Opera is now completly FREE!!!!!

With the new 8.5 release of opera the makers of Opera dropped a huge bombshell. Opera is now free. No more banners, no more registering, you can now get opera for free.

Now there's no reason not to give it a try!




On a side note: I've given up on the blogger addin for word. It's just much too limted. Qumana is a far better product

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iTunes 5 for windows oddities and gripes

Here’s a screenshot of the new iTunes 5 for windows

Now, notice the oddities of that window? It’s not very windows-like in many areas

• The menu bar is inside of the titlebar
• The titlebar is completely hidden. Between the menu and the window controls is the titlebar. Double click switches window states like it does in windows, and a right click brings up the system menu
• The various columns of the playlist are left and right justified. It seems almost random what one is which justification
• The “search bar”, which is right above the browser and has those lists of options, is quite odd. I had to really look at it to figure out what it does.
• A scroll bar disappears and leaves a blank space instead of removing all of it
• Under the source columns there’s a gripper bar. You can use that to resize the column. Oddly you can still use the column divider also

Now just some general gripes (not pictured)

• Menu items change. Instead of a checkmark, the actual wording of the item changes. It’s jarring to look at a menu that a toggle causes the wording to change
• Too much garbage loaded. I don’t have an iPod, so why is the iPod service loaded? I don’t want to use bonjour, so why does it try to force you to load it?
• You need to install quicktime also. Ugh, that’s just a way to try and get you to use the quicktime player. Just installing quicktime alternative is enough to get iTunes working, so why include the player?
• The store is still extremely sluggish. It’s like web surfing on my old 486sx all over again.
• There’s still a “close” and “exit” in the same menu. Mainly because it still has the odd habit of spawning child windows of itself. What does that mean? Get iTunes to open up two windows, and closing the first window, even with “close window”, exits the program.

iTunes did however make some big improvements:

• Startup is a lot faster. If you get rid of the entire helper program, iTunes does start quicker. That was a huge deal for me, because I don’t use library function, but instead I click on a mp3 and play
• Resize is much faster
• It doesn’t steal your file associations. At one time when you installed iTunes it would take your file associations, even if you told it not to when installing
• Preferences look like they are from windows. They dumped those oddball osx-looking dialogs for the most part