The Innovation Mantra

Adapting, evolving, innovating… Freeware grows up.

Ever heard of the term “bat walking”? Well, it is a nocturnal activity indulged in by bug-eyed humanoid insomniacs and batty naturalists scouting for bats (those nasty looking winged mammals of the Chiropetra order). Instead of binoculars, the bat walker breed carry high-frequency listening devices to monitor their subjects' echolocation activities. I find myself congenitally very similar to bat walkers in my nocturnal routines. Only I equip myself with a high-bandwidth Internet locomotion contraption to get a fix on the IP location of innovative and adaptive technological coding activity across various latitudes. Here are a few of my recent discoveries…

Democracy Player
http://participatoryculture.org
www.getdemocracy.com
DP is a new wave desktop app for watching internet TV. A free and open source programme, it improves and enhances the video over the Internet experience by letting you subscribe to video RSS feeds, podcasts, or video blogs, or explore free Net TV channels. It allows you to download and save video from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video etc. You can watch your video downloads full screen, one after the other by arranging them in a playlist in a single app.

Touted as the only player you need on your PC, DP plays QuickTime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID etc. formats. It permits you to browse and organise your video collection as well as generate playlists. Wah bhai wah! Everything—including the interface—is quite hunky dory, but watch what the narrow nostrils of your bandwidth permit!

Hamachi
http://www.hamachi.cc
If you want to set up a personal little Virtual Private Network of your own, this is it. (A VPN is a private network that employs public telecommunication infrastructure but maintains privacy via protocols and security procedures.) An awesomely tidy piece of code, Hamachi sits unobtrusively in the background and manages secure (AES-256 encrypted) connections between a group of PCs that you approve. Available for Windows XP, 2000 and Linux. Remote desktop dalliances, file sharing fellowships, global gaming… that’ll be a good VPN beginning.

Surprisingly, you don’t have to get your noddy neural noodle in a twist with gibberish like IPSec, SSH, SSL, PPTP while setting this up… Hamachi requires virtually zero configuration and is up and running in minutes! The graphical user interface is easy to use and a first-timers wizard explains how to get things done. Go man, go…

StrokeIt
www.tcbmi.com/strokeit
Nope, this is not about petting your fur-faced (Tommy, Tipsy, Tipu?) canine companion. StrokeIt is “mouse gesture” recognition software. Mouse gestures are uncomplicated symbols that you "draw" on your computer screen using your mouse. This software identifies the gesture and performs the "action" associated with that gesture, thereby providing you shortcuts and saving you the time/effort (and the carpal tunnel syndrome) of wading-clicking through menus.

For each gesture recognised, StrokeIt executes a user-defined set of commands within the active application. It is pre-programmed with over 80 gestures for the more ubiquitous programs like Photoshop, Firefox, Internet Explorer, WinRAR etc. But trust me you can easily train it to recognize mouse gestures for any software—as well as customise it to your suit your needs.

Songbird
www.songbirdnest.com
Find that an odd name? Then what say you for its developer’s moniker--Pioneers of the Inevitable! But that’s beside the point. Songbird is a rather radical desktop Web media player, browser cum jukebox. It integrates your local and Web music libraries into one amalgamated audio player. Yes, you can play audio files directly off the Web and add them to you playlists as well.

Some of you will find it quite akin to iTunes, but it is much more mature and much faster. Some of you will find it quite akin to Winamp in supporting extensions and skins (or should we say feathers?), but it is in quite a different league. Just try the search-and play-on-the-spot feature and you will love it. Gripe zone? Stability.