Both iTunes and Winamp offer a way to share music with your friends although their implementation is rather limited. Apples iTunes software shares music only with users that are within the same network while Winamp Remote offers a way to listen to Winamp from a website.

Simplify Media tops both implementations by offering a way to stream music from iTunes or Winamp over the Internet that can be accessed using iTunes or Winamp. The real benefit besides being able to listen (sort and search) to your own music collection from a different computer is that your friends - better the friends that you invite - can also listen to the music on your computer.

Several limitations have been added to Simplify Media probably to please the Music Industry. The number of invites is limited as is the amount of users who can listen to your music at the same time. Users who are connected to your library cannot save or burn the music either. (unless they happen to use Grab++ or a similar tool)

continue reading "Share iTunes and Winamp music"

You might have cursed the developers of Notepad for instance if you ever tried to open a file in Notepad with a different extension than .txt. Notepad can only filter file lists for txt files or display all files. If you were looking for a php or htm file for instance you had to display all files in that folder and search for the file that you wanted to open.

Notepad is just one example, several other applications like Wordpad for instance have the exact same limitations. CFD Button is a software that was developed for the Donation Coder Getting Organized Challenge. This tool adds the possibility to define new filters for programs that use the Windows Common File Dialog.

You could for instance create a filter for php files, one for htm / html files and one for log files. Please note that creating the filters only sorts the files in that directory, this does not change the fact that a software can only open certain file types. It would not make sense to filter exe files in notepad because Notepad can’t open those.

continue reading "Add Filters to the Windows Common File Dialog"

Mouser of Donation Coder was so nice to email me informing me about the results of a little coding challenge that they had in November. The Getting Organized 2007 Programming Challenge was to write a computer program (or web service) which helps people be more productive with their time that had not been published prior to November 2007.

The results are now in and I would like to take the opportunity to list all the tools of the challenge here at my website. Nine programs are listed on the Donation Coder homepage that in one way or another help users be more productive, they are:

continue reading "Getting Organized Donation Coder Challenge"

If you are looking for a quick way to create and publish a beautifully looking photo album you should take a look at Photo On Web. This software is ideal for those who want to create photo albums without having deeper knowledge of html and design. Users simply create a new album, add the photos that they want to see in it to it, choose a template from the 20 available that fits it nicely and click on publish to generate the photo album.

Photo On Web has advanced features that make it an incredible piece of software. The templates can be altered right in the utility. Users can for instance change colors, the quality level of the images, the dimensions of the website and make changes to the overall layout.

Photo Albums can be password protected but this does only work if the location that you save them to supports .htaccess. If that is not the case everyone can view the photos, this is for example the case if you save them locally in Windows.

continue reading "Create and Publish Photo Albums"

Print Conductor is a small software for Microsoft Windows that can print multiple documents in a batch process which is invaluable if you happen to work with a lot of different file times throughout the day. The tool supports 16 file types including pdf, doc, txt, xls, ppt and dwg which means that probably the most common file extensions in offices are supported.

The benefit of Print Conductor is that you do not have to open all those applications to start the print job which can save a lot of time. The interface is as simply as it can be. Users can add documents by drag and drop, open a list of documents that have been previously saved or scan a folder or drive for documents of the type specified.

Scanning a drive will add lots - and I mean - lots of documents to the print queue. A test drive on my applications drive added thousands of files to the print queue. The clear all button removed them again without further difficulties.

continue reading "Print Multiple Document Types at once"