Liberty's Blog

Geeky Software Notes.

Software has been a big topic here. Lots seems to be going on.

Forté Agent 3.0 just came out, and its just been followed up with 3.1. I have been a beta tester for Agent, and I like it. The next step will be 3.2 and it is supposed to have multi-pop capabilities. The multi-server news capability is a long awaited feature and I'm glad its now available. I think its too late to salvage the email part of Agent its just too far behind. The biggest lacking is in contact management or address book.

Today an address book is more than just a list of names, but consist of work and home addresses, several email address' Home phone, work phone, cell phone and pager. Sometimes even a spouses name. One program that does this well despite all the other problems associated with it is Outlook. The newcomer on the block is Thunderbird. It has great spam blocking capabilities, A real nice Contact and Address book. The nice thing is that data can be imported from MSoft Outlook. This is completely free no strings attached software. Although I'm using mostly Gmail and Agent for mail home computer. I've switched at work and Equality is happy with Thunderbird on her laptop. It also has about the best RSS reader I've used, and an adequatet news reader. The RSS reader is as good if not better than any of the other free dedicated RSS aggrigators that I've used.

There has been lots of chatter and exitement in the blogosphere about a program called Flock The only problem is that the program doesn't exist, its not even in beta yet. Never the less, there is lots of enthusiasm for this yet to exist software. Its called "social" browsing. New Scientist explains:

A “social” web browser has been created to meet the needs of a new generation of web users who want to edit, comment on and share web content, rather than just peruse it.

With the underlying capabilities of a basic web browser like Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox, the new browser, called Flock – after the buzz it hopes to create – adds features specifically designed to make writing, editing, sharing and displaying web content faster and easier.

“The problem is that the web browser has remained fairly stable over the last 10 years, but the web has changed quite a bit,” says its creator, Silicon Valley-based Bart Decrem, who left the Mozilla Foundation to build Flock. “It has gone from a collection of static documents into something that has a largely social dimension to it.”

By seamlessly integrating tools for blogging, photo blogging and shared bookmarks into the browser, he hopes Flock will be the first browser to meet the needs of the next generation of collaborative, social web users, which currently number over 10 million and call themselves “Web 2.0”.

Sounds like this has the capabilty of putting web design and blogging in the hands of anyone with webspace. I didn't think anything could be easier than Blogger.

I've written about softWIRE before. A neat free programming aid for C# & Visual Basic .NET, It is a quick and dirty way to program applications. I've been using version 5.1 and have created some real nice Applications with just a couple of hours investment. Softwire is now selling a version 6.0 for an introductory price of $499 soon to be $995. The new version offers more waveform analysis, but little more that I can see. Although their website doesn't advertise the free version anymore, It is still available on their FTP site as DAQ Software CD.

posted by Liberty @ 2:40 PM