Pandora Sidebar Gadget for Windows 7, Vista 64-bit

Pandora Internet Radio released the 1.0 version of their Windows Vista sidebar gadget which utilizes Adobe Flash Player to play your stations right from your Windows sidebar. Fortunately, the gadget also worked for Windows 7. The only problem, however, was that Adobe didn’t have a 64-bit version of their Flash player for Windows (uh, guys? It’s 2010 64-bit has been available to consumers for nearly 6 years). The only way to get the Pandora gadget to play in the sidebar for 64-bit systems was to force the system to start the 32-bit version of your sidebar (or gadget process for Win 7), through some registry change, or startup addition, so it’d use the 32-bit version Flash available.

Today, that all changes. Pandora’s old 1.0 gadget can now live on in the 64-bit world with Adobe’s release of Flash Player Square, the first 64-bit version of Adobe’s popular Flash Player. As I type this, I’m listening to my Pandora QuickMix from the Pandora gadget running on my 64-bit Windows 7 Professional machine!

Take note that the “Square” version of Flash is a preview of 64-bit Flash player and will not automatically update and may not function correctly in all cases.

Download: Pandora Sidebar Gadget for Windows 7 and Vista

Download: Adobe Flash Player 64-bit “Square”

[via Download Squad]

Change Permissions [chmod] with Dreamweaver [Update]

Last April, I reported my findings on how to use Adobe (formerly by Macromedia) Dreamweaver to change the permissions of web files and folders. The versions of Dreamweaver I had used were older, and the only way to accomplish this was to use a command-line interface built into Dreamweaver to enter FTP commands the ol’ fashioned way.

Being, by far, the most popular post with several follow-up comments, I felt it was time for an updated post with all the tips rolled together.

Lightweight Alternatives to Adobe Reader [Lite PDF Viewer]

Screenshot of PDF-XChange Viewer in action

The portable document format, known as a PDF to most, is a terrific way to share documents online without worrying about whether or not your recipient has the appropriate operating system,  software or  software version, basically to ensure that it arrives the way you sent it, among other things. Adobe Reader has become the defacto standard program to view PDF files and it usually does just fine, but I’ve never been known to leave anything well enough alone. Reader was always just too slow for any PDF viewing. I rejoiced when Google introduced the feature on their search engine to view PDF results as a HTML render; the same goes for Gmail.

Looking for a little more excitement (and an new option for a recently reformatted laptop of mine), I looked around for lightweight viewers. I found Foxit PDF Reader which is quick to load, and allows annotations, highlighting, and, most importantly, typing on the PDF for saving or printing. Another alternative is the PDF-XChange Viewer (screenshot shown) which loads a little more slowly (though, still years faster than Reader) but has a plethora of tools including drawing, copying, text boxes, typewriter mode, and even a smaller portable version.

On a similar note: Need to create a PDF, or convert a file for a friend lacking the software? Try PrimoPDF. I use it most often to save online confirmations or receipts as PDFs instead of physically printing them. I’ve also used it for posting resumes, or PowerPoint files as PDFs with no worry that the end-user didn’t have the latest version of Office.