New Applications

Here are some new freeware applications I've tried lately, and some thoughts about them:

Mediabee 1.0 - a personal organization center for the desktop
Mediabee is a program that can be set as an active desktop that combines a calendar, mail center, weather, other websites. It was difficult to use and to customize. But you could set up users and look at calendars by different users or the whole family.
+: It's all there, and you can sort by family member
-: Very crude and hard to use. You could add contacts through CSV files, but if you added a birthdate, then it wouldn't add to the calendar. Even though it was the same program, it all seemed unrelated and unconnected. Furthermore, it was impossible to customize. Very primitive and difficult program.

Pluck - A personal web information center
Pluck's main feature is that while you're seaching the web, if the web site you go to has an rss/atom/xml feed, then Pluck will "pluck" the feed from the web and put it easily into a tool bar. It also organizes your bookmarks and history. There is also a "personal shopper" called Perch, where it will continually do searches for products or anything you want.
+: Toolbar is always on, easily plucks feeds. Easily imports bookmarks from IE.
-: Only works with IE. No connectivity with any other browser. Does not import contacts easily.

Opera 8.0 - the latest release of the browser
Opera is probably the first major browser to use tabs and has not abandoned this feature. It also has a mail client. The mail client is nice because it provides many labels (todo, mail back, call back, funny, valuable...) and will separate by mailing lists, contacts, labels easily. It also sorts which messages has what type of attachments. It also includes "Newsfeeds" and whenever you visit a site with an rss/atom feed you click the RSS icon and it ads it. The browser seems faster than most and shows the percentage loaded.
+: Easy to use, great addition of rss feeds, labels and mailinglists are helpful and its easy to sort mail. Plus there are keystrokes and mouse gestures for fast use. Has IRC chat.
-: Cannot import bookmarks, history etc, from any other browser (including IE). Also does not import addresses even from a csv file. I also couldn't find how to set as the default browser, and I looked a lot. Would be better if it had a connection with