Archive for October, 2006
OmniWeb: Ehh…Maybe
In our ever-continuing quest to find the perfect browser, we decided recently to give the new version of OmniWeb a spin. For those of you on Windows machines, you can skip most of this: the browser is for OS X only.
For those of you on OS X, using Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, or some other alternative, you might find the following highlights useful:
- The Good
- Quick loading times: OmniWeb seems to load pages quite quickly. We’re not into the whole “sit in front of the machine with a stopwatch thing,” but we noticed that OmniWeb consistently loaded pages more quickly than both Safari and Camino, was a tad faster than Firefox, and was about the same as Opera.
- The tab layout scheme (with the thumbnails of the tabs on the left) is awesome. We considered this to be another overhyped feature…until we used it. Having a visual glance at your tab options is incredibly handy, and this feature alone might be reason enough to use OmniWeb.
- Bookmark layout: it’s on the same relative plane as Firefox and Safari, with a very intuitive page for editing and creating bookmarks. We found ourselves missing the integrated del.icio.us links available natively through Flock, and via extensions in Firefox, but satisfied with our local options. The ability to sync bookmarks across iSync (and .Mac) was also quite useful.
- Rendering: everything looked as it should on 95% of the pages we visited.
- The Bad
- The username/password management is absolutely terrible. Terrible. Some of the combinations that it came up with for logins was not only dead wrong, but quite creative. We saw the mixture of usernames and email addresses on several different pages - some of which wouldn’t correct themselves even after telling OmniWeb to accept the new values. Sadly, this issue is substantial enough to keep us from using OmniWeb as our main browser.
- The price: you’re going to have to break out the wallet if you want to use OmniWeb. It’s $29.95 for a single license, and $44.95 for a family license. While that price level isn’t particularly unreasonable, the free alternatives (every other browser we’ve talked about) make the price seem a little difficult to swallow.
- Display lag: we noticed that on slower machines (read: eMac G4/800 with 800MB RAM), form entry lagged several key strokes behind our typing. Yeah, we type fast…but that’s no excuse. Occasionally closing and re-opening OmniWeb helped a tad - which might suggest memory leakage - but who wants to do that? If you’re using Firefox, you’re probably already doing this…but you didn’t pay for Firefox, did you?
On the whole, OmniWeb is a solid browser. The username/password problem is a big one to get around in our book; but if you’re not big on saving that kind of info in your browser, you’ll probably find the graphical tabs to be worth the $30.
Technorati Tags: browser, omniweb
Gmail Hosting: 4 Months In..
We talked almost four months ago about our endeavor to use Gmail Hosting as our primary email conduit; we also promised updates.
Guess what? It’s good to go.
It’s probably self-explanatory, given that we continue to use it (four months later), but Google has done an excellent job of making Gmail Hosting feel and behave exactly the way your Gmail account does.
If you’re not familiar with Gmail, you’re not going to grow familiar with it in this post. But if you love Gmail, hopefully this will convince you to give their hosting option a run (at least, if you own a domain).
It would be interesting to see how many people are using Gmail Hosting as a way to have over 50 gigs of email storage. After all, you could, theoretically, create 25 unique email addresses - each with nearly 3 GBs of storage - and just keep forwarding messages as they fill up.
Or, how are people using this to manage things like Getting Things Done? It may not be an implementation that works, because of the login/logout issues, but it’s certainly a possibility.
Overall, this has been a seamless integration for all of our email. Go check it out.
Technorati Tags: email, gmail, google
Dash: T-Mobile Takes the Lead
Regular Martini Geek readers will remember that I hate my MDA, and have been waiting for an adequate replacement that doesn’t suck.
In my most recent post, I was chocking the MDA’s terrible performance up to Windows Mobile 5. But Engadget’s review of the T-Mobile Dash has convinced me that maybe it was the hardware…not WM5. I’m eager to get my hands on the new Dash - if for no other reason than the pleasure I’ll take in snapping my MDA’s stylus in half.
Bravo, T-Mobile. Now, send us a review unit and we promise to use it.
Technorati Tags: PDA, PocketPC, windows mobile, smartphone, video
Samsung Camera Videos in OS X
My relatively new Samsung sports camcorder rocks the proverbial house. The thing is so small, solid and generally usable that I’m amazed it ever has time to charge.
That being said, we’ve had a hell of a time with converting its videos (which are .AVI DIVX files) into something usable on our Macs. Thus far, I’d been unable to convert the videos using any of the standard tools (DivX Toll, DivX Doctor II, etc.), and had been using iSquint - which works where Quicktime had not - to export the videos in .MOV.
I’ll still use iSquint, but it’s going to be for iPod conversions only…thanks to the solution below.
I took a few minutes and sent the following email to a lesser geek buddy of mine. You might find it helpful.
Yo -
I just discovered a much better way to convert the videos you shoot
with your Samsung video camera.iSquint works pretty well, but it’s really more intended for
converting videos to be iPod-friendly.This new method keeps the original file size, shape and resolution.
You can always export for iPod when you’ve done something in iMovie.First step: change the recording mode in the camera options of your
camera from TV to PC. Leave it there.Second step: download hexedit for OSX here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hexeditOnce you’ve copied your camera movies (*.AVI) over to your hard drive,
open one of them in HexEdit. Leave the settings as “auto”.It’ll open up a bunch of stuff that’ll look like garbage to you. Don’t
worry, this is hexadecimal representation of the file’s code. If you
look on the right side, you’ll see the letters “SEDG” twice: once on
row 70 (usually), and again on row B0. You want to replace each
instance (there are only two) of “SEDG” with the letters “DIVX”. Using
the Apple-F (Find) command has an option for Replace, so it simplifies
things a tad. Be aware that doing the “Replace All” command will take
a few seconds, as large video files have a ton of lines…I find it
quicker to “Find” then “Replace” twice for each file.Save the file, close it, and try to open it; it should open in QT by
default. If it plays, we’re golden.There may be some DIVX codecs that you don’t have installed….but
that’s super simple. Let me know if this doesn’t get your videos
playing.Once you’ve done that, you’ll probably notice that you’ve got a new
file called YOURFILE.AVI~, and the original called YOURFILE.AVI. This
is HexEdit automatically creating a backup of your file. Once you’ve
got things rolling smoothly here, you can turn off “Create Backups” in
the options menu of HexEdit, and it’ll no longer create those files
with the ~ at the end. You can also delete those files once your’e
satisfied. In the event that something goes terribly wrong, you can
restore the ~ files before deleting them.Essentially, Windows recognizes that SEDG nonsense…even though it’s
not standard. We know that the Samsung cameras are encoding in DIVX
format, so we’re just circumventing the weak attempt at further
Windows monopoly.
Tip: If you’ve got a bunch of files to modify, select them all in a
Finder window, and right click (ctrl-click), select Open With, choose
Other, and select HexEdit. It’ll open all of the files in stacked
windows.
Enjoy!