Fresh Favourites
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 1, 2003
Weed out old bookmarks with AM-DeadLink, writes Rose Vines.
AM-DeadLink 1.4
From: www.aignes.com/products.htm
Price: Free
Browser Bookmarks or Favourites are one of the most useful surfing tools. Without bookmarks most of us would have to plaster our screens with Post-It Note reminders of sites worth revisiting. With bookmarks, those reminders get neatly filed away within the browser itself.
Over time, that list of bookmarks can become unwieldy and out-of-date. That's when it's time to launch AM-DeadLink. This free Windows utility displays a list of all your bookmarks and, with a click of the Check Bookmarks button, quickly contacts each site to ensure it's still functioning. AM-DeadLink also lets you weed out duplicate bookmarks.
To use AM-DeadLink, close your browser, run the bookmark check and click the Sort Bookmarks With Errors button. This will group sites according to their status: unreachable (file not found), redirected to a new address, and so on. To delete outdated sites, hold down the Ctrl key while you click each site's name, then click the wastebasket icon on the toolbar. Next, click the Find Duplicates button and delete one of each duplicate found.
Gazo DigiBook
From: www.kuraemon.com/gazo/us
Price: Free
There are plenty of programs that let you organise your photos into albums. DigiBook distinguishes itself in a number of ways. First, it features a cool although definitely non-standard design, with the photo albums arranged in a bookshelf and a graphic desktop for working with snaps and albums. Second, it lets you add sound clips to each photo, making it easy to catalogue your shots. Finally, it's free.
You'll need to read the help notes and spend some time exploring DigiBook to get a grip on the unusual design, but it's certainly fun to work with, if not highly efficient.
Oriens Enhancer 1.01
From: www12.brinkster.com/greenkhan/enhancer.asp
Price: Free
Oriens Enhancer delivers a collection of graphics editing tools for which you would expect to pay big bucks. Admittedly, this free software has a few rough edges, but nothing too disabling.
The program lets you view and open images in 40 different formats and save images in any of 20 commonly used formats. It also contains all of the standard editing tools - paintbrushes, pencils, rollers, fill, crop, rotate, resize, colour palettes and so on. Then comes the cream: a generous collection of filters, tools and utilities which let you do everything from emboss an image to capture screenshots.
What about those rough edges? Well, there's no help provided, so you will have to don your explorer's hat. A couple of items on some of the menus don't work. And you may have to first deselect then reselect items in the Views Menu in order to display all the toolbars.
If you've used a graphics editor before, none of those problems should prevent you from having a ball with Oriens Enhancer.
Jardinains
From: www.jardinains.com
Price: Donation-ware
Breakout was a simple but immensely popular game before games turned into 3-D reality shows. Since those early days there have been a couple of truly brilliant Breakout knock-offs, including DXBall and MozPong. Now you can add Jardinains to that list.
Jardinains bills itself as being "like Breakout, but with more gnome bouncing" - a pretty accurate description. The object is to use your bat and ball to break all the "bricks" in a level, then do the same on the next level, and so on. Your task is made easier by grabbing power-ups such as magnets and ball multipliers. It's made harder by the gnomes intent on crowning you with pot plants.
It sounds wacky, and it is, but it's also beautifully done and totally addictive.
Palmdownload
Palm Lemmings 4.1
From: www.ardiri.com/index.php?redir=palm &cat=lemmings
Price: Free training levels
Lemmings was one of the all-time great games and it translates surprisingly well to the tiny screen of the Palm. The goal is to lead a herd of lemmings through a series of hazards and on to the next level. To help your little tribe of rodents on their way you can endow individual lemmings with skills such as bridge building, floating, climbing and bombing.
Aaron Ardiri and his team have gone to great lengths to mimic the original. The game runs on almost any Palm device with Palm Operating System 3.1 or later. The base game is free; add-on levels will cost you.
© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald