FeedDemon 3 is ready for public use, after months spent in a beta version that saw a confusing migration from proprietary online syncing to Google Reader.
That rough patch sorted, FeedDemon remains one of the best desktop RSS and Atom feed catchers. This version contains a lengthy list of changes, including greatly enhanced Twitter connectivity, a tweaked interface that's a bit easier to use, and better tagging and sharing.
My Twitter stream in FeedDemon 3.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)FeedDemon has dumped its proprietary synchronization site, Newsgator.com, in favor of syncing with Google Reader. New users won't notice, but older users are likely to lose many unread feeds, since Google can't import feeds with more than 10 unread items. Once synced with Google Reader, unread feeds can again include more than 10 items.
There's also a new, persistent ad placed in the lower-left corner of the interface, and FeedDemon's performance could be a lot better--RAM usage was hefty, and 3GB of RAM didn't prevent occasional program hang-ups.
Twitter feed reading has been baked in because FeedDemon supports authenticated feeds. Hyperlinking and short-URL expansion are automatic, and if you use Twitter as a live news stream, FeedDemon's Twitter link sharing should appeal to you. To set that up, you need to subscribe in FeedDemon to your Twitter feed here.
Tagging, tag clouds, and item sharing get a massive overhaul in FeedDemon 3, with all three features added to the item view and a tag cloud added to the Subscriptions Home view. The interface will look similar to FeedDemon 2.8, but there are many little tweaks to improve its usability.
Flags have been renamed Stars for Google Reader consistency, for example, while the Home page features videos, pictures, and content from your feeds. One smart improvement over Google Reader is that you can view your starred feeds in the folders they came from, instead of in a single "starred items" folder.
We'd like to see performance addressed in future versions, but overall, FeedDemon remains a favorite option for desktop feed management. Let us know your thoughts on the new FeedDemon in the comments below.
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CNET)
If you are an iTunes fan with a large library of music, chances are you have several songs with missing tags and cover art. Most people get their music from a number of sources, making it inevitable that some of your music doesn't have the right tags. While you could go in and fill in the genre, album name, and artist fields by hand, a huge library would take a long time to get through--not to mention all the time it would take searching for all the missing album artwork.
TuneUp Companion (Windows or Mac) is a plug-in for iTunes that does all the tedious tagging and cover art retrieval work for you. In addition to cleaning up your library, TuneUp offers the "Tuniverse," which locates videos, concert tickets, and news on the Web about selected bands. You also can find out when the artist of the currently playing track has a concert coming up in your area. I wrote about an early version of the software in June of last year, and while it did a fairly good job of cleaning up tags and cover art, I didn't think it was quite ready for prime time.
TuneUp Companion shows up right along side of iTunes so it's easy to drag and drop tracks for cleaning
(Credit: CNET)Well, the folks at TuneUp Media announced today they have streamlined TuneUp Companion and added a new look and extra features to sweeten the deal. Along with the cleaner interface, users will now be able to choose which metadata to save through TuneUp Companion's newly added field-specific cleaning. Other tweaks include the ability to disable greatest hits compilations in search results and Mac users will now be able to choose whether they'd like TuneUp to create playlists of all the albums they've cleaned.
The Tuniverse tab gives you a nice overview of currently playing music along with online videos, news, and more.
(Credit: CNET)The downloadable trial will let you sample some of the program's features including 100 free track cleanups and 50 cover art matches, along with the Tuniverse information and upcoming concerts. The pricing for the full version of the program is a bit strange. You get unlimited use of the product for $19.95 a year, or you can pay $29.95 for a lifetime membership. Sounds to me like any sane person would pay $29.95, but that's probably what they're banking on. Either way, if you have a big or growing music library, TuneUp Companion is a great way to get all your music properly labeled. The additional easily accessible online news and videos as well as concert information are icing on the cake.
This collection of free utilities for Windows will energize your corners, introduce tagging for files, and allow you to move and resize program windows in a Windows 7 style via your Alt key.
TaggedFrog is an iTunes-styled tag for your files.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)TaggedFrog tags your files, but keeps the tags to itself--there's little cross-over with Windows Explorer. You can drag and drop from Explorer, though, and that makes adding tags significantly easier. It does nothing automatically, which means there's little chance of a file getting mistagged and lost in the tag cloud. You can batch tag files from the Scan and Tag option under File, and batch edit tags after your initial tagging process. TaggedFrog can be accessed and tags initiated from the system tray.
TaggedFrog's biggest drawback is the utter disconnectedness of the program from Windows Explorer--there's no way to tag files from Explorer without mouse labor. The iTunes-based interface belies the unnecessarily complicated workflow, another drawback. Where tagging and managing should be one-step motions, it can take three or even four to complete basic tasks.
The Filter box is especially hard to get used to, with both drop-down options and the ability to accept user-entered parameters. When entering your own search, you must hit Enter to initiate the filter. It also needs about 45MB of RAM to run, which isn't outrageously large but seems like a bit much for a program with so few visible hooks into other system processes.
TaggedFrog does offer a portable version, and the tagging abilities are robust if you can handle the program's idiosyncrasies.
AltDrag's About window is the only place to find instructions within the program.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)AltDrag is a simple, nearly one-hit program that should appeal to Netbook users and others who need more options for moving program windows around their desktop. It runs at a shade under 6MB of RAM, and sticks a quick toggle switch into your system tray. Click on the black mouse pointer icon once, and the plus-symbol that indicates the program has been enabled goes away. Click once more to re-enable the app. You can set it to run at Windows launch, and hide the tray icon, too.
Using AltDrag is easy, although the instructions are hidden in the About pane, accessible when you right-click on the system tray icon. Hold down Alt and click your left mouse button anywhere in a program window to move that window. Hold Alt and use the center or right button to resize a window. The Windows 7 functionality comes in when you press Alt and Shift and then drag the window using your left mouse button. The window will snap to the edge of your monitor that you've been dragging it toward. Alt plus a double left-click will maximize a window, or restore a maximized window to its normal size.
Resizing the window is a bit wonky because it's hard at first to determine where the resizing anchor point is. Still, this is a smart tool to have for those with small monitors.
Hot Corners is a program that will have many screaming "virus!" but after having installed it, I can confirm that it's not. According to the publisher, the installer comes from a third party that sets off red flags and claims that it's not a threat. They've released the source code to prove it, but unless you're running NOD32 or ClamWin, your virus scanner will have to be disabled for the duration of the installation process. Turn it back on after you've installed it.
Hot Corners provides preconfigured and customizable mouse gestures.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)If you decide to go ahead and install Hot Corners, you'll find your PC now has OS X-style corner actions that go far beyond what they can do on the Mac. The program executes a stunning variety of tasks by turning all four screen corners into Hot Corners. The hot-key combo of the Windows key plus X key gives similar powers to mouse gestures as the Mouse Move feature.
With either Hot Corners or Mouse Move, you can launch programs, search Google, run your screensaver, minimize or maximize windows, open your My Documents folder, place the computer into stand-by mode, lock the screen, show your desktop, jump to the previous window you were viewing, or run a specific file. The Google search is surprisingly smooth, utilizing a small pop-up query box that then opens a new browser tab with your results.
In testing the various tasks, all of them worked without flaw. A system tray icon that can be hidden from the program's options menu lets you disable Mouse Move. Hot Corners runs on about 6.5MB of RAM, and looks to be an immense time-saver for your most repetitive tasks.
I can't think of a worse place to look for editorial than YouTube comments. Historically, they've been so bad that YouTube was forced to create a comment playback feature so users could hear what they had typed before sharing it with the rest of the world.
That hasn't stopped two Firefox developers from coming up with OpinionCloud. This small Firefox add-on will give a video's comments a quick once-over and show you which words are most often used, and the general user sentiment based on a percentage of keywords that are either positive or negative. Clicking on one of the keywords will pull up a list of comments containing that word. All of this appears below the video, and can be toggled on and off.
According to the project page the tool indexed 9 million YouTube comments to help build out its dictionary of slang terms and phrases. And that number is growing each time someone uses it.
Why would you want this? It's helpful on longer videos if you don't have time to sit down to watch them. It also lets you see what people are saying without having to cruise through several pages of comments, which YouTube breaks up to just 10 per page. Of course both of these require users to have commented on the video and left something intelligible, the latter of which you may be hard pressed to find.
OpinionCloud sorts out the good from the bad comments. The ones we've blurred are less than child-friendly.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Many moons ago when Mozilla introduced Thunderbird 2 (Windows and Mac), one of the neat new features was that the neat new feature of tagging could be combined with the neat new feature of Outlook-style saved searches. However, there was no documentation on how to do this, and it got pushed aside for more important things.
It's possible to save a search folder for tags in Thunderbird, although it's not well-known.
(Credit: CNET Networks)In other words, I forgot about it.
As soon as I remembered, I was surprised to find very little documentation about it. I could see how to save searches, but those were only for the options in the search drop-down, right? Turns out, I was wrong about that.
Step 1: Perform a search for any term and save it.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)First off, let's quickly review how to create a tag and perform a search in Thunderbird 2. To create a tag, go to the menubar option Message, then Tag, and choose New tag from the drop-down list. The built-in color-coding feature makes tagged messages pop out from the others that surround it.
In the text box next to the magnifying glass icon on the toolbar, you can start typing to search, or narrow your search using the drop-down specifics such as To or CC and Subject or Sender. Frustratingly, there's no option for Tags in the menu, making it hard for me to see all the e-mails I've tagged as High Priority in every folder.
To begin the process to save a tag search across all your folders, type in any term--I chose "DVD". Then go back to the search box, click the triangle below the magnifying glass icon, and click on Save search as folder.
Step 2: Set the folders to be included in the search.
(Credit: CNET Networks)In the window that opens, rename the folder so you can easily identify it--mine is High Priority, same as the tag name. Then choose the folders you want to be included in the search by click the button directly below the search name. If you're on a Microsoft Exchange server, be sure that you specify whether you want local folders included. The next option is Search Online, which I left unchecked since I apply my High Priority tag on a case-by-case basis.
In the Configure search criteria box at the bottom of the window, change the first box from the default Body to Tag. The second box should be set to Is if you're searching for only one tag, but left at Contains if you want more than one. In the third box, type the name of the tag precisely. Pressing the plus button to the right of the third box will allow you to create more search criteria, while the minus button will remove them.
Step 3: Create a search rule for the tag.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)As you can see in the large screenshot, the resulting folder contains all e-mails that meet the search criteria. Using the hot key combination that's associated with the tag, you can toggle an e-mail's inclusion from within the saved search folder. Most importantly, you can now collect all your tagged e-mails in one place, cutting out a lot of organizational angst.
Mp3tag makes it simple to edit batches of MP3 files.
According to a recent New York Times article, 80 percent of people who make New Year's resolutions abandon them before Valentine's Day. But we can all beat the odds, right?
This year, I'm hoping to make some sense of my digital music collection. I'm a big fan of the audio-tracking site Last.fm (my username is "field_day" if you want to friend me), but I'll often get an error when trying to "scrobble" a song because my ID3 information is missing or erroneous.
ID3 is a metadata format within MP3 files that can store a song's title, artist, album, track number, genre, year, and other useful data. And editing that info song by song in iTunes, Winamp, MediaMonkey, or other music players can be a real pain in the butt.
Enter the batch taggers. These software programs make it much easier to edit multiple MP3 files at once. One of the most popular, Mp3tag, was a Featured Freeware selection back in August 2008, and TagScanner is another top-rated and popular freeware option. Among the shareware solutions, TagTuner offers a full 30-day trial and includes one unique and critical feature: the ability to roll back any batch changes.
Will 2009 be the year I finally get my MP3 act together? I certainly hope so. If you have any expert advice on organizing digital music or cleaning up my ID3 tags, tell me about it in the comments.
Search Cloudlet is a Firefox extension from the International Software and Productivity Engineering Institute (INTSPEI) that gives users a cloud of tags to help modify and focus searches on Google and Yahoo. Once installed it will show up on top of search results and provides a simple way to tweak the original query by offering up keywords pulled from the results.
Words that appear more often in the results appear as bigger, bolder tags that you can click on to re-start the query with that word tacked on. The creators recommend dialing up the number of default search results to 100, which may make your searches slightly slower but result in a much more accurate tag cloud. This can be done from the user preferences in both Google and Yahoo.
In addition to standard Google and Yahoo searches the extension works on Google News both for keywords and locations. It also works for Google Blog search in a really neat way by adding tags for each author that you can click on to filter which posts come up.
Search Cloudlet is an experimental add-on and does not yet work on the latest beta of Firefox 3.1.
Google and Yahoo search results get smart tag clusters that let you narrow down results with Firefox extension Search Cloudlet.
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TuneUp Companion has been getting a lot of attention for their iTunes plug-in for Windows, and now they're trying to drum up interest in the Mac version.
Basically, the plug-in powers up cover art discovery while cleaning up metatags, automatically discovering contextually-related Web content, and sniffs out upcoming concert information. I haven't yet had a chance to check out the Mac version yet, but keep in mind that it's a beta and there is likely some serious debugging needed.
In fact, the bugs aren't likely--they definitely exist. In the words TuneUp's media relations guru Andrew Kippen, the core features work but, "there will be bugs." That may not matter so much if you're the kind of person who likes to get in on the ground floor--TuneUp Media has given Download.com 100 invites to check out the Mac beta.
Send an email to download@tuneupmedia.com with your name as the only thing on the first line in the body of your message, and let us know in the comments here what you think of it.
Digital music is all well and good, but who wants to type in album and artist information for each track? With TagScanner, you don't have to. This efficient and powerful tag editor lets you edit metadata automatically as well as by hand, both for individual files and file batches.
The automatic tagging feature is most impressive. Although it can hit up online databases such as FreeDB, Discogs, and Amazon like many other auto-tagging apps, it can also generate tags from file and folder names--that's something many similar apps can't do. It works in the opposite direction, too, generating file names from tags. The app supports ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis comments, APEv2, WindowsMedia, and MP4/iTunes tags.
TagScanner has an elegant and orderly interface, and lets you preview file names before applying changes. The only catch is that you'll need to spend some time learning the program's file- and tag-naming language. However, if you have thousands of music tracks crying out for organization, that's a small price to pay.
UPDATED: Trial not limited to 30 days, clarified YouTube video embedding.
I'm not a big fan of iTunes for Windows. Even though I have an iPod, I haven't used its software sibling in nine months. (That'd be enough time for Apple to gestate a better version, you'd think.) However, iTunes addicts who just can't break away might want to take a look at TuneUp Companion, a neat little plug-in recently out of beta. It does a much better job of album art downloading, track tag repair and discovery, and tracking down concerts by your favorite bands.
In terms of user interface, TuneUp Companion is a bit awkward.
(Credit: CNET Networks)First thing to note with the program is that it installs as a sidebar on iTunes. If you're using the mothership in full-screen mode, or near enough to it, you're going to have to pull in the right edge of your jukebox before you can see what's going on. From there, TuneUp lets you register from within the add-on's sidebar.
The registration is boilerplate for Web sites these days. You don't have to contribute a credit card number, though, and that makes this an interesting replacement for the iTunes store. The new Genius bar is basically a repackaging of the old Apple hard-sell for the iTunes Store, whereas TuneUp Companion offers links to DRM-free Amazon under the now playing tab.
The program can clean song tags and discover new tracks, among other things.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Links in TuneUp include more than music purchasing, though. There's also a YouTube discovery feature, automatically pulling in links to related YouTube videos. Click on the link and video opens within TuneUp, which isn't quite as smooth as embedding the video directly--but it does save on space. Concert notifications are courtesy of StubHub, news comes from Google, and there's a bunch of eBay links, as well. These can be swapped around or minimized, but not completely hidden.
Other features include Clean, which fixes track metatag data that has been improperly maintained. This feature has been buggy in the past, although I didn't experience any crashes when testing it this time around. It doesn't come close to MediaMonkey's or Winamp's built-in tag repair, but it will make sure that your "RaDIOhed" tunes are spelled correctly and capitalized in the right spots. The album art locater worked well, having no problems with either popular or obscure albums.
Despite being fairly responsive, the plug-in's interface feels cramped and hectic, although that might be because it sits next to Apple's famously austere iTunes design. TuneUp Companion makes a good choice for people who want more out of iTunes, and it costs $20. The program limits you to 500 songs repairs and 50 album art downloads.
