Yes, you read it right: 5.13. The people at Nullsoft discovered a critical vulnerability in Winamp, and 5.13 is here to solve that. And nothing more 
So the work on the 5.2 betas continues.
Monthly Archive for January, 2006
For my audio editing, Audacity has all I need (plus it’s free etc). Adobe Audition (called Cool Edit in the past) is, besides Sound Forge, the most used commercial audio creation tool. Since Adobe bought Cool Edit, nothing much had changed to the program (the same goes for Sony buying Sound Forge). But, last week, Adobe revealed Audition 2.0! These are it’s main highlights:
- Low-latency mixing with unlimited tracks.
- ASIO support.
- Audible scrubbing.
- Analog-modeled Multiband Compressor.
- Recordable parameter automation with external hardware support.
- New tools for mastering.
- New Spectral Frequency Display tools.
- Broader video format support.
The retail build has already been leaked onto the evil internet, so if you’re into that, stick your head up at the usual sources. A trial version should be available soon.
>> Read more about Adobe Audition 2.0
Nullsoft will release a series of beta builds of the upcoming Winamp 5.2. The highlights are:
1) gapless mp3 + aac playback.
2) vastly superior wave file playback (24bit etc).
3) compatibility fixes with tagging.
4) many unicode updates.
5) native portable device support.
” PC Magazine is running a review of several popular BitTorrent clients. They review uTorrent, an app that ‘packs an outstanding array of features in 107KB, and doesn’t even create a folder in your Program Files’ and give it 4.5 stars. BitTorrent Client from BitTorrent.com, ‘whose clean interface has three basic elements: a large progress bar for each torrent you’re working on, a slider that controls your maximum upload rate, and a link to the BitTorrent Search engine’, gets 4 stars. BitPump ‘features an attractive interface that sacrifices a detailed feature set for BitTorrent tweakers in favor of simplicity and ease of use’ and gets 4 stars. Finally, Azureus, ‘a favorite with advanced users, who enjoy its plug-in system and huge range of tweakable settings’, gets 4.5 stars. An interview with Bram Cohen from BitTorrent is available as well.”
Miranda IM is a multi protocol instant messenger client. Miranda IM is designed to be resource efficient and easy to use. It uses very little memory and requires no installation. Just unzip and run! This also makes it ideal for users that want to run their messenger client from a removable storage such as an USB memory stick. It can even be stored on a floppy disc if not too many plugins are used.
The powerful plugin system makes Miranda IM extremely flexible. Only the most basic features are built in, but there are currently more than 350 plugins available for download that allows users to extend the functionality in Miranda IM. Plugins can be installed to add support for ICQ, AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Gadu-Gadu, Tlen, Netsend and other protocols.
Crashes addressed
* After a few sessions, Dreamweaver won’t launch (Windows)
* Dreamweaver crashes when a template is opened, the site is changed in the Files panel, and the template is then modified and saved (Windows/Macintosh)
* JavaScript Error on Windows (crash on Macintosh) when previewing file from the Files panel when site is not selected in Files panel (Windows/Macintosh)
Performance issues addressed
* Dreamweaver is unresponsive when expanding the Files panel or viewing the Assets panel (Macintosh)
* Dreamweaver 8 is slow editing certain large files (Macintosh)
Application issues addressed
* “Locked by template” warning incorrectly appears when deleting server behaviors if “override case of tags” preference is enabled (Windows)
* When doing Find & Replace, Dreamweaver prompts you to re-checkout a file already checked out in Visual SourceSafe, and all changes are lost (Windows)
* When using PHP/MySQL, there are no MySQL tables listed when the database or a table name contains special characters or reserved words (Windows/Macintosh)
* When updating templates that contain dynamic links with multiple parameters or a URL encoded attribute value, pages created from the template are corrupted (Windows/Macintosh)
* Restored the download time and size indicator functionality to the Status Bar (Windows/Macintosh)
* “The parameter is incorrect” error when trying to save changes to a file on an offline mapped network drive (Windows)
* “The parameter is incorrect” error when performing this action: File > New > click on Templates tab (Windows)
* Access Denied error connecting to a FTP server with a UNC path as the Host Directory (Windows/Macintosh)
* Behaviors targeting an absolutely positioned empty tag (e.g. image) behaves incorrectly (Windows/Macintosh)
* Sync file unchanged - Dreamweaver always thinks the local and testing server versions both changed if the file has never been put to the remote server (Windows)
>> Download Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.01 Update (Windows)
>> Download Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.01 Update (MacOSX)
* Fixed: 319004 - Overlong page title causes hang on subsequent startups
* Fixed: 312415 - Selected images (from a selection of the document to print) are black
* Fixed: 319357 - Crash in browser when attempting to print a text selection
* Fixed: 296907 - fill/stroke shouldn’t destroy path
* Fixed: 299343 - Can’t copy and paste into the beginning of a line (Midas/designMode)
* Fixed: 301678 - XML object parsed from string from flash throws permission denied error when accessed
* Fixed: 309044 - Flashplayer 8 “Bad NPObject as private data!”
* Fixed: 312550 - Incorrect wrapping in RTL textarea with horizontal scrollbar
* Fixed: 316821 - Crash with moz-border-radius and small font-size
* Fixed: 318489 - Unable to create new XMLHttpRequests and DOMParsers from an XPCNativeWrapped window (e.g. in a Greasemonkey script)
* Fixed: 315434 - Security error with remote : can’t switch tabs if chrome has focus
* Fixed: 105894 - Clicking a partially off-screen link shouldn’t scroll the page
* Fixed: 314222 - If link target URL has non-ASCII char that is not encoded by UTF-8, the default file name is always escaped at “Save Link As…”
* Fixed: 315509 - Crash: array_unshift doesn’t handle holes properly [@ js_DeleteProperty - array_unshift]
* Fixed: 306067 - Crash involving autocomplete
* Fixed: 320488 - Crash [@ nsSHistory::EvictWindowContentViewer]
* Fixed: 313988 - [Mac 10.3] Positioned select drop-down doesn’t work
* Fixed: 298502 - [Mac 10.2] Empty pulldown menu and Firefox hangs
* Fixed: 312154 - [Solaris] Start script does not take care of running instance
Version 1.5 of Mozilla’s popular email client and RSS reader has been released. Thunderbird is a free, full featured email, RSS, and newsgroup reader. It now supports more streamlined updating much as Firefox 1.5 does, along with a host of other new features and improvements such as podcasting support, phishing protection, and spell check as you type. Some of the more prominent ones are as follows:
New Features & Improvements:
* Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Thunderbird may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
* Sort address autocomplete results by how often you send e-mail to each recipient.
* Spell check as you type.
* Saved Search Folders can now search across multiple accounts.
* Built in phishing detector to help protect users against email scams.
* Podcasting and other RSS Improvements.
* Updated: Reduced large amounts of Memory and CPU usage in the Windows platform version.
* Updated: Removed incompatible translations.
* Updated: Removed unnecessary themes.
* Updated: Fixed Publish icons which were corrupt.
I’m sure some of you are in the same situation: during the time you’ve been on the internet, you’ve gathered a bunch of people whom you keep in touch with through messaging programs. In Belgium, most people use Msn Messenger nowadays, but in other countries, other messaging programs are used. I have contacts on Msn Messenger, on Yahoo Messenger, on AOL Messenger, on ICQ … There was a time when I had all of the official messenger clients installed, but I soon discovered that 1) Most of them suck, being ad-invaded and all wanting to start automatically when my Windows boots up. And 2) Running three or whatever such programs at the same time consumed a lot of system resources. A few years ago, Trillian came into the spotlight, a free multi-protocol messaging program, meaning you could talk to almost all of the different networks, in one and the same program. For a while, Trillian was my preferred messaging client. But it’s made by a company, and the company wanted money. The I discovered Gaim, a free and open source multi-network client that exists for a lot of operating systems. On Linux, it’s my favourite program. On Windows, on the other hand, due to the way it is programmed, Gaim acts slow and can behave weird from time to time. And then there’s Miranda IM (IM= instant messenger), also free and open source, multi-network, and designed to be very light on system resources. Miranda works with plugins, if you want a certain feature, you add the appropriate plugin to the program. I you don’t need that, you don’t install it, so you end up with a messenger that loads only the things you want, only the things you’ll use. It leaves a very small memory footprint, and looks very clean.
Alas, some features are still best supported in the original, closed client, offered by the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo … The webcam function for example is mostly not, or poorly supported. And file transfers can be difficult to get going. But in the case of Gaim, camming is among the things that the team is working on very hard to improve. So give Gaim or Miranda a try, it won’t hurt!
>> Miranda IM
>> Gaim