Category Archives: Software

Contributing to the Open Source Community

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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A week ago, we tweeted a promise to contribute more to the open source community. As a Research & Development organization, there’s a lot of random code samples, small libraries, forks/modifications of popular scripts, and more that’s just lying around, begging to be open sourced.

While a lot of these may prove to have little to no value to anyone, given how easy it is to make things open source thanks to github, there’s no real drawback to throwing them out there for anyone that may benefit at some unknown point in the future.

We have a couple of hundred miniature projects, test code samples, and other such content across a number of drives to sort through, and whenever we find something useful, this is our promise to the community to share it. To that end, we’ve set up a github repository at http://github.com/neosmart where we’ll be uploading the code, and from where you’re all more than welcome to check it out and contribute back.

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A Brief Message from Hosni Mubarak

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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You can say what you want about our friends in Nigeria, but the one thing you can’t call them is slow. It’s scarcely been a few days since fellow netizens in Egypt have been clamoring for the ouster of their president/dictator/king-of-the-world Hosni Mubarak, but we’re glad to be able to reassure you all that we have it on the up-and-up that he’s already planning his exit, and is only looking for someone to help him sneak out billions of dollars in money stolen from his people before he can announce his resign. Hooray for Democracy!

Follows is a top-secret and highly-confidential message from government insider Mohammad Hammad, explaining the details of the situation and seeking out a business partner to help out a tyrant in need. Hat-tip to Muayyad for forwarding me this valuable document!

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Happy New Year!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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To our dear members, readers, users, and beloved friends:

Happy New Year 2011 from everyone on the NeoSmart Team. On behalf of all the NeoSmart Staff, thank you for being here with us this year!

We’re looking forward to more great years to come, and thank you for being with us every step of the way.

Twitter search results truncated after downtime

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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It seems that after yesterday’s extended downtime for Twitter (which no one really raised much of a fuss about, since it’s just another routine day for tweeps worldwide — unlike, say, Skype) has some (severe?) repercussions: search results are being limited to the past ~6 days for low-volume queries.

A quick search for “git tower” on Twitter returns results limited to the past six days, only. (A quick shout-out: Tower.app for OS X gets our award for best Mac development tool of 2010!) And the same goes for searches for “NeoSmart” or “EasyBCD.” (Unfortunately, none of these topics are anywhere near “trending” on twitter, and the low volume of search results serves to prove the point).

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Things that suck about CoD Black Ops

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Treyarch released last month Call of Duty: Black Ops, the latest in the much-hyped “Call of Duty” game lineup. Black Ops made headlines when, within 24 hours of going on sale, it managed to sell some 7 million copies in the US and the UK. However, all is not well in the land of Call of Duty, while this game has received rave reviews from a number of gaming sites, including Game Spot and Metacritic. But reviewers at Amazon seem to get it right, with a thus-far average rating of only 1.8/5 stars. The reasons? Many.

I’ve personally been a fan of the Call of Duty series for quite some time, as the games tend to be well-developed and well-written on both the technical and storyline aspects. But Black Ops falls far, far short of the mark and in many ways is a step back from what we’ve come to expect of its predecessors. On many different fronts, Black Ops fails to deliver — consistently failing to impress and, perhaps most disturbingly, almost as if it was intentionally made this way.

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Updating Flash Player Manually on Chrome for OS X

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Recently (late November), Adobe finally got around to releasing an update to Flash Player for OS X that comes with the long-awaited hardware-based rendering of H.264-encoded videos. However, for those of us that use Chrome, there is no way to updated to the latest 10.2 beta of Flash; Chrome uses its own copy of Flash that comes built-in and cannot be externally updated. These steps below will guide you through the process of using Flash Player 10.2 with Google Chrome on OS X:

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EasyLDR and EasyBCD 2.0’s New XP Support

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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At NeoSmart Technologies, we’re not just about making cool software that makes your life easier – we also like to share the how and why behind our work, to make things all the more beneficial for one and all. While the EasyBCD documentation has been out of date for a while now (we’ve been too busy working on the code and support), we’re making a real effort to bring things up to date.

We’d previously finished the tutorials for dual-booting Windows 7 with Windows XP and with Ubuntu 10 (complete with picture-by-picture steps!), but now we’re getting started on the real meat: the technical details of just what exactly is going on behind the scenes. The normal OS boot process is one of the most complicated parts of an operating system with just one OS in the mix – with multiple operating systems, each that works in its own way, things get that much more complicated, and it’s always good to have a nice, illustrated guide to refer to.

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EasyBCD 2.0.2 Released

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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It may have taken us over 2 years to go from 1.7.2 to 2.0, but now that we’re there we have no intention of letting EasyBCD languish. Those of you unfortunate enough to run into a fatal error in EasyBCD may have noticed the presence of a custom error reporting dialog that we now use to keep track of crashes and errors as they occur. As a result of error collection over the past 2 weeks, we’ve released a point update to EasyBCD.

The changes in EasyBCD 2.0.2 correlate to 21 issues in the bug tracker, and can be seen after the jump.

Download EasyBCD 2.0.2 (1343 KiB)

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Software with a (Subtle) Sense of Humor

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Every once in a while you come across something in a piece of software that makes you smile. In this case, it was trying to open a 60MB CHM file in BetterZip, the best OS X unzip utility out there. A lot of software out there tries too hard to be funny, and really doesn’t come across as such (I’m look at you, ImgBurn).

But here’s a very serious program that does some very serious stuff. It’s never cracked jokes at me before, and it’s been a dependable creature, all business thus far. But all work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy. And so that brings us to the sense of humor – image after the jump:

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Free Download: Timeline 2.1 Home Edition

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Four months ago (though it does feel like much, much less than that!), we posted about the release of Genie Timeline 2.0. Timeline, in both its free and paid Home/Pro editions, has been well-received around the globe – the free backup software market is severely undersaturated, especially when it comes to good stuff that actually works.

Earlier this month, Genie-Soft released Timeline 2.1 which fixed a number of issues and greatly improved the performance. For the next 24 hours (well, 23 actually as of the time in this posting!) Genie Timeline 2.1 Home Edition is available 100% for free on Giveaway of the Day.

Download: Genie Timeline 2.1 Home Edition

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