My Piece of the Inter(.)net » Software

Wow, Photoshop IS magic!

David McGrath — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:06:09 +0000

I am officially blown away. Adobe has some pretty cool technology in the works. Take a look at this video of some “content-aware” features in the upcoming Adobe Creative Suite 4.

(link)

Arcadia: Soon!

David McGrath — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:01:15 +0000

Arcadia, my emulator frontend that manages a wide variety of classic gaming system files, is just around the corner! I have a stable version right now, and am looking for beta testers. (Contact me if you’re interested!) Once I give Arcadia the ability to check for update to itself I’ll release it publically, but for now email me and I’ll give it to you.

Windows 7 Availability

David McGrath — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:33:30 +0000

Windows 7 will be publicly available on October 22nd, and available to MSDN subscribers August 6th. Read more about Windows 7 from my favorite source, Paul Thurott’s Supersite for Windows.

Downloading the Windows 7 Beta

David McGrath — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:08:49 +0000

If you’re curious about Windows 7 beta, downloading has resumed after Microsoft added a few more servers to handle the extreme demand. As far as I can tell downloading resumed within the last 30 minutes. I jumped on the oportunity and am downloading the 64-bit English version now. After specifying those requirements I was brought to a very brief survey page, which asked such things as my name, email address, job, and current OS. After that I was brought to the following page, which was pretty straightforward. (I blocked out the product key, duh.)

Clicking “download now” brought me to a page that downloaded a download manager, which is downloading the ISO as I type this. The speed seems to be pretty good for now… at least it’s the fastest I’ve seen a download go on this Internet connection.

The “Installation Instructions” page is a link to here: https://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-installation-instructions.aspx

I’ll try to document more of the beta experience in later blog posts.

View any video format in Windows Media Player

David McGrath — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 03:04:06 +0000

I used to use the Combined Community Codec Pack to get a support for a host of codecs on my Windows XP and Windows Vista (32-bit) machines. It seems that development of the pack has fallen behind, and I have noticed that it does not work as well in Vista x64. After some research I cam across the Vista Codec Pack, which supports just about every codec, including MOV (QuickTime). VLC is a good alternative, if you don’t mind (or prefer) a bare-bones media player, but I’m glad to have support for everything that I would want to view right in Windows Media Player.

Lyrics Plugin for Windows Media Player and Winamp

David McGrath — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 23:39:40 +0000

The Lyrics Plugin main page really says it all. It lets you see the lyrics for the music that is playing. I use it for Windows Media Player 11, and the install process is easy. Click download, run the installer, which will close Windows Media Player, and after the install Windows Media Player reopens with the plugin enabled. It takes the place of the visualizer, and it is simple enough to switch between the lyrics plugin and the visualizer.

It downloads the lyrics dynamically when each song is played, so if you’re offline you’re out of luck, but with an internet connection the lyrics load more or less instantly. Over all the actual lyrics seem to be pretty accurate as well.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s free?