Nifty Downloads

[laura_seabrook]

I like to download different apps to try them out, and these are some I really liked.

Music Players

OK, I used to use WinAmp but I found that it used up a lot of resources on my PC. I've been trying out the following.

• SongBird is open-source, but mysterious cuts out on me. It's stable at last but could do with improvements. It's sophisticated (you browse websites internally using the Gecko engine) but seems like version of iTunes (which I briefly tried but un-installed quickly) Thing is, if you wait long enough they'll happen, just like Firefox and Thunderbird.
• SysTrayPlay is a simple Tray Player for windows. Uses really low resources and I use it when I only want to play media on my hard disk.
• Nexus Radio is another windows Internet radio player. I found the interface confusing.
• Screamer is the windows player I'm trying right now. It has a simple interface and breaks radio stations (which are oddly found under "Presets" into Genre, Language, Network and Region. I like the fact that Second Life is a region, and I also like the fact that I can record what I'm listening to by simply pressing a button.

Games & Puzzles

• Liquid Crystals is a Tangram type puzzle where you have a set of 7 pieces you have to arrange to make preset shapes. There's 37 shapes to make. Looks easy but maybe not.
• Parmen is a 3D simulation of 3D Chess from the original Star Trek. It's hosted at HEMP TREK and you tell the owners have smoked a bit.
• Dogfight 2. Not a download but an online Flash game. Be a WWI Ace now! Actually it reminds me of Sopwith 2 which I used to play on my XT.
• Doom. Yep, same thing again, but somebody ported Doom into a Flash format. I die pretty quick with this one. What I really like at the site is Dolphin Olympics (very pretty) and GemMine (an anti-Tetris?).

Browsers

• Text Formatting Toolbar is an add-on for Firefox. It adds an extra row of formatting buttons which you can use to format text when entering forms and LJ posts/comments.

Comments

[aesmael.livejournal.com]

Surprised about Winamp and Songbird - I only run Songbird if I am doing little else, as it takes up about three times as much memory as Winamp does. Still think it needs a lot of work to become first-choice, but I have some definite fondness for it so far.

I'm curious about the text formatting toolbar. How useful have you found it? I've been trying to use HTML directly as much as I can over the past year.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

I found it much easier to use than the BBComposer add-on. BBComposer (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=bbcode) swapped the text area over into a "rich text" type display. It worked but was a pain to use and had random results under certain conditions.

The text formatting toolbar adds a button and a toolbar like the one below:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/7895693@N03/3241464905/)

You can toggle the toolbar on and off by another button or via the Toolbars option under the view menu, so I just hide it when I don't use it. Most of the buttons work by selecting text and maybe adding parameters like a URL. I found it easy to use and clear about what I was editing. It also does Bulletin Board and Wiki code as well.

Don't forget that this is designed for text fields of one sort or another. This reply was formatted using it (though the screenshot is copied from Flickr). If you are editing a whole document, you'd have to use something else.