Rihards Unplugged

Thought I’d talk for a change about software that I use, and that I wouldn’t part with. RocketDock is something that most Mac users have had for quite a while now, it’s that shiny dock with big glossy icons usually situated at the bottom center of the screen. RocketDock is a windows application which acts and does the same as the Apple Mac OS X.

It even comes with a “Minimize to dock” option, which basically creates a small thumbnail of the application that you just minimised and puts it on the dock, quite nifty and keeps the taskbar clutter free.

The above screenshot shows how I have my RocketDock setup at home. The really cool thing about is that there are lots of styles/skins to chose from, and if you don’t like any of them it’s quite easy to make your own as well. In addition to the styling there are also a lot of behaviour settings and customisation.

It’s a great way to keep you desktop clean, without having to resort to using the start menu which in most cases is very slow, clumsy and you can’t find what you need most of the time either. Plus, RocketDock coupled with some shiny dock icons looks gorgeous as well.

It finally arrived, and quite timely as well, as I was about to leave home for work. So I sign for it, and then realise that I’ve about three minutes to leave for train. Had to leave it all packaged on my table in my room and go to work. Very annoying.

But now I’m back home and have already updated all the software that comes with it, only took me a better part of an hour and close to 500mb in bandwidth. Now I just need to get all the software that I’m still missing for it, and I’ll be ready to start working on it.

An in-depth review with a lot of pictures coming soon.

Until now I’ve been using various combinations of video players, VideoLAN(VLC), Windows Media Player(WMP), mplayer, QuickTime Classic, and so on. As well as having Firefox plugins to download videos from video sites such as YouTube, and of course players that could playback “flv” files as well that come from those sites.

But no more. I finally got around to installing the latest version of Democracy Player. And now I can pretty much watch all my videos, download and watch anything from YouTube inside the player itself. But that’s not all. The player has support for bittorrent as well, not only that, but there is a large number of channels for it already where you can watch hours and hours of quality video content.

Just yesterday the latest version of Burning Board 3 Beta was released by Woltlab. Beta 3 brings us a new “Help System”, finalisation of language packs, upgrading options, feature improvements and bug fixes. The new beta version has hopefully improved on the installer as well, as I’ve been having nightmares from the Beta 2 installer already.

You can download the free(it will become a pay to use script once it leaves beta stages, so hurry!) beta version from Woltlab’s Beta Download page.

In semi related news, I have started using my wBB2 license once again, so watch this blog to find out what exactly I’ve done with it. Soon(tm).