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Towards bettering the digital life

This edition of NetSpeak features a few tools that could enhance your digital life productivity.

Downloading resources from the net is a common task among netizens. To help you download and archive the downloaded materials efficiently, several tools are in place.

These tools, generally referred to as download managers, help us download files several times faster than the conventional browser-based downloads. Also, they help us organise the downloaded resources in specified folders automatically. As regular readers of this column would know, NetSpeak has already featured several such tools (like DL-Expert, StarDownloader and the like) in the past.

While traditional download managers are quite effective in downloading resources from a Web or FTP server, they fail to download resources from the new Web 2.0 services like YouTube or free file storage services such as Rapidshare. So, we have to hunt for a generic download manager that can download not only from the usual web links but also from the new emerging services. The rich media downloader, Orbit, is one such tool that could come handy for this purpose.

Apart from providing the usual features (such as resuming the disconnected download task, accelerated download with multi-threaded downloading), Orbit comes bundled with features for downloading from social content storage/sharing sites such as YouTube, GoogleVideo, Pandora Radio and so on.

To download from a video-sharing site, first play the video to be downloaded; then, at the top of the movie window, you will find Orbit’s icon. Just click on this icon, Orbit will fetch the video URL and start downloading it.

Yet another advantage of this free, open-source, download tool is its facility to download metalink downloads. Many popular web resources are available on multiple servers (such as Web, FTP, BitTorrent). However, we fail to take advantage of this facility as we can download only from one of the available sources, with conventional downloading tools. If the downloading from a source fails due to some server error, we cannot move to another source and resume the download process automatically. Metalink is a solution to this issue.

Metalink technology allows a resource provider to combine all the download links available to the resource into a text file in a standard format, readable by a download manager. This format enables the publisher to incorporate error correction facility also. So, for a metalink resource, we get the link to a ‘metalink’ file and the download manager with metalink support does the rest. Here, the advantage is that the download tool can switch to the next source in the list, in case the current one fails. For more details, access here: http://www.metalinker.org/implementation.html and here: http://en.wikipedia. org/ wiki/Metalink.

For managing files, Windows users generally use Windows Explorer that comes along with it. Windows Explorer, albeit a good tool, has several shortcomings. For instance, it is very difficult to spot the folders that occupy maximum space on one’s hard drive from a single window. Also, if one wishes to find the different locations, where files of a particular type (say MP3) are distributed across the hard disk, this is not possible with Windows Explorer.

The free file management tool WinDirStat (http://windirstat.info/) could help you overcome such shortcomings. The software scans your disk and displays all the folders with the share of space occupied by each of them. Alongside each folder/file, a coloured rectangle (with the area proportional to the size of the folder/file) is also seen.

In addition, the program provides an extension list that helps you easily spot the distribution of files of a specific type.

Yet another folder/file management tool worth a try is Folder Scout ( http://www.folderscout.com/ ), a software meant for accessing folders/files on your desktop with ease. Once the program is installed/set-up properly, you can access any folder or file on your local storage by just typing down a part of its name. As soon as y ou start entering a string, the system displays all the folders/files with this string in their names.

A variety of freeware office suites are available on different flavours (Open Office, Portable Office and the like). Floppy Office ( http://www.xtort.net/office-and-pr oductivity/floppy-office/ ) is one such freeware in this genre. This suite of programs that can be placed on a floppy or USB stick comes bundled with a wide range of office productivity tools (like Rich Text -RTF- editor, mail client, spreadsheet program, PDF creator and so on). Besides this product, ‘Xtort’ hosts lots of valuable, free applications. Regular visit to this service could fetch you rich dividends.

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