Artwinauto

Last week, we uploaded an English frequency word list for TypingAid. A series of tests have been carried out to ascertain the benefit of using such word list. A 63-word passage was randomly extracted from a news site. A typist was asked to type the passage without TypingAid, with TypingAid + comprehensive English word list and with TypingAid + frequency-ordered English word list. The time spent was taken down with a timer, from which we calculated the typing speed. We also kept track of the number of keystrokes registered.

 

Both the program TypingAid and the word lists can be downloaded from the page:

TypingAid and word lists.

 

The test involving frequency-ordered word list was recorded in the video below:

A TypingAid user has asked me about the difference between TypingAid and BlitzType. Both of them are text autocompletion programs and productivity programs maintained and distributed by Artwinauto.com

 

TypingAid is originally a small and nifty program I found and improved on. I spent time on distributing it, hopefully to bring awareness to the advantage of autocompletion tool as a text expander alternative and to draw traffic to my site. However the response is overwhelmingly good, much to my surprise. Two software developers besides me are interested in working on it, so we have regular stable release. I intend to make it free for all time, partly because of many's wishes, and I do not hold sole copyright of it in order to commercialize it. Perhaps I could also collect donations for me and the 2 developers.

 

On the other hand, BlitzType is my own project. It's a more ambitious one with many carefully planned features and is designed to be more advanced, more applicable than TypingAid. I intend to experiment with some crazy ideas for instance, machine learning and speech recognition. This approach will put in much innovation, but a regular stable release is not possible. The program is also very flexible and can be turned into say, a thesaurus program with some tweaking, because it's meant for commercialization originally. If a decent funding is obtained, I could also release it in both free version and commercial version. TypingAid is a conservative approach to make an autocompletion software, and BlitzType is an ambitious one.

This 5-part series of reviews is a reply to a statement in

Debunking Common Windows Performance Tweaking Myths

which says "I’d go a step further: Don’t run registry cleaner programs, period. I won’t go so far as to call them snake oil, but what possible performance benefits can you get from “cleaning up” unneeded registry entries and eliminating a few stray DLL files?"

 

We choose to take the scientific approach, to prove or disprove something, what is better and more objective than testing the assumption in an experiment. Find out whether registry cleaner is useful or not in our 5-part reviews which are the results of our experiment.

Google Chrome is a browser innovation developed with Google philosophy: Chrome has amazing javascript rendering speed ("Fast is better than slow"), a relatively simple and uncluttered graphical user interface, strong stability and a handy collection of developer tools. These features gradually made Chrome a favorite alternative after its inception.

To compete with its competitor Firefox, Chrome still has many things to learn from it. We list out 6 features that Chrome ought to have in order for it to become a more productive browser suitable for people who browse for a living.

 

The "browser war" is getting more and more intense with no end in sight. Back in my time, browsers were just Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Now newer and stronger players come into the existence, to name some of the big names: Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Chrome and the most recent one: Lunascape, all of which are freewares. On one hand, this is a good news to consumers, as we get to choose our favourite browser from many varieties and flavours. On the other hand, which one should we choose?

 

With the retail version of Windows 7 to be on the shelves, we are once again faced with the question of "should we spend the money to upgrade or not? We have listed down seven reasons not to.

 

1. Windows 7 minimum requirements:

(from Microsoft Makes Windows 7 Minimum Requirements Official - OSNews)

Windows 7:

1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit) 1 GB of RAM (32-bit); 2 GB of RAM (64-bit) 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit); 20 GB of available disk space (64-bit) DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

So you all have been complaining that Adobe Acrobat Reader has turned into a bloatware. Some even suggested using lightweight replacements for efficiency. But does it really perform badly? Here we do a benchmarking to compare Adobe Acrobat Reader with two other free alternatives: Foxit Reader and Cool PDF Reader. We downloaded and installed them all at the same time (their newest versions respectively) on a fresh-installed Windows Vista Ultimate on a Intel Core2Duo CPU P8400@2.26GHz, ~2.2GHz, 1GB RAM Workstation environment.