ZipSearch

I started to make a Firefox add-on and wanted to lookup a few things in the source code of Firefox. But all the source is inside a jar file and I haven’t found any software to search content inside Jar or Zip files. There a plenty where you can search for file names, but none inside the text files in the zipped file.

So I decided to program one for myself. As a Java programmer it was quite fast to get any result. By the first version, which I put to sourcefourge, you can search directories with many Jar’s or Zip’s and search content inside the zip file.

Current version of ZipSearch is 0.0.1

Multimedia

Multimedia is everywhere. So for playing music I use songbird 1.2, which has a similar look and feel as iTunes. It is running on Linux and Windows and playing mp3, wma and more. Currently it is a bit slow at startup (especially on Windows), but this might be fixed with a new release. Otherwise it is intuitive usable and can synchronize between iTunes and others (but I haven’t tried yet).

For playing videos I use the ubuntu-default player Totem, which I haven’t had any problem to watch a movie. So far I could play .flv (Flash), wmv (Windows Media File), avi, and many more (see Totem homepage).

I guess almost everybody has a digital photo camera. And these photos you want to watch, edit and publish in the web. For this I like F-Spot most, because of its export capability. With this function you can resize a bunch of photos or publish it at PicasaWeb, Flichr or other. A more detailed edit software is GIMP. GIMP is a powerful image manipulation program, which is also available on Windows.

Office programs

Most people know, that OpenOffice 3.0 can read, write and edit MS Office documents, like Word, Excel or Powerpoint documents. Personally I like it more than Word, because it’s organized better with style sheets etc. So I use it also on my Windows office PC.

Firefox 3.5 is a fast, relable and adjustable Internet browser. There are nice add-ons, but I’ll write about that in another blog.

For most a email client is an essential office program. I do not use Evolution, which is installed by default in ubuntu 8.10. I use Thunderbird 2.0 with Lightning extension. I like to use same programs on linux and Windows, if possible. But if you want to use the calendar extension lightning on Linux you need to install libstdc++5; installation is described in ubuntuforums. But in Thunderbird 3 Lightning should be integrated, so this detour hasn’t hopefully done anymore.

Top Linux programs

Many ask me about linux, if I can do specific things, like opening Word documents, edit images and so on. So I would like to make a list in which the most useful programs are listed:

Office programs: writing letters, emails, make internet research

Multimedia programs: playing music, watching movies and editing photos.

Welcome!

Welcome to my site. I would like to use this blog primarily for blogging tipps and hints to computer topics.