Software Archives - Page 37 of 53

Dave Dumps Vista

Now that I’m back home for a few weeks, the time has finally come to remove remove Windows Vista from my desktop. While I appreciate the rich GUI and new functionality (photo gallery), the computer is just too slow to be usable. Plus, my MCE <-> Xbox 360 connection has been unreliable. The media extender … Read more

Time Out for a Little RSS Reading

This isn’t quite within the realm of what I’d normally cover on ZNF, but it’s probably relevant to anybody who’s reading this site. Yesterday I had time to kill on a train from Trenton, NJ to New York’s Penn Station. Given that: blogging takes up so much time primarily because of the reading involved (jkOnTheRun agrees), Google recently launched Google Gears, and I have no mobile broadband connection, I decided it was the right time to try out the new offline Google Reader feature. Here’s how it went:

Step 1
Download Google Gears and restart browser.

Step 2
Click the new offline button on the Google Reader home page to transfer the latest 2,000 items in my RSS subscriptions from the Web to my desktop. (The file download was remarkably quick.)

Step 3
Unplug and hit the train with new offline reading material.

Hands On with YouTube’s Remixer

I’ve drooled over Final Cut Pro for years, but unfortunately in this lifetime I don’t have enough hours to learn the software, much less use it on a regular basis. So, I’m thrilled with the fact that there are now a bunch of Web apps that make video editing exceedingly quick and easy. YouTube is of course the latest to offer such a tool with its addition of Adobe’s Remixer app. I tried it out and was initially all set to sing YouTube’s praises. Unfortunately, the published version of my first remixed video looked nothing like the very-promising preview. The basic editing cuts worked, but the transitions I’d added in were gone.

Wondering how other people had fared, I decided to check out the comments on YouTube’s blog post about its site updates. Ouch. There are a bunch of very unhappy people out there. A few people mentioned having trouble with the editing features (audio problems, text rendering issues, problems with graphics, etc.), but far more people wrote to say they are having trouble with other parts of the site that worked fine before. That plus the fact that YouTube has added a “Videos Being Watched Now” section to its front page that seems to highlight rear shots and outright adult topics, makes me wonder what YouTube was thinking.

Unofficial Apple TV Development Kit

Whether you like Apple TV or not, last100 (via AwkwardTV) reports it’s relatively easy now to create plug-in applications with the unofficial AppleTV software development kit (SDK). In a closed ecosystem like AppleTV, having a hacker’s SDK is probably crucial to acceptance and proliferation among the geek community. What will be interesting to me is … Read more

New Roxio Software: Crunch & Blackberry

Roxio is putting out a pair of media manipulation applications this week. First up is Crunch, a Mac app design to convert video for iTunes, iPod, Apple TV, and (hopefully) iPhone playback. Crunch ($40) will handle DivX, AVI, MPEG and even DVDs… though it won’t remove encryption. Check out the AppleInsider pre-release review. In conjunction … Read more

Slingin’ on Mac OS X

As you may have read yesterday, Sling Media (my employer) released SlingPlayer for Mac 1.0. The beta version of this software has been available for several months — And since launch we’ve beefed up our staff with several former Apple employees, served up over 80,000 downloads (of .145), and squashed hundreds of bugs. Feedback from … Read more

TiVo Desktop 2.4 Out Of Beta

In an unusual move for TiVo, they released Desktop v2.4 (PC) software two months ago as a public beta. Looks it went GM a few days ago, though without full support for Vista. (If you can get it to install, try XP compatibility mode.) TiVo Desktop 2.4 adds support for additional PC folders and offers … Read more

Akamai Releases Firefox BitTorrent Extension

We’ve seen BitTorrent companies strive for respectability (here and here), and now we’re seeing a legit company descend into the murk. There’s probably some unpirated media to be found on BitTorrent, but who are they kidding? Akamai’s FoxTorrent Firefox extension is now available and was obviously included in the $15 million purchase price of Red … Read more