Month: April 2011

Convergence is a free game about life. You play through three stages of someone’s life, making choices for them, and will see how that effects their success and happiness.

Will you compete with your brother and do as your mother says as a baby? How will you balance your job and your girlfriend? With charming 8-but graphics, Convergence is a gentle game with multiple endings that depend on the choices you make in the first stages.

This is an very unusual game, but it’s an interesting experience. Check it out at Kongregate, and make sure you have the latest version of Flash installed.

[via indiegames.com]

2008 was the year of the Great Software Easter Egg hunt on OnSoftware, where we rooted out some of the coolest hidden computer program tricks or secrets (known as Easter eggs) ever made.

But three years is a long time in the tech world, and since then applications have begun moving away from the desktop and into the cloud. It seems that cheeky web app developers are just as keen to hide tasty Easter eggs in modern day online applications, though, just like the wise-cracking software programmers of old.

Don’t worry though folks, I haven’t lost my knack for sniffing out hidden software secrets, and I’m about to blow the lid on the greatest Easter eggs on the web. Happy Easter!

Google Tilt

A hangover from a Google April Fool’s joke this year, this little trick works with Android and iPhone devices. Simply type “Tilt” into Google in your mobile browser and you’ll be presented with a strangely skewed search results page.

Continue reading “The great software Easter egg hunt – web app special!”

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is ideal if you need to edit a document but don’t have it in an editable form. For instance, you may want to use text from a document but only have it in hard copy. OCR software allows you to scan it and then translate the printed characters into something you can edit on your Mac saving you hours of painstaking manual typing. Alternatively, its useful for creating a fully searchable version of a PDF document. Although there aren’t many reliable OCR software tools for Mac, here are some of the best:

VueScan One of the most useful and lightweight scanning tools for Mac is also great for OCR scanning. VueScan is impressively accurate in this respect although it works even better if you download this dictionary of common words. Just place the file (vuedict.dat) in the same directory as the VueScan program and choose the language using the “Output|OCR text language” option.

Adobe Acrobat X Pro Many people are surprised when they learn that Adobe Acrobat also allows OCR scanning of documents. To use it, go to Taskbar Create >> PDF from Scanner and choose any of the 3 document presets (Black & White Document, Grayscale Document, Color Document). These 3 Presets have the OCR option enabled by default so you can get a fully searchable scanned PDF in a single click. For full instructions, check here.

ABBYY FineReader Express If accuracy is extremely important, then ABBYY is one of the most precise OCR readers out there. Its also available in a huge number of languages (171) compared to most OCR software so it will read just about any language. Although accuracy is great, formatting can sometimes be an issue and you may find yourself having to do some manual readjustment. The professional version is more accurate when it comes to formatting however.

PDFPen Although PDFPen is used mainly for annotating PDF documents, it does also feature an OCR function so you’re getting two pieces of software for one. However, unfortunately the accuracy isn’t as great as dedicated OCR software options and you’ll spend a fair amount of time correcting words that have been interpreted wrongly before you can do anything else. However, if you want to electronic signatures to PDF documents or manually annotate them in any way, its a useful two-in-one tool.

Readiris Pro It doesn’t come cheap but Readiris Pro probably has just about every OCR tool and most importantly, is very accurate. Readiris Pro also does a great job of preserving formatting unlike ABBYY FineReader Express. In the past, the interface was quite poor but version 12 has been completely redesigned for Mac OS X with a slicker interface and more helpful step-by-step scanning hints. Readiris Pro is ideal for those that need to publish their freshly scanned OCR documents to the web as it has a handy web publisher too.

One of the rumored features of OSX Lion is iOS-like scrolling. It may not be immediately obvious, but that actually means scrolling will be reversed! On a touchscreen, dragging up moves the page down, whereas the opposite is true on desktops.

You can try this out right now if you have OSX 10.5 or above, with the tiny Scroll Reverser app. It’s easy to install and uninstall, and so far seems to work perfectly. Of course, you will be able to turn it off in Lion, and if my experience is anything to go by, you will probably do just that. There’s something very strange about reverse scrolling with a mouse or trackpad. Even jumping from iOS right onto OSX with reverse scrolling is jarring. However, Apple are masters of designing interfaces, so there must be a good reason for introducing this… I just can’t see it yet!

Try out Scroll Reverser and see if you’re ready for touchscreen-like controls on your desktop!

Cat Astro Phi is a retro Gameboy adventure that you can play in your browser. Traveling through space, your ship is damaged in an meteor storm, and Jonesy the Cat is ejected onto a nearby planet. Can you escape this hostile world and rescue him?

Cat Astro Phi has an excellent 8-bit soundtrack, and it’s impressive how much effort has been put into making a totally new Gameboy style adventure. The tiny graphics are full of character and, though the gameplay is simple, it is fun. Play it over at Newgrounds now!

You’ve tried, contrasted and compared, and by now you’re probably dedicated to your favorite browser. There’s a good chance that browser is one of the big three, in other words, Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome.

What you might not be aware of, however, is how many alternative browsers are out there. There’s a niche for different ways to surf the web, and judging by the number of apps out there, it’s not that small. More browsers means more options for users, and that’s got to be a good thing, right?

So, fancy taking a look at the competitive world of the alternative browser? Excellent! Step this way…

Maxthon was born as MyIE2, an optimized version of Microsoft’s legendary browser. Today it has reached a 3rd version under the name Maxthon. This browser boasts two rendering engines, Trident and WebKit, which guarantees optimal web page viewing, and it also adds extras like ad-blocking and mouse gestures. It’s one of the most popular of the alternative browsers, and with good reason – it’s packed with options!

Pale Moon is an optimized version of Firefox that aims to bring you the best performance on computers running a Windows-based operating system. Compared to Mozilla’s browser, it’s faster and lighter on resources, although being based on Firefox, Pale Moon features the same stability and reliability, as well as support for extensions and themes. A fourth version was recently launched, keeping it bang up to date with Firefox’s latest effort.

Rockmelt is also known as the social browser, and we’ve already mentioned it a few times. Its main advantage is integration with apps like Twitter and Facebook, and truth be told, browsing without having to open new tabs for your social networking is very comfortable. It runs on WebKit, the same engine as Chrome and it’s pretty quick.

Continue reading “Top alternatives to Firefox, Chrome and IE”