New great service available!
Create a spreadsheet, define some fields in your table and then share this spreadsheet as a form that users can fill out. When they do that, they add a line to your spreadsheet. It is pretty simple to setup.

More information on the Official Google Docs Blog.
Some time ago I’ve found an nice Silverlight 1.0 application which is now part of Silverlight.net Showcase. It is an open source configurable slide show application. The configuration is made by using XML or inline javacript (using JSON - JavaScript Object Notation).


See the live demo in Vertigo’s website. I had some issues while trying it on Firefox. The problem was Silverlight 1.1 September Alpha Refresh. So, in Internet Explorer it runs well with the 1.1 version, but to run it on Firefox you must have the stable 1.0 version.
This project is also hosted in Codeplex.
Since I’ve created this blog I’ve been using a nice Wordpress plugin to allow a nice user experience while visiting this website with a mobile device. It is called Wordpress PDA Plugin and it’s installation is plug-and-play. Since this is a blog, and probably most of the readers just subscribe my RSS feed into some reader or aggregator, this plugin isn’t essential, but is still pretty nice.
These are some screenshots from my website mobile version.

As you can see, in the homepage it removes all the images and shows only part of the text, to optimize performance. By entering into a entry details you can read the whole content, including images.
Yesterday I took a look at Songbird Media Player. I must admit that I was very excited as a read about this open source media player. why? Because it has many things that look like my favorite web browser: Firefox!
The screenshot bellow shows the default look & feel of this application that looks a lot like iTunes. I like a lot the library navigation. You can filter the musics by year, artist and album in a simple way.

How about Firefox similarities that I talked about? Here it goes. It is “developers friendly”. Has themes and add-ons support like Firefox. It allows tabbed browsing with a Firefox-based internal browser. As you can see in the screenshot below some interface elements like options and Add-ons menu are similar to the analogous ones in Firefox. Almost a copy of them, which can be nice while getting used to Songbird interface. This project is powered by Mozilla (which explains a lot
).

The screenshot below which shows a album browser isn’t a built-in feature. It is a Java-based add-in which I installed. Looks nice but has some issues about resizing, and hangs a little bit too… You can navigate through the add-in list in here.

My deception was when I played some songs… Songbird takes a lot of memory and CPU usage in order to work.

I’ve tried iTunes 7.5 and tough it uses an considerable amount of memory it almost “doesn’t require” CPU time. I must confess that this memory usage of 47Mb doesn’t bother me. 2Gb of RAM is enough to handle it
And I’m used to Firefox memory usage as you can also see in the screenshot.

With Windows Media Player 11 I had some great results about both CPU and memory. It is the least I can expect with a media player built-in into the operating system.

I must confess that I don’t use media players that often, and when I use it’s just to listen to music and leave the player running in background. Songbird seems promising, but for now I won’t use it because it doesn’t fit my needs (low memory, low CPU,shuffle and playing!). Although my experience wasn’t good, don’t stay stick to what I have written. Install it and give it a try!
A simple application (that doesn’t require installation). Maybe it is old news, but I have only found out about this software today. Pretty nice because it gathers some (sometimes) useful information. The features list is “copy-pasted” from the website.
Features:
- Detailed informations about Processes, Startups, Explorer, IE Addons, Uninstallers, Windows, Services, Drivers, Connections and Opened Files
- Action History for monitoring processes activities
- Making of Registry & Files snapshots for easy comparing of system changes. Result of comparation is displayed in tree view and text list. Can be used for analysation of product installers/uninstallers (like Total Uninstall)
- Performance graphs for monitoring usage of system resources in time
- Easy check of suspicious files via VirusTotal
- Easy search details about file/process via online databases
- Easy access to System Utilities
Download here
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I’ve been looking at this application evolution since more that six months. It runs on Windows Mobile, it is freeware and brings to the tips of your fingers a little bit of the iPhone user-experience.It is a contact manager that replaces the default one and allows you to scroll your contacts with your finger.It allows sending SMS, creating a favorites list and adding pictures to your contacts.You can set different themes. My favorite is the black one in the side picture. Download it here.
Still based on the ideal of using your PDA only with your fingers you also can find a keyboard in this website. Download it here. |
Nowadays I don’t use this software. I’m in a minimalistic phase as a windows mobile user. Only the essentials to have it working. (Qtek S200 performance made me took this decision).