random thoughts thinking aloud

Firefox 1.5 & del.icio.us plugin

Firefox finally released its major upgrade version 1.5 today. Do you want this upgrade? Yes, but I do not say it with much enthusiasm.

The first thing I noticed is nothing of the software itself, but the change of the domain name of the project website from mozilla.org to mozilla.com. The new domain name would definitely meet the project's new marketing strategy.

Looking at its release note, the new stuff in this upgrade are not that attractive. Features like "drag and drop reordering of tabs" have been achieved by extensions (e.g. Tab Mix Plus). The support for newer web standards like CSS3 should be interesting, only if they could show me where I can find a website demonstrating these new standards. Other improvements regarding bug-reporting or automated update are more subtle to the eyes of ordinary users like me.

One of the factors to consider before upgrade is whether the existing extensions are still available. In this aspect Firefox 1.5 does a great job. The only one that cannot work after upgrade is Bookmark Synchronizer. But it should not be missed because of a new tool.

This new, "Featured" tool is the del.icio.us extension. It adds a new item to both the menubar and the right-click menu for easy tagging with the del.icio.us service. This extension immediately reminds of Flock, a browser which is promoted for its integration with tagging and blogging. Flock is obviously superior to the Firefox del.icio.us extension in terms of outlook and user-friendliness. But since Flock is still under development stage, it will be much more secured to use Firefox.

No matter what you are looking for, as long as you avoid using IE, you will be fine.

OpenOffice.org 2.0

OpenOffice.org 2.0 finally released on 20th October, with numerous new features, including a database software Base, better PDF export, 65536 rows in spreadsheet (one of the most critcised drawbacks in v.1.x, but it never bothers me).

Although I am still using the word processor from that company, I exclusively use OpenOffice.org on my own laptop for a long time, and I have tested beta versions of ooo 2.0 and found it satisfactory.

With the hardware-demanding Windows Vista (together with the new Office, of course) coming next year, ooo will become more attractive to SME.

But you are accustomed to Chinese interface, you will have to wait for the language pack (the English version can handle Chinese).

The Register: OpenOffice challenges Microsoft on XML standards

Saving Windows Media Video Streams

I often get questions like "Why can't I download the movie trailer from that website?" Because the links on those website only point to video stream files, so the users could not get the video files directly by right-click-and-save-as. Video streams come in various formats, one of which is, of course, Windows Media (ususally with an extension of .asx or .asf). SDP Downloader is a nice little utility to get around this problem.

Previously I used ASF Recorder, but I cannot find its website anymore, except the one with SourceForge.

Another common video-streamling format is QuickTime. It used to be easy to download QuickTime streams: you only need to change the QuickTime Player settings to allow it saving a copy of the temporary file, and then you can make a copy from the "Temporary Internet Files" directory. But I am not able to do the same with the new QuickTime 7.

Reference:
Streaming Media Reccording - a comprehensive list of softwares for downloading audio / video streams. (I haven't tried them all ... those in the QuickTime section will be my first targets).

iTunes 5.0

Of all the new features of iTunes 5.0 advertised on the official website, I only find Playlist Folders useful. But there are at least 2 new "features" inconvenient to me.

Firstly, the Library. In the previous version, the Library only contains songs. Podcasts could be found in a separate section on the leftmost column labelled "Podcasts". Everything was tidy and easy to be found. iTunes 5.0 mixes everything together in the Library, may it be podcast, music, or audiobook. Thinking about deleting the podcasts from the Library and then relying on the Podcast section on the leftmost column? No, no, you can't. If you delete those entries, they will also disappear from the Podcast section. There is no way to change the default view or to apply a default filter to the Library. The only solution is the new Search Bar, which is actually a set of filter buttons. So now I have to press the Music button on the Search Bar first to filter out everything but "Music" when I browse my Library.

Another annoying thing (to me, at least) about the new iTunes is the interface language. iTunes 5.0 automatically chooses the language matching that of your OS, and it does not give you an option to choose another language. I hate using a Chinese interface as I often get lose at the meaning of the commands. I take the following remedial measures: