Filed under: Windows, Linux, Office, IBM, Freeware

IBM has put the finishing touches on Lotus Symphony, a free Microsoft Office competitor based on OpenOffice.org. The company pushed out version 1.0 of the office suite which has been available as a public beta since last year.

Unlike OpenOffice.org, Lotus Symphony is not open source software. While IBM is providing it for free, Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, which is the last version of OpenOffice.org that had a license allowing developers to modify the code and keep the changes private.

According to Linux.com, IBM hopes to target the enterprise market with this software. The goal is to provide Lotus Symphony as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, while charging $25,000 per year for support. Of course, if you know how to use word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation applications, you probably won't need to spend the money. But you also might not find much in Lotus Symphony that isn't already available in its open source cousin, OpenOffice.org.

So what's new in Lotus Symphony 1? Here are a few highlights:

• Critical crash and freezing issues have been fixed
• Improved performance when creating new documents, spell checking presentations of spreadsheets, redrawing a presentation page, saving PPT files, and performing other actions
• Improved interoperability with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, and SmartSuite documents
• Added support for 4 more languages, bringing the total to 28

Lotus Symphony is available for Windows and Linux. While the only supported Linux platforms are SUSE Enterprise Desktop 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, you can install Lotus Symphony on other distributions. You just might run into a few errors here and there.

thanks Hessel Olijve!

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Filed under: Macintosh, Commercial

Delicious Library offers users the ability to catalog their entire collection of music, movies, electronic gadgets, kitchenware, clothes and most anything else using a web cam onto digital shelves on their Mac.

All you have to do to enter an item in your database is scan the product's PC using a webcam. Delicious Library connects to Amazon to determine what that product is. From there, it will download the cover art, detailed description and a host of reviews and additional information.

The program's been around for a few years, but the developers recently released version 2.0. There's a huge list of changes, including the addition of 5 new item categories, which brings the total to 9. You can also view other Delicious Library users' shared libraries from within the application itself instead of going to the web now. Cover art and graphics have a better 3D look to them and scale a lot better too. In addition, the library performance has been improved.

Continue reading Living your life the Amazon way with Delicious Library 2

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Filed under: Design, Fun, Photo

If you're no Photoshop guru, but you have fun applying different novelty filters to your pictures, you might like Dumpr. It's web-based, very simple to use, and has a pretty decent library of effects: sketch, Lomo, reflection and jigsaw puzzle, to name a few. You can upload photos from your own hard drive, or paste in URLs from some of the major photo hosting services, including Flickr and MySpace.

Dumpr isn't really meant for advanced users, although buying a Pro account will get you access to a few more effects. Despite the ... interesting ... choice of name, Dumpr is pretty fun to play with, and it's great for quickly doing things to photos that would take a while for a novice to learn in Photoshop. It also has a few Flickr-specific features, like searching for pictures similar to your favorites, and rating Flickr photos. We're still not sure about telling our friends we're going to Dumpr some photos of them, though.

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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Trayconizer is a little application that lets you change the behavior of any Windows program so that it can be minimized to the system tray instead of the taskbar. You'll have to configure each application manually, because Trayconizer is designed to be inserted into a program shortcut.

Here's how it works. You unzip Trayconizer to a folder on your PC. Let's say it's C:\Trayconizer. Now all you have to do is insert Trayconizer into the target field of a program shortcut. For example if you want to be able to minimize Firefox to the system tray, you would right-click on the shortcut for Firefox and insert the path to Trayconizer.exe before the path to Firefox.exe. It should read something like


You can also use XNeat, a program we covered a while back, to minimize running programs to the system tray. But Trayconizer has the advantage of running automatically every time you launch a program so that all you have to do is click the minimize button.

[via Freeware Genius]

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