Digsby Worth Checking Out

Digsby is a neat little communications program that combines IM, email and social networking websites all in one. I’ve been using Pidgin for my IM predominantly, but the addition of Twitter to Digsby makes it an attractive alternative.

For IM, Digsby handles AIM, Yahoo, Google talk, MSN, ICQ and Jabber. It seems to have most of the basic features you’d expect from an IM client and I haven’t encountered any problems yet.

You can add Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, AOL/AIM mail, POP or IMAP accounts. I’ve just used it with a Gmail account as a way to be alerted when there is incoming email, but I’m curious about the IMAP and POP functionality. One neat feature is the ability to send emails right from the IM window, without having to open another application or webpage.

For social networking, you can add your Facebook, Myspace or Twitter accounts. I currently just use Twitter, and Digsby provides me with updates to recent Twitter activity, and lets me update my status. If you use Facebook or Myspace, Digsby will alert you to new friend requests, messages and other activity.

With Twitter, the interface isn’t as customizable as Twhirl or Snitter, but so far has been more stable than either of those and doesn’t require AIR. Digsby’s Twitter pop-up notifications display all recent activity, placing @s first. There isn’t much customization available for the Twitter interface, but it handles the basics well.

For me the real strength of the program is having all these things tied together in one package. You can turn off pop up notifications and sound for any or all accounts if, for example, you only wanted to be alerted for emails and not Twitter, or you only wanted sound and no pop-ups.

Digsby is still in Beta and could use a few more features and options, but right now it behaves well and has been reliable. I’m impressed!

Trying Out Open Office

I may be getting a new laptop in the near future, and was thinking about not buying a new version of Microsoft Office. Sans MS Office, I’ll definitely need a replacement suite for word processing, presentations and even the occasional spreadsheet.

I decided to give Open Office a try before it came time to purchase the new computer, so I’d have a good idea if I could live without the Microsoft suite.

I’ve already abandoned MS Outlook. I use Mozilla Thunderbird near exclusively at this point, and its customizability and addons make it a top notch program in my book. If you are looking for another free alternative, Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail is a nice program for mail and newsgroups (no calendar), but for my money Thunderbird is where it’s at. There’s a new version in the works which will incorporate new features like chat integration.

The Open Office download took several minutes even over a cable modem, but installed very quickly. In a short period of time I was already playing around with Writer, mostly arranging the toolbars and buttons to my preference.

I tested a few Word2003 documents which all seemed to open fine and I saved them both in Word format and in Open Document format. MS Word won’t recognize the .odf files but was able to open the .doc files saved with Writer. OO did have trouble saving the document as a rich text format file. When saving a document as an .rtf the file wouldn’t display properly when opened with MS Word. When opened again with Writer, it only displayed a blank screen. If a .rtf file was initially created with Word or Writer it would open fine in each of these, but Writer had problems opening other formats and then saving them as a .rtf file.

I also recently downloaded a database file (.mdb) which opened fine in MS Access 2003, but crashed Open Office Base each time. The program locked up when trying to open the file.

I also downloaded an Excel 2007 file which I was able to open in MS Excel 2003 with the help of the free conversion tool available on the MS Office website. Open Office Calc would not open the Excel 2007 file. It can handle Excel 2003 and earlier formats but can’t handle 2007 files. The Open Office website says that they are working on a conversion tool.

So far the compatibility issues have been very disappointing. I’m a bit tepid about using Writer if it can’t properly save and convert to widely used formats like .doc and .rtf.

The Base program will be useless to me if it can’t open databases created with Access.

The Excel issue isn’t a big deal assuming that a conversion tool comes out soon.

Overall my first impression of using the software to create new documents was very favorable. All the tools I needed were easy to fine and everything went smoothly.

I’m going to keep trying Open Office for a while. I like the price (free) and the basic interface. If I continue to encounter compatibility problems, however, then I will have no choice but to stick with Microsoft Office.

HTML-Kit Perfect Editor for Novices

Have you ever needed to design a document using HTML and didn’t feel like using the bloated Microsoft Word tools or needed something with a little more oomph than a basic text editor? If so, then HTML-Kit is probably for you.

It is available as a free download at http://www.chami.com/html-kit/

Windows Live Writer WordPress Tags

WordPress.com blog users know that WP supports both categories and tags. Windows Live Writer (a fantastic, free blogging client) also supports both of these but the interface isn’t obvious on first glance.

Categories are handled through the scroll box and entry field at the bottom of the screen (labeled “Set categories”).

Tags are hidden initially. To add tags, click on the upward pointing double arrow in the lower right corner (shown in the picture above)

This brings up a new set of options. The section marked “Keywords” is for WordPress tags. Simply type in the desired tags, separated by commas and that’s it!

It’s a straightforward setup, but isn’t always intuitive at first glance.

Good luck!

Windows Live Writer Just Got Better

WLW is my go to program for composing and publishing blog posts. I’ve written about it a few times and have been using it exclusively for posting to my blogs.

I recently switched from Blogger.com to WordPress.com and Live Writer handled the transition marvelously.

Today, thanks to a blog post over at makeuseof.com, I came across a very important link: a series of extensions for Windows Live Writer. Just visit gallery.live.com and you’ll find a whole host of awesome plugins to make WLW even better.

There are a number of extensions to integrate other web services like Flickr or Picasa into WLW, which I am taking advantage of with this post. The Picasa plugin lets you upload images to Picasa from WLW and link them in your blog post. Very cool.

There is also a “blog this” extension for Firefox that helps you blog a particular web page or article. It’s a pretty simple plugin that helps automate appropriate links when referring to a particular source.

There are currently 80 plugins available, so you’ll have to look for yourself to see them all, but if you’re a WLW user, you’re sure to find something useful.

-Jeff

ESPN Widgets

All you sportsfans out there who can’t get enough ESPN news and scores will be happy to learn that ESPN now has a collection of widgets available for use on your homepage or blog. There are a variety of different widgets for sports news in general as well as individual sports. They can be downloaded from widgetcenter.espn.go.com.

I don’t think I’ll be sticking them on my blog, but I will try them out on my various customizable homepages like My Yahoo and Netvibes.

Gadwin PrintScreen

I’m trying out another screencapture utility, Gadwin PrintScreen. It runs on Windows and is freeware.

You can download the program from download.com here.

The main thing that I like when compared to my other favorite program in this category, ScreenHunter, is that Gadwin Printscreen has more options and is a bit more configurable.

Specifically, the program allows you to save in several different file formats such as jpeg, gif, png, tiff and bmp. There are plenty of other customizations as well. You also have the option of previewing all of your screencaps in a popup window before saving, letting you judge whether you got the job done right or wish to tweak it a bit.

Images can be taken from the current window, client window, full scree or a selected rectangular area. The program lurks in the system tray when running, and tiny instruction bubbles pop up to remind you of what to press and click to get your image.

One interesting quirk is that the program can’t take a picture of itself. The key to start capturing won’t work when the option screen is up.

If you’re looking for an alternative to the Print Scrn button on your computer, Gadwin’s PrintScreen utility is a nice freeware alternative.