YouTube is a household name, but most handheld gear doesn't support it. The Flash video grabber and converter YouTube Downloader makes taking your YouTube with you a cinch. Seth Rosenblatt shows you how in this First Look video.
XnView is a robust program, an image browser and viewer as well as a converter that can handle more than 400 formats from Camera RAW, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and other still images all the way through AVI, MOV, MPEG, and a multitude of movie formats. Metadata EXIF and IPTC formats are also supported, ensuring that you don't lose any location or shooting data. There are also tools for taking screenshots.
In addition, you'll find tools for capturing screenshots and creating basic slide shows, as well as a simple audio player. The utility for generating Web galleries has been … Read more
Popular Mechanics has published a guide showing how to convert a Sony PlayStation 3 to a full-fledged PC. It has been long established that the console's Cell processor is akin to those used by supercomputers, though this is probably a first in terms of a major exploit.
Best of all, the magazine says the Linux operating system makeover is perfectly legitimate and relatively risk-free. The procedure involves a hard drive upgrade and relevant software installation. The latter, such as Ubuntu, can also be downloaded free online.
The hacked console retains all its original functionalities and can be easily toggled … Read more
A recent Gartner study estimates that 189 billion mobile messages have been sent by U.S. mobile-phone subscribers in 2007. It forecasts 301 billion mobile messages sent in 2008.
If correct, those figures would still account for only a small fraction of the 2.3 trillion messages to be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (a 19.6 percent increase from the 2007 total of 1.9 trillion messages). Asia is the biggest mobile-messaging market worldwide. China is in the lead, with approximately 560 billion SMS messages sent in 2007, followed by the Philippines' 430 billion and Japan's … Read more
Video and text don't always go together, but that's not stopping video and audio microblogging service Seesmic from partnering with the distributed comment tool Disqus. Starting Wednesday, users of Disqus will get the added benefit of video commenting alongside the text entry field.
The option is turned off by default in Disqus, and must be enabled by whoever is administrating the account. We've gone ahead and turned it on in the Webware 100 winner pages, where we've been using Disqus since unveiling the 100 winners late last month. I've also added it to the end of this post, where you can add your own video comment after the break.
One small hiccup I've found is that Seesmic won't pull in your Disqus account information. You've got to be registered with the currently private alpha service to have it linked up with any sort of account. Otherwise you're limited to leaving an anonymous comment that can later be reclaimed when you get Seesmic access. Disqus founder Daniel Ha tells me the two companies are working on deeper integration for user authentication, but in the meantime anonymous recording is the easiest option for people who don't yet have Seesmic accounts.
I'm still not sold on the trend of video commenting. It's a bit gimmicky, and as others have said, it makes conversations difficult to parse. Ideally I'd like to see services like Seesmic partner with Jott to add a small transcript under the comment that would save me some time, and improve the experience for search engine bots, the deaf, and others who don't feel like watching and listening to what could be a simple sentence or two of thought.
These seem to be apocalyptic times for designers. If you happen to be a member of this threatened species, you better look for another calling. We had just put Pillippe Starck's "Design is dead" fatalism to bed, and then I read Peter Merholz's essay from 2007: "Stop designing products!"
What sounds like another shocker initially, however, turns out to be a milder riff on an old and well-known theme that Merholz himself has been promoting for two years now: "Experience is the product -- and the only thing users care about:"
"… Read more
Power Downloader tries his best to help all, but recently his friend Francois Foto approached him with a tricky problem: is there a way to easily convert photos from one format to another? ''Ze emphasees,'' said Francois, ''eez on easy.'' Power had a simple solution, a freeware program called XnView.
XnView is a robust program, an image browser and viewer as well as a converter. For conversions, though, it can handle more than 400 formats from Camera RAW, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and other still image formats all the way through AVI, MOV, MPEG, and a multitude of movie formats. Metadata … Read more
Some programs are more trouble than they're worth.
I'm a big fan of the PDF file format. It lets you share files with people using almost any type of computer without worrying about whether they have the right program installed to view it, or whether it will look to them the way it looks to you.
The problem is Adobe Systems' Acrobat, which is simply more software than I need to meet my meager PDF requirements. (It's also more annoying than any two Office apps combined.)
The fact is, you can create, convert, and edit PDF files … Read more
The miniaturization of matter has long been a human desire, and viewing the world from a smaller perspective is the core of many novels and movies. The idea of shrinking people for the purpose of traveling inside another human's body, in particular, has been frequently used in animated cartoons, including The Simpsons, Futurama, Beetlejuice, and SpongeBob SquarePants.
One of the most entertaining pieces in this genre is Fantastic Voyage, a science-fiction movie from 1966, which -- albeit not free of some severe logical flaws -- has lost none of its original appeal. Fantastic Voyage tells the story of a … Read more
For Luca Filigheddu from abbeynet, the five-minute limit was a natural fit for his topic, "Micro Video-Blogging and the Future of … Read more
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Fitness tech is here to stay, and the competition is only getting stiffer. Watch the Fitbit Flex and the Jawbone Up fight for fitness tech supremacy!
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