If you’re looking for a good open-source media player alternative to iTunes or WMP, consider Songbird. Songbird 1.1 was released today and shows significant improvement over previous versions.
Tommy
Mar 112009
- Image via CrunchBase
The excellent web service drop.io has recently received the most significant added feature upgrade since its launch. From their announcement:
drop.io is now fully realtime enabled. this means realtime rich-media streaming collaboration and chat like never before. in one click set up a drop, invite participants, and seamlessly exchange any media on the fly. With full mobile and third party client support, drop.io is the simplest way to collaborate with exactly whom you want how you want.
Check out the launch site, or get more details. There is also a screencast.
Last week drop.io launched playlist.io, which allows you to stream music (or sermons, or lectures) to whoever you want.
Just a quick note that we just launched a new applet at drop.io called ‘playlist.io’ (http://playlist.io) – it is a dead simple way to post your music to the cloud in 3 clicks, and then stream it basically anywhere you want to play it (home, work, etc) — there is a demo video explaining how to use it at http://drop.io/file/playlistio
using the newly release API base iPhone application ‘droppler’ (http://bit.ly/EmZVc) you can even stream your playlist right to your iphone… there is a bit more at http://drop.io/blog if you are interested.
All in all, drop.io is shaping up to be a very handy way of distributing information. It’s a great place to put sermons, for example, or distribute class or lecture materials (which is one way that I use it). There is also a new app for the iPhone or iPod Touch (http://bit.ly/EmZVc) that integrates with drop.io, which makes all this even more portable!
- Image via Wikipedia
NPR‘s All Things Considered reported yesterday on an interesting web-app that allows churches to write or rearrange hymns and easily distribute new music. It’s called SongMap and is available through LifeWay Worship. NPR explains:
The Southern Baptist Convention has introduced a new Web-based application called SongMap, which allows music ministers to rearrange hymns and contemporary praise songs with a few clicks of the mouse. For example, the traditional hymn “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross” has four verses and four choruses, but the Web site allows a verse to be cut, a chorus to be added or the song to be put in a new key.
When the song is mapped, a window pops up with a dozen alternative segments. Once those are arranged, the score can be printed out for bass guitar, piano and even a trombone. For a fee, you can download the audio of the custom arrangement.
It also takes care of all the licensing and legal stuff for you, and charges you on that basis. Being only moderately musical, I have not tested any of this, but those who lead worship might want to check it out. And feel free to report back in the comments!
It’s been a long time coming, but SBL has finally released their promised Greek Font. The download page is here, or you can download it directly here. There is also a Hebrew font.
The fonts work in all Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, Mac). They are not open-source (so a couple of other fonts are still my top recommendations), but they are free to use:
SBL fonts are made available without cost to individual scholars for non-profit use. Commercial use by publishers is reserved for members of the SBL Font Foundation.
If you haven’t already set up your keyboard to support Unicode Greek, follow my guide (for Macs go here, or for Linux here).
SBL’s Biblical Font FAQ is also worth a read. If you’re not already familiar with the advantages of Unicode (as described, for example, in my guide), you may find their explanation of interest:
Why should I bother with a Unicode font? Isn’t it easier to keep using the fonts I have used for years?
With older, non-Unicode fonts, character glyphs were simply mapped over Roman characters. So, with SPEzra for example, pushing “b” displays a bet, and “[” displays an ayin. However, the computer understands these characters as “b” and “[.” Thus, when the document is transferred to a computer that does not have that specific font installed, the computer displays those characters.
Unicode seeks to allow for transfer of encoded documents between platforms and independent of fonts. So, if a document is typed using one Unicode font, it will also be viewable using another Unicode font. Likewise if the font is not installed, the computer simply defaults to its normal Unicode font. If one wants to use a different font for aesthetic (or other) reasons, one can change the font just like one would do with English. Additionally, the computer understands the characters to be the ones that the screen displays. So, an ayin both displays as an ayin and is encoded that way. This makes cross-platform text transfers and searches possible, because texts can be encoded with the characters in which they are written. Even though learning to switch to and use keyboard layouts for other languages takes a little bit of time to learn, the benefits of Unicode more than make up for this small initial investment of time and effort.
HT: Rod Decker
If you ever type in Greek, Hebrew, or any other language that requires special characters, then you need to make sure you are using a Unicode font. I have written up a pretty thorough guide to using Unicode fonts in Windows and/or Linux, but my Mac knowledge is flaky. If you’re a Mac user and are interested in typing in Greek or Hebrew then follow this guide.
Regardless of your operating system you might also be interested in my introduction to Unicode.
Justin Taylor lists all the ways you can get free access to the ESV.
Mar 052009
Some good news from Microsoft: Office 14 and the next Service Pack for Office 2007 will natively support the OpenDocument format (ODF) used by such software as OpenOffice.org and Google Docs. This open-source format has been adopted as a standard by recognized computing organizations and governments worldwide, succeededing to gain support in many areas that Microsoft’s OpenXML format has failed, which has put pressure on MS to respond with a similarly “open” format.
Cnet reports:
For a company that is happy to list a million reasons why Office is better than OpenOffice or Google Docs or other rivals, Microsoft sure is putting a tremendous amount of effort into working better with those products.
The next version of Office will natively support the OpenDocument format (as will the next service pack for Office 2007). As it is developing the next Office, Microsoft is also documenting every change it is making as part of its commitment to documenting all of Office’s various formats and protocols.
For those unable or unwilling to wait, you can download a plugin for MS Office that will add ODF support now. There is one from Sun (which I am given to understand is the version to be included in Office 2007 SP2 and later) or from the OpenOffice community.
As a follow-up to my previous post, here is an excellent review of some more great PDF conversion and manipulation tools.
Also I am happy to report that I have had good success converting PDF images to plain text with OCR terminal, so give it a try!
Rod Decker and Danny Zacharias have reported about a new unicode Greek font that will be of particular interest to those that need text-critical glyphs. From Zacharias’s blog:
I’ve just been made aware of an excellent Greek unicode font that is the most thorough I have ever come across. Designed for the papyrologist and text-critical scholar in mind. The font is called IFAO-Grec and can be downloaded at the bottom of this page. You will see also a documentation page, which lists all of the extra characters available.
You can download the font here.
Rod Decker mentioned in a comment that the font is offered free of licensing constraints:
The only statements I can find re. licensing issues is that “IFAO-Grec Unicode is issued free of all rights” and: “Elle est gratuite et libre de droits” (~ “It is free and free of copyright”). There does not appear to be any reference to any of the “Open” licenses.
This is not quite the protection I would recommend (see my post about Greek font recommendations) but if you need a full text-critical arsenal, this might be a good option.
For most of us, however, some other open-licensed Unicode font might be preferable. Check out my guide for more information and font recommendations for Greek (and Hebrew).
Mar 032009
It’s pretty easy to add all the various modules and resources available in Bibleworks to your Zotero database. Follow this guide.
