Features category

One of the recent things I’ve been doing in Vista is playing around with stacks. A new view in Windows Explorer in Vista is to stack your files into groups by attribute. In reality, it is a bunch of searches for specific files with pretty icons. To stack folders, you can click on the arrow next to the heading you want to stack (say, Name) and selecting “Stack by Name”. You’ll then get lots of icons with files holding a certain name.

This can be helpful in certain situations. One of the things I like to keep organised is my music. In XP, I would’ve had to create a folder to each artist, then another for each album. In Vista, I can do half that work automatically.

I just type “kind:music” in the search box, then go Artist → Stack by Artist, and all my music is magically put into virtual folders. (We first type kind:music because of the folder images that can add unnecessary cruft).

Now I can double-click on an artist and get all the music by that artist.

But, what if I want to get a certain album? Well, this is why I said “half that work automatically.” It cannot remember stacks within stacks, but you can still do so. Just go Album → Stack by Album. The music is then stacked by album.

You can navigate the stacks just like any folder from the folder tree as well.

Now you may think this all useless because you can’t access this in Open dialogs. You are mistaken. Click on the Save Search button in Explorer to save it to your Saved Searches folder (or anywhere else for that matter). Then, open up an Open dialog box somewhere, goto Saved Searches and double-click your new search. Tah-da!

I finish off this post with a tip that not even US PC World knew. If you are finding the icons too large or too small, you can quickly resize them by holding down Ctrl and rolling the mouse wheel - roll up to make them bigger, roll down to make them smaller. The thing PC World didn’t mention in the article above was that this applies to the desktop as well. Just go to your desktop then Ctrl+Mouse Wheel. And yes, if you make the icons 32×32 (the old size), the shortcut icon will overlap a quarter of the icon. Just scroll down one more and it won’t.

If you are using Vista, these two tips that I posted late last year might help you out with two open source problems:

• Using The GIMP with Windows Vista
• Getting Windows Media Player and Firefox to play nicely in Windows Vista

Now that I’m in Vista full time I’ll be updating my blog with any tips and tricks I find with problems lurking about (such as the Creative Live! card one below).

I finally got my copy of Windows Vista (Business) and installed it last night. The “wow” lasted for about five seconds until I had to grapple with Creative’s lack of Live! 5.1 drivers. Unfortunately, they will never ever be produced. So I’ll have to upgrade my sound card.

I tried the kX drivers at first, but the version downloadable from the site didn’t work correctly with Vista (it sort of does, just the Mixer didn’t work). I then tried the modded drivers and they didn’t work at all. I then took out the sound card and tried the onboard sound. No luck with any of the drivers I downloaded (from Gigabyte, Intel or Realtek). I then found newer kX drivers on the forums (Version M), so I put back in my sound card and tried those. It works, not perfectly (full Vista support will be in 3539, not 3538), but it’ll do.

I think I might just upgrade to an Audigy card, as my current card is getting on and I’m hearing pops and clicks every so often.

So now starts my Vista.

Microsoft was the first that came to the scene with “integrated” search. Involving a massive search index to make finding stuff a lot faster. It was touted as being a WinFS feature, and of course we all know how WinFS is these days. Soon after the announcement (a couple of years back now), Google released Google Desktop Search, and Apple did a similar thing in the next version of OS X. Suddenly, everyone was on the indexed search bandwagon.

Funny thing is, Windows XP always had search indexing, it just wasn’t very good. If you go to Start > Search, and look through the options, you’ll find the option of searching through the index. For some reason, it was terrible though and hardly worked. Microsoft tidied it up for Vista though, and put it everywhere. In fact, why have a search box on your taskbar, since it is embedded in almost every app that comes with Vista?

You’ll find a search box in the Start menu, Windows Explorer, Mail, Internet Explorer, Calendar, Windows Media Player, Photo Gallery and countless other places. But would you use it?

Well, maybe, yes. Of all the features in Vista, when I boot into XP I miss this one. And GDS and Live Desktop Search all suck. You are kind of forced into it with the Start menu, as they have modified the way the All Programs menu works - it is no longer a menu. It is a series of point and click operations, which can be tedious, that it is easier to type a couple of characters. The benefit of the Start menu search is that not only does it search the Start menu (that is its priority), but it also doubles as a command line, so you can launch anything from anywhere, including your e-mail.

Windows Explorer search is much improved too. At any time, you can start typing a few letters in the search box and it will instantly filter the file list. It even looks through program and file metadata so that if you come across a whole barrage of setup programs, typing in the program that you want will most likely yield your result.

Case in point. I use the Firefox extension Scrapbook to keep together some of the more amusing internet pages at my disposal. I even keep some important ones in there, like my timetable. One day I had to find my timetable, but I didn’t know where it was because I hadn’t installed Firefox at the time. I looked through the Scrapbook folder. Each scrap is kept in a dated folder.

In XP, it would have been a pretty daunting task to find my timetable, looking through each folder. In Vista however, a couple of key presses and I’ve narrowed my search.

They aren’t even named “timetable.”

Despite the demise of WinFS, I think Microsoft were quick in providing almost all the features that it was going to provide. As said before, it is one of those features that I miss, and it is really helpful. No more trawling through folders, spending minutes at a time looking for the program to open some conspicuous file needs.

Well I decided a couple of days ago after checking out the pre-RC1 build that I might talk about the little things in Vista that are both good and bad. You always hear about the collective reviews that just lump it in the good or bad category. I’m not sure how often I’ll post to this, but I’ll see when I can.

You thought this was over! No, not for a couple of days yet. Doppler is the next one in the series and boy is it something. I was a little disgruntled by it at first but after a play round it is a decent podcatcher with a difference.

The UI is so simple and basic. About the simplest in this feature. You have a search bar at the top, the list of feeds, and two buttons. That’s it! It does podcasting, what else? So to add the feed you click the Add Feed button. It is simple enough.

Now, to see what is in the podcast you double-click it in the list. It’ll then give you a list of the episodes and their descriptions. The tricky part - where can I play the podcast I downloaded? There is no notice of which ones have been downloaded, and there isn’t any Play button or anything to open the podcast. To do that, I right click the podcast and then click Open Download Folder, then open it from there. Oh, how fun.

And that is about it really. It does download them well enough, but if you want to play them you have to go through the loopholes. Version 3 is out on beta and is a lot nicer than the current offerings, but only use it if you enjoy getting bleeding edge stuff, as some elements of it are quite broken. Look out for that.

Pros: Somewhat simple interface; it downloads the podcasts fine.
Cons: Playing the podcast isn’t as simple; no icon or anything to hint a certain cast was downloaded.
Verdict: If you just want something to download the casts then get this, otherwise you might want to look somewhere else while keeping an eye on the next version.
Doppler

The next podcatcher in the series is called ziePod. This is an interesting one. It is in the “podcatcher with a media player attached” variety. And it also has four different interfaces.

Yes, four. There is:

• Deskbar mode, which is just the media player in a bar, like winshade mode in Winamp.
• Player mode, which is the media player part and the playlist in a small window.
• Column mode, which has the media player at the bottom of the window, and podcast information at the top.
• Full mode, basically like your standard RSS reader. The column mode view on the left, then on the right the podcast information (this is the screenshot).

The column mode and full mode both have a, what I think they call, “bin view.” This is where there are four tabs along the top, Home, Folders, Search and Tasks, which contains bins of information. For example, Home has a bin “Today” telling you what podcasts have updated. This is quite handy. It also has two big “Synchronize” and “Add” buttons at the top, very nice. By default though it streams the podcast episodes. This can be annoying. You can tell it to download the podcasts to your hard drive via the options though. To download a separate episode you right-click it and then choose “Download.”

Of course though it has its media player attached. At the moment I’m not liking these. I want to use my player, not the one that is included.

ziePod can also be used as a standard RSS reader. It’ll show a little icon to show you the difference. But whether you’ll use it as a standard reader or not is up to you.

The interface is a non-standard one. In my opinion, it isn’t terribly pretty. I’ve also noticed that when I exit it, I think it is actually crashing. I’m not sure, but the notification icon stays in the tray until I mouse over it, usually indicating the program behind it crashed.

It does include a searchable directory. That’s what “Search” is for. You can type what you want and it’ll search it. However, it appears to search podcast episodes so that isn’t very good and there is no simple one-click way to add the podcast itself to your list. It uses a site called Feedzie to do it all.

Pros: At a glance information; easy to add podcasts (that you have the URL to); play the podcast without downloading it first.
Cons: Why four interfaces?; Non-standard UI; built-in player; downloading not by default; podcast directory only searches episodes.
Verdict: Well, it does appear like an OK podcatcher. Sometimes the interface could be clunky though, and I think you need to warm up to it.
ziePod Download

So during this review process I’ve noticed two types of podcatchers, those with media players, and those without them. But if you look at the media players category, it is either a media player with podcatching attached, or a podcatcher with a media player attached. We review one of those two today, iTunes. Disclaimer: This feature focuses on podcasting support, and does not entail media playing features. While sometimes the verdict will be biased depending on how crap the media player, it is not the point of these reviews.

If you have an iPod, you are most likely using this program because it does everything automatically. You plug in the iPod and it works! (Much the reason why I made PSP MusicBox). iTunes is a nice media player, it does lack one or two minor features that I like, but its podcast support is probably the best.

Firstly though, we’ll look at the quirks. It’s an Apple product, so you think that it is made for those without a clue. Actually, that is false. If you have an OPML file with all your podcasts in it, you can actually import it. When you click on the Import menu option it’ll list playlists, text files and plain XML files as import targets. It does support OPML files, you just type in *.* into the File field and press enter and the Open dialog will show everything (all common Open dialogs do that by the way).

Next I first thought I couldn’t add any feeds. There was no Add Feed button anywhere to be found. So I thought the only way was through the Podcast Directory. Actually, the “Subscribe to Podcast” option is hidden in the Advanced menu. Joyous.

Right, onto the actual podcasting and I must say I like the interface. It is very clean. You have the big update button in the top right (where the context button always is). The list of podcasts is presented like a standard tree. It’ll show you the content of the feed by clicking the triangle to the left of the feed title. There is a little orange spinning circle to the left of the feed and episode titles that it is downloading. Neat. If you want to get an episode that iTunes isn’t downloading yet, then clicking the Get button to the right of the episode title. It’ll then change to a grey circle with a X in the middle to let you cancel the download. Files that are waiting to be downloaded will appear with a grey circle to the left of their names. Blue circles indicate that the file is downloaded and ready to play.

The podcast directory is probably the largest. It is integrated with the iTunes Music Store, which really is no biggy. When you find the podcast you want to listen to, you can just click the “Subscribe” button, or get the separate episodes first to see if you like it. Many podcasts homepages have a “Subscribe using iTunes” link in them. This does make it a snap to subscribe to them, as it pops open iTunes and takes you to its iTMS page.

Because it is in iTunes, you get the media player goodness as well.

Pros: Subscribing using the directory is a snap; clean interface; snap to use.
Cons: Subscribing from a URL is hidden; OPML importing is hidden too.
Verdict: If you are an iTunes user, then this is great to use. If not, and you don’t want to change, then maybe not. (As a side-note, I’ve found that iTunes tag editing so much better than the media players and the dedicated tag editors).

And we start this series off with Juice. Juice used to be known as iPodder and has been around for a while. In the spirit of podcasts, Juice is free, and not only that but open source.

So, when you start up Juice you are presented with a window with four tabs; Downloads, Subscriptions, Directory and Cleanup. Subscriptions is where you’d want to start of course. Clicking Add will of course let you add your podcast, it’ll then do a download of the feed. One of the frustrating things I noticed about Juice is that it has to download the feed everytime. Even if it downloaded it during a general sync, when you click on a feed to look at it it’ll redownload it. That is a real big no-no for RSS readers (which podcatchers effectively are).

While you are browsing the feeds, they can have either a checkbox or a play symbol. You check the checkbox to download the cast. You then have to click the Download button, which once again downloads the RSS feed then continues downloading what you were after. The play symbol will open it up in your media player, either iTunes, Windows Media Player or Winamp. iTunes of course now supports podcasts (so look out for a review on that later), but Juice does automatically create playlists for them in the program.

The Downloads tab is where you’ll probably go most often, simply because it doesn’t have to reload the feeds all the time. Also, sometimes the feeds forget which episodes it has downloaded. Here each episode has either a grey, blue or green circle next to them. Grey meaning it was cancelled, blue meaning it is downloading, and green meaning that you can play it (by clicking on it no less). I’m not sure what else to say about this tab, so moving along

The podcast directory is OK. You just click on the Directory tab and select what you want to go through. However, it only gives the podcasts title, so finding out any more information will mean a trip to Google first.

Pros: Free; Decent interface.
Cons: Has to download the feed everytime; Some interface elements are confusing.
Verdict: A good podcast program that if I don’t find any better I guess I’ll be going back to.

Download: Juice

A while back when I was looking for a good RSS reader I had a series of articles that I thought were good and not so good. Through that I recommended RSS Owl. Well, now it’s time again, time to look for a good podcast client.

I haven’t really come across one yet, but as I try each one (which I started doing last night) I’ll post my thoughts on it here. Then if you are on the hunt for a good podcast client, at least you’ll have something to look to.