Storts Family

Lot of users swear by VLC as their preferred media player, but there’s plenty of other capable players out there, like the multi-functional video/audio player and converter Media Cope (which also resizes/converts photos, and creates slideshows). When it comes to resource-friendly media players, the list narrows down.

Splayer (version 3.5) is a lightweight, open-source media player that carries quite a few features underneath its simple interface, making it very user-friendly. It uses the GPU to render videos, just like the video players listed here that support GPU acceleration and pretty much leave the CPU alone to carry out other tasks.

Splayer (which stands for Shooter player) plays major video and audio formats, as well as Blu-Ray and DVDs.

Now, whether or not you’ve set it as your default player, you can easily drag-and-drop media files onto the player.

In playing an audio clip, you won’t have any visualizations as it shines with a minimal interface. To enable more options, right-click inside the player.

Let’s go over some of the player’s features (using the open movie, Big Buck Bunny).

Selecting What Files To Play

Upon downloading the player (I’m using the portable version which runs beautifully and is available here in a ~8MB .7z file, so you can unzip and extract with 7-Zip), you’ll be able to set whether you want it to become your preferred media player for audio clips, video files or both.

Playing Incomplete Files

If you want to make sure  your video file is high-definition, for example, playing incomplete files in Splayer is a no-brainer.

Setting Actions After Playback

You can choose whether your computer should go into Sleep mode, go on Standby, shut down, or log off, which can come in handy to automate things, or if you have a long movie that might make you fall asleep. To access these options, right-click on the video area, head to Playback, then select the preferred task.

Showing Statistics

You might find this useful if you’re making your own subtitles or want to look at the frame count.

You can either press Ctrl + 4 or right-click on the video, go to GUI > More Panels > Statistics.

Finding Subtitles

Speaking of subtitles, one of the unique features of Splayer is that you can automatically get subtitles for a popular title if you enable Smart Subtitle Matching (which should be checked by default).

For lesser-known films, you may not have as much luck but the player might still attempt to find subtitles.

You can also upload a subtitle file on the player’s website to expand their subtitle database.

Setting Multi-Tasking Options

Multi-taskers might like how Splayer offers an option to stay on top of other windows and also set opaque or transparent properties for the file.

To adjust the transparency or set to stay on top, hover over the top area of the video and click the following icons.

Alternatively, to set the transparency, you can press Ctrl + 5 or right-click on the video area, go to GUI and select Transparent Control. To select the Stay On Top option, press Ctrl + T or right-click, go to Pin To Front > Always.

Generating Images From The Video

Creating an image preview of the video’s contents with Splayer is really easy. You can hover over to the top bar and click on the camera icon.

Alternatively, right-click, select Capture and you’ll have four options. This screenshot will be pretty self-explanatory.

You can basically copy the current video frame (i.e. scene) as a JPG or BMP (Image), to your clipboard or automatically (Save w/o Prompt) assuming you’ve set a default folder. You can also generate a thumbnail (also in JPG or BMP format) of the video and customize how many pictures you want in all (by selecting the rows and colums) and the image width.

Here’s a sample thumbnail using the settings from above.

Recording From Webcam

You can also choose to record from your webcam and save the recording in an AVI, MKV (Matroska) or OGM (Ogg Media) file. You can also choose to save the audio as a separate WAV file. To get started, press Ctrl + V or right-click > Open > Video Capture.

Unfortunately in my testing, the player kept showing me that dreaded Not Responding message and eventually closing itself, which might be because of conflicting capture filters from my default webcam program (CyberLink YouCam). If you have better luck, feel free to let us know about the results in the comments!

There’s other helpful features such as options to rotate the video and adjust the brightness/contrast of the video.

We certainly didn’t cover all of the possible options with Splayer. If you have other tips, please enlighten us below.

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One of the issues I’ve always had with my free Yahoo email account is the fact that it’s so difficult to deal with it anywhere outside of the online Yahoo Mail system itself. There aren’t very many online email systems that will let you extract email from your Yahoo account as easily as you can get it from your Gmail account. This is because, unlike with Google Mail, a free Yahoo Mail account does not include free POP access.

Recently, I wrote a review of RSS Bandit, a very cool feed reader with the ability to pull in email feeds from Gmail accounts. It doesn’t use POP access, instead it utilizes the authenticated Atom feed that Google provides to all Gmail users. This is awesome, but once again it made me regret ever signing up for a free Yahoo account, because it’s once again left out in the cold. No matter what, I always have to go back to the online Yahoo email system to check those emails. In a Web 2.0 world, Yahoo Mail feels so disconnected from everything.

After writing the RSS Bandit article, I realized that if there’s some way I could convert my free Yahoo email account into an RSS feed, I’d have an instant connection to that free email account without the need for a POP connection. It actually didn’t take very long to discover YmailFeed, an awesome free service hosted on Google AppSpot (ironically) that lets you convert your free Yahoo email account into an RSS feed.

Setting Up Your Yahoo Email RSS Feed

The first thing you’ll need to do to set up your Yahoo Mail as an RSS feed is to visit YmailFeed, sign up for your free account, and then click on “Start the Process“.

You’re then taken to your Yahoo account sign-in page. This is a legitimate Yahoo sign-in, it’s not a scam! YmailFeed is not collecting your login information, you simply need to log into your account so that the YmailFeed system can retrieve a unique key associated with your authentication.

This is similar to when you give external applications permission to access your Facebook account. Likewise, by logging into your Yahoo account, you are “approving” that YmailFeed can access your incoming email. To hammer this home, Yahoo requires that you sign off on this request, since you’re basically opening up your email account to a third-party app that is going to convert your incoming mail into a feed format.

Once you agree, your account is active and all new, unread email is converted into a feed. You can see a preview of that feed in the left window in your YmailFeed account. You have three important links at the bottom of the next screen, which is basically the feed for your free Yahoo email account. If that URL is ever compromised and falls into the wrong hands, just click on “Regenerate the Codes” and a new set of feed URLs is provided – the old ones will be disabled.

Three types of feeds links are provided, AutoDiscovery, a standard RSS Feed and an ATOM feed. Now that I’m using RSS Bandit, which can handle AutoDiscovery, I just initiate a new feed and add the feed under my existing email group. The feed shows up under “Feed Details” just like any other regular RSS feed.

The way RSS Bandit handles it when you click on the email itself is that it opens up a direct link to Yahoo Mail within the lower content panel. Another cool way to make use of your Yahoo feed is by clicking that little “Netvibes” link on the YmailFeed page with your feed URLs. In just two clicks, you can add an awesome Yahoo mail widget to your Netvibes account.

Getting Yahoo Mail loaded into my private Netvibes dashboard is something that I haven’t been able to get working for a long time, but now with YmailFeed, it works like a charm.

If you just want to get your most recent Yahoo mail in Google Reader, simply add the RSS Feed from your YmailFeed account and you’ve instantly connected Google Reader to your Yahoo inbox. Now, how cool is that?

In fact, having your free Yahoo inbox as an RSS feed like this opens up a whole world of possibilities. You could install the GreatNews RSS Filter and use it to analyze all incoming Gmail and Yahoo email and send you alerts. Rather than setting up filters in all of your email accounts, you can process all incoming email in one place.

Can you think of other cool ways you can make use of your Yahoo email RSS feed? Share your ideas and insight in the comments section below!

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Do you compose text and email on your mobile phone? If you are an iPhone user, it would be a waste of features if you didn’t.  The problem is though that text and mail on the iPhone has left us little room for customization.

Not to mention that writing on a small screen using your thumbs on the touch keyboard is not exactly the same as ten fingers typing on a full screen keyboard.

During the first days of using my iPhone, I went on a quest to find ways to make my texting and emailing life look and work the way I wanted to.

Here are several iPhone email setup tricks that I found.

Undo & Redo Typing

I guess every iPhone user knows that double tapping a word in a text will select it and give you access to standard editing functions like Cut, Copy, and Paste. This action will also give you the option to replace the word with alternative words.

But what if you’ve made mistakes or you have had second thoughts?  Can you do other important editing functions like Undo and Redo? I just found out that you can do that easily by shaking your device.  So the next time you want to change the last words that you typed or cancel the deletion of words, just shake your iPhone and tap Undo/Redo Typing.

Adding Auto Replace Text

Apple brought innovation to the mobile world by introducing the iPhone touch keyboard. It comes with all of the cool features and is designed to make typing on the small screen as easy and comfortable as possible.

One of the features is automatic text replacement. It will suggest and replace any mistyped word with the best correction it can find in the dictionary. Unfortunately, sometimes this feature also replaces correct words like people’s names or ambiguous alternatives like “its” and “it’s“. You can cancel the text replacement process by tapping the pop up suggestion, but this will slow down the typing flow.

Luckily, you can add words to a custom dictionary. To do that, go to: “Settings – General – Keyboard – Edit User Dictionary“.

The only caveat is, you need to activate at least one other international keyboard layout like Japanese or Chinese before you can enable this feature.

Using Glyphboard To Add Symbols

Tapping and holding on one keyboard character will reveal other alternatives of that character (even though not all characters have this feature). This is how you can insert uncommon characters to your text such as ė, ñ, § or ¢.

But digging through the characters to find the one that you are looking for could be time consuming. Moreover, the choices are limited to typographical characters. To insert symbols, you need the help of a web app called Glyphboard. Web apps are server based applications that can be run from users’ own devices via web browsers. Since Safari on iPhone can save webpages to the home screen, we can use this feature to “install” many web apps to iPhone.

To save Glyphboard as an app, open its web address from your iPhone’s Safari and tap the “Plus (+)” button from the toolbar below. The web app will be installed and you can access it like you would access any other apps.

Using Glyphboard to add symbols to your texts and emails is as easy as opening the app, tapping and holding on any available symbols, followed by copying and pasting.

If you want to use multiple symbols, you can temporarily copy and paste the symbols one by one to the “scratchboard” before selecting all and copying them to another place.

Enabling Emojis

If you want to go further, you can install one (or more) emoticon enabler apps such as Emoji Free, Emoji Free! and other similar apps. You can find them easily using the search function within the iTunes App Store. What these apps do is add new keyboard layout(s) with emoticons as the characters instead of letters.

That’s why enabling this app requires you to restart your iPhone after installation and add the Emoji keyboard layout(s) via “Settings – General – Keyboard – International Keyboards – Add New Keyboard“.

And every time you want to insert one of these emoticons, just switch the keyboard layout by tapping the “Globe” key on your keyboard.

Other ideas about using Glyphboard and Emojis are utilizing their symbol collections for folder names and Mail signatures. But please note that these emojis don’t work outside iDevices. So if you send an email full of emojis to your friends who don’t use an iDevice, he/she will only see empty boxes. However, Glyphboard symbols can be opened anywhere.

Adding A Cool HTML Signature

Speaking of mail signatures, when you send mail from iPhone, it will automatically add the signature “Sent from my iPhone” by default.

You can change the signature by going to “Settings – Mail, Contacts, Calendars -Signature“. Use clever lines and add some Glyphboard symbols if you want to.

But you can also use an HTML signature in your mail. The easiest way to do that is to use a web service called iPhone Signature. This service requires you to fill in your data (and upload an image) to their website and they will provide you with an activation link. You could also request the link to be sent by email.

Open and save the link as an app in your iPhone.

The app will open a new “Compose email” window with your customized HTML signature. We’ve discussed this web service briefly before. Be sure to check the article out.

I’m sure that there are other iPhone text customizations out there and this article just barely scratches the surface. So if you know other tricks, why not share them using the comments below?

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