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We all have tasks that accumulate throughout the day from work, family obligations, and life. Keeping tasks organized can help prevent that feeling of life slipping into an unmanagable chaos. Enter Task Coach, a desktop task manager for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. With Task Coach, you cna create, edit, and delete tasks and subtasks. Each task can have as much or as little detail as you need to get it on your list and stop worry about whether you will remember to do it. Entering tasks can be as easy as dragging an email message into the Task Coach task viewer, which saves time in typing things more than once. Grouping tasks makes it possible to segment your responsibilities into the various buckets that make up your life.

Being able to document the geographic location of your photos is great for putting together a story about a trip or simply for jogging your memory at some point in the future. GeoSetter makes the process of geotagging your photos easier by allowing you to search for a location in Google Maps and setting EXIF data in the photo file with the latitude and longitude of the location. Once you tag the photos, GeoSetter can show you a route map for related photos, or multiple routes if you have several clusters of photos, creating a sort of online photo walk that recreates your trip. GeoSetter is compatible with the LOCR geotagging photo community, so you can share your photos with other people who have a common interest in geotagging.

One of the few artistic manipulations I like in the digital photography world is the ability to make a photo look like a drawing or watercolor. Maybe it's I'm simply not artistic enough to draw the pictures myself. While apps like Photoshop include features for converting digital files to digital drawings, apps like FotoSketcher are nice to have because they focus on doing this one feature really well. Convert your favorite portrait photography and still live scenes to line drawings, water colors, or oil paintings using FotoSketcher to fine tune all the elements of your composition. Whether you want to create a framable sketch to send as a gift or simply make an artistic image to use on a website, FotoSketcher includes enough versatility to tweak all the image settings to get the digital likeness you are looking for. You can also use

A text editor is something I can't live without. Notepad just doesn't cut it. WordPad adds too much extra stuff. I was using Notepad++ as the best free text editor, but lately it exhibits strange errors on even a clean Windows 7 install. After reviewing the best text editors as chosen by a past reader survey, I realized it's time to seek out something new. So far RJ TextEd looks to be among the best. The app includes syntax highlighting for most programming languages. If you use TopStyle Lite for CSS, it will automatically use TopStyle for CSS editing. There's a built-in Firefox and IE browser preview for testing HTML. Search and replace works across the current document or an entire folder of documents. A number of text transformations are included. Uploading via SFTP is supported. Overall RJ TextEd does everything I need a text editor to do. I'm still not sure I'm ready to give up on Notepad++, but if I do RJ TextEd is the front runner. [Windows $0.00]

If you want to freehand computer drawing, MyPaint is a great free digital painting program to get you started. Available primarily for Windows, MyPaint also has Linux and Mac OS X distrubutions. MyPaint offers digital paint editing, compatible with either your graphics tablet or mouse. A huge assortment of digital paint brushes make everything from creating complex textures, to intricate shading, to simple line drawing look amazing. The only thing MyPaint is missing is the artistic skill to create the drawings. Tools are constructed with keyboard shortcut toggling to make sure you can easily maximize the digital paint canvas on your screen and only interrupt your drawing with tools when necessary. If you can't find one of the many realistic paint brushes to fit your needs, MyPaint allows you to create your own. Other key features include layer support, color sampling, and non-destructive Undo. Digital paintings are saved in Open Raster format (.ora) or exported to PNG or JPG compressed image formats. [Windows/Linux/Mac $0.00]

I've mentioned several times about how much I enjoy have a Kindle. The format is an absolute joy to read on, without all the eye fatigue I feel after several hours of staring at an LCD screen. For my travel schedule, the greatest thing about the Kindle is I can bring the 3-5 books I'm reading at any given time, without needing all the physical space created by having those books in my backpack. Of course, if I ever forget my Kindle, then I don't have any of those books. Amazon makes a Kindle iPhone app, but since I use an Android phone, that doesn't help. Enter the Kindle for PC software. As long as I have a computer and Internet connection, I can still download all of my Kindle library. The reading experience does not match up with the Kindle device, because reading on a PC comes with eye fatigue. Being able to adjust font size and reading column width are a great advantage over paper, because you can optimize the page for faster reading, but it remains imperfect. Like the Kindle hardware, if you finish a book, you can always download a new one. If you think you might want a Kindle, don't use this software to judge against the quality of the reading experience; it's just not the same. But if you have a Kindle and want to share your library with another family member (or simply forgot your Kindle) this is an acceptable alternative. [Windows 7/Vista/XP $0.00]

Amazon S3 became my primary solution for hosting images and download files over a year ago. It's also become an excellent place for me to post videos when I do projects for other people. What isn't so great about S3 is the lack of tools for getting data in to S3. For months I relied on the Firefox S3Fox plugin, which creates a sort of FTP-like interface for Amazon S3 in a Firefox browser window. Upgrades of Firefox periodically break this plugin, making it unavailable for uploading files at times. I tried various pay solutions and found them all to be largely worse than using S3Fox. Recently I started using CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3, which is free and does everything I need to get files from my PC to the Amazon S3 service. Like S3Fox, CloudBerry functions like an FTP client, except CloudBerry is a standalone application. Batch uploading is supported, you can configure permissions on files from CloudBerry, and overall I find CloudBerry Explorer to be far more reliable than S3Fox. A pro version adds support for compression to keep the upload cost of putting files on Amazon S3 down, along with encryption, support for multiple accounts and a sync between local files and Amazon S3. [Windows XP/Vista/7 $0.00]

If you like the idea of ebooks, but find the idea of separate hardware for reading ebooks cumbersome, Sony eBook Library Software may be right up your alley. The software looks similar to iTunes, with location filters for folders and the online store in a left side navigation, with most of the interaction in a center pane. Like iTunes, you can browse a store from the interface, locating the books you want to download. One of the key features making this free ebook software appealing is the collection of 500,000 titles from Google Books specially formatted for reading both in the eBook Library Software and on the Sony Reader hardware. Literary classics are among the available titles, as are many historic works of non-fiction. You can find a number of out-of-print books in the Google collection which are unavailable in most other places. If you have a Netbook, like my HP Mini 1000, this is a great companion software solution for adding useful functionality to an already highly portable tool. Dowload eBook Library Software free from Sony. ebook prices vary by title. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]

One of the most important features Windows still needs is system-wide spell check. There's no reason I shouldn't have access to spell check in every single document window if I want it. Microsoft builds one of the best spell checkers available into Word, yet fails to provide anything for the operating system. tinySpell helps solve this problem by offering spell check to any application you want to use it with. The 110,000 word American-English language dictionary goes a long way toward solving most common spelling problems both as-you-type or on any block of text. The only downside is the free version does not include a way to add new words to the dictionary, which is, of course, resolved by purchasing tinySpell+. If you do most of your typing in Firefox, which does include spell check, you may not need tinySpell, but for many of us, an app like this goes a long way to avoiding mistakes. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]

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Download CleanAfterMe

Daily computer use creates a bunch of extra stuff on your system. As you use applications, browse Web sites, open documents, and generally go through your daily routine, you leave bread crumbs about your habits everywhere. If you use a computer on a corporate network, in a public location, or even share with family members, you may have reasons for not broadcasting every little thing you do to anyone who sits down at the computer. You may also not want a bunch of extra junk building up on your system even if you don't care whether people know where you've been. Enter CleanAfterMe, a simple utility designed to remove temporary files, clear the recent documents list, flush the Windows Event Logs, remove the list of installed USB devices, disable auto-complete information, and eliminate cookies. My biggest complaint is the software doesn't allow you to choose which cookies to keep, since there are some that come in handy for saving specific types of preferences. CleanAfterMe runs without an installer, making it a great solution for use on public networks where an admin may have control over what you can and can't do with your computer. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]