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BetaNews.Com (5 non lus)

Capture, record or broadcast your desktop with QIP Shot

Publié: juin 21, 2014, 8:33pm CEST par Mike Williams

QIP Shot is an interesting screen capture tool with some unusual bonus features.

It doesn’t just capture the usual full screen, active window or freehand rectangle, for instance. You can also grab ellipses, freehand areas and even scrolling windows (web pages which are too lengthy to fit on the screen, perhaps).

The program doubles as a desktop recorder, capturing all or a part of your screen – optionally with audio – and saving the results as an AVI video.

Captured images may be rotated, mirrored and cropped, or annotated with various tools (line, arrow, rectangle, ellipse, pencil, text and blur). It’s a bitmap, rather than a vector editor, so you can’t move or edit your annotations later, but it’s fine for basic use.

When you’re happy QIP Shot will save your image locally, upload it to Facebook, VK, or its own shot.qip.ru/ photos.qip.ru. Choose the latter and a browser window opens to display your capture, which shows you everything has worked correctly, and provides a link to share with others.

If there’s something you need to share with a lot of people then you might prefer the Broadcast tool, which can broadcast part or all of your desktop via Justin.tv, CyberGame.tv, Ustream and more.

Some welcome usability features include a History sidebar with thumbnails of your recent captures. Not only does this make it easy to view them again (just double-click), but right-click options can also open them in the editor or your browser, copy their path/ URL to the clipboard, or open Explorer at their folder/

This is all very configurable, too. QIP Shot allows you to customise its hotkeys, screen capture names (they can use numbers, dates, times), default file formats, video codec, optional audio settings, proxy settings and others.

The editor is the weak spot here. If annotations are important for you, maybe you’re hoping to use the results in a document without editing them elsewhere, we’d opt for HotShots: its excellent vector editor is one of the best around.

QIP Shot’s screen recorder and broadcast tools are major pluses, though, and if they’re more important to you then the program is worth a try.
The most popular stories on BetaNews this past week: June 15 -- 21

Publié: juin 21, 2014, 2:26pm CEST par Mark Wilson

This is the week of the Surface Pro 3. Brian had already attended the launch event earlier in the month, and has provided an essential list of hardware and software purchasers need to grab for the best all round experience -- he even goes as far as suggesting that it's better than a MacBook Air. Even before launch there was an update available for the tablet-cum-laptop, and there was also news that the Intel Core i3 and i7 models would be shipping earlier than previously expected. But not all of the products we looked at this week were quite so "every day". There was the wifi doorbell complete with camera, and also the prospect of charging your phone wirelessly with your pants -- yes you did read that correctly.

The Windows Phone market is dominated by Nokia, but a new batch of handsets has been unveiled by Indian manufacturer Micromax. If Android is your mobile OS of choice, you may be thinking about venturing into the rooted world. This week a new tool was released that makes the process as quick and painless as possible, opening up a whole new breed of apps and options. Joe decided to take a walk on the wild side and adopt the Nokia Lumia Icon as his phone of choice. In the Android arena, a new contender entered -- the Amazon Fire Phone. Will a kill switch be added? Microsoft and Google have agreed to add it to their mobile operating systems.

Whatever your preferred phone choice, do you side with the 88 percent of Brits who are under the impression that their phones are being tapped? Whether you are paranoid or not, more speed is on the way as the foundations for 5G networks have been set. For anyone concerned about privacy, the news that online mapping services such as those offered by Microsoft and Google will be allowed to use higher resolution satellite images will be enough to send them scurrying under the bed covers.

When it wasn't busy going offline -- just for about half an hour all over the world -- Facebook was softening its guidelines surrounding photos of breastfeeding. The #FreeTheNipple campaign proved a success in the end. This was far from being the only social network-related news. LinkedIn is going to be in court at some point in the future after a judge found it had violated the privacy of users by "spamming" their contacts. Twitter managed to make its way into the headlines as well after the company reinstated a series of tweets and user accounts that had previously been deemed blasphemous. An interesting patent case has made it clear that simply applying an existing idea to computers does not make it patent-able -- patent trolls beware.

No week's roundup would be complete without its fair share of security news, and this week is no different. Hackers discovered a sneaky way to double their money through PayPal but better news came from Avast who released an Android app to remove ransomware -- and it might be just as well because batches of phones have been leaving factories pre-infected with malware. New figures showed that using dating apps could be a security risk, but there are security problems on the desktop as a fifth of businesses refuse to upgrade from Windows XP. But as it turns out, it's the users who are the biggest security risk.

That's all for this week. Pleasant weekends all round!
Quickly transcribe audio or video files with easytranscript

Publié: juin 21, 2014, 11:29am CEST par Mike Williams

Accurately transcribing audio and video files can be a long and difficult process. No matter how fast you can type, it seems there’s always someone who can talk faster. And then mumble half of what they say, leaving you frequently rewinding to try and figure it out.

There is no simple solution to this, but specialist transcription software should at least save you some time. It doesn’t have to be expensive, either -- the open source easytranscript offers some useful starting features entirely for free.

You’ll first need to install the program, of course, and that’s trickier than you’d expect. The program needs Java, VLC for media playback and Pandoc for exporting, and it won’t install these itself. The developer does at least provide a Ninite package to set up and install everything for you, so this isn’t too much of a hassle, but just keep in mind that -- unless you have these components already -- installation is going to be a two-step process.

Once easytranscript is up and running, you’re asked to create your first project. A wizard simplifies the process, and an incomplete translation complicates it again (some of the text is still in the original German), but it’s relatively straightforward. Choose a media file; accept some defaults; click Play, and start typing -- that’s essentially it.

The first easytranscript extra you’ll notice is that, when you press Enter to complete a section, the program adds a timestamp after your text. This shows you at a glance where any text appears within the file. But also, if you double-click within any timestamp then playback will start at the beginning of that section, helpful when reviewing your work.

If some words aren’t clear then clicking the Back button jumps back a few seconds so you can hear them again.

There’s support for automatically identifying the speaker. When transcribing an interview, you can have easytranscript add the text "Interviewer" and >name< to alternating sections of text. Simple shortcuts help you handle more complex situations manually (Alt+1 is "Interviewer", Alt+2 is "Person 1", Alt+3 is "Person 2", and so on.

The program can expand abbreviations to speed up transcribing, although translation issues make this less than obvious. To begin, click Preferences > Stenographie, and check "Activate Stenography". Enter the abbreviation in the Kurzel column (et), the full word or phrase in the Voller Text column (easytranscript), press Enter and click Save. Type that abbreviation, press the spacebar and it’ll be expanded.

You might be working on a lengthy project, but there’s no need to complete the transcription in one setting. Reopen easytranscript’s project file and it restores your source file and everything you’ve done so far, ready to carry on where you left off.

When you’re done, it’s possible to export your transcript as a document or YouTube subtitle file, or just copy some or part of it to the clipboard. Enable easytranscript’s "Worktime" support and it even records how much time you spent on the job, and calculate whatever you’ve earned.

There’s clearly work here to do on setup and the English translation. We’d like an option to adjust playback speed, too. But easytranscript also has plenty of useful features and should reduce your transcription time and hassles.
Google uses Nest as a middleman to buy Dropcam

Publié: juin 21, 2014, 2:45am CEST par Brian Fagioli

Google has been on a buying-spree lately. It feels as if the company is a nouveau riche lottery winner with money just burning a hole in its pocket. I guess in some ways, the company did win the lottery and its users' information is the winnings. You see, the search-giant earns a lot of money from advertisements and harvesting user info, but to continue that success, it cannot rest on its laurels.

With the acquisition of Nest, Google obtained an ability to earn money from hardware and home services, expanding on its existing business focus. However, while Nest represents an expansion, it also represents "business as usual", as the search-giant can eventually utilize home-automation for advertising and harvesting data too. Today, Google buys a company called Dropcam, which offers cloud-based home video monitoring. Clearly, Google wants to be in our homes, but will you put out the welcome mat?

"Although this was a big decision for us, it wasn’t a difficult one to make. Before deciding to extend an offer to Dropcam, we spent a lot of time looking at camera companies and technologies around the world. And I can say without a doubt, Dropcam has the best products, services, and customer experience in the business", says Matt Rogers, Nest founder.

Rogers further explains, "eventually, the plan is for us to work together to reinvent products that will help shape the future of the conscious home and bring our shared vision to more and more people around the world. For now though, not much will change. Dropcam products will still be sold online and in stores. And Dropcam customers will still continue to use their Dropcam accounts".

So Google bought Nest and now Nest buys Dropcam. In simpler terms, Google bought Dropcam. While I am sure the newly-aquired company's products are great, I question why Google is unable to just design similar products on its own. Maybe I am missing something, but a cloud-connected webcam does not seem to be a very unique business. Quite frankly, the same can be said for the Nest acquisition. Hopefully this will not go up in smoke.

Did Google make a smart purchase? Will you trust Dropcam products in your home? Tell me in the comments.
Microsoft to retire old versions of Skype -- Mac users should be worried

Publié: juin 21, 2014, 12:56am CEST par Brian Fagioli

Hate all you want, but Skype is awesome. The fact that it is supported on like, everything makes it one of the best video chat solutions. It works on Linux, Android, Windows Phone, iOS, OS X -- it is the bomb. Microsoft shows no favoritism to platform when this software is concerned.

Today, however in a bit of shocking news, Microsoft announces that in an effort to move everyone to the newest version of Skype, it will be retiring older versions for Windows and Mac. Does this mean that outdated versions will move to Florida and join AARP? No, well...maybe. Actually, it is not at all clear what retirement means in this case.

"As we look ahead to the future, we're focusing our efforts on bringing the latest and greatest to the most recent versions of Skype. As a result, we are going to retire older versions of Skype for Windows desktop (6.13 and below) as well as Skype for Mac (6.14 and below) over the next few months" says Tom Huang, Microsoft.

Huang further explains, "don't panic -- whether you’re using Skype for Windows desktop or Skype for Mac, you can download and update to the latest version today for free. We encourage all users to update to the latest version today to continue using Skype without disruption".

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa -- stop the clock. Disruption? This seems to imply that Microsoft will purposely block access to older versions. However, the company is mum on that for now. But, you are a BetaNews reader, so you should enjoy being on the most recent versions of software, right? As fas as I can tell, there is no downside to this, right? Wrong.

Newer versions of the Skype software may not run on older computers. Case in point, the new version for Mac requires Mavericks (OS X 10.9.x). This could mean that if your Mac cannot run Mavericks that you cannot use Skype! The Windows version however, is supported all the way back to XP SP3.

Are you worried about the potential "disruption" to older versions? Tell me in the comments.

Photo credit: Robert Kneschke / Shutterstock