Foxit PDF Alternative to Adobe Reader

While browsing BetaNews over the weekend, I came across Foxit PDF Reader. It’s a PDF reader and that concept may seem a bit redundant at first since Adobe has a PDF reader that works fine, eh? Well, the only problem is that the basic Acrobat Reader could read PDF documents years ago and yet Adobe needed something to put in the new versions…

So, for the last few years, Adobe has released new versions of their PDF reader, adding obscure features which only served to slow down the app for the rest of us. That's where Foxit’s PDF Reader comes in. In contrast to Adobe's PDF Reader which — at least on my system — weighs in at 70 MB (?!), Foxit PDF Reader is about 2 MB. And, it’s just a single .exe file, so there’s no complicated install, either; just unzip and go.

I must say, I was skeptical of of Foxit Reader at first. I mean, how could such a small app display the same documents that needed a 70 MB app previously? Well, I was pleasantly surprised — this thing loads almost instantaneously and it properly rendered all of the documents which I tested with it. On top of that, my mouse wheel actually works this time around (for some reason, my mouse wheel was perpetually ineffective in Adobe Reader).

The only downside to Foxit PDF Reader is that it doesn't support PDF-based forms. Sure, you can view the forms (and print them if you wanted to) but it doesn't support filling out the forms right within the PDF Reader. So, at least for those rare occurrences, it’d make sense to keep Adobe Reader tucked away somewhere. On the other hand, Foxit Reader does have a feature which is similar and, depending on the situation, may be better or worse than native form support. In what they call “typewriter” mode, you can type on top of any part of a document. So, yeah, you could fake filling out a form by placing text right on top of the form fields. More importantly, you can add your own text to any form this way — whether or not they were designed with PDF form support.

PDFs used to be a real drag; I never looked forward to having to open them. But, I can open a PDF document faster than I can open a Word document these days — and I never thought that would happen. (And if you're up for it, I’d recommend trying the 1.3 beta over the current release; I’ve not had any problems with it.)

Process Throttling for Windows

While I was looking over Beta News the other day, I came across a handy freeware utility called Process Tamer. It implements an idea which I've had for a few years but didn't have the programming skills to implement ;). Essentially, it runs in the tray and keeps watch on the currently running process (your web browser, your word processor, and so on) and if any of them starts becoming greedy and eating up all your CPU cycles, Process Tamer puts the hammer down and lowers that app’s priority until it gets back under control.

“There are many times when a process will hog your cpu, such as when converting audio/video files, or working with compressed archives. Because these processes completely consume the cpu, your system becomes sluggish to respond and using the computer for other tasks becomes impossible while these processes are running.” “Process Tamer solves this problem by identifying such these degenerate conditions and temporarily reducing the priority of the offending processes in order to allow your system to respond to other requests. Stop being a victim to an overloaded cpu — let Process Tamer keep your system responsive no matter what you're doing. […] ”

If all this talk of “processes” and “scheduling” is Greek to you, I’ll try to go over the general idea. As you’re likely aware, modern operating systems can multi-task which allows them to run multiple programs at the same time (such as viewing a web page while your e-mail client runs in the background). But, at the micro-level, your CPU can only pay attention to one application (“process”) at a time. So, it cycles through each application, doing a few calculations for one of them, switching to the next one, doing a few more calculations, and so on.

And, each process can also have a priority assigned to it which means that higher priority processes are given a preference if there’s a mad grab for CPU cycles. One example of priorities is your mouse cursor which, if I recall correctly, has nearly infinite priority — that is, even under heavy load, your mouse cursor is always supposed to remain responsive. So, what happens if two applications have the same priority but one of them becomes greedy? Well, the meek app just loses out.

And that’s where Process Tamer comes in. Say you're ripping some CDs and the ripping application is hogging the CPU, making your e-mail client sluggish; well, Process Tamer notices that and temporarily lowers the ripper’s priority, leveling the playing field for the other applications.