Motiv Designs

It has been a long time coming, mainly because I run several Drupal sites under one multi-site, and had to update the main install first, but I have finally updated the site to Drupal 6. Drupal 5 is basically out of date at this point, as community development on Drupal 7 is already in the works. There are some basic enhancements that have been made to Drupal 6 that make it a much better CMS, right out of the box so to speak.

ImgBurn is a free image burning software that allows the burning of CD, DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray discs. It has a pretty slick interface, and should be pretty straightforward. If you are confused, you can check out their website. *Update 3/22/2010 - This software now contains spyware in it's installation files which cannot be turned off. This is in the latest version 2.5.1.0. Previous versions don't seem to have included the spyware. It is advised not to use this software at this point. I have removed all links to the site and files at this point.

Teamspeak is a great application to have around for keeping your hands free of typing while trying to chat with a group of people. All you need is a mic and some speakers, or a headset. This app is mostly used for gaming, but can be used for groups of virtually unlimited amounts of people, as long as you are NOT selling slots on the server. You can also license the software which allows you to do so, but we are pimping the fact that you can use this for talking to large amounts of people as long as you have the right codec set, or bandwidth available. I personally have been using Teamspeak for over 8 years, and it has always satisfied my needs for communication with my gaming friends and other friends online. It is much less commercialized than Ventrilo, and therefore makes my list of favorite files. It is more of an app for the community.

Mozilla Thunderbird is the awesome email counterpart to the ever popular Mozilla Firefox browser. Mozilla has once again created a great, free, open source emailing client. It has built in learning capabilities to combat spam, and can handle multiple email accounts. Aside from that, the Mozilla community also creates addons for Thunderbird, just like they do for Firefox. This means you can extend the already great functionality of the Thunderbird email client to fit more of your personal needs.

Lynx is a text browser that is used to browse the World Wide Web. Lynx is often used by web developers, and is even suggested by Google to identify and troubleshoot problems with how a web spider might see a particular webpage. The Lynx browser is no way the latest and greatest browser on the web, but it does continue to serve a very useful purpose to the web community.

As you may have already known, the Google SOAP API key that powered the Digital Point keyword tracker and many other keyword ranking tools on the web was discontinued by Google on August 31st 2009. Immediately there was a frenzy on the Digital Point forums about this. Digital Point owner Shawn Hogan was quick to jump on the scene and said he would be looking for a fix as soon as possible.

Adobe Air is the new buzz in the application world as it allows for developers to design their applications around one framework, instead of having to port their program to many platforms. Adobe Air applications are usually fairly small, and most update themselves automatically when needed. Overall it is a pretty solid piece of software, and if you check out the applications that are out there for it, you will see what the buzz is all about.

Opera is one of the older browsers on the web, and didn't always used to be totally free. In it's early day's it was supported by ads which would run in the header of the program. Well, times have changed, and Opera has smartened up to the fact that a browser has to be free in order for it to be popular. Nobody is going to pay, or want to have extra ads thrown in their face for using the most basic of tools to access the web. They have gone even further than imagined with their latest release, which essentially turns your browser into a social networking hub. This enables you to share files with your friends easily, chat, and become your own server that you can connect to from anywhere in the world. It seems like a pretty cool idea, but time will tell how effective it is for their browser.

Open Office is the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, and does a great job of competing with it's commercial rival. You can open most, if not all Microsoft documents in Open Office with minimal formatting errors, and even save documents in Microsoft formats that open up pretty well in Office. Open Office also comes with a word processor like Microsoft Word, a spreadsheet component like Microsoft Excel, and a presentation component like Microsoft Powerpoint. Open Office even comes with a drawing component that has some nice options to create your own digital art. The only thing Open Office seems to lack right now is database capability like Microsoft Access, but not everyone needs that anyway.

DiffMerge is a useful tool for comparing 2 of the same text files, and merging the differences if you want. It is great for keeping track of the changes between different versions of configuration files, html files, and even revisions in documents. Diffmerge integrates with the Windows explorer, which allows for easy right clicking and merging files within the Windows explorer. It is highly configurable allowing rulesets and options to provide customized appearance and behavior. Diffmerge is also available in 42 different languages and has the same features across multiple platforms including Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.