Picasa 3.9, rating: 9/10

Good: A bunch of new photo editing/enhancement methods.  My new favorites: Lomo, Boost, Vignette.  Face recognition seems improved.  Side-by-side photo viewing for original versus edited comparison.

Bad: Although admittedly a rare occurrence, I wish there was a way to create two separate photo edits from a single original without making a copy of the original.  I.e. somehow one managed to get two good subjects in focus in one photo and one wants to create separate photos from them.

Firefox 4

Good: Faster javascript.  Allows a higher level of customization to the appearance of toolbars.  Tabs can be above or below.  Saves vital real estate by removing status bar.  Menu bar can be hidden also.  Most firefox 3.6.x add-ons continue to work.  Profiles port from 3.6.x very seamlessly without any loss of history, settings, etc.  Websites can be notified of desire for ‘do not track’.

Neutral: Finally realized that firefox has a system proxy setting (since 3.6.4) which continually syncs it with the OS proxy setting.  This resolves the issue of the special proxy detector used by corporations switching the proxy dynamically for open sessions of IE, but not for firefox.

Bad: Whereas on Firefox 3 had a semi-readable cache organization, Firefox 4 has implemented a way of fragmenting the browser cache to prevent you from picking off youtube videos from it.

Bloomberg App on Android

This app was very highly rated in Market.  It’s might be most useful for people who are fairly active investors, but even if you’re not, the Bloomberg news reporting is quite good.  I noticed it is one of the few ‘information’ apps which works reasonably well off-line (without data connection or wifi).  The trade-off offline is that it will try to poll for data and freeze momentarily [may depend on the speed of your phone] and then eventually revert to using its cached version.  It’s a good idea to start up the app while connected to wifi and you can read in free moments later on.  [A side benefit of offline reading is that ads do not show up.  Shhh, don't tell the app writers. (I'm sure they'll figure out a way to put them back up even when offline.)]

3/16/2011 follow up:  I found out that the app starts to slow down over time.  I think it may be because of some particularly inefficient data structure holding the indices to cached articles.  But there is a simple solution.  Go to settings: applications: clear data.  This wipes settings including news selections and stock tickers (stock quotes are not particularly good however with this app, so I wouldn’t bother entering them; use Google Finance instead).  But it drastically improves responsiveness of the app.  I think it maybe a good idea to do this monthly or even weekly.

6/24/2011: It seems that if you have no data plan, it’s important to go into the settings to turn off data.  You’ll still be able to use wifi to supply your data.  If you don’t do this, then the Bloomberg app hangs waiting for data which never comes — because obviously you have no data plan.

Firefox 3.6

The latest thing is personas (or themes) which allow you to customize the look of your firefox.  Also useful for distinguishing your running browsers, if you happen to use two firefox profiles (for two yahoo or google or whatever accounts).

Recuva file recovery

I had an old hard drive which sometimes made strange noises, but I decided it could work as a backup disk.  I was trying to find some old files recently and the disk had file system errors.  I found this software which is able to scan the disk for both deleted (non-overwritten) or non-deleted files even if the file system gets messed up.  It works pretty well.  There are a fair number of options which was a pleasant surprise for free software.

K-Lite Codec Pack (544 Basic)

In a quest to simplify the number of music players I would need to learn to use and import files to etc, I found  (via UK Yahoo Answers) a free version of the codec to play m4a/aac in WMP.  The codec seems to work just fine.  There were some issues with the install I’m guessing because (f**king)  iTunes locks out anyone trying to change the windows registry associations for m4a, aac, etc.  (Solved by the thing in my next post.)

There is still a downside that WMP11 doesn’t realize it can even play m4a files (even if you rename them to mp3) and so they don’t show up in your library unless you add them specifically to a list and even then they only live in the list and not in other auto list or the library.

The Codec Pack does also conveniently include FLAC decoder and FLV decoders so you might avoid having to get special programs to read such files (e.g. VLC viewer).

iTunes (Windows version)

I had to reinstall all my apps due to a bonehead move on my PC.  I hadn’t reinstalled iTunes because I really didn’t like the previous incarnation.  I just decided to download it again, and it’s a rather bloated 89MB download.  Part of this is because it sneakily adds Quicktime as well.  Is it worth it though?

As recommended by a friend, the radio stations are good.  The genius recommendations seem cool.  The free starbucks album from becoming a facebook fan is pretty impressive.

I find the interface still has some aspects that are not as intuitive as they should be at least to me.  Perhaps there are some common Mac interface methods which would be obvious to Mac users, but not to a pure Windows user.  I am still not liking the inability to mix tracks with my more usual music player, WMP, as many of my library tracks are in WMA.  And I really dislike converting and having two copies even though I have plenty of disk space.  I wonder if I can convert the few M4A tracks I have to mp3.  (I just found that there is a freeware app called Switch Sound file converter… M4A support shows up in WMP12 which ships with Win7, but I’m not upgrading to Win7.)

Overall, iTunes is much improved over the previous incarnation, I will say that much.  I haven’t tried it enough to be sure there aren’t more upsides or downsides.  Will update when/if I have.

Windows Media Player 9 and 10

Once in awhile I have a problem with WMP11 libraries being corrupted.  I discovered if I revert to WMP9 or WMP10 all my problems disappear, and strangely WMP10 and even WMP9 seem to have practically all the functionality of WMP11 and in some areas in fact more.

Microsoft Security Essentials (Anti-virus software)

Good:  Scan runs quickly, no annual licensing hassles, free.

Bad:   Need to make sure your OS is completely updated before you can install it.

QuickProxy Firefox add-on

Good: Actually my work provides an automatic tool which does this, but unnervingly often it screws up and doesn’t update the firefox proxy setting even with firefox closed, and it is still a pain to close firefox and reopen it just for updating the proxy setting.   It’s also annoying to navigate all the menus to turn on or off the proxy if you keep firefox open.  This add-on flips the switch with a single button on the status bar.

Bad: Actually, it’s nit-picking, but I’d like a navigation toolbar button.

Update 3/22/11: I finally realized that firefox 3.6.4 and greater has the system proxy setting which allows me to do without this add-on.