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Product review

Handbrake: Open sourcing your video

This is the second open source application review that I've done, but it really should have been the first. I could probably live without talking to other people (Adium), but I'm not sure I could survive long flights without the occasional movie. Handbrake covers this fundamental human need.

If you're not currently using the open-source Handbrake application, your life is woefully incomplete. Handbrake is one of the applications that you will continue to use when you die. Angels are using it, even as I type, to rip their DVDs to their hard-drives so that they can save battery life on long trips (to Redmond, most likely :-).

Enough gushing. What is Handbrake? … Read more

Adium, the Mac-based instant-messaging king

Given all the great consumer-facing open-source software available, I figured that I'd try to evaluate and write reviews on those I use most often. Open source long ago stopped being about developers for other developers. Here's proof.

Adium is quite simply the best instant-messaging (IM) client available. Period. It has its flaws and is, in some ways, deficient compared to iChat, Apple's own IM client. But its strengths vastly outnumber its weaknesses. I've been using it for years. In some ways, it's very similar to Trillian on the Windows platform in that it allows you to combine nearly all of your IM services (Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Jabber, etc.) into one client.

But Adium actually goes further and provides more.… Read more

Product update: Zimbra takes online calendaring offline

Zimbra has now made a great product even better. Determined to help "fat-client Luddites" like me, Zimbra has released the second version of its Ajax, offline client, Zimbra Desktop. First it was email offline, and now the calendar works offline, too. This may well be the the first major web application to go offline.

Who cares? Well, I do, and not because of Zimbra's open source credentials. The primary value I see in Zimbra is an enterprise-class email server that treats Macs and Linux as first-class citizens, rather than as an afterthought.… Read more