Laura Seabrook's Ramblings

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.

 Beat the Rope is undeniably cute but also one of the dopier online games I've played. The other games at the same site look  interesting. Death Trip is frustrating but cool.

I was reading an Linux magazine just now and they mentioned something called Open Laszlo, which is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software. Apparently you create code using XML and Javascript, and it compiles into flash binary (.swf) files, which will run on any browser with the current flash plug-in.

Sort of very cool, though yet another bloody syntax to learn to get results.  I always wanted to play around with Flash, but there were always obstacles. Although I really like Fireworks (perfect for adding speech balloons and saving graphics for my web comics), which has a similar interface, whenever I tried using the "official editor" it'd always be slow, clunky, and buggy (some of which might have been due to my old hardware). I downloaded heaps of "free editors" but most seemed to be really primitive, of advertisements for their shareware versions.

I shall have to have a look at some of the project on that list. I've been interested in using flash in web comics pages (mainly, for one particular space battle in on strip) - I've seen this done well in other web comics.

Doing a search just now, I came across the Open Source Flash site, with a huge list of projects! Number one project is probably an Open Source Flash Player, called "Gnash". Gasp - no proprietary software system is safe any more is it?