wiki link] is a great way to backup and synchronize files, but developer Thomas Döring couldn't find a Windows GUI front-end that met his needs. Like a lot of enterprising coders, he decided to take matters into his own hands and build one. The result: QtdSync. The small download includes both the QtdSync client (which is fully portable) and server apps, as well as a sync monitor ...

Dropbox is a great little service (and app). Developer Hylke Bons seems to like it -- but he's got designs on building an alternative with a few improvements. As he writes on his blog, "Dropbox has a great user experience, but it has downsides as well: you can't host your own server; it's not open source and has some freaky things in its license agreement." Dubbed SparkleShare, Bons is ...

On paper, Ubuntu Netbook Edition looks great. I mean, what's not to like? It's got a sexy launcher, a lean and mean footprint, fast boot times, ... and it's free! So, I decided to take the plunge. I didn't use a virtual machine to just "review it," though. I actually took an old Acer Aspire 1650 laptop -- which was running XP -- and switched it to Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Installation was a ...

I love freehand painting. While I have absolutely no talent, I love the freedom of working with paint or even crayons. It just feels nice, even if the result is nothing to write home about (in my case, at least). If you're looking to replicate the same experience on a computer, there's always Corel Painter. But on the off chance that you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend just to doodle, ...

We covered the exciting launch of the Humble Indie Bundle a few weeks ago -- and more fool you if you failed to pick up titles like World of Goo and Penumbra at a fantastic price -- but now it's time to look at the results, because they're even more interesting. First and foremost: Linux users made up 25% of the total sales revenue. Take a look at the tasty pie chart on the right: while Linux ...

KiTTY is Win32-native PuTTY. If you've ever used PuTTY before, this is all you need to know. On the other hand, if you're wondering what PuTTY is, let me tell you! It's what I'm here for, after all. PuTTY is a free and open-source terminal emulator; you can use it as a client for Telnet, SSH, raw TCP sessions, and rlogin. If you have no idea what any of this means, I'm afraid KiTTY may prove less ...

Ohloh is not a project hosting website; instead, it is a "tracking" website for open source projects and developers. It's easy to explain with an example: The screenshot above comes from Stefan Küng's profile page. Stefan is the lead developer for TortoiseSVN, and his profile page lets you zoom in and see exactly what code he personally committed to the project, and when. That timeline you ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/04/29/ubuntu-10-04-hit-by-major-bug-on-release-day/'; It's the end of April. Spring is here, and so is Ubuntu 10.04. Or at least, that's the plan. Canonical's rigid release schedule is awesome for many reasons -- one of which is the amount of excitement it generates around each new Ubuntu release. However, I don't think this is the kind of ...

Loki is a Rich Text editor for the Web. The current leader in this arena is clearly FCKEditor (which is now called CKEditor), so why does the world need another WYSIWIG editor for HTML textareas? The first thing that caught my eye was... the very first feature on the feature list. That wasn't because it was first either, honestly! It says: Hitting Return produces a new paragraph. Mozilla ...

BrainParty is extremely popular on the App Store at $0.99, packing 36 fun puzzle games into a single download and charting just how much gray matter you're packing. To share the fun with an even bigger audience, its developer has decided to release the source code under the GPLv3 license. Want to play the games on your system? Just download the source code and compile it. BrainParty has ...