Anamon
You'll find me most actively contributing on software related to my topics of research (video processing, camera technology, mobile development) as well as some of my hobbies (music and films, media production and editing, photography, design and layout, legacy software and old games).
- Level 8
- www.anamon.ch/
Comments & Reviews
Commented on KexiIt looks really promising. I would love an open-source alternative to Microsoft Access, which, for some reason, is still pretty much unchallenged for 30 years and counting. LibreOffice Base is on the right track, but has a lot of usability issues. Kexi looks awesome, SQLite support is a great plus, as is the ability to migrate to/from PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, the project seems to be dormant. The last stable release was in 2019 and, browsing through the commit history, the last years have only...
Commented on Collectorz.com Movie Collector2024 Update: The developers announced earlier this year that the desktop applications will not see any new feature development. There will only be maintenance updates "for as long as it is feasible". They strongly encourage users to move to their cloud-based, web-only applications.
Personally, this is a(nother) dealbreaker for me. For an application where I spend a lot of time entering data, it is completely unacceptable to me to not have this data stored locally and under my control. I'd...
Commented on Embarcadero Dev-C++On the Embarcadero website, you're asked to share your personal information before receiving the download link. However, you can download without registration from the project's GitHub releases.
Reviewed HxDIn my experience, this is the best hex editor for Windows. Of course, it has all the needed tools and settings. You have lots of options to customise the view, there are powerful search and diff features. You can calculate checksums, open drive images, and even memory snapshots.
But what really sets a hex editor apart from the rest is, in my opinion, the speed at which it handles large files. And HxD has one of the cleanest, best-performing large-file implementations I've ever seen. You really...
Reviewed AnyDVDAnyDVD HD works. Rarely is it almost sufficient to know that much about a software.
I own many relatively obscure commercial Blu-rays, but also sometimes want to watch rather new ones. Both of those properties can be a problem when trying to watch them on a PC the usual way, using a key database, because often the keys for those discs won't have been shared yet. I don't know how it does what it does, but simply having AnyDVD HD running in the background, so far I didn't encounter a single...
Commented on Bluhell FirewallUnfortunately, this add-on has so far not been ported to WebExtensions, so it's incompatible with Firefox Quantum (versions 57 and up).
Reviewed MessengerTerrible, terrible, terrible. Facebook Messenger is slow and a battery hog. On my Xperia XZ1 Compact, it was sometimes responsible for almost 50% of my battery drain – even if I never opened the app on that day, and didn't get any messages. The same was the case on my three previous Android phones as well. Just to clarify once more: I was able to almost double the battery life of all of my smartphones by simply uninstalling Facebook Messenger. Who knows what the heck this thing is doing in the...
Commented on TeamViewerTeamViewer is free for personal use only, and it uses certain rules to try and determine if someone is violating those terms. If they suspect your use is not personal, you will get a message saying that they suspect, or even think they're sure, that you're using TeamViewer commercially. From that moment on, the software will be severely restricted by closing every session after about 10 seconds.
After years of using TeamViewer to access my home desktop while I'm ouf of the house, I somehow...
Reviewed BandcampI would refer to Bodik's review for everything that is great about Bandcamp, both for artists and listeners. This is the way forward, and the way music distribution should be done. Moving away from the climate of threats, fear, distrust, bullying and downright scamming that the major labels and distributors have cultivated for decades, especially in light of their failure to adapt to a digital marketplace. Instead: mutual respect, trust and support, with a healthy and rational attitude. As I...
Reviewed SkypeSkype was pretty terrible from the start, but it has been completely devastated through recent updates. The UWP version of the client was (like almost every UWP app) an entirely unusable, feature-free toy that wasn't useful for anything, but at least we could use the legacy desktop version. Now my Windows 7 client was updated to a similarly horrible version that won't let me do any of the things I used to do in Skype anymore.
It's one of those mind-bogglingly bloated Electron applications,...
Reviewed gmasterThe interface is very nice, the semantic merging engine great. Everything looks really well thought-through, and it's a joy to work with.
That being said, there are a few functionalitites I consider pretty basic for real-world, day-to-day use, that are still missing from gmaster at this point. For instance, while the branch explorer is very nice and quite helpful in some situations, sometimes I'd rather have a simple list of branches to switch between them, rather than having to search for...
Commented on IDAIf you're a bit confused (as I was) why this is listed as "Free Personal": the main versions of IDA are not, they are offered as time-limited trials, only. However, if you open the Support section of the website and go to Downloads from there, you will find a version that is declared as Freeware, and free for non-commercial use. It's not the latest version (currently v7.0, almost a year old) and not the Professional edition – for those, you'll have to buy a license.
Reviewed JoplinI think I have found my OneNote replacement. After Microsoft announced that OneNote is being deprecated, and its replacement is probably never going to support offline notebooks, I was looking for something new, mostly a tool that would still let me decide where I store my own data (the fact that it's 2018 and Microsoft still doesn't understand this need, or has forgotten about its importance, is baffling).
Joplin offers desktop clients as well as pretty full-featured mobile apps. This...
Reviewed Microsoft OneNoteSunset – better stop using it now!
Microsoft has announced that OneNote is no longer going to be part of Office 2019, so OneNote 2016 will be the last ever version. It's going to be supported until 2020, then it's over. One of many sources: RCP Mag
What Microsoft wants you to use instead is the UWP/Windows 10 version of the OneNote app. Of course, as everyone who has ever tried using it knows, that little...
Reviewed RateBeerI have a love-hate relationship with RateBeer. Almost everything that can be attributed to how the site is created and run, I love, while I seem to be really, really deeply incompatible with the predominant tastes of its community.
By sheer size, there is no better place on the web to learn about beers and breweries. The amount of information is decent and helps you categorise, know what to expect from a particular beer, or help discover your next favourite. The number of beers (both current...
Reviewed QobuzQobuz is a music streaming service and download store focussed on audio quality. It's still relatively unknown, which has a lot to do with the fact that it hasn't been very widely available. So far, the service was only available in France, Benelux, Great Britain, and the German-speaking countries. However, with the January 2018 news that the service is going to be available in the United States before the end of the year, this felt like a good moment to add a first review here. Is Qobuz...
Reviewed SpotifyThis is an updated review to trump my previous one.
After having been a Spotify member for 4+ years, I finally cancelled my account in frustration.
To anyone considering it as their next music streaming service, consider this: while the offer may look decent on the surface, and everything they promise is technically there, the low quality of their software and their absolutely abysmal customer support will ensure that you'll get more frustration than anything else.
What Spotify seem...
Reviewed SpyHunterThe developers of SpyHunter, and/or their affiliates, are spamming the web with countless nonsensical pages that pretend to describe malware and how to remove it. What they do is copy all the names from the malware dictionaries of virus scanners like Microsoft Security Essentials, and paste that name into always the same walls of text containing the same nonsensical (sometimes in barely understandable English) content.
In effect, they try to scare people into installing their software. The...
Reviewed Microsoft EdgeI appreciate the effort, but no.
The browser looks nice, feels fast, and the rendering engine seems decent. Microsoft obviously tried to catch up, and had some good intentions behind it. There are even some very nice features that feel new, like the tab stash that I haven't seen as a stock feature in any other browser yet (stash all of your open tabs and close them, then open that stash back later to go through it). It makes sense considering the way I browse the web, and I could very much...
Reviewed SketchUpAfter having tried more than a dozen tools to visually plan how to furnish an apartment, Sketchup remains the only really usable one. Which is saying something, considering it's buggier than a rat's nest! Freezes, memory leaks, access violations, you name it, it's got them all. The number of times this program crashed on me (rarely in the same way twice) while preparing the layout of just one apartment is amazing. Luckily, it has an auto-save feature, so I never lost more than a few minutes...
Reviewed BackBlazeLong story short: for all of Backblaze's marketing talk about security and end-to-end encryption, that is only the case if you never need to restore anything from your backup! Which is, of course, not the point of doing backups.
The idea behind end-to-end encryption is this: you use a private key to encrypt your files locally, before sending them to Backblaze servers. They only ever store the encrypted data, and, since they don't know your private key, have no reasonable way to decrypt...
Commented on HainIt looks like a very nice tool and handles beautifully. However, the internal package manager used to install plugins seems to be broken. I can't list, find, or install any packages, because it gets stuck at "Please wait, fetching available packages…". The repository seems to be up, so it seems to be the plugin's fault.
While packages can be downloaded from a browser, there are no installation instructions whatsoever (apart from the package manager method which is broken, of course). I tried...
Commented on Adobe Acrobat DCI just saw the current pricing for Acrobat DC, and I'm not even sure if Adobe are just pulling our legs at this point. They're asking $30/mt. for the full package. Given the generally abysmal quality of the software, that might be somewhat justifiable for a lifetime license. But a monthly recurring fee? They have to be kidding. Acrobat is outclassed and outperformed by pretty much every third-party offering out there, and I don't think any of them exceed $200 for a one-time payment (excluding...
Commented on FlashBackEdit: This information is outdated as of August 2018, please see the comments below!
FlashBack is still the screen recorder software I would most recommend. However, this is just a quick heads-up that features are now starting to be removed from the free Express version. Maybe the developer has some cashflow problems, with not enough users upgrading to a paid version, so they feel the need to restrict the free version more. And because even the free version requires an online activation,...