Ian Harac

Firefox is in a state of rapid updates, when it seems every month brings a new version to your screen. In the vast rush to get new features out there, older features, perhaps considered no longer necessary, are dropped by the wayside. Fortunately, the extremely robust plug-in ecosystem and developer community that keeps Firefox my personal browser of choice (winning me back from Opera solely due to some add-ons I found I couldn't live without) means that if there's a feature you like, someone will add it back in if it's gone. Thus it is with Status-4-Evar, which recreates the pre-Firefox 4 status bar widgets, but with improved flexibility.

Status-4-Evar offers many ways to customize your display.The trend in browsers today is towards a minimalist and Spartan interface, which makes sense for the tiny screens of netbooks. This is why many of the features included in Status-4-Evar went away. I've got a widescreen monitor at a desktop PC, though, so I have a lot of real estate that's not doing anything. Status-4-Evar brings back Firefox's thermometer bar of yore, which shows how much of the page has loaded, a download progress icon, and a text status bar. All of these have several configuration options, including placement in various toolbars, color, and other types of general behavior. For example, I have set page load status to show as both a small bar on the bottom of my screen, and as a field of color that creeps along my address bar. You are not required to do both, but you can, and flexibility is Status-4-Evar's goal. (Spelling, clearly, is not.)

Tales of Maj'Eyal 4 is a roguelike game, which means a top-down experience where you control a single character who traverses a semi-random world in pursuit of power, glory, and finding new and interesting ways to die. TOME 4 does quite a few things differently, though, and they may make it appeal to some who like old-school CRPGs but dislike some aspects of roguelike games.

In TOME, you need to watch out for killer bunnies, as well as the usual suspects.First, TOME 4 is graphical by default: You're an icon, not an @. To be very clear, the icons are static, 2-dimensional images with fairly basic art; you can tell an ant from a ghoul, and large creatures take up multiple squares, but that's about it. Don't expect Skyrim--or even Daggerfall--quality here. However, that's not the point of a roguelike. The graphics are functional, they let you know what's about to kill you and how far away it is, and that's all they need to do. There are some minor animation effects for auras, and there's a dynamically adjusting line-of-sight which accounts for lighting, special senses, and blindness, as well.

Many people need to keep track of structured information in a simple, straightforward, way. Database programs often skew towards the higher end of cost and complexity, or towards unstructured, free-text tools which have benefits, but also drawbacks. EasyTables ($35, 14-day free trial) is a program that attempts to fill a niche for users with no database or coding experience that still need to track, sort, and search their data. Unfortunately, showstopper bugs and an unresponsive development team make this database program an unreliable choice.

EasyTables allows the user to create simple flat-file databases with minimal hassle.EasyTables 2.4.5 resides, after installation, in the taskbar, and this makes it convenient to create or review tables of various sorts. The user can create as many tables as he/she wishes, and access them from a right-click on the icon in the taskbar. Thus, it's easy to quickly bring up a contacts table, a to-do list, or a simple inventory.

No matter how big hard drives get, they always seem to fill up too quickly. This isn't due just to ever-increasing media file size; it also happens because the same files are often stored multiple times. When moving document folders around, downloading information, or making backups, it's easy to end up with many copies of the same file, sometimes with different names. Duplicate Cleaner Pro ($40, 15-day trial with limitations) is a utility that helps locate such files.

Duplicate Cleaner helps find, and clean, the clutter that any large hard drive accumulates.Duplicate file finders, in general, are nothing new. Many general-purpose disk utility sets, such as Captain Optimizer or Perfect Disk, include this function, but because it's often a secondary or sideline aspect, it can be underdeveloped. DigitalVolcano's Duplicate Cleaner has no other purpose, and thus a high degree of functionality is expected--and in this case, delivered.

At $20, GS-Base 9 is very inexpensive and requires virtually no prior database knowledge to use. Furthermore, it uses a number of metaphors and options which should be very familiar to those comfortable with spreadsheets, a fact that makes it useful to a large set of business users who rarely venture away from Excel. Indeed, it shares many of the functions and syntax found in Citadel's inexpensive, but functional, GS-Calc spreadsheet program.

GS-Base offers grid, field, and pivot table views, but not much flexibility beyond that.Creating a database is GS-Base is straightforward; so is creating the tables within that database. The user follows the basic pattern of creating fields and setting their types. Once created, the table structure can be edited, using clear dialog box that displays the fields in a tree structure on the left, and the relevant options and values on the right.

EmEditor Professional ($40, 30-day free trial) is a powerful text editing program with many features that can make it useful to programmers, Web designers, system administrators, and anyone else who regularly works with unformatted text.

EmEditor Professional handles large files, and delimited files, with ease.The interface for EmEditor is very standard--a variety of panels which can be shown or hidden, with a central tabbed editing area. Slightly confusingly, some of the side panels are controlled by 'View' and others by 'Plug-Ins'. While this makes development sense, it's not instantly intuitive where to look to turn on or off a feature. This is a common thread throughout EmEditor: It's often a bit more of a task than it should be to figure out how to use a particular aspect of the program, but there are enough cool bits in the program that it can be worth it, especially if you're not already committed to another text editor and thoroughly indoctrinated in its quirks.

As we all know, the Jamestown colony was founded on Mars in the early 1600s, where it was destroyed by invading Martian war machines allied with the Spanish. Well, perhaps not, but that's the basis of Jamestown ($10, buy-only), an exciting top-down, retro-style, co-op play, buzzword-compliant game from Final Form Games, whom, I suspect, are in league with the manufacturers of mouse buttons. I nearly wore mine out frantically clicking to evade ever-increasing waves of Martian attackers, exploding scenery, and continual pyrotechnics, all while trying to swoop and swerve to catch the falling coins and gears that would extend my life or power-up my little craft.

We learn the fate of the Jamestown colony... it was overrun by Martians! Of course, it was on Mars.Jamestown brings a unique theme to the top-down shooter genre, namely, "Pilgrims...in.... spaaaaace!" (at least, I've never seen any other game with it), and adds in co-op play (you can have one player use the keyboard while you use the mouse, or add in extra controllers via USB). There are single player leaderboards to record your high scores, and I mean your high scores, because I'll never be on them. There are achievements to unlock, and new ships to buy as you earn coins, and unique, powerful, boss monsters at the end of each levels whose attack timing and weaknesses must be learned to defeat them.

How much would you pay to not have to see anything about someone's weird trick to lose weight that orthodontists don't want you to know about? Is "nothing" a good price to pay? Adblock Plus is a powerful, and free, plugin for Firefox, Chrome, and Thunderbird that strips out almost all advertising from the Web pages you view. Install the plugin, restart your browser, and resume surfing.

Adblock Plus gives you the power to edit filters to limit more ads, or even let some in.I say "almost all" for two reasons: First, the default configuration, with the user can change with ease, allows in a small amount of non-intrusive advertising: No flashy animations, no popups. These ads are allowed in by a user-editable list of "approved" sites and sources. This is not a bad thing; many sites can exist only because of advertising, and blocking everything, even on sites you like and support, will mean the end of a lot of content. Second, while I haven't found problems yet, it is known that advertisers, especially the ones you most want to block due to the sleaziness of their tactics and their products, are constantly working to find ways around blocking, so there isn't an absolute 100% guarantee that something won't slip by. Fortunately, Adblock Plus includes the ability to report such sneaks (so the algorithms can be updated).

GS-Calc 9.2 ($20, 30-day free trial) is an inexpensive spreadsheet program that isn't a simple Excel clone. It offers has a number of interesting features, including a large work area (4094 columns by 12 million rows), pivot tables, fairly robust charting, and a nice interface for dealing with multiple worksheets in a single project. It also has some imperfections that are at least partially mitigated by the low price.

The folder interface in GS-Calc makes it easy to organize complex spreadsheets.The first thing I noticed that got my positive attention was the basic interface. Rather than a row of tabs along the bottom to handle multiple sheets, which becomes problematic when a workbook grows beyond 4 or 5 pages, GS-Calc offers a hierarchical, folder-based view supporting multiple levels of folders. This makes it much easier to create a workbook consisting of many smaller, more-focused sheets, a boon to navigation and debugging.

One of the things you learn as a reviewer is just how long the long tail really is. There are more "alternative" browsers out there than most people could guess, and it's hard for most of them to offer any reason to switch from the top tier. Visual Explorer Ultimate offers one major piece of functionality that's tempting, but narrowly focused.

Video Explorer Ultimate may be my choice for archiving videos from the Web, but not too much else.So let's go for the good stuff first. Streaming video is wonderful but transient; sites vanish, videos are pulled for legitimate and illegitimate reasons, and the time you most want to watch a particular video is always when you can't get an Internet connection for some reason. There are many plug-ins for downloading streaming video for different browsers, but my experience with them has been uneven and, being plug-ins, they often break when the browser is upgraded, which now happens approximately once a week with Firefox. Visual Explorer Ultimate builds video downloading--and, even better, conversion--right in.

Zoho Writer is an online (with offline and syncing functionality) word processing application that offers a nice amount of functionality, especially given the limitations of the Web as a platform for productivity tools. After creating a free account with Zoho, you can access Zoho Writer. It looks a lot like most word processors, so if you've used any major program in this category, it will take no more than a few minutes of poking around to learn how to do things. This is good, because the "Help" is in the form of a FAQ, not a tutorial or index of functions.

Zoho Writer offers a clean, user-friendly interface that packs a lot of functionality for a Web app.The interface for Zoho Writer is well designed. Each button serves as both a tab which reveals a toolbar, and as a drop down menu. This is really, really, nice--you can have the Format toolbar showing, then click the "Insert" dropdown and choose a command, without the current toolbar being replace. There is no need to click back to your preferred "main" toolbar. On the other hand, if you prefer switching toolbars, just single-click the appropriate button, and there you go.

Dungeons of Dredmor ($5, buy-only) is a graphical roguelike game, which is not quite as contradictory as it might seem. It follows most of the defining tropes of the genre, but also adds enough new twists that they're worth commenting on. It wraps the standard gameplay in highly stylized, (perhaps too highly stylized) graphics, which are fun, memorable, and charming, and a wonderfully far cry from typical thud-and-blunder fantasy images.

Sadly, neither your impressive eyebrows nor your purported diseases will keep you from many, many, deaths in the Dungeons of Dredmor.In Dungeons of Dredmor you control a single adventurer who must make his or her way through a randomly generated dungeon, casting spells, swinging a sword, collecting items, avoiding traps, battling monsters, committing acts of "Heroic Vandalism", gathering lutefisk to sacrifice to the lutefisk god, making grilled cheese sandwiches... wearing a traffic cone... wait, what was that about lutefisk?