Debug Episode 2

In this episode we talk about alternatives to iTunes, i don't know about you guys itunes is crappy piece of software, very heavy on system resources and slower than a pregnant elephant in a marathon. I love my ipod don't get me wrong but i hated itunes so i started looking for other ways to sync my ipod to my comptuer and i found loads of alternatives. Today we are going to discuss few of the top alternatives.

1. Foobar 2000
2. Winamp
3. Song Bird
4. Yamipod

Foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/) is free media player available which can play nearly all the media formats you can throw its way, apart from being a good media player (although i have other favourites when it comes to media players) it can also sync with your ipod to transfer songs to your ipod.

Few are few screenshots of foobar2000 in action

Main Interface

Main Interface Alternative

Convertor Lets You Convert Between File Formats

Winamp (http://www.winamp.com/) does not needs any introduction unless you were hibernating for past few years or so, perhaps the most popular and oldest mp3 player around lets you play different media formats. Among several other features it also letsyou sync with your ipod and transfer songs to it.

Nice And Easy To Use Interface With Loads Of Skins To Alter The Looks

With Enough Features To Keep You Busy For A While

Songbird (http://www.getsongbird.com) is yet ANOTHER media player in the list, and like the predecors it can play variety of media formats and among its numerous features it lets you dock your ipod to your comptuer and transfer songs to it.

Yamipod (http://http://www.yamipod.com) is the last program on our list but certainly not the least infact it happens to be my personal favourite program among the list, Why? because its a no nonsense straight ipod manager and it shows from the name (Yet Another Ipod Manager) with letters rearranged to make it better "sounding". It virtually lets you achieve all the things you can do with your itunes including having podcasts while keeping a very small memory usage.

The Main Interface

Find And Remove Duplicate Files Among Several Other Features

That's it for this segment from Reboot's 2nd Episode, do feel free to write to me with comments and suggestions both for the show or the blog and i will try to answer you as soon as possible. :-)

Reboot

Well what is reboot? it's just another tech / gadget show on air, what makes it different from other show is the fact that this show for a change have people both on and off camera who know what they are talking about, so instead of getting lousy facts and figures copied from google and lack of research evident from the content you will find something you can relate too.

We shall try to address common problems and provide some solutions catering to our local market, not everyone can get something from bestbuy and fix their computer, so how about relating it to our local market and telling viewers what to do :)

Ali Ansari, a very humble and down to earth person who enjoys gadgets as much as he enjoys music


Well, it's me, much to horror of many friends, i now haunt everyone on TV :/

Reboot - Episode 1 - Debug

So in the first episode of Reboot we decided to explore the topic which bugs us the most, so we decided to do a segment on different freeware utilities which are available and can be used easily without going through pains of cracks and serials and what not

Achieve / Zip / Compression Programs

When it comes to achieves the name winzip automatically comes to mind, but its small in size, its free and it gets the job done, this freeware program will open most of the achieves you will come across.

7-Zip (Archieve) - http://www.7-zip.org/

Adobe Acrobat Reader

Acrobat reader is widely and most used program when it comes to pdf, but as far as we are concerned it is heavy on resources and honestly does install many unnecessary features (crap or blotware) which one might not want. If you are the sort of person who wants a simple to use and low on machine resources pdf reader than I will strongly suggest foxit reader to you.

Foxit Reader (PDF Reader) - http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

Windows Notepad

May sound strange why we want to include an alternative to a program which is already included for free in Windows, well·Although Windows Notepad does gets the job done but lets admit it, its undermined and that is because it lack features which could make it a powerful WYSIWYG editor, this was deliberate on part of Microsoft team in our opinion to differentiate notepad from its elder brother Wordpad.

Following are few screen shots directly from developer's website to give you a better idea of its features

Multi-View (document in clone mode)

Multi-View (document in clone mode)



Multi Document And Multi-View



XML Syntax highlighting and folding



HTML (and embedded php, java script) Syntax highlighting and folding

Notepad++ (text editor) - http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Will be posting more utilities and freebies in another post so keep on reading the blog ! :)