If I say "MP3" and ask you to tell me the first software application related to it that comes in your mind , probably most answers would be "Winamp". This is no surprise, since Winamp is the second most used media player on Earth, after Windows Media Player. Anyway, if I say "Winamp visualization plugin", the answer is very likely to be"G-Force", and since yesterday SoundSpectrum released version 3.7.4 of this software, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you more about it...


G-Force 1.0.0 was released back in January 2000, about 3 years after first public version of Winamp, and quickly became one of the best visualization plugins for this player, and recent versions are also capable of handling sound input from other media players as well. Recommended by Apple iTunes, CNet, Yahoo Musicmatch, and even Microsoft, G-Force is very easy to install, and the best part of it is that you won't ever get bored, because the graphics generated are never the same!

Available to be downloaded as a free trial version for Macintosh and Windows(including Vista), G-Force has also 2 commercial versions - Gold, and Platinum.

The exclusive features of the Platinum version include support for multiple media players, the ability to visualize any audio source, even from external CD players or amplifiers, and a nice screen saver. Priced at $30, the Platinum version is 10 dollars more expensive than the Gold version, which also comes with a nice pack of features, including album cover art display, one year of free updates, exclusive visual effects, and more.

According to its producer, this latest version of the software improves full screen support under Windows, fixes some previous issues and features V-Bar support for legacy machines (and machines without full OpenGL support), so upgrade yours, or grab it for a try, if G-Force sounds like something new, because I am sure you won't be disappointed.

One of the things that I really hate to install are codecs, so I started using VLC and, sometimes, mplayer. Anyway, for a lot of people, having their system loaded with all the software required to play their family movies encoded in the last decade using a dozen of different audio and video codecs is a must, and codec packs such as K-Lite can make their lives a lot easier...


It seems we just got 3 different codec packs from Codec Guide updated to version 3.6.0 Beta, and since I found out about it only today...here's what you can grab, for free, from the official site - K-Lite Codec Pack Standard, Corporate and Basic.

While the Beta versions may have bugs, you shouldn't run into any major problems, at least I didn't have any special problems so far, when I used these codec packs. On the other hand, the last stable versions of these packs were released on the 21st of November, so they aren't really old either.

To play it safe, you can choose one of the following - K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 3.5.7, K-Lite Codec Pack 3.5.7 Full, K-Lite Codec Pack 3.5.7 Corporate, K-Lite Codec Pack 3.5.7 Standard, or K-Lite Codec Pack 3.5.7 Basic. One of the main reasons for using these is the fact that you get a fully customizable installation procedure, and once you decide to remove the pack from your system, everything is removed, including all registry keys!

Some time has passed since Apple's Leopard was released into the wild IT world, and now first reports about its sales started to arrive. Best part of this is the fact that, as figures show, Leopard is the best-selling operating system from Steve Jobs' company so far. Obviously, there's a long road ahead until we'll see an OS from Apple fighting head to head with its competitor from Microsoft, if that will ever happen, but...


...let's see what numbers we have here, shall we? According to a study conducted by NPD Group, in the first month on the market, Leopard sold 20.5 percent more than Tiger, 30 percent more compared to 2003's update known as Panther, and 100 percent up, compared to first month of sales for 2002's Mac OS X release, Jaguar.

It may sound great but, in fact, I am sure that a part of these sales have been accomplished because Apple's retail chain has grown bigger, and we must also take into account the fact that Vista's performance contributed to a drop in usage of alternative operating systems, such as Ubuntu, now preinstalled on some Dell desktop computers and laptops and, of course, Leopard.

These being said, all I wish to see next is the sales and usage figures once a year since Leopard's official launch will pass, as well as how the OS market is going to change by late 2008, but there's still a long wait ahead, unfortunately...

In the last few weeks, I had the unfortunate opportunity to talk with some new people that are using Windows Explorer for their file management needs, and it all ended up as usual... I can give hints, but I can't force anyone to use a certain program, so if they think wasting their time with Windows Explorer is a good thing to do, so be it. For the rest of us, today I'll talk about a program I promised to review a few days ago, called FlexTk Professional...

Setup

FlexTk Professional is not quite what I expect from a file manager, and maybe the main reason is that this program isn't quite a file manager, but we'll see that a bit later. For now, it should be enough to say that the version I review today is labeled 1.6.44 and, according to the About screen, this build is dated on the 14th of December, so it's about 3 days old. Oh, my, I love the smell of fresh software in the morning!

Priced at $25, FlexTk Professional is available as a 30 days trial version, and its setup package has almost 4MB in size, being pretty easy to download even for people with a slower connection to the Internet.









As you can see above, I installed it without any problems in Vista, so OS support shouldn't be a problem, as long as you're not using Windows 95 or 98 (I can't run those on my computer, because the chipset doesn't support Windows 98/Me or earlier, so...). Also, it was very easy to install FlexTk Professional, so let's move on and see how it looks & feels, shall we?

Interface

FlexTk's interface looks great, all the graphics are well done, and using it is pretty easy, but I found the File menu to be useless(only the Exit option?), and sometimes the popup windows that appear as you run a command may be more than needed (most of the time, you'll get two windows popping up, but I consider one to be enough). Anyway, the big thing missing, for me, is the ability to customize the interface of this program, because even though this is not a file manager as I am used to, I repeat it, a two-panes view would help a lot.

Features

If we want to take things a bit higher than they really are, we could consider FlexTk Professional a file management software suite, with powerful verification capabilities. I won't tell you how easy it is to manage your files with FlexTk, because it's not. After all, this program isn't capable of handling at least ZIP archives, but that's not the point. There are 5 major tools packed inside it, and this is what I will talk about here...

FlexCls, the tool that starts once you press the Classify button on the toolbar, is a file system classification and categorization program, capable of scanning instantly millions of files, and having an impressive speed (as an example, it took less than 32 seconds to scan the 82,000 files on my system drive, with a total size of over 51GB!).









FlexSize, the storage utilization tool from the package, scanned my system drive in less than 7 seconds, giving me quick access to disk space statistics. Even more, these statistics can be easily exported to a HTML, TXT or CSV file.

At last, we have FlexDup, FlexHas and FlexSig, three tools able to help you find duplicate files, and generate MD5, SHA1 or SHA256 signatures for files or entire files systems. While most home users won't use the last two tools mentioned here, I am sure professionals would find them extremely useful.

These being said, I should also mention that the View options are pretty poor, with only detailed/icons/list views available, and no customization features, but the good part is that FlexTk Professional can be extended with additional plugins, and a multithreading option is available in the Advanced Options area. The rest if it... I am sure you'll be thrilled to check FlexTk in detail for yourselves, so I'm going down to the conclusions now.

The Good

FlexTk Professional can handle huge amounts of data with an impressive speed, and if we consider the prices of the individual tools included in the package, this program is really a bargain! The interface is very good, although it can also get better, and I had no stability problems while using this program.

The Bad

To be hones, I expected to have a Help file on my drive, and the Online Help doesn't have as many details as I'd like to see. I also think that adding some file manipulation features (batch renaming, two-pane view, packing/unpacking support) would attract more users to this product.

Conclusion

I don't want to lie, so I won't say that FlexTk Professional is an ultimate file management tool, because it doesn't cover the "file management" topic as I expected. Nevertheless, this is an excellent tool for a limited number of tasks, so if you need to track disk utilization, find duplicates, and check for authenticity of the files from your huge 5TB disk array without growing a beard while this happens, FlexTk is one of the best tools to use!

Developer: Flexense Systems Ltd.
Price: $25
Trial Link: Download

If you want to create professional-looking icons for Vista and XP, following closely the look of Microsoft's ones (in fact, there are clear guidelines available for those that want to create icons XP or Vista-style), you can either use Photoshop or a similar program, combined with a serious amount of design skill, or grab a specialized program, which is less expensive and maybe also a bit easier to use. One of the best icon creating program for Windows is called IconWorkshop, comes from Axialis Software, and got a new version this weekend...


If you're new to this program, then it's enough to tell you that IconWorkshop can create icons for Windows and Mac from scratch, or based on an existing image. To help you as much as possible, the producer introduced a library of graphic objects that can be used as you wish, allowing you to create different icons in a blink of an eye.

To keep up with the industry tendencies, IconWorkshop offers full support for Windows Vista icons, as I mentioned above, and can also export your work in a variety of formats, if you consider necessary to use a high-end graphics editing software to retouch your work.

Unfortunately, the official page wasn't updated with news about the latest release, so all I can tell you is that the current version is 6.11, with pricing for Corporate Edition being $69.95, and a Personal Edition valued at $49.95. Of course, a free trial version is also available, and you can grab it from here.

At last, if you didn't notice, the official download page still shows the current version as being 6.10, so we are bringing you news as hot as possible once more!