Nobrainer’s Think Tank

The FoxIt reader is good to have around, but is not ready to be the star of the PDF world. It is light and agile. Unfortunately the find feature is unreliable and some characters don’t get printed correctly. It’s probably a good default PDF reader as long as you aren’t reading a lot of scientific papers.

FastStone Capture can be used to do screen captures of almost anything: windows, window contents, any user-defined shape, the full screen, or even a scrolling window. It’s got some other neat bits as well. The bad news is that FastStone recently removed it from the freeware category. I have version 5.3 which was free. Now, if you want the new version 5.5, you have to pay.

Pidgin 2.0 is what used to be GAIM. With the new name comes a new logo and much less confusion for me when I’m trying to open the correct program (GAIM or AIM) when the icons look virtually identical. I haven’t used the new Pidgin much yet, but it seems to be the old GAIM with mostly (needed) cosmetic changes.

Safari for Windows. I’ve seen various reviews and saw little reason to feel inspired, but I figured I would give it a try since I generally keep around just about every available browser.

My current browser rankings are as follows:
1 – Firefox 2.0.0.4
T2 – IE7
T2 – SeaMonkey 1.1.2
4 – K-Meleon 1.02
5 – Opera 9.10
6 – Maxthon

Having used Safari for a little while, I’m not exactly sure where to rank it. It does seem to render pages faster. The in-page find function is nice. And I like that I can re-size a text box (although it seems to allow this to an obscene and detrimental degree as I was able to drag this textbox under other page elements). But in most other regards, it seems a bit clunky. Bookmarks are hard to handle. It uses a ton of RAM (230MB right now). Windows are difficult to re-size. And what may be the worst thing of all, the keyboard shortcut for switching tabs is Ctrl-{. In reality, that is Ctrl-Shift-[. What the fuck were they thinking? And why on Earth are the dialog boxes animated? How do you brag about having the fastest page-rendering speeds and claim to have a browser that “gets out of your way” and then go and program in a piddly-shit animation that slows people down?

And of course it doesn’t have any of the handy extensions that have made Firefox so valuable. And it has something that says “check spelling while typing” but it doesn’t pick up anee speling missteaks. On the upside, it is perhaps the best piece of Apple software that is on my computer, not that it says very much. I think it may see some additional action on my computers, but probably less than IE7 and SeaMonkey.