Actually, I think this is a great idea. Consumers do not want multiple devices to carry and that is the main reason why convergent devices came in to existence. But even as newer devices are brought in to the market by the companies, we find ourselves owning multiple devices that we would love to carry with us. But we also want to travel light. So it’s usually a toss up between cramming the netbook, the eBook reader, the large smartphone and a PMP into your bags or carrying just your smartphone and maybe the netbook.

However, you cannot use either a netbook or a smartphone under direct sunlight and the battery life is usually not conducive to hours of reading. So Entourage’s idea is to give you something that will let you read books and surf the net at the same time.

They give you an e-Ink using eReader screen that is 9.6” diagonal (1200×825 pixels) and has all the features of an eBook reader – like zooming, taking notes directly on the book, glare free screen and the ability to read under direct sunlight. Using its various connectivity options, which I am coming to in a bit, you can choose to store your notes and journals on a server, email them to a friend or just keep them on the device.

The screen accepts stylus input, so you can open a new journal page and draw on the screen. Text can be input by hand or by Bluetooth keyboard. The e-paper is Wacom Penabled, which is how you are able to draw on it. It supports both ePub and PDF formats, so you are pretty much covered on that area.

What is does not have is an attached online store like the new Barnes & Noble’s Nook or the Amazon Kindle. But I do not see that as a deal breaker. There are enough ways to get Books these days.

The netbook side is pretty basic. It has a 10.1” color touchscreen that displays 1024×600 pixels. The two screens are connected with each other and you can view the images on your ebook in full color on the netbook screen. It has a webcam and microphone that allow you capture video, still images and audio respectively. You have the option of hooking a microphone up to it if you want better quality audio recording . It as built in speakers as well. It supports Mp3, MP4 and 3GP file formats.

You can browse the Internet, check and write emails, playback audio and video and type out long documents via Bluetooth keyboard if you so wish. It has an on-screen keyboard that you can use while chatting.

By the way, this is an Android device. No wonder they can claim so many things about the software.

Coming to connectivity, it has a lot of options for you. It has Bluetooth, 3G, WiFi b/g (no ‘n’) along with optional EVDO or HSDPA mobile modem. You can have only one type of modem. Battery life is decent for such a device – 16 hours for the ebook reader only and 6 hours for the LCD screen only. I am suspecting about 8-9 hours with heavy netbook usage from time to time and long hours of ebook reading.

The inbuilt memory is 4GB, with 3GB available to the user, but you can take it up to 32GB with the included SD card slot. There are USB 2.0 ports as well. It will start shipping from February 2010 and is priced at $490. One thing that I do not get is why they charge $40 extra for getting it in a color other than the ‘midnight blue’.

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We have covered Notepad++ plugins in the past which can be really helpful under certain circumstances. One of the most useful plugins for users who work with Notepad++ regularly is the Autosave plugin.

The plugin can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It needs to be extracted into the plugins folder of the Notepad++ installation (the folder might need to be created if this is the first plugin).

The new autosave option becomes available after the next program start once the two files have been placed in the plugins folders.

Autosave can be configured to automatically save documents if the application loses focus or at time intervals with the default interval set to one minute. It is furthermore possible to only save the current document or only named ones so that these temp documents that some users like to create do not get saved on the computer system.

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You can use a simple key to add a quick note, just select any text and press ctr+shift+q. Your note will be instantly created, which you can then edit, add a subject to and save. This is not so new, a lot of apps offer this functionality, but the little things that Quotepad offers add a lot of extra to the program.

Just as an example, clicking the taskbar icon brings up a note list. Clicking it again (or double clicking) brings up the interface to add a new note. Simple, but very effective and efficient use interface. You can mark notes, have the whole window stay on top, change color schemes, change reading order, use filters to narrow your notes, Quotepad can become a great research tool, not just a copy-paste companion!

I find it very useful when I’m thinking about post ideas. Even with tools like Google Reader, it is sometimes hard to keep track of what I want to write about, and a quick copy paste into Quotepad is a big help, firstly because I can paste the intro paragraph from a blog post, or a description from the app main page. Quotepad shows the source of the text, so I can save the url copy-pasting time. I can then narrow by keyword, making all my blogging work much easier and faster.

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There is not a noticeable difference performance wise considering the program startup time and text loading performance. The Intype text editor uses a tabbed interface to display multiple text documents in the same interface. Plugins – which are called bundles in the editor – are available for various programming languages to add better support in the editor. Support is build in for programming languages like C, PHP, Java and various other scripting languages like HTML, XML or CSS supporting language grammar snippets and additional features.

The project’s website contains downloads for additional bundles that can be added to the text editor. The editor is currently in alpha stage. It can be freely downloaded from the developer’s website. The FAQ states however that the editor will not be free once it is fully released.

Intype might be worth a look for users who use plain text editors for coding purposes. It does not however provide access to powerful new features or commands that other text editors like Notepad++ do not offer.

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When you normally copy paste contents into Microsoft Excel they will all be stored in the same cell in the Excel application. That is usually not the desired way of presenting the information. It is possible to copy and paste the contents into other cells or prepare the text in the text editor in a way that the contents are automatically copied into separate cells.

Pasting text into different Excel cells can be done by making use of the TAB key in the text editor. Pressing Tab represents a new cell in Excel when pasting the contents into Microsoft Excel. To create a four column layout in Excel one would simply write down the name of the first column, press tab, write down the name of the second column, press tab and so on.

The same holds true for additional rows. Just make sure to press tab only once even if the contents do not match in the text editor they will in Microsoft Excel. So even if the columns in the text editor will not look even they will be perfectly fine in Microsoft Excel.

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Ribbon seems the way to go and Microsoft already made several announcements about their upcoming operating system Windows 7 and the use of Ribbons in default applications like MS Paint and Wordpad.

But Microsoft is not the only company that is trying to push the new interface. A user on the Deviant Art website saw the screenshot of Windows 7 Wordpad with the Ribbon interface and decided to code that for Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Solo-Dev pushed out an release candidate that is currently supporting plain text documents: A Notepad replacement so to speak with plans to integrate rich text and doc applications so that it will become a Wordpad replacement instead.

The downside of the project is that it requires the Windows .net Framework 3.5. It also uses lots of resources currently but the software developer promised to optimize the code and application so that the computer memory consumption would become less.

The interesting questions leading from this is: Have you worked with Microsoft Office 2007 yet? Do you like the Ribbon interface? Let me know.

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Disabling sessions from Notepad++ should not have any impact on other software features like the tabbed interface. The option to disable sessions in Notepad++ can be found in the options of the software program.

A user opening Notepad++ can open the program’s options by selecting Settings from the main menu and Preferences from the submenu. The Preferences window is opening which is displaying several tabs and lots of options.

Locate the Misc tab of the Preferences menu and uncheck the “Remember the current session for next launch” box to disable the session feature in Notepad++.The user will only see the current document the next time Notepad++ is opened. New documents are still added in tabs during a session but once Notepad++ gets closed the information are erased.

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Today the first beta version of Notepad++ 5.0 was released to the public on Sourceforge, more than 18 months after the release of Notepad++ 4.0. It offers further performance improvements over previous versions, bookmarked lines, different colored tabs, plugin commands in the context menu and additional options to configure the application.

The announcement lists 18 fixed bugs and features that have been added in Notepad++ 5.0, they are:

• 1. Improve Notepad++ performance – on startup and on exit.
• 2. Add Calltip capacity.
• 3. All the menu commands can be added in context menu, including plugins’ commands, macros and user defined commands.
• 4. Add bookmarked lines operations : delete all marked lines, copy all marked lines into clipboard, cut all marked lines into clipboard, paste from clipboard to replace all marked lines content.
• 5. Fix crash bug : Open files with date pre-1970.
• 6. Fix clone mode bug : now the actions done in one view will be synchronized in the cloned view.
• 7. Add tooltips in document tab to display the full file name path.
• 8. Change hide lines behaviour : Hide lines now saved during switches.
• 9. Change file history list behaviour : Most recent closed file is on the top. Add number on list.
• 10. Caret width and blink rate are customizable.
• 11. Add asterisk in title bar if file is dirty.
• 12. The bookmarks’ look & feel are improved.
• 13. Add “Select all” and “copy” context menu items in Find in files results window.
• 14. Fix goto line with command line bug.
• 15. Improve smart highlight / mark all / incremental search highlight all visibility
• 16. Tabbar’s coulours is configurable via Stylers Configurator(Active tab Text, Inactive tab text, Inactive tab background, Active tab focused indicator and Active tab unfocused indicator).
• 17. Add the smart highlight file size limit – 1.5 MB in order to improve the performance.
• 18. Add exception handling (dumping filedata)

The complete announcement can be read in the Notepad++ forum and the new version can be downloaded directly from Sourceforge.

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Adding plugins is a breeze. Notepad++ comes with a plugin folder that is a subdirectory of the root directory of the installation. Just place all downloaded plugins into that directory and they will automatically be recognized by Notepad++. If the plugin directory is not existing create it. The plugins can be configured from within Notepad++ by clicking on the Plugins menu in the toolbar.

The removal process works the same way, just delete files in the plugin directory to remove a plugin that you do not want to use anymore.

The main plugin page lists 26 plugins for the latest version of Notepad++. Here are the ones that I found useful and decided to install:

• XML Tools – XML Checker. Can auto-close tags and provides other useful features.
• Hex Editor – adds a Hex Editor to Notepad++
• Compare Plugin – compare two text files.
• FTP Synchronize – modify and upload files directly to a ftp server.
• Multi Clipboard – add up to ten text phrases to the clipboard.
• Windows Manager – great if you work with many open windows at once regularly.

Those are just five of the 26 available plugins. Most have been written for special purposes and are probably not useful to the majority of users.

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Akelpad is lightweight. That is the first thing that I can tell you about it. It uses roughly 3 Megabytes of Ram with one text document open and all available plugins loaded. Yes that’s right, you can enhance the software with plugins to add functionality to it. Akelpad itself has a size of 186 Kilobyte and has several comfort features that are unknown to Notepad.

This includes the ability to load text documents that are larger than 64 Kilobytes, document previews before opening them, editing of read only files and more. Plugins add a number of additional features to Akelpad like syntax highlighting, auto completion, sessions, macros and scripts and auto saving.

You might be asking about the differences to other Notepad replacements such as Notepad++ and I can only say that Akelpad uses less resources to display the same text document but does not offer all of the functions that Notepad++ offers. It’s worth a try if you ask me and definitely an option if you are looking for a Notepad replacement and have not made a decision yet.

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