Software Giveaway: Active Desktop Calendar 7.27

This fully customizable calendar with notes, tasks, alarms and contacts provides seamless integration and interactivity with the desktop background. You can organize your data in layers and share them with other people on a local area network.

The program can integrate with Outlook to show its appointments and tasks on the desktop. There are options for changing calendar icons, fonts and colors, marking weekdays of choice and marking dates with notes and/or alarms. You can have a text only version of the calendar and choose between displaying one, two or three months on the desktop.

Recurrence patterns are available for both notes and alarms. An alarm can be stand alone or attached to a note. If interactive desktop option is enabled, the program accepts direct clicks on dates, notes and tasks displayed on the desktop. You can set each note to normal, private or invisible desktop view. Private notes are displayed as generic text reminder and
invisible notes are not displayed at all.

Printing calendar data is easy and includes an option to choose date range for printing notes. Built-in address book allows you to maintain detailed information about all your contacts, personal and business alike.

Importing contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Address Book is possible.

Google Calendars are supported through direct connection with their iCal addresses. Special desktop pictures option will let you add some of your pictures to existing desktop background. For importing and exporting calendar data the program supports iCal and comma separated values CSV formats. Tablet PC users should not worry as the program detects desktop orientation changes automatically. Finally, Active Desktop Calendar comes with world clock screen saver that shows your computer's system time, plus five major time zones around the world.

Features:
Blends data with desktop wallpaper
Calendar, notes, tasks, alarms, contacts
Many recurrence patterns for notes/alarms
Interactive desktop interface
Fully customizable (icons, fonts, colors)
Data export/import/print (CSV, iCal)
Included preset calendars with holidays
Detects Tablet PC desktop orientation
Dual/multi monitor systems supported
Group calendar data in layers
Share data layers on a local area network
Direct connection with Outlook®
Google® calendar support
Automatic data backup
Many icons available for marking notes

Download Full Version(divshare)
Download Full Version(zizfile)

Software Website

Miro 1.0 Delivers the Video Web to Your Desktop

In an ideal world, every video, movie and TV show you ever wanted to
watch would be available for download direct from the source and you
could watch it where ever you pleased. But as long as that world
remains a fantasy, Miro 1.0 may well be your best alternative.

Miro is essentially an online video browser, aggregator and player.
Find content you like, turn it into a channel in Miro and the software
will monitor RSS feeds, alerting you whenever new videos are posted.
Once they download via the built in BitTorrent client, watch the videos
right inside the Miro player. Pretty much like you imagine internet TV
should be. The software is free, cross-platform and open-source.

On Tuesday morning, Miro released version 1.0 of its client. The
release comes after a long period of beta testing during which the app
has gained a cult following. If you’ve been using the recent preview
releases, you'll know what to expect, but if you haven’t checked out
Miro since it changed its name from Democracy Player, there’s a bunch
of new stuff to discover.

As part of the release, Miro has put a nice list of features, inspired by and somewhat similar to the one Apple released for Leopard.

For a full review of Miro, check out our earlier write up, but here’s run down of some new and often overlooked features:

• Video Format Support — Miro claims it can play
  just about anything, MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media,
  Flash Video, and more. I've yet to encounter a file that didn't play in
  Miro.

• Video Playlists and Watched Folders — We raved about this feature
  last time and nothing has changed. Even if you aren’t grabbing all your
  video content through Miro, just tell the app where you’re storing it
  and it’ll show up in your playlists regardless of where you got it.

• BitTorrent and RSS support — Miro can download
  individual BitTorrent files and torrents that are in feeds and you can
  subscribe to any video RSS feed you like. There’s even a setting to
  auto-download new videos whenever they show up in a subscribed feed.

• Saved Search Channels — like smart folders
  essentially. If you search for a something specific across sites and
  you like the results, you can add it as a channel and new videos will
  appear that meet the saved search criteria.

• Social site integration — Got a video you like
  and want to tell the world? Every video in Miro has quick links to post
  to Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and Video Bomb.

Miro 1.0 also takes a bold stand against main competitor Joost. The
revamped front door of the site has a huge banner reading "Better Than
Joost."

In terms of interface and functionality, Miro has Joost beat (unless you're really big on chatting while you watch videos). However, Joost has a slight edge when it comes to exclusive content.

Of course the value of Joost's exclusive content is open to debate
as it depends entirely on individual taste. Perhaps as a step toward
the aforementioned utopia, someone will figure out a way to get Joost's
content into Miro's interface, but as far as I can tell that’s not
possible at the moment.

Still, when it comes to searching, finding and actually watching video, Miro is head and shoulders above Joost.

Download Miro 1.0

Source

Making Menu Transparent using Compiz

Compiz brings a lot of bling to the Linux desktop, but with such an
extensive selection of configurable features, it can sometimes be
difficult to figure out how to take advantage of specific
functionality. Several readers have asked me how to use Compiz to make
menus and tooltips transparent, so I figured I'd share this trick with
the Open Ended audience.

In order to set up menu transparency, users will need the Compiz
Config Settings Manager, which can be acquired on Ubuntu by installing
the compizconfig-settings-manager package. Users can launch the utility
from the command line or from the GNOME Preferences menu. The settings
manager contains a number of tiles that provide access to various
plugins and features included in Commpiz. To set menu transparency,
select the General Options tile and navigate to the Opacity Settings
tab. Expand the Window Opacities section and click the Add button. A
small dialog window will open and prompt for window specification and
the desired opacity.

In the Opacity Windows text field, you have to input a
pipe-separated list of window types to which you want to apply the
transparency. I use the following string:

Tooltip | Menu | PopupMenu | DropdownMenu

Then I set the Opacity Window Values field to 90 to indicate that
windows of the previously specified types should be 90 percent opaque
and 10 percent transparent.

You can also use more elaborate window matching strings that use
window class, role, and title. For instance, I like to make all of my
Pidgin conversation windows slightly transparent, but not the buddy
list. In order to do that, I assign 95 percent opacity to all windows
that use the Pidgin class and use the buddy list window title to
exclude it from the match list. This is the string I use in the Opacity
Windows text box for my Pidgin transparency:

class=Pidgin & !title=Buddy List

You can also use these window matching strings with the Compiz
Window Rules plugin to automatically make certain windows adhere to
certain behaviors when they are created. For more information about
Compiz window matching rules, check out the documentation at the Compiz wiki.

Source