January 12, 2007
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Nerd Software Roundup
There’s this nifty thing called Inquisitor. It’s a live web search as you type. It works in the Safari search box. The developer calls it ‘Spotlight for the web.’
I don’t like it, though. It slows things down for me. I’m unlike other people, though, so maybe it’ll rock your world. Maybe if it were more configurable, or you could easily turn it off if you didn’t want it. It seems that Safari will let developers do stuff like this, but doesn’t give them a way to change settings.
There’s also this nifty lightweight graphics viewer/editor called DeltaLab, which is for Windows. I’m linking to it because it will decode Pentax PEF files. I’ve never used it, but I would certainly give it a try if I was one of you Windows folks.
There’s also some KDE software I tried out, called DigiKam. KDE is a linux desktop system, and what iPhoto is to Mac, digikam is to KDE. I had to install a proverbial buttload of stuff to get it working. The attraction: It stores tags and keywords in the files themselves, as EXIF and IPTC metadata. This is important to me. Unfortunately, digikam wants to collect all image files in one place, like iPhoto does. So its main strength (distributed data, stored per-file) is countervailed by its main weakness (you don’t get to store the files wherever you want to).
It’s nice software, though, if a bit annoying around the edges. Clicking on an image opens the editor. I just wanted to select it, d00d…. Anyway.
Also, there’s a new fink install of exiv2, which makes me happy. Time to start scripting.
Update: Oh, and I forgot one thing, presented here for fink users who want to launch digikam and/or other KDE software, without launching the whole desktop manager thing. The command line you’re looking for is
open-x11 kdeinit digikam –no-kded –suicide
Leave off the –suicide part if you don’t want KDE to quit after you’re done with the application. In practice, it doesn’t matter that much, though.
There’s also one more: Paw, which is exactly what I’m looking for, but requires QT4, and I’m at the end of my rope with installing GUI libraries and other assorted similar crap.
Comments (4)
thanks for the deltalab link…
I try not to get addicted to new toys. Old fogey that I am.
Firefox 2.0 has something like Inquisitor built into the search box, offering suggestions for search terms as you type. It can be disabled, but it doesn’t really slow things down, so I leave it on. It’s very neatly tied into Google, so if you type in a simple conversion, like “92 grams in stones” or “3 light years in furlongs”, the answer pops up without ever having to actually go to Google.
I feel your paing re: Digikam.. I had the same problem with FSpot, a similar app for Gnome. FSpot was even more sinister though. It actually had a setting that said ‘leave my images where they are’, and simply ignored it. :/
I like the firefox thing too, and tend to use firefox instead of Safari most of the time. I heard this NPR story yesterday about a new $100 automatic tripod mount that lets you shoot a big scene as series of picture so it can be “zoomed in to.” I thought of you. But now I can’t find anything about it online.