When Urs Fleisch needed a utility to edit the tags of MP3 files in 2002, none of the existing programs available on Linux suited his needs. At first he tried to enhance TkTag, a Perl application, but he soon realized that he had to write his own application to get what he really wanted. Fleisch created Kid3, an audio tag editor that follows the Unix philosophy of ?do one thing and do it well.?

Kid3 originally ran on KDE, but nowadays it runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It handles not only ID3 tags in MP3 files, but also tags in Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, MP4/AAC, MP2, Speex, TrueAudio, WavPack, WMA, WAV, and AIFF files, and it lets you edit all tags in a file, not just a selected subset.

Kid3 has a simple user interface, but it?s powerful under the hood. If you want to get more out of it, you can define your own import, export, filename, and tag formats using regular expressions, add cover art sources with URL conversions, use custom filters, script it with D-Bus, and configure custom user commands. To get the most out of Kid3, Fleisch advises users read the Kid3 handbook. ?When they know the basic usage, they can start with custom formats for import, export, filenames, and filters.?

Fleisch has been working on the code in his free time for eight years, for an average of one work day per week. He codes in Emacs, and builds the software with autoconf/automake for KDE 3 and cmake for KDE 4. For the version without KDE dependencies he relies on QMake and Qt, the cross-platform application framework.

?I make two releases per year,? Fleisch says. ?Most new features are requests from users. Kid3 is rather feature-complete, but there is room for improvement, perhaps in areas like editing of synchronized lyrics or setting tag fields by extracting information from other tag fields. Users can help me by reporting bugs, suggesting new features, providing translations, and telling other people how happy they are with Kid3 so that more people use it.?

Excel has become something of a lingua franca for financial information ? you can be relatively sure you can share your figures with others if they?re in Excel. Ah, but how do you get them into Excel if they?re stored elsewhere? You can employ Excel Writer, an application that produces simple Excel files with basic formatting from a variety of sources.

Excel Writer can use financial data pumped from a database, historical data on the Web, a human-readable log file, statistics from a profiler, source metrics ? in short, a just about anywhere. It?s more flexible in getting information than Excel itself. With Excel you?d need to use the Excel API, meaning your application would need to be on a computer where Excel is also installed.

Swiss developer Gautier de Montmollin wrote Excel Writer last year in Ada to help build a simulation spreadsheet with hundreds of elements. ?In such a case, a CSV file would be not only too austere, but would lead to confusions in absence of proper numeric formats and a little bit of page formatting.? He uses the GNU Ada Translator (GNAT) as his compiler during development.

de Montmollin licenses the software under the MIT license, because ?it seems to be one of the most liberal licenses available. I don?t care if people sell closed source software using Excel Writer; I would be more concerned that people not be blocked by some license issue they didn?t anticipate.? Similarly, he hosts the project on SourceForge.net because ?it is the most open-minded open source site, and with amazing services, especially source control, releases, and trackers.?

de Montmollin plans to continue to develop Excel Writer to emulate more versions of Excel and support more contents, depending on users? needs. He welcomes feedback via SourceForge forums.

If you want to develop an application that incorporates information about movies, do we have a tool for you. IMDbPY is a Python package that can retrieve and manage the huge amount of data available from IMDb.com, the Internet Movie Database. IMDb data is free for personal and non-commercial use; IMDbPY is free software. The tool is widely used by video collection managers, multimedia players, and media centers, says its creator, Italian developer Davide Alberani.

Alberani began writing IMDbPY in 2004 to help him organize his own movie collection. Six years and 20,000 lines of code later, version 4.5.1, released this month, is included in every major Linux and Unix distributions and is used by more than 20 other software projects. It has been publicly praised by Col Needham, the founder of IMDb.

Alberani wrote IMDbPY in Python ?because of its clearness and simplicity: using a high-level interpreted language, you can greatly speed up the development cycle. Moreover, it has a large user base, and countless libraries were already available.? Thanks to its use of Python and its libraries, along with certain fall-back functions and platform-specific patches, IMDbPY works out of the box on a huge variety of platforms, including mobile devices.

On the back end, IMDbPY interfaces with SQL databases via the SQLObject object-relational mapping (ORM) and SQLAlchemy. ?When we decided to switch to the SQLAlchemy ORM, we didn?t drop SQLObject support; instead, I wrote an adapter layer so that IMDbPY can now work with both.?

IMDbPY has been used in a variety of high-profile projects, Alberani says. In academia it?s been used to produce papers about cinema and also in an in-depth course about optimization of a MySQL database. A few years ago it was used by some of the contestants for the Netflix prize (?but they did not win?). ?One of the most awesome thing IMDbPY was used for was research about automatic generation of teasers using ontologies. I don?t even try to pretend that I understand it!?

With the software essentially feature-complete, Alberani is concentrating on making it more robust and bulletproof. ?We?re working with user-supplied data, and part of our work is to follow a moving target ? the imdb.com site. This also means that we need to release a new version every few months. For the future, I?d like to see improvements in our ability to do more complex queries on the SQL database, and it would be wonderful if we could have a working and up-to-date version for mobile devices (Symbian, iPhone, Nexus, Maemo, and so on), but every new idea is welcome! The best way to present your ideas is on the imdbpy-devel mailing list.?

Many years ago, Felipe Castro learned to type with the help of the proprietary Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing application. But though Castro is from Brazil, he had to use an English keyboard layout. That got him thinking. When Castro, an engineer by trade, decided to improve his programming skills, he decided to create a touch typing tutor, Klavaro, and make it keyboard- and language-independent.

Klavaro is designed to help people learn the keys on a keyboard by touch ? that is, by muscle memory. Castro says it can help you learn a new keyboard layout in a week or two, if you use it for one hour a day. ?For example, I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak using it, then I switched again to the Portuguese-specific layout Nativo.?

The software provides easy lessons for beginners, and supports any keyboard layout. The lessons in the basic module go through the keyboard row by row, using pairs of keys, balancing the use of fingers of both hands.

Castro says, ?I like the simplicity and elegance of pure C, so I didn?t have to think much when I chose that to write Klavaro.? The application also relies on the GTK+ toolkit.

Castro gets a lot of enhancement requests for the application. ?When people ask for some incredible new feature, I analyze it carefully, so that it doesn?t ruin the tutor?s methodology. There are some features I think would be nice, like network support for local ranking. Another thing I thought would be great was some kind of dictation lesson, though that would be very language-specific. But I don?t have much time to deal with all those things. It would be nice if someone else got interested in developing further some of those features. SourceForge.net provides a nice infrastructure for people to collaborate, and I?m very open to new contributors.?

Remember the governmental regulations that SourceForge ran afoul of, requiring us to keep users from certain countries from downloading certain software? Today the US government made a move toward software freedom when it issued amendments to its regulations to allow individuals in some of the affected countries more privileges.

According to the government press release, ?The amendments add general licenses authorizing the exportation of certain personal Internet-based communications services ? such as instant messaging, chat and email, and social networking ? to Iran, Sudan and Cuba. The amendments also permit the exportation of related software to Iran and Sudan.?

I don?t know how much influence our efforts or the reaction of our users had on the people who make the regulations, but that doesn?t really matter. What?s important is that more people around the world can enjoy the same privileges many of the rest of us take for granted. It?s a step in the right direction.