E-Musings Mon Immorata

Ding Dong Bell! Freeware Going To Hell Popcorn email client goes pay, but nPOP fills the gap, plus new Opera 7.20... I guess it was inevitable. To survive you need money. And all these months, Ultrafunk seemed to be subsisting on revenues from their audio-processing software plugins for Sonic Foundry's SoundForge. But these were sold in August 2003 to Cakewalk, an other sound-processing software developer who just happens to be a competitor to Sonic Foundry. So with lots of idle minds and time, the Ultrafunk crew decided that Popcorn needed improving. And in a space of 2 months, I have seen over 5 builds. The last free build was Popcorn 1.50. Unfortunately, the company's website follows a slash 'n burn policy, with newer builds over-writing older ones. You can only download the latest version -- 1.51 -- which just happens to have become $20 shareware. Vastly over-priced for the feature set. And like JV16 Power Tools, another great application is soon going to bite the dust. But if you are adventurous, use the free Filemirrors service to search for "popcorn" and you might get lucky enough to find an older free build. The difference between the free and registered versions, is the former only allows you to access a single mail account. And if you upgrade from a previous version, you will only be able to access the first account. There aren't any hacks or cracks available (as yet). So my advice is for a few rather minor tweaks that I'm sure most of us can live without, retain your older Popcorn version. Or upgrade to the still-free competition. nPOP (84 kB, free) is a similar freeware that's available in separate downloads for Windows 9x/ME/NT4/2000/XP, Windows Pocket PC, and Windows CE in English, French and Japanese! This application has a clunkier interface caused in part by its Japanese origins that seem to have been literally translated into English. Although in nPOP you can't drag column headers around to customize your look. The check mail feature offer more user control. You can download just the mail header, or the mail body as well (Popcorn only downloads the header). And like Popcorn, nPOP too is unable to render HTML so you should be safe from mail-borne malicious scripts. And although you can't view attachments, you can view the complete message (MIME) source. Or delete a file attachment; which is pretty neat. I've decided to switch today. What about you? Opera 7.20 is finally done with No more betas. It's available for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. In both non-Java and with-Java versions. Al;though based on my previous experience, its best to download the Sun JVM (Java Virtual Machine) separately. The latest Sun JVM build is 1.4.1_02. And in an effort to "push" Java, Sun is offering games, utilities and more. OK, no more delays. The free CD writing software whose praises I've been singing for several weeks now. But not actually delivering is called CD Burner XP Pro 2.0.9.3 Beta 9.3 (8.8 MB, Windows 98SE/ME/Win2k/XP, free) and is available with, and without Window Media Audio (WMA) support. To activate the latter there is a separate add-in to download. This software does almost everything Nero does including audio CD ripping, normalizing WAV files, converting WAV to MP3, erasing re-writable disks, mixed mode (audio & video) CDs and the earlier version (1.1.x) can save ISO image files. The software also supports Burn-Proof, a technology to limit buffer underrun, track write errors and other incomplete writes. As well as multi-session disks and import (and conversion) of ISO images to disk. Almost all CD?DVD writing hardware is supported with a complete list here. Stay tuned for the full hands-on review. That's it for me. See you again next week. Click Here to Email Me