10 Types Of People

So, I’ve reviewed most Ubuntu releases since 2009 (I think…don’t quote me ) and I was trying to decide whether or not to review this one when I asked the question on Google+ “Is Ubuntu relevant”. It appears so. Although very few people in my circles are talking much about it, most of them still use it. I also checked over my site logs, and my 10.10 post is *still* my most viewed post ever, and also had more hits in the single day that I posted it, than I get most months. So clearly people still want to hear my opinion on Ubuntu. So, I downloaded the most recent ISO of 11.10 and set about reviewing. Obviously its not 100% done when I am writing this, so if something is different, this is why, but it should be pretty much the same as I’m writing it the day before it comes out.

On booting up the ISO, the boot screen is still not great. This is 1 thing that Ubuntu has annoyed me with for a long time. It tries so hard to get everything to look nice and shiny, but yet when you get an error on the boot screen, you have this horrible looking splash screen replacing the normal one, and the error is normally even wrapped across more than 1 line.
When installing, it does, however, have a really nice looking hard drive chooser. You get 2 options: “Use entire hard drive” or “Do something else”. This is fantastic, IMO, as it is essentially giving a really easy option to people who don’t know what they are doing.

The rest of the install is fairly basic for Ubuntu. Like previous versions, it starts installing and asks you your personalisation options (a thing that I really love for the record). Location, keyboard and user settings. And then a bunch of information about stuff included in Ubuntu while you wait. For the record, the user settings is simplified a bit I think. Really simple. I like.

Right…now on with the actual OS:

• Dash

• Window buttons

It would not be an Ubuntu release, without something about the window buttons. If you look at the screenshot to the right, the top is the bar with the mouse hovering over it and the bottom is without that. There has been many a discussion about that, so I will just give a quick opinion about it, and that’ll be all. I think its a great idea, but there is 1 issue with it. Its not obvious how to get to it. Once you are used to it, it is. But there is no obvious visual cue that you need to hover to get this. And that’s my only issue with it.

• Software Centre

• Settings menu

This is something I asked for from Ubuntu a year and a half ago, and hey presto…we have it. A concise Settings menu that gives you all the options the average user could want. It is simple, obvious and actually pretty good looking. You get there by clicking on the power menu (top right) and choosing System Settings. Then do what you want…exactly what I wanted

• Thunderbird!

All in all, it seems like a very nice release. Seems much nicer for people who don’t care how their machine works, and people who like unity should like everything that has changed. I apologise for the amount of stuff in here, and I’m sure many of you will suffer a case of (TLDR), but if you really care about what I feel is important, then I’m sure you skimmed the bits you didn’t care about. Let me know what you think about it in the comments…and what your favourite/worst thing about it. Trolling won’t be accepted

So, I’ve reviewed most Ubuntu releases since 2009 (I think…don’t quote me ) and I was trying to decide whether or not to review this one when I asked the...

Right. I’ve taken far far too long to post this, so here we go. I’m sitting down to write it and not getting up until I’m finished.

I have 3 computers that I use daily. My desktop, my netbook and my server (o, btw, I’ll be posting about my server sometime soon). And so, I decided to try and get all these running Karmic. Some experiences were great, some were not so.

(more…)

Right. I’ve taken far far too long to post this, so here we go. I’m sitting down to write it and not getting up until I’m finished. I have 3...

Managed to get this up earlier than I expected, as I realised that you don’t need to build it from source from the songbird website, I just needed to download it and run it.

So, to the new features:

• Equaliser:

  The equaliser is quite interesting. It works reasonably well. It has sliders for 10 frequencies, and is quite nice. It isn’t the best equaliser I have ever said, it lacks a few features that are planned (either by the songbird team, or by addons), such as presets and the ability to remember equaliser settings for each song. That is something that would be immense, and I would really love.

• Automatically managed folders:

  Well, now this is quite a cool, interesting feature now. It is quite useful. I’m sure most of you would know what it would do, but you can turn on what it calls “Managed Mode” on. This will allow you to choose the folder for your music, the folder heirarchy, and the file name, and when you change anything in the metadata, it will change them for you. Really useful I think. It works as well.

• 2-way sync with iTunes:

  Very useful feature, not for me, but for a lot of people who love Songbird, but also love the iTunes music store. Does exactly what it says on the tin…syncs with iTunes both ways. Means you can buy music in the iTunes music store, and it will sync with songbird. Create playlists in songbird, and they will sync with itunes, and you can then sync them to your iPhone or iPod touch (which currently aren’t supported in songbird). I don’t know how to do this feature, and I don’t have iTunes so I can’t try it and tell you if it works, but it seems really cool.

  This could also be used in conjunction with dropbox (or similar) to sync itunes on a mac, with linux or windows on another computer, or to sync several OS on 1 computer. It has huge potential.

• Last.fm:

  I don’t get what is new with this. My Songbird 1.1.1 has last.fm on it, but maybe that is just an addon. I don’t know, it might be that it was an addon, and is now part of the core. But still, it allows you to do everything with last.fm that you can on the website, and also allows you to scrobble.

• Performance enhancements:

  Not as many of these as there have been in previous releases, but lets try

  • Faster searching. Definitely obvious. Searching is almost straight away in my library (its only about 1000 items just now though, not sure what it will be like with really large ones.
  • Less CPU intensive. It seems to be less CPU intensive, but this isn’t an exact science
  • Multiple files. Supposodly deleting and selecting multiple files is faster. I can vouch for the selecting, but I don’t see why I would ever need to delete lots of files at once, so I don’t feel like trying that, I’ll take their word for it.
  • Fewer crashes. Obviously I can’t test this one until having it running for a while.

Future things:
They have quite a few interesting ideas for the next few releases. The august one will have device firmware update, MSC device support, playback of AIFF MS-ADPCM, WMA 1 & 2 and AAC LC, editing metadata of ASF and M4A files, improvements to metadata editor and transcoding.

Other things they need to get done before it can surpass the likes of Amarok and Banshee, are podcasting support (it really doesn’t work just now) and cd ripping, which will be included in the October release.

To be honest, I love this release, it has a few cool features, and we are getting closer to a fantastic media player. It really needs to get into the repos for Ubuntu, in my opinion, and I’ve outlined what it needs to add in above there.

This release has gone from ~79M to ~90M of RAM with 20 addons and playing music. This is not bad, but we need to make sure it doesn’t keep going up, but this is the only bad thing I can find about this release apart from features that don’t exist yet. I love Songbird, and I really want it to be a fantastic and popular Media Player

p.s It seems I was beaten by Alan Lord to put a review out on Songbird, ach well.

Managed to get this up earlier than I expected, as I realised that you don’t need to build it from source from the songbird website, I just needed to download...

I have had a wee bit of time to look at Songbird 1.1 and decide what I think about it. This may take a while, so I may blog some of it today, and some tomorrow. But the blog won’t go out until I finish this. So you might be reading this bit on Sunday, but I’m actually writing this on Saturday. Woop!

NOTE: I added no addons during this review, unless stated.

• Watch Folders

Ok, so this may not be a very revolutionary thing, but it is something that is essential in a mainstream full media centre. And now Songbird has it. I have tested this out…and I have to say…it works better than any media centre I have ever used. One thing that I know annoys a lot of people with iTunes…is that when you delete a file…iTunes doesn’t delete it. So when you go to play it iTunes goes “Ahhhhh…can’t find this”, and you go “Grrrrr”. Well…when you do it with Songbird, the song dissapears straight away. I moved a song away from my watched folder, switched straight to Songbird, and it was not in my library anymore. I then put the file back in, switched back to Songbird…and it was there again. That is IMMENSE! I would tell everyone you need to see this…it is immense.

• 7 Digital Music Store

So…not the best thing ever…but still a step in the right direction. The 7 Digital Music Store does what it says on the tin…sells music. It is in no way as good as the iTunes Store yet…as you can only get music (no TV shows, films, etc) but hey…its something isn’t it. Singles are normally 79p (familiar at all) and albums are 7.99. All (as far as I can see) are in mp3 format, so…its not gonna get me off CDs yet…I want me some lossless music. It also has a recommended section which takes your most played music and gives you some recommended stuff.

What I want is

1. Integration of Amazon store
2. Lossless downloads
3. TV and film downloads.

Once we get that…Songbird will be able to compete with iTunes Store. Cause, although being a step in the right direction, it is not near being able to compete.

I have had a wee bit of time to look at Songbird 1.1 and decide what I think about it. This may take a while, so I may blog some...

Songbird is finally stable. Well…officially anyways.

I’ve always found the whole 1.0 thing funny to be honest. Take WINE for example. It was “unstable” for 15 years. But what makes that stable or unstable? I’m not sure. I never had it crash on me before it was stable.

What actually makes something stable or unstable? Do there have to be a certain amount of crashes to be unstable? I’m not sure.

Anyway, this isn’t about stable/unstable. This is about the 1.0 release of Songbird.

Now as we all know…Songbird is nowhere near good enough to be a replacement for normal people of iTunes, Amarok or WMP (if WMP is really your thing, I never liked it at all).

For example…it cannot rip or burn cds. It cannot constantly watch a folder and add tracks to it. It does not work with media keys (unless you are running linux on i386 with the MMkeys addon). I cannot get podcasting to work.

But, although it isn’t as good as the big dogs yet…it is good enough for me to use it all the time. The only 2 things out of that list that annoy me are 1. folder watching and 2. media keys. Yes, I am running linux, but the addon doesnt work for 64 bit.

It does have loads of great things going for it:
1. Addons. Yes, some people may not like them…but I love them. I wanna be able to mod it.
2. Open source. “Wow” I hear some of you saying sarcastically. But seriously…this means that it will get updated more, it has a great community around it, etc etc.
3. The Browsing. I don’t use this very often. But for when you just have songbird open…say at a party…and you wanna show someone a youtube video or something…no need to bring up firefox, just “ctrl-t” and go to youtube.

This along with the fact that it looks well good if you skin it how you like it. Take a look at mine. I’m using YABS (Yet Another Black Skin).

There are also, of course, things that I really want them to change.

1. Native titlebars. This really annoys me…I want songbird to use the same titlebar as everything else in my computer…but it doesnt. There is talk about changing this so that it does…but we shall have to wait and see.
2. As I said before, the MMKeys and the Folder watching needs to be implemented.

Once I get those 3…I would be exstatic. Obviously they could slim it down a bit, because at this point in time, it is quite big. Granted, 3.5% of my 4GB of RAM isn’t huge…but I am a power user. I run thousands of things at once.

These are my thoughts on Songbird.

Songbird is finally stable. Well…officially anyways. I’ve always found the whole 1.0 thing funny to be honest. Take WINE for example. It was “unstable” for 15 years. But what makes...

Before I start, I would like to point out that OOo3 is not fully stable yet. It is in Release Candidate stage, which means that it is pretty much stable, but there may still be bugs in it.

I read recently that OOo3 has just gone into RC1 stage, and decided that I should give it a try, because I think it is a fantastic peogram, and an advancement for the OpenSource world.

So basically, I was very pleased to see that actually, OOo3 now has a database program, which I believe it didn’t have before hand. This is fantastic addition, that will probably please many people who had this reason only not to switch to OOo3, which I think I may know a few of them.

Another good addition for the OOo users is the fact that we don’t have to email back to people and say “Could you please send me this back in something other than .docx. .txt would be preferable, but .doc will suffice. The reason for this is because OOo3 has support for read-only support for MSO 2007 formats, and read-write support is planned. However, why send anyone a .docx when they can read .doc anyway? And if MS stick to their plan, they will be able to read .odt anyways. So I’m not fussed about being able to write to docx files.

I have told a number of people who are confused by 2007s format, that OOo has a format similar to 2003, and this is still true, however, it may be simple and similar to previous MSOffices, but it could do with a bit of sprucing up. As Preston Galla says in his review of the beta, “it is like taking a trip to the ’90s”

That being said, I do prefer its format to MS Offics ’07. It just doesn’t work. I don’t know why MS like to change things all the time just because they can. A comment from the blog I just quoted says “Suppose every time you bought a new car, you had how to drive all over again.”

I am all for redesigning and resprucing of programs, but why completely change the way it looks, works and is designed, just because you can. It worked like it was, just add stuff to it and make it better. Don’t completely redo it so noone know how to work it.

OOo3 really feels like a full Office suite thanks to The Start Centre.

If you are not running an OOo application already, this pops up and asks what you want to do. Makes it feel very professional, and integrated into everything else.

To summarise, all in all, I really really like OOo3 but I would like a wee bit of polishing up on the UI. If anyone can do something in Microsoft Office which they cannot do in OOo3, (something that you would actually use in real life) then please tell me, because I would really like to know.

Before I start, I would like to point out that OOo3 is not fully stable yet. It is in Release Candidate stage, which means that it is pretty much stable,...

Ok, so I recently found this fantastic web browser called Flock. Now, to be honest, it is very very like firefox, in fact it is based on firefox. Ok, it is firefox which has been edited. But the edits are fantastic, and really work.

This web browser has been created with people like me in mind. People that have joined almost every social networking site in the world, and don’t want to have all those loaded up in tabs all the time.

Flock includes a sidebar, which I then incorporate with the AIOS (All-in-one Sidebar) for Firefox. And the great thing is, you can use any normal Firefox addon as well. The built in sidebar gives you access to your Accounts, your RSS and ATOM feeds, your bookmarks, a blog editor, a media uploader, a web clipboard and a people’s status updates etc. If you add AIOS (like I have) you can also have your addons, bookmarks, history, downloads, and the source for the website, as options for the side bar.

On the right, you can see a screenshot of, almost, the default layout of the flock browser, with the “My World” page open, the sidebar on the “People” option, and the media bar on the top open. On the left, you can see my view of Flock, with the Sidebar on “People”, all my sidebar options on the AIOS bar, a black theme, on the “My World” page.

To be honest, this browser will not interest anyone who does not use Social Networking sites, however if someone was like me, and was infact a member of almost every social network on the planet, then it would be amazing.

Currently, Flock has support for adding your Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Twitter, Youtube, Photobucket, Picasa, Piczo, Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, WordPress, Xanga, del.icio.us, Magnolia, AOL Mail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail, along with any self-hosted blog you have. I also believe that Myspace and Bebo support is in the pipeline now that they both have an API to work with, but not sure when they will be implemented, apart from the fact that on the forum it is stated that Myspace will be sometime this year, which will be great.

The accounts that I have that they currrently don’t support are – Myspace, Bebo and identi.ca. If/when they implement these accounts, I will have all of my social networking in my browser.

Ok, so I recently found this fantastic web browser called Flock. Now, to be honest, it is very very like firefox, in fact it is based on firefox. Ok, it...

will finally be released in a few hours.

I have to say, I am extremely excited, because this means that my addons will start to properly work with firefox 3, and then I can put the version checking and security update checking back on.

I noticed just now, that 1400000 people have pledged to download firefox, and annoyingly, we have to download it from the website, rather than updating from the repos, so I shall be doing that as well…anything to get a world record eh

So far I have been very happy with firefox 3, and I’m just looking forward to addon compatibility.

will finally be released in a few hours. I have to say, I am extremely excited, because this means that my addons will start to properly work with firefox 3,...