Sometime ago I reviewed Adobe Reader against Foxit. Many people often direct PC users to Foxit when they find older versions of Adobe to be slow and bloated. My conclusion was that Adobe Reader is a lot better now and it’s many benefits outway the little speed improvement you get with Foxit.

You’d have thought Adobe would have been happy with this but, instead, argued with my comparison methods – even though they were generally favourable towards them.

However, they remained strangely quiet, even when I specifically questioned them on this, about not providing the facility, for many home users who just need the more basic feature set, a leaner, stripped down version of Adobe Readers. Others had done just this, and I concluded that people should try Adobe Reader Lite.

Now, this was never affiliated with Adobe – someone had taken the standard Adobe Reader and removed the lesser used features. This produced a much quicker, leaner version that could compete even more favourably with the competition.

That was 14 months ago. So, imagine my surprise to find that Adobe Reader Lite appears to be no longer available to download. My usual source is from Major Geeks, but the link simply shows a blank page. Searching Major Geeks still shows the software in their index, but clicking their links results in the same blank screen.

The programmer used to post his code on a forum and its there that we can see what has happened. The links in his forum posts have been removed and the following text added to the bottom…

Reason for edit: We’ve been directed by a 3rd party to remove the links, as these redists violate the Adobe EULA and copyright – redist is forbidden. Post edited, links removed.

And indeed, the discussion has been closed with a post that explains the situation further.

It’s not Adobe that’s directly doing this but I suspect they’re behind the request. I’d like to think that they’ve felt the need because they now provide an equivalent. But they don’t.

But then, from a company that argues with reviews which are in their favour, odd behaviour appears to be natural to them.

My Simple Social Bookmarks has just been updated – and it’s a biggie!

Version 1.4 now gives you…

• Updated default icons
• Added AddToAny, Ping.fm, Google Bookmarks, Google Reader and email to the list of providers. By default these will be turned off so as to not to suddenly appear on existing installs and cause problems!
• Further improvement to blog title issues
• Removed URL shortening on all services with the exception of Twitter, as it was not required and may have even have caused some issues (such as some services not being able to get hold of thumbnails and general page content).
• NOFOLLOW and TARGET parameters added

However, the 2 big changes are that it now uses my Simple URL Shortener plugin to provide, erm, URL shortening and that short URLs are now cached.

As always, head to the dedicated page to download a copy or leave comments.

By default, get_the_title and the_title will return the title of the current post. It’s stored in the database in plain text, however, when returned using the aforementioned functions if appears to be encoded. This means that characters such as ampersands and apostrophes will be converted to equivalents that are more HTML friendly.

Unfortunately, passing, say, this title to Twitter, via the URL, causes problems. First you have to URL encode and the mixture of the HTML encoding and the URL encoding produces a mess that Twitter simply doesn’t cope with very well.

However, the standard HTML decoding in PHP didn’t seem to work 100% with, for example, apostrophes not being decoded. After much head scratching and some frustration I found that this was due to the parameters that I was using.

The following line will correctly decode the post title to plain text…

html_entity_decode(get_the_title($post->ID),ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8');

To then encode is to be passed via URL, then simply use this…

urlencode(html_entity_decode(get_the_title($post->ID),ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8'));

It seems obvious now

2 months in the making… Ok, that’s sounding more dramatic than it really is.

Since my last 2 lists of Open Source software, I’ve been noting any further new ones that I discover. Finding “winsupermaximise” finished my 10, so here is, once more, 10 Open Source programs that you’ve probably not heard of…

calibre
Got an eBook? calibre includes library management, format conversion, news feeds to eBook conversion, as well as an eBook reader sync feature and an integrated eBook viewer.

Process Hacker
Process Hacker is a feature-packed tool for manipulating processes and services on your computer. Think of it as being like the Task Manager that appears when you press CTRL/ALT/DEL but a lot more detailed.

JavaRa
JavaRa is a simple tool that does a simple job: it removes old and redundant versions of Java.

TweetMyPC
Make use of Twitter in other ways – send commands to your PC, allowing you to shutdown, log off, transfer files, etc.

Xmind
Xmind is brainstorming and mind mapping software. You can even embed results in your blog.

MonitorES
A fabulous idea – when your lock your desktop, MonitorES will automatically put your monitor into standby and, optionally, pause any media players, mute sound and change your Instant Messaging status’.

Sweet Home 3D
This is a free interior design application that helps you place your furniture on a house 2D plan, with a 3D preview

iColorFolder
Bored of your folders? With a quick right click, iColorFolder will allow you to change their colour – useful for grouping together. You can also change your default folder icons with a selection of “skins”.

Data Crow
Weird name, but useful application. Data Crow is media cataloguing software – audio, software, book, film and photo collections.

winsupermaximise
This is another “simple but handy” utility. It adds a system tray icon which, once clicked (or you can press a hotkey combination), will “super maximise” the current window – that is, it will resize so the title bar is actually above the screen boundaries, thus saving those extra pixels that you don’t want to waste. A great utility for Netbook owners, in particular.

I’ve not written a WordPress plugin for some time now – but I’m really excited about this one. This new WordPress plugin will shorten a URL using one of many different shortening services.

Now, that may not sound exciting, but its true ability lies in its possibilities for other plugin developers – myself included. Expect to see my 3 existing social bookmarking plugins being updated soon to use this plugin. This means that this one plugin needs updating to add any new shortening services.

You can view more details and download it from the official WordPress site, or from it’s official page on this site.