A bad RocketPost review

I found this piece of software called RocketPost from Anconia. A software that makes all your blogging go much easier.

From their web page it seems to have almost all the features that I want from this sort of software.

So I downloaded it and gave it a try. It did not work. It failed to work with Blogger that is one of the most popular blogging software out there. It probably failed because I use Firefox as my default browser. I just could not log in.

So I uninstalled it.

Mass mailers review

This article will talk about things to look for when using mass mailer software. We will look into the difference between Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Publisher and SmartSerialMail. The first two are popular software that come with Microsoft Office. The last one is something you will have to buy.

Shortcuts to parts of the article:

1. 3rd party database integration
2. HTML code
3. Plain text code
4. Personalization
5. Bandwidth considerations
6. Compare the different applications
7. How Outlook works
8. How Publisher works
9. How SmartSerialMailer works

Integration with third party email-databases

In many cases you want to send out e-mails to other people than your primary contacts. Like responses to a survey on the Internet where the contact information is stored with an SQL server.

Often the software will import the email-database into its own format. When handling the life-cycle management of an e-mail you probably want to work directly towards the external database so changes applied there also are applied for the next distribution.

Some mass mailer software can read NDR's and update the database (block the e-mail address for future messages), but it won't do you any good if these changes are overwritten in the next import.

HTML code

If you like HTML coding you need full control of all aspects of the HTML code for the mail being sent. Many e-mail clients can only do simple formatting, which is very limited compared to what you can do with, for example, inline CSS.

Plain text

The plain text representation of an e-mail is always sent with the e-mail and is often just the text displayed with all formatting removed. Many clients can still only read the plain text version so you probably want to make a version of your message readable to those clients as well.

Most often you want to change how links to external pages are displayed and how tables are displayed in plain text.

Personalization of e-mails

If you want to make a personal invitation, like greeting the recipient by its first name or showing what e-mail address this e-mail was sent to you need personalization.

Bandwidth requirements

If you do this from home or any other place where you have limited bandwidth think of how the mails are sent. Is it sent one by one or many at one time?

If you have 100 recipients and sent out an e-mail that is 50kB in size you will transfer over 5MB to the Internet. This can take some time. If your recipient list is large enough - is your time window large enough for this?

If your mail software sends out one SMTP mail for these three recipients; a@a.com, b@a.com and a@b.com the SMTP server will optimize these reciptients into two SMTP messages when relaying; one for each domain.

If you send out one by one the relay will also do so.

Comparison guide

Feature	Outlook	Publisher	SmartSerialMail
3rd-party integration	No	Import	Import
HTML customization	No	No	Yes
Plain text	Automatically	Automatically	Full control
Personalization	No	Yes	Yes
Bandwidth	Efficient	Depends	Inefficient

Outlook

Outlook (in both Exchange and SMTP server mode), Outlook Express and Windows Mail are very similar when it comes to how e-mails are handled.

Outlook can import contacts from some external systems, but not databases. You have no control of how the embedded HTML code is made. The code is often ugly and unnecessary complex.

The plain text version is generated automatically based on the contents.

As you have no personalization options available if uses your bandwidth very effectively.

When your message is mostly text from top to bottom Outlook is a great tool.

Publisher

Microsoft Publisher works well with Outlook. As there is no mail support within Publisher it relays on MAPI to send mails. Outlook and Outlook Express are both MAPI enabled.

You have absolutely no control over the HTML code that is generated but you have a WYSIWYG GUI that does all the work for you. If something can't be displayed using HTML Publisher will create an image of the text and display it instead. (Like text rotated left.)

The plain text version tries to place the text at the same place as the HTML version. This gives you lots of spaces between sections of text. This format is not optimized for mobile phones or other clients with small display.

Publisher also has a design checker that informs you about potential problems with the format of your mail, like overlapping images.

You can choose if you want to personalize the message or not. But you have to do so if you want to use address book except for Outlook. The feature is called e-mail merge. If you choose to merge you can use your Outlook contact list, any SQL data source or create your own list.

SmartSerialMail

This mailer works only with its own database. You can however import from many different data sources, including the Outlook personal address book.

You create your e-mail using an HTML editor with basic formatting from the GUI. You can edit the HTML code directly so if you know how to code HTML modifications are easy.

The plain text version is either made automatically from the HTML version or you can make your own version that fits your needs.

Personalization is supported as you can use any field that you have in the database.

The bandwidth requirements are the highest of them all as each mail is sent on its own - leaving no room for good network performance.

This mailer has some unique features that still makes it interesting. It can handle bounced messages and automatically exclude that e-mail from receiving any further emails. It can also read a POP3 account and handle e-mail based subscriptions. This makes the recipient life cycle management easy.

Audio Master class review

Audio Master Class is an online course for learning how to do audio well. By audio I mean how to record music, how to mix it, and something about all the cool gadgets you can buy to edit music.

If you don't have time to read the entire article, the summary is here:
I find this course to be very light and not very educational. At least if you want to learn as much as possible. If you have no knowledge on this topic you can read and learn a lot. But when you have learned a lot there is still more to learn. Stuff that you cannot find here.

Information about the course

The course is called Music Production and Sound Engineering and are built up of 12 modules, each covering a topic. On print the main text of the course corresponds roughly to 40 pages, printed from Internet Explorer. The twelve topics are:

1. Analog & digital audio
2. Microphones
3. Microphone preamplifiers
4. Equalization
5. Compression
6. Recording Software
7. Effects & Plug-ins
8. Synthesis & Sampling
9. Recording Techniques
10. Mixing
11. Mastering
12. Marketing Your Music & Recording Services

Each module are built up of:

• An introduction.
• The module main text (large HTML page).
• The answers the questions in the main module text.
• Examples.
• Assignment.
• Assignment notes.

For each module you are expected to spend at least a week working on the module text and on the assignment. I am not sure if this is because of the alleged complexity of the course or if it is to make sure you have read and understood the content.

The only way to learn is to spend time and experiment. The course only points you in the right direction, you'll have to work hard to get through the course.

Extras

If you look at the web pages for Audio Master Class, and more specifically to their publications you will find content they want to charge you for. This is content that to my knowledge is not included in the course. I had to ask to get some of them available for me.

My review

I have read through much of the material and the author talks us easy through each chapter of the book and it is fairly easy to learn and understand the topic.

You get listening samples, you get to download good samples you can work with and try for yourself. This is something I have not found anywhere else.

But it stops there. When I am ready to learn more, and I sure will do so - I need to look elsewhere to find the knowledge I hunger for. And if so this course is mostly waste of your money. Money is a scared resource. (The book Mixing Engineers handbook seems to give me a lot more value for the money.)

About the author

My experience with music production and mixing is very very limited, I have started out with the best intent to try learn something new and exiting. But I find it hard to find any good place where I can learn the basics before I go practice.

AHD 200 review

AIPTEK, a company based in Germany have created a cheap and light camera called AHD 200.

Cheap is good, or is it?

In Norway this camera is sold by Clas Ohlson for less than NOK 1000 (nearly €100).

High Definition Camcorder - AVC (H264) performs 720p (1280 x 720) high definition quality at 30fps

I do not intend to write a lengthy review of this camera. For it's price I like the camera. You buy a cheap video camera, and you get what you expect from a cheap camera.

There is no optical zoom with the camera, only digital. When you zoom the picture gets bad, so do not use the zoom.

I have attached some videos from the camera so you can make out your own opinion. All recordings are from the highest possible bitrate and resolution.

1. Outdoor recording of a car driving by. (5MB.)
2. Low light, indoor recording walking down the stairs. (10MB.)
3. A picture of a car and a boat outdoor.
4. The outdoor and the low light indoor recording rendered to a MPEG file with TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. (26MB.)

Other sources and references:

• A test at SimplyDV
• A test at cnet
• Product homepage

Tracktion 3 review

This article is part of a series of articles I have written during my search for a good way to record and mix music. You can read my overview here or look into my articles labeled as multimedia.

Tracktion 3

Mackie is a company that is probably more known for its mixers and other hardware used by professionals over the world.

But they do also make some software - and today I am going to look into a product called Tracktion. At the time of writing Mackie have released version 3 of their software.

Learning curve

Mackie claims that the GUI is designed to be easy to work with and intuitive for newcomers. I disagree. The first time I started Tracktion the only thing that worked for me was the button. Honesty, I try lots of software, but do not often see anything like this. I did not touch Tracktion for another week and started reading the reference guide.

I still not think that Tracktion have a great user interface in terms of ease of use. But I think that when you have spent 10-20 hours with it you will start to be productive. In Tracktion you have everything available from the main page shown below.

Features

Unlike many modern DAW's you do not have the traditional mixer here. Not that I miss it. You can accomplish the same using output filters here, but it does not look like a conventional mixer.

In Tracktion you work with tracks, where mixers (and probably most other DAWs) works with channels. A track in Tracktion is always in stereo (two channels). You do not have output buses either, but you can send the output to another track.

Chaining of filters, effects and instruments is easy to work with(when you have learned it...) So is editing and automation.

MIDI

MIDI support is great. It is easy to record and edit MIDI. And with some of the third party instruments and effects you get with Tracktion you can have endless hours of fun.

Conclusion

I love the price. It is the right price for me. The price compensates for the high learning curve.

SONAR 7 review

This article is part of a series of articles I have written during my search for a good way to record and mix music. You can read my overview here or look into my articles labeled as multimedia.

SONAR 7

Cakewalk have been in the DAW business for many years now. They have a solid product and a well known reputation. While testing SONAR 7 they decided to release version 8 of their product. I could not get my hands on it, so all my testing is done with version 7. What is new i version 8 you can read about here.

My eval had expired so I could not bring any pictures from SONAR. You can find many picutres in the product home page.

Learning curve

SONAR was easy to start using. Without any hassle I could set up my channels correctly and start recording. There are lots of features in SONAR and I have probably only used 10 % of its functionality.

The manual that came with the demo is online and i chm format. Because of that I could not print it out and read on my bed as I usually do with documentation and exiting stuff.

Features

SONAR has its own mixer. With the producer edition you can easily make surround sound (multichannel)- that is an exclusive feature with the producer. And the producer have lots of third party effects and instruments that seems very promising. 

Conclusion

I find this to be a good product. But for my limited use and wallet this is not the right product for me.

DMX 6Fire USB review

From the product homepage:

High end USB 2.0 audio system
With high demands on sound quality the DMX 6Fire USB is the perfect external audio system for musicians, DJs and gamers. This unofficial successor to the DMX 6Fire 24/96 has been completely reworked and has reached new heights: Instead of a PCI expansion card, it is now equipped with a USB 2.0 jack. Instead of 24 bits / 96 kHz, its engines now hum at 24 bits / 192 kHz.

The retail price is €199.

Specifications

This was the first soundcard I found when I realized that I needed something more than the built-in sound card. This card has:

• USB 2.0 audio system
• 1 microphone input with gain control (combo XLR / 6.3 mm jack)
• 48V phantom power
• 20 dB pad switch
• 1 instrument input with gain control (6.3 mm jack)
• 4 analogue inputs (cinch)
• 1 phono input (RCA cinch) with RIAA equalizer and gain control
• 6 analogue outputs (cinch)
• Stereo to 5.1 Surround Expander
• 1 headphone jack (6.3 mm) with separate volume controller
• 1 optical digital input/output (TOS Link)
• 1 coaxial digital input/output (cinch)
• 1 MIDI interface In/Out (5-pin DIN)
• 24 bit / 192 kHz A/D converter with 114 dB (A) SNR* (input 1/2)
• 24 bit / 192 kHz A/D converter with 105 dB (A) SNR* (input 3/4)
• 24 bit / 192 kHz D/A converter with 114 dB (A) SNR* (outputs 1-6)

Sound

This sound card sounds great. I have a little problem with hum when recording on my laptop, but that is not related to the sound card. I have played and recorded sound in churches and at home and the sound card performs quite well.

The software can be configured to give you tree set of stereo outputs or one surround output. You can also use this sound card as a mixer - that is you can send what you receive out again after mixing the inputs together.

Conclusion

This sound card works great if you have the right computer for it. It is easy to use and easy to configure.

File recovery that works

When ever files are lost (deleted, card error etc), on your file system or your flash memory Google will help you find programs that can help you recover these files for a small amount of money.

Often the end user will end up with spending $ on a program that was not as good as promised. And more important than the money - the files are still lost.

One program that stands out - both beeing free of charge and actually good at locating your files - is Convar PC INSPECTOR. With two flavours available, for general files and memory cards (eg. photos)you are saved.

This tool scans your drive for files even when the FAT is corrupted.

NCH software

I have always loved small companies that have good niche products. I tend to prefer them over bigger companies when products are similar. I have reviewed some very interesting products over the past year.

The other day I came across a cool company from Australia called NCH Software. This company have many products ranging from disc burning software to VoIP/SIP server. It is not often I come across companies that have a product range this big. I think they have more than 20 programs in their portfolio. Some of them are free, many cheap and some unfortunately not cheap.

One thing that is in common between all programs (that I have tried) is a small footprint, no installation hassle and easy to use.

Below are some of my favourites.

Product	Function	Price in US$
Express Burn	Burning CD and DVDs. This buring software is very simple and easy to use. It should cover about 90 % of what people actually need.	$68 with all features
WavePad	WavePad is a sound editor program for Windows. This software lets you make and edit voice and other audio recordings. You can add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction.	$76 but free with limitations
Axon	Axon is a virtual PBX designed to manage calls in a business or call center. It works as a fully featured telephone switch connecting to phone lines and extensions using state-of-the-art VoIP technology.	$156, but free with less than 10 extensions.
HourGuard	HourGuard is a completely free, easy to use timesheet and time recording software designed to releave the pressure of having to account for your time.	free
MixPad	MixPad is multi-track mixing software designed for professional audio production. It lets you load or record audio clips and mix them together.	$76
MSRS	MSRS is a multiple channel voice recorder program designed for recording conferences, court proceedings and similar multi-speaker forums.	$507
Stamp	Stamp ID3 tag editing software is an audio file tag editor for windows that allows you to add or change the internal file information associated with an Mp3 or wav audio file.	free

Altogether this company have many cool products. They have small footprints and their software seems to work well. Have a look yourself.

Edraw is a cool drawing tool

It is not often I come across good drawing programs. Not bitmap drawing tools like GIMP og PhotoShop, but vector graphics.

Edraw Max (and other versions of Edraw) are much like Microsoft Visio that Microsoft Office users are used to use.

Vector graphics are graphics you can scale up and down without loosing any quality. If you scale up a bitmap image you will soon start to see dots and blur mages.

From what I can tell both Edraw and Visio are very good tools. Visio have lots of features not found in Edraw (like actually drawing you active directory by getting the design) but Edraw has many libraries with cool 3D images.

The price is right, less than $100 for the full version. And a lifetime of free upgrades.

Xobni oranizes your inbox

Xobni is inbox spelled backwards. Beside that it is a tool that allows you to organize your Outlook inbox within seconds.

Highlights are:

• Fast search of your inbox (and other mail folders).
• Organizes your contacts.
• Let you see lots of useless statistics on to whom and how you use your e-mail..
• Integrates with LinkedIn.

With fast local search - like Windows Indexing service, Copernic Desktop search and Google you can find anything you want within seconds as long as you know how to spell your search.

While Xobni only indexes your e-mail it seems to do a better job at letting you find your e-mails as you can search on contact and continue from there.

You can also se who knows who as it analyzes mail headers and build social networks based on this information.

From one day of usage I really like this program. This is a tool that you will not live without. But Xobni has to mature first - it crashed Outlook three times for me before I decided to uninstall it.

Web Developer Toolbar in IE

From time to time we are all curious on how other people do their web design. Unfortunately it is not always easy to read the code and find what you need.

Are there anything we can do about this?

Yes it is! I believe there are many tools out there that can assist you. I have looked into two tools that I found interesting.

IE WebDeveloper	US$115 (non-commercial).
Microsoft Developer Toolbar	Freeware.

IE WebDeveloper

This is the tool from the same guys that gave you HTTP Analyzer. I have talked about this tool in a previous article.

Anyway. After I installed this tool Internet Explorer started to crash all the time. But from what I could see it seems like a good product - easy to find the information you are looking for.

Developer Toolbar

Given it's price it is priceless. Not as good to work with, seems to lack some features in WebDeveloper. But given the price this is what I am going to use.

Looking into HTTP traffic with Internet Explorer

I work a lot with web applications and from time to time I need to look in to the HTTP session - what headers are sent back and forth and what web page elements takes time to load.

I have found two products that does this well. I will cover these in details below.

HttpWatch

HttpWatch from Simtec Limited. This product seems to be the most mature of these two. It have cool features, the most important one is beeing able to show you what the web client spends it time on; DNS lookup, TCP session setup, or the data transfer.

You can look into HTTPS traffic.

The major drawback is the price. It cost $295 for a one user license. As a result I did not test this product any further.

IE Inspector

IE Inspector from IEInspector Software is a nice application. It works much like HttpWatch above, but is much cheaper. It lacks the capability to show what a page spends it time on doing; you just get the end result.

You can look in to the HTTP headers sent to the web server and what HTTP headers are received. You can see detailed cache information about Internet Explorer cached elements.

You can also purchase a module that analyzes other applications that uses HTTP. This is nice if you want to test other applications communicating over HTTP.

You can look into HTTPS traffic only if you use the Internet Explorer integrated decoder.

If you buy both modules as a non-commercial license you end up with US$99. If you happen to be commercial the price is $129. Either way it is much cheaper than HttpWatch.

Ethereal

Ethereal is the Swiss army knife of packet decoding. You can't live without it. The tools mentioned above presents HTTP traffic in an easy way. But Ethereal gives you a lot more - if you learn how to use it.

It is open source. And we can't dislike open source!

Big-IP review

Do you need to put your web server on steroids? Do you find it slow and do not know what to do? If you have the money, I have the solution.

Here is one solution for you. The Big-IP is a all-in-one box where you can do lots to tweak your web server performance and reliability. Features includes:

• Connection pooling from the Big-IP to your backend web server. This offloads connection setup time on your web server.
• SSL offloading when you encrypt your web pages. With this feature you do not need to spend web server CPU cycles to manage SSL sessions.
• RAM cache is also possible which offloads static content that is downloaded all the time. You can also cache dynamic content if you want.
• Compression of content. Most of the content on a web server is compressible. With this feature enabled you can save bandwidth, speed up clients on slow lines and load web pages faster. On a site with much content you can expect 60-70% reduction in bandwidth requirements using this feature.
• Load balancing with failover. If your solution needs more than one web server you can load balance traffic and as soon as a node fails it will be removed from the pool.
• Web accelerator combines several technologies to try speed up.
• HTTP header manipulation. You can manipulate every http header if you want.

What you will use depends on your requirements and wallet. Some of the features above are expensive, but they all work great. You will have to pay about US$20,000 for the entry level platform.

The Big-IP platform

After one week of work on this platform I have to say that I am impressed. It is relatively easy to use and configure. All the basic configuration settings are configured from a web page. Just spend some minutes and read their quick startup guide to get familiar with their naming conventions.

With less than one hour of configuration you should see improvements on your solution.

Big-IP customizations

One think I really like is that if I need something that F5 did not think about I can tweak it myself. Here is the code to cache HTTP 302 replies and redirect my secure site to HTTPS.

when HTTP_RESPONSE {
 if { [HTTP::status] == "302" } {
 CACHE::enable
 }
}
when HTTP_REQUEST {
 if { [HTTP::uri] starts_with "/secure"} {
 HTTP::redirect https://mysite/secure
 }
}

This is called iRules. The language is based on TCL.

RAM cache

Squid is probably the most known cache server in the world. But it is only a cache. Big-IP is lots and lots of more, but probably not the best cache-only solution. It only caches to memory, so if you serve big content like images, videos and so forth and require a big cache this is not the best solution.

But for all other uses it works great in conjunction with compression and load balancing.

Web Accelerator

This module rewrites the web page so it loads faster and tries not to transfer redundant data twice to the client. This is at least what F5 says.

Out of the box the web accelerator have profiles for Microsoft Exchange Server and Sharepoint. (And some others, but I don't remember now.)

On low bandwidth and high latency inline objects (like images, CSS, javascript) are rewritten to be downloaded from other servers. This to overcome the limitation in Internet Explorer to only open open two connections to one server at a time.

Combined with compression this should make some chatty Microsoft web applications more speedy over the Internet.

Conclusion

I love this product. It have lots of features and you can tweak and tune it to fit to most web applications. I spent much time evaluating the RAM cache but see lots of potential in all the other features.

The Big-IP documentation is not impressive. Nor the Wiki on DevCentral. You need to spend some time to figure out how to use it if you need custom features.

PS! The load balancer feature is not only for web traffic. All kind of traffic can be load balanced.

Good luck! If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask me!

NovaMind

Some time ago I wrote about NovaMind and that I did not like the program. I got lots of complaints by people that do like this program.

As a result of this I decided to give NovaMind a second try. After all - NovaMind only have one product and it better work, right? I have been using NovaMind for about three weeks now.

Starting to learn

Compared to all the other mind managers I have tried NovaMind takes some time to learn. The ribbon menus really are troublesome to learn. Even if images says a thousand words I do not believe this is true for menu items.

I started up by reading all available tutorials and documentation to get a hold of what features I should now and how to use them.

Step by step I found out how to use NovaMind and I also learned what I did wrong in the first place.

Is it as bad as I first said?

My short answer is no. Even though I do miss lots of creative/useful features NovaMind is not a bad product. And compared to the cost of US$99 I now find NovaMind very interesting. You can read more about what I miss and what I like below.

Memory consumption

NovaMind loves your memory. My Vista computer with only a half a gigabyte of memory peaks out when I installed the 5 free available graphics add-ons. For my everyday work I find 200MB of memory usage to be very high. With this memory consumption it uses more memory than Outlook and Opera together. (And these programs love memory.)

Cool features

There are some cool features that I do like very much with NovaMind. They are;

• RapidFire. When RapidFire is enabled you can write subtopics without the need for an extra enter when you have created a topic.
• Rainbow colors. All topics below the root gets their own color based on the placement. Why this? The brain works better with different colors and images.

Features I miss

First of all - I love to use the keyboard. NovaMind is not designed for ease of use with the keyboard.

• General zooming and panning. Try to zoom in and out without using the mouse.
• Focus on a topic. Compare to MindManager F3 function which collapses all other branches and let you focus on the one you are working on.
• Try to get to recent files without using the mouse. You can't open the menu at all using your keyboard.
• The new Windows key to the right of the keyboard shows you the same menu as you get when you right-click on a topic. You can move but you can't choose anything without left-clicking with your mouse.

Conclusion

 I was wrong. Nova-Mind is not as bad as I first thought after all. When I learned to use it. Nova-Mind just announced version 4 of their editor. With this new version they will change both pricing and the feature list. You can read more here. Recently they have also released some new releases of version 3.

Wink video capture

I just wrote about codecs and screen scaptures. When I was finished with the article I found a cool program called Wink from Debugmode.

Wink is a screen video capture program that allows you to edit it - add annotations, balloons, text and so forth.

Highlights are freeware, easy to use and optimized outputs.

Have a look yourself at the Wink product page.

Screen capture codecs and tools

I have been looking into codec's for capturing the screen into videos. The reason for doing this is to produce videos from the screen wich are both small in size and with the best possible quality. Codecs for movies do not have the optimal characteristics for screen videos.

You can search your self with Google.

Codec	Comment
MSU Screen Capture Lossless Codec	Codec that produces the smallest files possible without loosing quality.
FM Screen Capture codec	Codec from the producers of ScreenVirtuoso. Outputs are about twice as big as with MSU.
TechSmith Screen Capture Codec (TSCC)	This codec can only be used to encode movies when you have a valid license for Camtasia Studio. You can download this codec free of charge to decode movies.

Capture programs

To use the codec's you need a program to capture the screen to a movie. Google can help out here as well.

Program	Comment
SnagIt	Good to capture still images. With videos you can only capture it, not manipulate it. Read my review here. You can encode with any installed codec.
ScreenVirtuoso	Capture tool with some options. Captures  media output as well. (DVD's, media player etc.)
ALLcapture	Another capture tool. They seem to have their own codec. And their own tool TurboDemo to create something useful out of the capture.

Good luck!

Capture with SnagIt and Camtasia

Screen capture and video capture of the screen? Is it possible and how do I do it?

TechSmith have two programs to do just that. There are of course others, but today I will focus on TechSmith.

SnagIt 8	Camtasia Studio 4
Capture still images and records video.	Captures video with own optimized codec. Still images if you purchase SnagIt bundle.
Very good options for editing your images.	Created to capture video and make movies of output.
Outputs to all common image formats, and .AVI for videos. You can choose codec for output.	Final output includes MPEG, AVI, Flash, RealMedia, QuickTime and executable. You have full control of output settings.

SnagIt - $39.95

SnagIt is a world known and reputable screen capture program. I love it - in addition to capture images (as you can do with alt+print screen) you can do lots to the final image. You can change perspective, add edge effects, highlight text, add arrows, add callouts and more.

If you send screen dumps in emails or make user documentation this a must-have tool.

Camtasia Studio 4 - $299

Charged with good hope after using SnagIt I downloaded Camtasia and decided to try it out.

I expected to find a tool to make videos as easy as SnagIt makes screen shots. But no, I did not manage to do anything usable with Camtasia. I can zoom and pan, but did not manage to do anything else with it.

If you want to make something out of a capture - look into Photodex ProShow first. I have already blogged about it.

Freemind 0.8.0

Earlier I wrote about mind managers. This article will focus on FreeMind from the Open Source Community.

You can see a video here.

FreeMind 0.8.0

A great product - compared to price. It is easy to use and let you focus on being creative. You can change key bindings to whatever you need.

What is bad?

• Open Source. It is not in release 1 yet.
• Java. It's just not good as GUI's.
• Not all key mappings work.
• Menus does not work. I have to press the hotkey after I have found it in the menu.

Novamind

Earlier I wrote about mind managers. This article will focus on NovaMind from the company with the same name.

You can see a video here.

NovaMind

This product did not work for me. I could not make it work the way I wanted. I could not find anything on the menus. They use the new menu system you get with Office 2007. That is images instead of text buttons.

The good?

I think it is a good program if you can make it work.

Visual Mind 8

Earlier I wrote about mind managers. This article will focus on Visual Mind from Mind Technologies.

You can see a video here.

Visual Mind 8

It is fun to see that we Norwegians can make good products! For this is a great product. No doubt about it.

When your purpose is to use your mind and make maps this product is easy to use, and won't distract you with lots of options.

Navigation between branches of the map is easy, you can do lot from the keyboard.

It comes in two flavors to choose from. Except for image export the home version got everything I need.

What is bad?

• The home edition does not allow you to export your maps to images.
• JPEG quality is not good as you can see from the red and green boxes on this image.
• On my Vista it crashed a few times.

Visual Mind 9

This product is currently in beta, and I have not looked at it. But they will ship a client/server version allowing several people to work on the same map. Exiting.

mind managers

Today we will be looking into mind maps and mind managers - software to manage your mind.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, and decision making.

Wikipedia

There are lots of people making mind manager software, and I have not the resources to look into every one of them. I have chosen to look into a few products, as you can see below. As I look into it for personal use price is the (almost) most important element for me. That the software works for me, is easy to use and that I feel I have control over it is also important.

How do I use a mind map?

Take a look at this mind map, created with an evaluation version of Visual Mind 8. You can see from the map what I looked into during this article. There are of course many other ways to make use of a mind map. You need to figure out for your self what works for you.

Disclaimer: The map above is a copy from the process. It does not necessarily reflect my final opinion on a product. Please read my product review instead.

What are the two prices above?

I have listed two prices; Price home and Price Pro. Some vendors sell a crippled version for personal use. You will have to read the product homepage your self to find the differences. Usually you loose these features;

• Task management.
• Export to MS Office and some other formats. (Even images.)
• Support for multiple maps in a project.

Product review

This is a short review of the different tools. Read the full article for more information about each product.

Product	Score
Visual Mind
MindMAP
FreeMind
MindJet Mind Manager
NovaMind

For me - I have to choose between FreeMind, Visual Mind and MindMAP. Both are good products that I felt comfortable with.

You can see a video here.

Opuzz Royalty Free Music

In the past I have been looking into viable options for royalty free music. I found lots of options - covering everything from small to big sites with lots of music. Many sites also have loops and sound effects as well.

First I want to clear up any misapprehensions about royalty free music. The music is not free - you need to buy it. But when you have bought it you can use it for whatever purpose your license agreement allows you to use it without paying any royalty. From an economical perspective this is good as you have fixed expenses you can include in the budget.

Royalty free music's counterpart is big organizations like RIAA. If you want to use music they manage you'll have to pay a royalty per use. That is usually more expensive - trust me.

But today I'll write about Opuzz, a royalty free music site that just crossed my web browser. There are several thing I like about Opuzz:

• They use a blog as a communication platform with their customers. This way you can see what they have been doing in the past.
• There are no limits in their license. It makes it easier for me as I don't need to count downloads, uses or anything else.
• You can purchase small parts of a song or the song as a whole. Small parts of a song if of course cheaper than the whole song.
• Instant download. (If your order is less then US$100, and not loops either.)

Price

As with everything - price is important. If it is too expensive you will walk away. Opuzz have several prices, one for about whatever need you may have. From buying one track (US$29.95) to all versions of a track (US$34.99) the gap to buying the complete CD online (US$59) is small.

Price Stingers $2.99 Music Loops $4.99 10-seconds $4.99 15-seconds $9.99 30-seconds $14.99 60-seconds $19.99 Full Length $29.99 Alternate Mixes $14.99 Music CDs $59 CD Downloads (download entire CD!) $59! Quote from their website on March 28, 2007

Music CD promotions

When I move back and forth I often find "Music CD Promo" - which sounds great. Two CD's for only US$79. But when you read the small print you'll see that it only applies to physical CDs only.

I'd love to see same or better promotions for downloads as well!

Loops

I found one loop collection that sounded interesting. Their best-seller Music Loop collection Vol 1 with a total of 117 loops at only US$49. A bargain - so I bought it.

But what do I find? Each collection contains about 30 loops. But each song (from where the loop is made) you get three versions. This gives you loops from 10 different songs.

This was not what I expected, and I am somewhat disappointed. Opuzz should be more clear about what is included in their loop. And I should have been more skeptic as this information is not easily available.

You can listen to a flash demo of all three jingle-bells loops here.

Quality of music

What is quality? What goes for me does not have to be what goes for you. But big collections makes it easier to find something you like! And with good categories it is easy to search for the song you need.

Hard drive

Opuzz sells a hard drive with all of their music for only US$1999. I have not seen this elsewhere, but I  like the idea. Unfortunately I can not afford it.

Conclusion

This seems to be a good web site with lots of music for a reasonable price. I miss sound effects - but will I ever be satisfied? :)

Music stocks compared

This article was updated on march 25. 2007 with a few more options in the comparison guide and the definition of price.

This article is an comparison guide between the different music stock options that I have looked into. I do not look at the quality of the music, but their prices and licenses as I believe they are more important to choose a starting point in the quest for music you can distribute.

Prices are for use on small websites or other small projects. Usually I have printed the lowest price for a complete track. Some offers part of tracks for a lower price.

Site	Price pr. song US$	Distribution limit # copies	Comments
Opuzz	29.99	none	Good price for albums of music - US$59. But read the fine print - no discount for "download only" purchases!
Stock-music	29.95	5000	You can buy their entire stock for US$199.
Stockmusic	29.95	none	Albums available for US$99.95 and 10 songs for US$199.95.
Royalty Free Music	59.95 Subscription available.	5000	Albums available for US$99.95.
Shockwave-sound.com	Varies a little, average 30	5000	Albums available for US$99.95.
Smart Sound	99.95	none	Discounts available.
Soundrangers	49.95	none	Clips available for lower prices. Very good choices of sound effects.
all music library	12.95	none
Proud Music	€59.50	1000	Expensive. I am not impressed by the music either...
Music Tracks Library	Varies a litte, average is 19.90	1000

Music stock brokers

A search at Google for stock music brokers gave me a few sites to choose from. So I decided to look into them to see what I can get today.

Most of the sites seems to have same price (collusive pricing???), around US$29.95 for a track with similar licenses.

I listened to some of the music, and I am sorry to say that it is hard to find good music here. It seems like the good artists all joined up with RIAA. Most of the music I can find here is boring, alternative or best used as background music.

Images at stockxpert

For some time ago I wrote about how to find and add cool graphics to your website. The site www.clipart.com is still a favorite of mine as they are cheap and have lots of cool drawing, art and photos.

But lately I have found out that I also want more real-life pictures on my site, in addition to clipart. But I don't want to pay much for it. Is this possible?

I found the site www.stockxpert.com where you can buy the right to use images starting at about US$1, depending on size and license you want.

Their metadata is not as consistent as with www.clipart.com but they sure got lots of images.

Give it a try!

WAN optimization with Riverbed

Today I had a chance to work with a product for WAN optimization for the first time. I ran a live demo at a customers site.

	It works. At least if your network traffic is predictable and repetitive. Most networks are, as clients tend to do much of the same.
	It is too expensive for most customers. It is really hard to justify the cost and more importantly the return of investment.

Acceleration of SSL traffic

Rivedbed promised to support SSL in version 4 of their software. I can't wait to try this one out. It only requires you to install your private key on the box inside your datacenter.

Steelhead appliances now accelerate encrypted (SSL) traffic, using all of Riverbed's algorithms to deliver LAN-like performance for those key business applications.

Of course this won't work for external web sites as you don't have access to private keys. But for intranet applications this is cool!

Exchange 2007

Exchange 2007 supports encrypted MAPI connections. Much details on this issue is not known at this point.

Based on our testing, we've found that the encrypted connections that appear by default in an Exchange 2007 environment with Outlook 2007 clients are a proprietary "MAPI encryption", not SSL.

Impression

Riverbed Steelhead appliances are easy to set up and work without the need to do much. Just make sure the traffic is unencrypted and leave the rest to Riverbed.

RiOS 4.0

I will do a new lab with RiOS 4.0 when it is released and do tests on Exchange, Sharepoint and web traffic. All SSL encrypted. If you are curious about this, please leave me a note.

A peek at GoDaddy

Shared hosting at GoDaddy is cheap, but are they any good?

Earlier I talked about web hosting options, now I will look more in depth on GoDaddy, as they seemed most promising.

Their shared hosting starts at US$3.99 and gives you either Linux or Windows based hosting. With MSSQL (on Windows) and MySQL database access. They charge you monthly instead of yearly as many competitors do. And they don't require you to transfer the domain to them to host the site.

We're the affordable, reliable place to host your site

Linux and Windows plans compared

You can see all details here. Below you can find the most important differences.

Linux	Windows
MySQL databases	MySQL and MSSQL databases
PHP, SSI, FrontPage extensions, Java, ColdFusion, Python, Perl, Ruby	ASP and .NET (1.1 or 2.0), ASP.NET Ajax, ColdFusion, FrontPage extensions
Apache	IIS

Access to databases

You can access databases through a web interface. The interface is easy to use, but simple. You need to understand how to use databases. With MySQL you got an option to dump the database to file. But you cannot do so with MSSQL. There is no easy way for you to move the database in case you want to change hosting provider.

Changes to your configuration

You only have a few options you can tweak on your site. You can add subsites (subsite.domain.com) and set directory permissions (on Windows). All changes to your configuration takes up to 24 hours to complete.

You should not be in a hurry when you want to do changes as it takes time to do changes. When I created a database it took about one hour before it was ready for use. The web interface is always slow - GoDaddy can do this better. It takes a few seconds to load each page.

Access to your files

All files are accessible via FTP. GoDaddy have some limitations on the FTP access, at least on the economy and deluxe plans. You can only have two FTP sessions active at any time, and the speed is limited to 40kB/sec.

In short it takes time to transfer data to/from GoDaddy. If you have 10GB of data it takes at least 72 hours to transfer data off the site. And with small files it takes even longer because of the overhead involved with setting up file transfers.

Uptime and access times

What is uptime? I see uptime as when my website is available on the net. Uptime is hard to measure, as many different factors are involved. To monitor uptime and access times I have used ipMonitor and configured a probe that download a static file every 300 second.

With GoDaddy I have 99.7908% availability the last day on my Linux account (this blog). This is also the average. I have never had 100%. In comparison, the same measurement on Blogspot gives me 100% availability.

Both sites are located in the US, and access times are much higher than in Europe. Speed do not seem to be a problem. On large files you get the bandwidth you expect.

Conclusion

I like GoDaddy. They are cheap, and their products fits me. I just wish I could find a comparable solution in Europe. Until I find this, I will stay on GoDaddy.