Ubiquitous Player 8.8

Ubiquitous Player is a media player. An image viewer. A web browser. A calculator, clipboard manager, screen grab tool, virtual keyboard and more, all crammed into a compact portable application. Which sounds great, but in practice there are plenty of problems.

The image viewer, for instance, is slow to generate its overly sharp thumbnails. And its interface is often less than intuitive. For example, we expected to be able to right-click a thumbnail to see what operations we could perform on it - but that doesn't work here. You have to double-click the image to view it in full, first.

But on the other hand, once you've figured this out then you'll be able to draw on images, add text, rotate and mirror them, apply simple blur and smoothing filters, and more.

It's a similar story with the Media Player. This section of the program has an ugly, cluttered interface which is awkward to use. But file format support is reasonable - you can play MPG, OGG, FLAC, APE and more - and there's support for creating and managing playlists, too.

And the very mixed feel continues just about everywhere you look. Click the Clipboard tab, say, check the "Monitor clipboard" box and Ubiquitous Player will collect everything you copy to the clipboard, for easy reuse or to save at a later date.

But then you notice that you can't select files using the mouse in the Media Player; or find some random button that has no tooltip, and doesn't appear to do anything; or try a program function which doesn't seem to work at all, and suddenly you're confused again.

Despite all this, if you regularly make use of portable applications then it may be worth giving Ubiquitous Player a try. There is a vast array of functionality here, far more than we've room to mention (even a basic Tetris clone), and you may find something that appeals. Just be prepared to spend some time in finding that out; there are lots of interface annoyances which you must bypass first.

Ubiquitous Player 8.0 is here. The latest version offers these changes/improvements:

- A completely re-designed user-interface

Ubiquitous Player tries to do far too many things, and unsurprisingly isn't very good at most of them. It does have some useful features, though, and if you can live with the interface issues then the program may be worth a try.