First of all, I am still sick, so this is going to be a short post, but I wanted to get something posted and I wanted to get this information out there for people.

TechSmith, the company that brought us Camtasia Studio, has released a new tool that’s completely free. The tool is called “Jing”, and from the limited time I’ve had to play with it, it seems wonderful.

Jing isn’t completely new. In fact, it’s been around for about six months. However, a new release was made on Nov. 28, 2007 that, according to the changelog, includes a lot of monumental improvements. I’m not sure how long Jing will be a free product, but as long as it is, I encourage you to try it out.

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The first beta release of Firefox 3 was released about a week ago, and there is a lot of buzz around the Internet about its pros and cons. A pretty decent review of the beta release can be found on this site. Another good, in-depth look at Firefox 3 Beta 1 can be found on CNET’s blogs.

The main questions people around the Web seem to be asking are:
What features will be added?
Will the new Firefox handle memory more efficiently than current and older versions?
Which bugs will be fixed?
Which standards of CSS will Firefox 3 support?

You can view the official plan for Firefox 3 on Mozilla’s wiki. You can view the complete list of developer information (how to update extensions, etc.) on the Mozilla Developer Center.

YaBB, an extremely popular and secure forum software, written entirely in Perl, released a new version on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2007. Exactly two years after YaBB 2.1 was released, YaBB 2.2 has come on full-force.

From the official announcement on the YaBB Support Forums:

YaBB 2.2 - small numbers don’t mean small changes

Below is a list of just some of the things changed for this release. The list will be updated over the next few days. There are so many improvements, it’s a project just to list them all!

Feature Additions:
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Allow members to choose non-administration membergroups in their profile
Private Messages Buddy List
Buddy list integration in view profile and topic displays
Added a:visited CSS style and various other missing or previously hardcoded styles
Carbon and Blind-Carbon Copy address boxes in Private Messages
User Panel - buddy list, private messaging center, profile, etc.
Admin option for who can see the members list
Private Message ignore list
Forward Private Messages

The full list of feature additions, security fixes, bug fixes, etc. is available in the official announcement.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of trying to figure out how to rip the audio soundtrack off of a DVD. To say the least, it was an extremely painful process. The end lesson for me was that there is no easy way to rip the soundtrack from a DVD.

I’m certain that there are tools out there to make this easier, but with the short amount of time I had to complete the project, I wasn’t able to find one.

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I subscribe to a semiweekly newsletter from CNet that keeps me up-to-date on some of the latest blog entries and forum discussions going on at the Web site. It’s kind of like a “Dear Abby” for technology users.

The main highlight in yesterday’s issue was a discussion about Microsoft Office and some of the viable alternatives available to the public. The comments that follow the initial blog post create a fairly interesting discussion.

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Because none of these utilities are open-source, I’m not going to bother writing entire reviews of each proggie. However, I did want to offer up my stamp of approval for each one.

The applications I’m going to recommend in this post range from media applications to Web development apps to general miscellaneous utilities.

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I’ve decided to add another installment to my reviews/recommendations of free, open-source software. Quite honestly, I had forgot that TrueCrypt was an open-source utility, otherwise I’d have reviewed it earlier. I only use it at work currently, since I’ve no reason to encrypt my files at home, so I’d basically forgot about it altogether.

TrueCrypt is an absolutely amazing encryption utility that can be used on flash drives, partitions and entire hard disks. TrueCrypt essentially reformats your storage volume in an encrypted format that can only be decrypted using the appropriate password. Once the password is entered, the volume is mounted on your computer the same as any other disk or disk drive.

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I was reading the blog of an old college buddy a few weeks ago and happened across a pretty remarkable post. Jon figured out how to get Windows XP and Windows 2000 running side-by-side on his Mac OS. With XP and Win2K running on his Macintosh (note, they’re actually running through MacOS, not running through a dual-boot setup), he is able to simultaneously test his Web sites in all of the major Windows browsers as well as the MacOS browsers.

You can read his post here.

Now, if only we could get a Mac emulator running on Windows, I’d be all set.

As the final installment of my reviews/recommendations of open-sourced freeware, I will review the granddaddy of them all (with the exception, possibly, of the umbrella that contains all of the various builds of the Linux operating system): Mozilla Firefox.

Mozilla Firefox is a lightweight, standards-compliant (for the most part) Web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation. The codebase/engine behind Firefox is the same engine used in the Mozilla/Seamonkey Web browser, Netscape Navigator and a host of other Web browsers.

Although Internet Explorer users still outnumber Firefox users nearly three-to-one, Mozilla is by far the most popular alternative browser on the market. It is not necessarily the best browser out there, but it is the most popular browser among technologically-savvy Internet users.

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Bluefish Editor is one of my favorite pieces of open-sourced freeware out there. It is, by far, my absolute favorite code editor. It’s simple, lightweight and powerful. It has all of the features I want in an editor and none of the features I don’t want. It’s almost as though it was developed specifically for me.

Bluefish is a code editor for people that actually write their code. It is not a WYSIWYG editor, nor do I ever see it becoming one. It is a plain text editor with a lot of features for coders. The developers like to call it a “What You See Is What You Need” interface. Honestly, I couldn’t have said it better, myself.

Unfortunately, Bluefish is currently only available for POSIX-based platforms (which apparently includes basically everything except for Windows). The developers have been working on a Windows port of the editor for a few years now, but no release has been made as of yet.

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