Media collection organizer

Libra is a free collection organizer software does tracks your books, audio CDs, movies, and games (for now apparently). It is only free for non-commercial use of course.

It hooks up to the Amazon database for its searches, although there's nothing stopping you from adding you own stuff.

The features highlighted on its website are:

• Turn your webcam into a barcode scanner (sounds impressive! no webcam to try...)
  
• Lightning speed database (not exactly lightning, but fast nonetheless)
  
• Track who borrowed your stuff (nice! provided I remember who borrowed what prior to this...)
  
• Print beautiful catalogs (interesting, those I prefer to save on ink ;)
  
• Share your collection online (I'll have to get some friends to try this)
  
• Attention to detail (yes, it looks prefer good, supports custom skins too)
  
• Import existing collection (from a couple of applications, most notably MS Excel)
  
• Extensible & Flexible (claims it is designed to support any collection)

Other stuff not mentioned include a built-in browser for their forums and the ability to edit item details (and reset, based on Amazon) as well as adding your own notes. A feature I found to be very very useful is being able to specify custom actions to items, such as creating a command that automatically fires up a playlist or opens up the PDF of a book. Another thing I like is that I actually like the cheeky tone they used for their website. Nice touch, hehe.

All-in-all, I'm quite impressed. I'm gonna keep it around and catalogue my collection of stuffs using it. I'll probably merge all my other mechanisms for keeping track of stuff into this!

PDF Reader

Goodbye Adobe Acrobat Reader..... and a wonderful good riddance. What have I got against that oh-so-pervasive PDF reader software? I installed Adobe Reader 8. The following is a rant.

Huh? Why? Two words: It sucks. Why does it suck? Well, first off, Reader 7 adds something called the "Adobe Speed Launch" into your Windows startup folder. Reader 8 does that too in addition to also add something called "Adobe Reader Synchronizer". What does that do? It's supposed to synchronised shared documents or collaborative documents... uh... right... but I only use Reader to read PDF files, I don't care about these features. And I'm not alone seeing all the comments in this blog post.

For those of you who didn't even realise that Reader has "Adobe Speed Launch", here's a primer: It pre-loads part of Reader into your memory... regardless of whether you'd actually use Reader or not. As such, it hogs memory that it doesn't use and slows down Windows startup. What's worse is that the so-called "speed launch" gives an almost negligible improvement given the processing capabilities of even an "average" computer these days.

If Adobe really thinks that these are useful, it should be an option. How hard is it to make a little checkbox on the installer to ask whether people want to use it or not? A forceful approach is almost always a bad idea.

Do you know what's even worse about Reader 8? For some reason, it's check-for-update keeps creating weird directory names like "Updater5" on my hard disk. I was worried that my computer got infected by some kind of trojan or virus because I recently reinstalled it and was slow in getting an anti-virus software in place. Luckily for me, another commentor in the above blog post link confirmed that it Reader 8's problem. I'm beginning to think that strange slowdowns and unresponsiveness on my PC might be Reader 8-related... only one way to find out.... uninstall it!

End rant.

How am I gonna read PDF files? Well, I found Foxit Reader. It's afree PDF reader from another PDF software company. According to this and this, it sounded too good to be true, so I just downloaded it, installed it, and whoa! Finally! A PDF reader that does just what I want it to do: read PDF files!

The latest version 2.0 is only 1.67 MB, compared to the 21 MB Reader 8 installer. It installs easily and very quickly. It doesn't have a tonne of so-called features that I almost will never ever use. The interface is simple. And most importantly, it opens all the PDF files I tested on (from tiny to huge) very very quickly. I should have looked for PDF reader alternatives even before Reader 7.

Launchy

Do you find yourself going the same routine of traversing the Start menu of Windows daily? Go to Start, go to All Programs, go to some company name that provided you with the tool, and finally the launcher for the tool or application you want to execute. I found that pretty tedious and plain sucks.

Which is why I use the Windows XP Start menu pin-up, recent documents, the quick launch taskbar, and the desktop alot. I also use RK Launcher, a little docking program where you add shortcuts to it. But these shortcuts had shortcomings too. I have to manually set up all the shortcuts, for each computer that I use regularly.

Now I don't have to anymore. Check out Launchy, an application launcher for Windows. It automatically indexes your Start menu by default and all you need to do is hit ALT-Space to bring up its window, type in some combination of characters that match the application you want, and it'll find the application you want. Useful no? Especially so for a "keyboarder" like me. It's pretty too, with its own site for user-submitted skins. And it doesn't just indexes your Start menu. By default it supports the Firefox keywords I mentioned in my previous post! It also has it's own quick search for several useful sites plus a simple built-in calculator. Hate the daily digging down into your personal directory of files that's over 5 levels deep? Well, Launchy can browse directly to the directory you want; all you need to do is type out c: and use the tab key for auto-completion. That's not all! You can have Launchy index whatever directory you want, for whatever file extension you want. No more having to locate that one particular ebook or mp3 or movie that you have among thousands of similar files. And finally, you can even install Launchy on your pendrive and have it work (once you rebuild the index, which is fast) on any computer!

See also:

• Add the Run Command to Launchy
• Tweaking Launchy
  

RK Launcher

I found a really neat tool the other day when checking out the desktop modding guide over at Lowyat.net's forum. It's called RK Launcher.

What does it do? Well it shows a very nice looking docking bar at the side of your screen that can be used to hold shortcuts. The good thing about it is that it's fully customisable. It's still in beta and it's already impressive. You can change it's location, the opacity, the size of the bar, the animation smoothness, and the icons. Just drag-and-drop the shortcuts. I'm in the midst of cleaning up my desktop and relocating everything on the bar (and hiding the standing Windows taskbar while I'm at it).

It gets better. You don't need to install it at all. Just drop it anywhere and maybe add a shortcut to the start menu so it starts up automatically. And even better, you can have multiple copies of the program and have two different docks containing different shortcuts!

While searching for more icon sets (very few by default), I found this post, which already manages to explain things I wanted to talk about, and with screenshots to boot, plus providing some links to icons.

Also, RK Launcher can be used to contain docklets as well, as mentioned in the above link. Do a google on Y'z Toolbar and ObjectDock. The docklets (mini-programs) for these applications can be attached to RK Launcher without much problems.

ajaxWrite - Word on the Web

Looking for Microsoft Office alternatives? OpenOffice too much of a hassle to download and install and update? Or just plain not as good as MS Office? I think you'd want to keep an eye on the new ajaxWrite. A new word processor that requires no money, no installation, and probably no requirements except having a JavaScript-enabled browser. It uses AJAX, a new development technique for interactive web programming. Give it a try, it definitely looks promising, especially since the word processor is just for starters.