Miro 0.9.8

The Democracy Media Player is now known as Miro, following user feedback that the name was misleading. The new name should be without any political intrigue, and although a Google search for the term "miro" yields their official website at the sixth spot, over time it should gain PageRank and move up in the listings.

I downloaded the preliminary version that they're calling "Public Preview". It looks pretty much identical to Democracy, with the same Apple-esque interface and the same features as before. However, their website states that there are many small changes, including a memory leak fix. You can get the latest use at the Miro blog.

Good luck to those at the Participatory Software Foundation with Miro!

Official Site:

http://www.getmiro.com/

FullSync 0.9.1

FullSync is an excellent program for synchronization and backing up of important files. Most people will find it most useful to use it to backup essentials on a USB drive, but I also use it to sync any development projects across different computers.

It's very flexible, with great features. Fullsync allows users to choose which files to update (through simple clicking or advanced regular expression filtering), supports scheduled backups, and even handles backups over networking with a variety of protocols (ftp, sftp, samba).

I've never had a problem with FullSync, it runs extremely stable and fast. Highly recommended.

Official Site:
http://fullsync.sourceforge.net

Abiword 2.4.6

Abiword is a lightweight, robust word processor that easily replaces Microsoft Word. It supports a wide variety of open and proprietary word processing formats and languages.

Although it can't save documents with the .doc extension (due to Microsoft's closed source proprietary file format), Abiword can save as documents as Rich Text Format files and then wrap them to look like a .doc file, effectively enabling users to switch between Word and Abiword seemlessly. It'll also open .doc documents fairly well, as long as there are no complicated tables or figures.

As a member of my university's tech support, I have a lot of students come in who want to type up essays for their foreign language classes, and Abiword tends to be the best solution, especially for languages that have text running from left to right.

The lack of macros makes Abiword extremely secure; Microsoft Word allows macros, which although helpful for advanced users, mostly serves as a method for virus transmission for the majority of people who just want a no frills word processor.

The well designed user interface should be very familiar and intuitive to anyone who has used any office productivity software, and the keyboard shortcuts are all the same.

Highly recommended.

Official Site:
http://www.abiword.com

Similar Software:
OpenOffice