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]
Recently in Freeware Category
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]
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]
I've been actively encouraging people to sign up for Twitter because I think it's a great way to keep up with sound bytes from lots of people. It's a decent way to quickly find help with a problem if you are engaged with enough other people. And if selectively used, Twitter is a great way to filter some of the information that flows through your life. For an excellent (and more detailed) explanation of Twitter, watch Twitter in Plain English. After experimenting with only reading other people's Tweets on my phone, only reading in a browser, and using a couple different desktop apps, TweetDeck comes out as the clear winner for organizing information in a way I can quickly digest, showing me the tweets from everyone, the tweets directed at me, and direct messages only I can see in separate panes. TweetDeck is built on the Adobe AIR platform, which feels like a slightly reinvented version of Flash, making it a cross-platform solution out of the gate. My biggest complaint with TweetDeck is that on my Vista laptop the software refuses to update to a newer version, although I've been unable to duplicate this on any other machine. [Windows XP/Vista | Mac OS X | Linux $0.00]
When Sysinternals first became part of Microsoft, I was concerned their regular release of free apps would cease. Fortunately Microsoft continues to let them thrive. The recent release of Desktops is a perfect example. The app is a simple solution for creating up to 4 virtual desktops for Windows. Virtual desktops come in handy because it can get confusing when you have many application windows open simultaneously. With a virtual desktop, you can give each application function its own space. Put your email client on one desktop, your Web browser on another desktop, your photo editor on a third desktop and your favorite game on the fourth. I find it really handy for keeping interruptive instant messenger windows from getting in the way of whatever I'm doing. Desktops also separates taskbar items by desktop, making it easier to get to the screen you want. Clicking the icon in the system tray provides a visual of all four desktops (shown below) or you can simply use Win+1,2,3 ,or 4 to switch between them. Desktops isn't a replacement for having two monitors but it goes a long way to reducing clutter on your desktop. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
There are many occasions where I want to combine a few PDF files into a single document for easy storage. If I get invoices, contracts and data about a project in several different files, I can archive them all as one file by combining them. Conversely, there are many instances where I get PDFs that have unnecessary blank pages or strange formatting that I eliminate by removing pages. I typically use the full version of Adobe Acrobat for these functions, but that's overkill for most people. PDF Split and Merge helps make it easy to merge and split PDF files without needing to spend additional dollars on a more complex program. The interface is a little clunky, but once you get used to it's quirks, splitting PDFs is a snap. The only possible disadvantage to this app is it lacks the ability to perform split and merge functions on password protected PDFs. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
You may remember the recent reader survey I ran as part of the 31 Days of the Dragon contest where I gave away an HP HDX Dragon. At that time, I promised to share your picks for the best software in each of the 20 categories. What I didn't realize is what a monumental task filtering the data would be. People from all 31 sites participating in the contest filled out the survey, which made the number of entries huge and delivered a massive set of results to filter through. A survey with entirely free form answers is much more complicated to assemble into meaningful data than one where everything is multiple choice. As a result, I'm breaking the results into two parts. The first 10 categories will be covered now, with the remaining 10 coming next week. In addition to the top vote getter in each category, I've provided additional popular choices for each category of software to provide a broader picture of what people are using.
Here are the reader's choice winners for the first 10 categories:
Photo Organizer
Picasa dominates the photo organizer category with 69% of readers choosing Google's photo organizer as their favorite. I understand why, although as I mentioned, I've largely switched to using Flickr for my photos. The Picasa interface is great for sorting, the search feature is snappy, and it's got great cataloging tools. If Picasa supported more online video hosts it would be almost perfect.
See other popular free photo organizers
Photo Editor
GIMP is quite possibly the most powerful free image editor available. It's also extremely popular with 38% of reader's choosing GIMP as their favorite. GIMP works great for simple things like batch resize a bunch of photos, covert a color photo to black and white, or even cropping one image file. GIMP excels at color correction, multi-layer image creation, and custom scripting for complex batch edits. If you want an image editor that can take whatever you throw at it, GIMP is a solid choice.
See other popular free photo editors
BitTorrent Client
uTorrent tops the list of popular BitTorrent clients with a solid 46% of total reader votes. Technically the name is µTorrent, not uTorrent, but I find it less confusing to refer to it alphabetically rather than with a symbol, not unlike referring to Prince by a name rather than an unpronounceable symbol. uTorrent also happens to be my favorite solution for downloading torrents. It handles simultaneous downloads extremely well with highly configurable bandwidth throttling on a per download basis. Quick-resume is an excellent way to make sure interrupted downloads complete. And the RSS downloader neatly handles subscriptions with embedded torrents.
See other popular free BitTorrent clients
CDBurnerXP Pro
CDBurnerXP Pro received 20% of votes to lead the pack in this collection of CD/DVD burning tools. It's simple workflow translates to creating data disks of virtually any type, including support for burning data to HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks. The app also makes ISO files, including the handy feature of converting BIN and NRG formats to ISO.
See other popular free CD and DVD burning software
Video Converter
SUPER, aka Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer leads this crowded pack of applications with a respectable 10% of reader's votes. It's among the best in this category and deserves a place at the top for it's ability to convert virtually anything you throw at it. Because of it's depth of features, SUPER is a little more bloated than most of the competition and I've occasionally found it slowing down my system if I use it for too long. Having said that, if you haven't ever tried SUPER, I highly recommend downloading the app. It's very likely SUPER will replace whatever you used for video conversion in the past.
See other popular free video converters
Video Editor
Windows Movie Maker leads the pack as the most popular free video editor with 34% of votes. While you could make a case that Movie Maker isn't free since you have to pay for Windows, I'd argue that you're not likely to use any of the apps listed here without Windows, so Movie Maker is a bonus and free enough to qualify for this list. It handles most video formats if you have the right codecs installed on your machine, although it's ideally suited for either MiniDV or HDV video editing (the latter being Vista only).
See other popular free video editors
Audio Editor
Audacity won the audio editor category for the reader's poll with a landslide 77% of all votes. It does multi-track editing, handles most effects and custom audio tweaks, and is actively developed. If you ever need help with Audacity, there's also a very friendly support community. In addition to a Windows version, there are also Mac and Linux installs.
See other popular free audio editors
Spyware Eliminator
Spybot Search & Destroy received a commanding 37% of reader votes for best anti-spyware solution. While many critics (myself included) feel that there are stronger alternatives in the commercial software realm, Spybot S&D has been among the top of the heap for years, commanding a great deal of mindshare with computer users everywhere.
See other popular free spyware eliminators
Antivirus Software
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition received the most votes in the reader survey, chosen by an overwhelming 61% of readers. AVG also happens to be the free solution most closely resembling a traditional commercial antivirus product. AVG provides basic protection from virus and spyware infestation by scanning email messages, and doing scheduled system scans. Like other free solutions, AVG does not proactively scan downloads and instant messaging communications, but should catch anything that slips through either of those methods if you happen to inquire an infected file and open it.
See other popular free antivirus software
Software Firewall
ZoneAlarm While only winning by a narrow margin, ZoneAlarm's free firewall product came in first place with 36% of all reader's surveyed choosing the ZoneAlarm free firewall as their favorite choice. ZoneAlarm offers very basic free protection from both inbound and outbound threats. It also includes a stealth mode designed to keep you invisible to hackers. In this case, I disagree with the readers and find Comodo (#2) to be a more fully featured solution.
See other popular free firewalls
Read Part 2 of the Reader's Choice Best Free Software survey
I saw an early demonstration of WorldWide Telescope at a holiday party in December 2007. The room was blown away. Everything cool we've seen from mapping software for the Earth was bringing all the known universe into focus on screen in a completely different way. You can travel to galaxies and view photos from telescopes from around the world. Hear the leading researchers in astronomy share data on the stars in the sky. World Wide Telescope fundamentally shifts the way we all learn about the stars. One of the big wins here for we Earthlings is that Microsoft has succeed in getting scientists all over the globe to participate in sharing data with the unwashed masses. It's fun to bash Microsoft as a big company that takes our money and frustrates us with lackluster products we're forced to use, but World Wide Telescope is a massive example of the company diverting some of those dollars to something that ultimately benefits everyone on the planet with access to knowledge and information that's primarily only been available to scientists, exposing it in a way that's accessible to everyone. If you have an ASCOM compatible telescope, you can use it in combination with WorldWide Telescope. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
Almost two years ago I wrote about the Schmap player, which enabled interactive map guides for about 30 major U.S. cities at the time. Schmap has since expanded, now offering 200 guides covering cities in Europe, Canada, and the United States. You can download the massive 388MB collection for local access on your computer, or you can selectively download cities as you need them. If you're planning a trip for business or leisure, Schmap offers an interesting way to find places you might otherwise miss, locate restaurants off the beaten path, or simply explore the city before you get there. After Schmap, you won't look at travel planning the same way again. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista Mac OS X $0.00]
Scott Dunn over at Windows Secrets provides a list of the nine must-have freeware apps, based on the overlap in reviews from four respected publications. To make Scott's list, an application had to appear on the list of three out of four of publications. You can read Scott's methodology in picking the software, then download the apps. Most have been mentioned here before.
Avira AntiVir Personal is one of the most frequently updated free antivirus apps.
Comodo Firewall Pro is a solid upgrade to the Windows Firewall, providing protection for both inbound and outbound traffic.
TrueCrypt is my favorite disk encryption software. If you want to make sure files on your disk are locked down, use TrueCrypt with an external key on a USB drive.
CCleaner is a favorite registry cleaner and temp file remover.
Lightning for Thunderbird is a must-have because Thunderbird lacks a calendar.
Foxit Reader is a lightweight alternative to the slow-loading Adobe Reader for PDF browsing. It is free but the terms are confusing because Foxit tries hard to upgrade you to their "pro pack".
Audacity is the best free multi-track audio recorder period. I've written several tutorials for audio recording and podcasting based on Audacity.
Wavosaur is the audio editor I affectionately think of as "Sound Forge lite". It's a great two-track audio editor with most of the functions you'd need from a pro app like Sound Forge.
Pidgin is my favorite unified instant messaging client. Since Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Google, and numerous other messaging apps refuse to collectively play nice, Pidgin bridges the gap for you.
My own lists of best freeware solutions are much longer, but it's excellent to see Scott's distilled list of freeware featuring nine overlapping greats.
If you're not using some kind of password manager to protect all those online accounts, or if you use the same password everywhere, there's a good chance you're exposing yourself to potential security problems. While Firefox has a decent password safe (that only encrypts your files if you supply a master password), using a third-party solution like KeePass is likely a better alternative, if only because it gives you easy access to that data outside of Firefox. KeePass stores unlimited passwords, makes it easy to create unique passwords for each account, and encrypts all those passwords to make it impossible for a virus or someone who sits down at your computer to access your online accounts. Clicking the remember this password box is a good way to give anyone access to your account. Instead of worrying about whether you can remember dozens of passwords, use something like KeePass to store them instead. You only need to remember the master password and KeePass does the rest. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Download Windows Live Photo Gallery
Windows XP may be long in the tooth, but it's certainly not dead yet. If you do only one thing to overhaul the current state of your Windows XP machine, download Windows Live Photo Gallery. This barely exposed update for the baked in Windows photo management tools is one of the most useful upgrades to your Windows user experience. An improved photo import makes this a worthwhile download all on its own. Photo management is upgraded to include views sorted by date and tags (a new tagging tool helps you ID your photos for grouping all pictures of a particular person, event, or location). Simple photo editing for red-eye removal, crops, and adjusting levels handles most common image fixes. If you happen to have a Windows Live Spaces account, there are additional features to publish direct from Windows to your Space or build slideshows for publishing to your Space. Download this free upgrade to the built-in Windows photo management experience and you'll be looking at your images in a whole new way. (The same features also improve Vista) [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
Download SpeedConnect Connection Tester
Is your Internet connection as fast as your ISP claims? Are you sure? When was the last time you ran a speed test to compare their published data transfer rate to what you're really getting? There are a number of online services that you can test against, but it's also handy to have a speed testing tool installed and ready for use (especially if your primary system is a laptop). SpeedConnect Connection Tester downloads a file from a Microsoft server and benchmarks your data rate during transfer, with a handful of stats to analyze once it completes. In theory this is meant to encourage you to purchase the company's Internet Accelerator, if your connection is slow, but you can simply use it to benchmark your connection with no strings attached. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Adobe officially joined the world of online photo editing with Adobe Photoshop Express. This online service allows you to upload photos, edit them, store photos in online albums, and selectively share some or all your photos online. This means you now have access to many of the basic Photoshop editing features without needing to own Photoshop and without needing to have your computer with you. In addition to having a photo repository with Adobe's Photoshop.com site, you can also pull in photos from Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa, which might get me to try uploading some photos to one of those services, instead of my personal preference Flickr.
I wasn't entirely sure I'd like editing Photos in a browser, but even testing the service from my AT&T BroadbandConnect account worked easily enough to convince me this could be a great way to edit photos going forward. Most of the editing features offer you multiple choices, so you can test several variations live, which makes editing just as fast as using desktop software. Editing is non-destructive, so you can always go back to the original version of the file, with a version history that allows you to look back through many undo iterations. Of course if you need automated actions, you'll still want to have Photoshop CS and many of the advanced features of Photoshop Elements aren't found here. For free Adobe has done a great job of exposing popular features, making editing easy, and paid attention to the need to store photos outside of the Adobe universe. Give Photoshop Express a try and you may think twice about tying up system resources with additional photo sorting and editing apps on your desktop.
While I'd like to see support for more online services (especially Flickr), in the meantime Photoshop Express will be one of my keyword bookmarks, so I have it when I need it.
Many of the Windows utilities have been part of the operating system for so long that they start looking neglected. The Windows Calculator is one of the best examples of this. It looks and functions like it was created by an intern writing his or her first Windows application. FreeCalc is the calculator that should have shipped with Windows. Beyond core calculator functions like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, FreeCalc ads a simulated paper tape to actually keep track of your calculations, with a convenient export to text file feature. Instead of a fixed size, FreeCalc is adjustable. There are many more key controls in FreeCalc than the standard Windows calculator. A visible memory value shows you what you stored with the memory function of the calculator. While you can certainly get more calculator functions buy purchasing a software calculator, FreeCalc takes you most of the way to many features that should be built in to any calculator for Windows. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
I have the need for making a flowchart or business diagram once every few months, which makes the price of something like Microsoft's Visio seem outrageous. Diagram Designer is tool for diagramming almost anything. If you need to create a flowchart, diagram of your workflow, the hierarchy of your office, or anything that makes more sense when connecting a bunch of boxes with lines or arrows, Diagram Designer will do the trick. In addition to simple layout of diagrams, the software supports import and export of the following image formats: WMF, EMF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, MNG, ICO, GIF and PCX. There's a graph plotter for math equations. A calculator is built in for solving equations. A compressed file format keeps the files sizes small for your drawings. For most diagramming needs, Diagram Designer will be the last tool you ever need. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
If you have a dial-up modem on your computer and broadband Internet, chances are that modem isn't getting much use. Here's your chance to make it useful and solve a number of phone headaches at the same time. PhoneTray takes data off inbound calls - showing caller ID info on screen and announcing callers via audio. You can configure ringtones for various callers to help identify whether a call is worth answering or not. Zap telemarketers with a special tone (which works for some but not all marketing calls). PhoneTray can also play a do not call warning and block unwanted callers automatically. Additionally, PhoneTray provides call logging, so you have a record of inbound calls on your computer. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
If you use Ctrl+C more than a couple of times daily, you really need a clipboard manager. I happen to really like ClipMagic, because in addition to storing the text I copy, it also stores the URL I got it from (if it came from a Web page), offers handy categories for clipboard items, and makes it a snap to recall previously copied text. ClipMagic saves tons of time for things like sending similar messages to multiple recipients via email. It's especially handy for recalling something you copied a few Ctrl+C combos back, because you won't have to track down that text again as you do with a standard Ctrl+C operation. ClipMagic also includes a handy feature that lets you merge two copied items together. For personal use ClipMagic is totally free making it hard to pass up. If you use it for business, the $20 it costs will be made up in increased productivity. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Also from this software developer:
Macro Scheduler Automation Tool
Download Feyruna Fairy Forest Screensaver
Who wouldn't want a sweet and adorable fairy soaring across a beautiful fantasy landscape on their desktop? Okay, maybe not me, but if you've got kids (or grandchildren) or are a kid at heart, this is a fun freeware screensaver that entertains while the computer is idle. Taken from the game Feyruna Fairy Forest, the screensaver features animaged scenes with the fairy using dazzling spells to defend herself against evil goblins and blazing firebirds. If you keep your speakers on, Feyruna Fairy Forest screensaver also includes the option to turn on some ambient music and sound effects. The animations are great non-violent stuff and make for something more compelling than watching a Windows Media Player visualization or iTunes Cover Flow. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
You can also download the Feyruna Fairy Forest game.
Automatic sync between Google Calendar and Outlook is one of the more popular things I've ever written about. Previous solutions ranged from a clumsy add-on for Outlook called RemoteCalendars and a handful of solutions that cost money. As of today, Google officially supports calendar sync with Outlook using their very own Google Calendar Sync freeware app. You need both Outlook and a free Google Apps account to use the app, but I'm highly impressed with the simplicity and speed of the official Google product. I downloaded the app and had complete sync of all my Outlook items within under 10 minutes. I'm currently defaulting to the 120 minute update timeframe, but you can update more frequently if your calendar changes more often. If you're a Plaxo user, you'll also now get a convenient way to get from Google Calendar to Plaxo by way of Outlook. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
Great freeware image animation apps are hard to come by. Most of the free stuff is either entirely confusing to use or so completely lacking in features as to make it useless. Beneton Movie GIF fits right in the sweet spot of image animating apps, providing both a simple interface for creating animations with enough features to create something you won't be ashamed of when you finish. While the title implies being a GIF only app, Beneton Movie GIF supports JPG, GIF and BMP files for input. Output is either animated GIF files or AVI video you can then use in other apps. Import frames, drag them to the location you want, then set various properties for each of the frames. A handful of image effects allow you to tweak things like motion blurring, image rotation, and color blending, in addition to also being able to animate transitions between frames. Some basic image editing is also built-in, making tweaking your images a breeze without needing to launch an external editor too. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Copy the contents from one smaller hard drive to a larger one, without needing to reformat or reinstall your operating system. HDClone installs on a bootable CD, including it's own OS, making it compatible with any desktop operating system. Once you've made the boot disk, simply boot into the HDClone interface, copy the contents of your old drive to the new larger drive, and when you're finished, you can completely swap out the older drive for the new one, saving tons of time you would have spent installing new programs and hassling with copying file to the new drive. HDClone works with any IDE, ATA, or SATA drive, with copy speeds of approximately 300MB/minute. The software works with both PS/2 style keyboard and mouse combinations, as well as with USB interface devices. If you need additional copy features, there are several fee versions of HDClone as well. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Lost your cat and want help finding it? Lost and found posters are a common way to get the job done. Love those one-word motivational posters available at bookstore, but want to create your own? Look no further than Poster Forge, a freeware app that's like a lite version of expensive tools like Microsoft Publisher. You supply the photo, choose from preconfigured layouts, customize fonts, enter text, and size the whole project, then save out a file ready for printing as a poster. The core movie poster, motivational poster, and wanted poster styles are all fully customizable making it easy to get what you need from the poster. If your poster is larger than what's supported by your home printer, Poster Forge automatically prints sections across multiple pages so you can tile them together to create a finished product. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
I've seen many instances where a well intentioned person deleted important Windows Operating System files, thinking they were freeing up space, only to find out that they completely destroyed their computer. While you may think 'this can't happen to me,' if you share a computer with anyone (kids, spouse, in-laws) you are putting your computing sanity at risk. Enter System Protect, an application designed to prevent the accidental deletion of important system files. You can also protect documents and files you don't want deleted. Using System Protect is a handy way to help make sure a virus doesn't futz with your system too. The downside is you'll have to enter a password to make some kinds of changes to your system, but particularly for Windows XP, this can cut down on unwanted support headaches and may just save you from losing data. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Quickly search for videos across multiple video sites from one convenient search bar with Ashampoo ClipFinder. This free app searches YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, Veoh, MySpace, iFilm and many other places, turning up videos based on your query. Thumbnails are displayed for all videos and you can watch videos without going to any of the sites. Download your favorites to your hard drive for offline viewing. Created by the people who brought you Movie Shrink and Burn, ClipFinder is one of the best tools I've seen for finding video. Movie search and downloading is comparable to what RealPlayer 11 delivers in ease of use, without all the extra overhead associated with the media library functionality of that app. Advanced search features do a good job of narrowing video search results to help return more meaningful results, which is highly useful if you are looking for specific types of online movies. ClipFinder requires free registration for use after the first 10 days. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
FastStone Photo Resizer is a handy tool if you take lots of photos. As the name implies this is a photo editing tool specializing in image resizing, but it does so much more. Crop, watermark, rotate, rename, and otherwise tweak your photos so that they are more meaningful than the raw IMG_00112.jpg label offered up by your computer either one-at-a-time or in batches. Create saved settings you can reuse on future batches of photos. Add text and borders to images to dress them up for publishing. This is a generally slick tool for making sure you breeze through those hundreds of images you've stacked up on your digital cameras flash memory card. There's a handy self-contained version that runs off of thumb drives if you frequently use public computers. The company also makes a screen capture app that I reviewed previously. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
You may also want to try Visualizer Photo Resize.
I have around 10 years of emails backed up, with the most recent three years of my mail still in my Outlook PST file. A large percentage of that stuff is useless, but there are times when I do open old archives and reference my mail. Having that much mail either buts into software limitations, or becomes unmanageable in a working environment, especially if you've changed applications over time (for example going from Outlook Express to Thunderbird). MailStore Home lets you archive all the mail you don't need ready access to in a MIME compatible format that remains searchable with complex queries. Better yet, MailStore Home consolidates mail across multiple email clients into one handy location so it can all be searched from one common location. You never encumber your primary email client this way, because you shuffle your mail off to an archive. And you're never bothered with re-importing a mail file you want to access later. MailStore also conserves more space by saving only one copy of an attachment, instead of storing a copy with every message where the same file appears. If you really want to open a specific message in your current mail client, you can re-import that one message instead of sifting through your entire email history. The whole thing is reasonably future proof by storing mail in as MIME compatible messages instead of a proprietary database structure like Outlook's PST system. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
While the name AutoRuns sounds more like a laxative than a system utility, this is one app that everyone should have in their Windows tool kit. AutoRuns takes the on board Windows MSConig utility to the next level, going far beyond the basics in seeing exactly what's starting up each time you boot your system. Find out all the nitty gritty details about what launches during the boot process and in what order. You can tweak application launching to precisely control what applications, browser helper objects, Windows services, and 3rd party utilities are allowed to start as Windows boots. This comes in handy for helping optimize the Windows boot time, keeps unneeded services from launching when you don't want them, and is also a handy detective tool for discovering malware hidden on your system. If the interface looks overwhelming, consider switching to the mode that hides the official Microsoft signed entires, so you only see startup items that aren't part of Windows. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
I hate it when I download or copy a file only to find out it won't work. It's especially frustrating if the backup copy you made turns out to be corrupt. Digital Video Repair may save you hours of frustration by fixing those damaged or corrupted files. If you downloaded a torrent, only to find out that all the seeds ceased existing, in some cases Digital Video Repair will be able to fix it. Copying files from a CD or DVD? Digital Video Repair can fix corrupt files there to. Most AVI formats are supported, so if you get a bad AVI, give Digital Video Repair a try before tearing out your hair. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Other damaged file repair tools include:
MP3 Repair Tool
WAV Saver - WAV file repair
Download Phrase Express Autotext
If you frequently type the same text, like email signatures, frequentlyl asked questions, URLs, or almost anything else, you can save your fingers by using a text replacement app. Phrase Express offers one solution for text replacement, allowing you to organize your text into a taskbar tool that you then right-click and select when you want to add a common text to any Web form, email, document or other text entry space. The only downside to this is that your hands must leave the keyboard and reach for the mouse in order to make the text replacement, which for shorter phrases might actually slow you down. For my own text replacement, I'm sticking with ActiveWords because I can do it from the keyboard and automate a ton of other stuff too. For an introduction to text replacement, you'll find Phrase Express a handy solution. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
ReminderCube is a standard desktop calendar, including automatic reminders for upcoming events, as well as alarm scheduling for task management. Like most other calendar apps, ReminderCube shows you daily, weekly and monthly events. Unlike typical calendar apps, ReminderCube integrates a couple of handy features. You can check your GMail account from inside ReminderCube. Image browsing is built in. And an RSS reader allows you to subscribe to your latest feeds in the ReminderCube interface. There's also a handy application launcher. For people who like to make notes in their PIM, there's a note recording feature here too. I'm inclined to stick with Outlook or the calendar component of Thunderbird, but if you don't have a calendar, ReminderCube offers a handy solution. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
How many favorites do you have on your computer? 10? 100? 1000? Some number in between those numbers? Better question - how many of those favorite links still work? Most of us have dead links in our favorites. Link200 checks your favorites in Firefox and IE to verify whether they still work or not. It steps through a quick series of wizard driven screens, checking for live links in your bookmarks and favorites, then helps you clean out the links that are dead. If you've got too many favorites, this is a great way to clean up the list and purge the stuff that no longer works. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
While it's still mere rumor that in 20 years we can all choose to live forever, Lifextender promises to give Windows Vista Media Center users a new lease on the life they currently have. As a background application for the Vista version of Media Center, Lifextender automatically strips commercials from programming, saving you about 15 minutes for every hour of television you watch. If you were already fast forwarding through commercials via a hack, you can still save more time by removing them altogether. It also does a respectable job of removing duplicate recordings when Media Center screws up and flags a re-run as a new episode. So far this thing looks to be a huge timesaver. You can integrate Lifextender as a Media Center add-in or simply run it in standalone mode. For shows you don't want to edit, a configurable set of rules lets you avoid specific shows. [Vista Premium/Ultimate $0.00]
I first wrote about FeedDemon almost 4 years ago. All the nice things I said then still apply. In those 4 years, the app has only gotten better, with improvements for subscribing to podcasts, searching for news, and pre-caching Web pages for offline reading among the many enhancements of active development in that time. Now instead of buying the feed reader I use every day, you can download it for free. Newsgator, the company behind FeedDemon recently annouced they plan to give away FeedDemon, Newsgator Inbox 3.0, and Mac feed reader NetNewsWire.
If you're currently using live bookmarking in Firefox, reading feeds in IE, or even using a Web based feed reading solution, I strongly encourage you to drop what you're doing, import your feeds into FeedDemon and give it a try. Why? There's tons of stuff you simply can't get from a Web app like Google Reader or Bloglines. For instance:
- You can read the feed, view images, and the Web pages it links to without being connected to the Web.
- You can create search feeds of your feeds, to bubble the important stuff to the top (this saves me tons of time)
- FeedDemon is fast - far faster than any Web based reader I've tried and I have accounts with several. The name isn't cribbed from Speed Demon for no reason.
- Managing podcast and video blogs with FeedDemon is awesome, and it doesn't care whether you have an iPod or a Zune
- FeedDemon makes it easy to blog stuff you find through desktop tools, skipping the copy and paste steps required by online feed readers
- You could dump your browser and use FeedDemon in place of IE or Firefox (I don't, but it does work).
Nick Bradbury, developer of FeedDemon has a much more comprehensive list of reasons FeedDemon beats your Web feed reader. Sure he's biased, but he's also right. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Security Camera software for your computer can be hard to come by (at least for free). Secure Cam offers support for both DIY Webcam video surveillance and input from a DVR security solution, providing an all-in-one command center for your security needs. To conserve drive space, a motion detection feature only kicks recording into action when there's something moving in proximity to the lens. Up to 99 different inputs are supported, with detailed info by zone provided during the capture process. A mutliplexing option allows you to sell all camera inputs at the same time (assuming you have a security device that supports multiplexed video. For really sophisticated home security, this may not be the solution you need, but if you simply want to monitor motion in your house, Secure Cam is a simple and affordable way to get the job done. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
I generally assume my hard disks are fast enough to do virtually anything I need to accomplish, with the exception of video capture and rendering. One of the easiest ways to drop frames in a video capture project is to try to write video to a drive that can't keep up. This is especially important with high definition video content, which is much more read and write intensive than standard definition video. CrystalDiskMark provides free disk speed benchmarking, so you can quickly see how fast read and write operations are to any drive on your system. You can run the test using multiple read and write operations to determine whether your drives are fast enough to keep up with any complex read/write operation. Nice visual results help you quickly see hard disk performance. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Tweaking your Windows user interface to make it function the way you want is the goal of many software apps. The free Microsoft TweakUI, available for every version of Windows is something I'm never without, but it never goes far enough in allowing me to customize all the Windows system and user interface settings. Fresh UI helps tweak where TweakUI falls short, offering a long list of Windows customizations for every version of Windows from Windows 98 forward. All tweaks and optimizations are organized by category and offer detailed explanations so you know what exactly is getting changed. The only shortcoming of Fresh UI is that it doesn't include a way to roll back to the setting before your change. If that's a feature you need, you may need to consider other tweaking tools. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
When you're making CDs from your digital music collection, it can be easier to tell various shiny disk apart by making some creative labels for the case, the disk, or both. CdCoverCreator is a freeware CD label maker and CD jewel case cover designer meant to exactly that - design labels and cover art for both Audio and Data CDs. Using CdCoverCreator, you can create everything from stick-on labels for CDs, jewel case inserts and even a booklet complete with song lyrics. The software is optimized for automating each aspect of CD layout, including searching for song lyrics and automatically importing all relevant song details from your digital files or by reading in CD-text. Many pre-defined style templates provide basic layouts you can customize with your own images. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
You may also want to check out Easy CD & DVD Cover Creator and Acoustica CD/DVD Label Maker as two other solutions for making CD covers and labels.
I use VirtualDub for all kinds of video processing tasks, but there are several types of MPEG files that VirtualDub is a hassle to deal with. Avidemux offers an interesting alternative to VirtualDub for processing and editing these MPEG files, along with AVI, MP4, and most other common formats. One key area I'm finding Avidemux useful is a free alternative for editing the M2T files created when capturing from HDV camcorders using HDVSplit; the combined tools offer a completely free way to go from HD camcorder to edited HD movie. Like other video editing apps, you can crop files, color correct video, separate audio and video, save out multiple formats. Like VirtualDub, Avidemux supports queuing tasks, so you can line up a bunch of edits on multiple files and walk away while they all run. Another neat feature of Avidemux is OS X and Linux support, which is something you don't get with VirtualDub. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista Linux Mac OS X $0.00]
One of my least favorite aspects of re-installing Windows is figuring out where all the driver disks or driver download websites are for my various hardware components. Even if you have a stock system from somewhere like Dell or HP, there's a certain amount of time involved in acquiring the latest drivers after a re-install. Driver Magician Lite helps speed up that process by backing up all the drivers for your hardware in a way that makes it easy to keep all those drivers in one place before you re-install your operating system. It automatically detects which drivers are built into Windows, so you don't get any redundancy, just drivers that are unique to hardware components. There's also a commercial version of Driver Magician which does some cool things like checking for updates and building an .exe installer of all the drivers it backs up, which greatly speeds the re-installation process. [Windows 9x/XP/2k/Vista $0.00]
One of the Websites I manage has about 10,000 static HTML pages that were created several years ago before I wised up and put everything in a content management system. The pages don't need changes very frequently, but when they do require a change, I need something that handles find and replace like a champ. TextCrawler became my new best friend while making those changes, because it saved me having to burn through hours of my own time or hire someone else to do the work for me. The software supports basic things like replacing the same chunk of text across many files, or replacing text with nothing. TextCrawler also does advanced text manipulation, including a number of regular expressions that will cut your file updating time to nothing when you leverage their power. I'm sure there must be a limit to how many files TextCrawler can search, but I can say with confidence that it can handle just under 10,000 pages like a champ. If you need to update lots of documents online or on your hard drive, TextCrawler is the best free solution I've ever used. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
If you're a great freehand artist and want to get your drawings on your computer, scanning is an obvious solution. Scanning only gets you a gigantic image file of your drawing; it doesn't get you a way to work directly with your drawing. To manipulate your drawing you need to convert it to a vector format first. LineTracer offers a free solution for taking hand drawn sketches and converts them to EPS format vector images. You scan your drawing at 200-300dpi, then import that scanned image into LineTracer. The simple interface supports cleaning up the drawings you made before conversion, by defining all the tracing points of your lines. The EPS file is then compatible with applications like Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Illustrator, and Flash. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
TrakAxPC is one of the first free video and music editors I've seen with a simple interface. Combining beat-matching and looping features of audio processing apps, with simple video editing features, you can create multimedia projects mixing photos, video clips and audio files all on the same timeline. Support for recording from camcorders and microphones means you can create original content directly in the TrakAxPC interface. Integrated CD ripping, built-in audio and video effects, and sampling capabilities compliment other core features. Optional TrakPacks are available if you needed looped audio content. Audio only projects are rendered as either WMA or WAV files. While I won't be tossing out apps like Sony Vegas or Adobe Audition in favor of TrakAxPC, it's definitely a great app for working with audio and video without getting overwhelmed by features. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
With a large percentage of new camcorders using MPEG-2 video combined with AC3 audio as a common storage format, it's become much more complicated to work with camcorder video. If you have one of these camcorders and use free tools like Windows Movie Maker for video editing, you simply shouldn't be without the free DirectShow filter AC3Filter. The app runs in the background as an audio decoder and processor filter for AC3 and DTS audio tracks. AC3Filter supports playback of AC3 and DTS audio tracks in software like Windows Media Player, in addition to enabling editing features in things like Windows Movie Maker. Audio processing supports an up-mixing any audio source to 6 channels or down-mixing to stereo from surround sound. Both analog multi-channel and digital (SPDIF) output are supported. AC3Filter encodes any audio source to AC3 on-the-fly and send it over SPDIF to your receiver. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Download Outlook on the Desktop
One thing I hate about Outlook is the way everything gets buried in the interface. I can't quickly see my calendar for a given day or week and know whether I've already got something planned. Outlook on the Desktop helps address this problem by embedding your Microsoft Outlook Calendar on your Windows desktop. You can adjust the calendar size, placement on the desktop and level of transparency to create a highly accessible desktop view of your schedule. Pick between daily, weekly or monthly views depending on how full your calendar is. You can also switch to Outlook Inbox, Tasks, Contacts, or Notes view from the tray icon for quick access to information. The pinned calendar supports full editing for adding and updating appointments. Double-click any item on the calendar to open in Outlook. One awesome feature of this app is multiple monitor support, which means you can pin your calendar to a second montior and have your inbox open on the other screen. Most importantly this works with all versions of Outlook from 2000 SR-1 forward, so you don't need the latest version to get the benefit. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
If you store passwords for frequently visited Websites in Firefox, chances are you need to move those passwords or back them up. Password Exporter, a Firefox extension, makes it easy to export passwords from Firefox as either an XML or CSV file. You can then import passwords from the file to Firefox on another computer (or simply keep a backup of your password list. Encryption of the stored passwords is optional, so you can keep your passwords secure if necessary. One really handy feature is the ability to backup all those sites you told Firefox to never remember your password for, so you don't get that nagging dialog box when you visit on another computer. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Find more Firefox tips and extensions
Download Secunia Personal Software Inspector
If you install more than a few applications, keeping up on the latest versions is a hassle. Not keeping apps up to date is also one of the most likely ways to introduce security holes in your computer. Enter Secunia Personal Software Inspector - an app designed to notify you when applications on your computer are out of date. It currently recognizes over 4,000 applications, so chances are good it will automatically detect anything you have installed. For instance, immediately after installing, I was notified that newer versions of Java and Flash were available, as well as more obscure free tools like VLC Player and the popular file compression utility WinRAR. This isn't a replacement for keeping your operating system up to date using Windows Update, but it will help you make sure you have the latest versions of software on your system. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Roxio is well known for making video tools. Their Easy Media Creator suite is a popular solution for editing movies, photos and audio. For some things, like quickly preparing a file for upload to YouTube, a full-fledged editing suite can be more software than you need. Enter Roxio Buzz - an editing tool for quickly cliping a portion of video for upload to YouTube, GoFish, Silverlight, or all three at the same time. The software supports WMV, AVI, MPEG-1, QuickTime MOV files, MPEG-2 and various implementations of MPEG-4, like 3gp and h.264. For photo slideshows, you can add pan and zoom motion, apply transitions and layer a soundtrack underneath images prior to uploading. While Roxio Buzz does not replace traditional editing tools, this is among the easiest tools for people who want a quick solution for getting their favorite clips from a hard drive to YouTube or other sites. [Windows 2000/XP/Vista $19.99]
Download Eric's Movie Database
A ton of requests hit my inbox for apps to catalog your DVD collection. It's tough to find the perfect solution because everyone has a different preference for the way they sort their data. Eric's Movie Database (EMDB) is a simple utility for cataloging both DVDs and digital movie files stored on your hard drive. Most movie details are imported via IMDB using a title search. EMDB supports adding your own ratings to movies. The app also stores specific information like audio and video codecs for digital files. Add your own cover images for each DVD or import the image from IMDB. Export movie lists as text delimited files or print them for your records. Keep track of loaned DVDs to make sure your friends aren't too forgetful. If you currently catalog DVDs with another solution, the app supports importing comma delimited files of DVD data. The big missing piece in EMDB remains support for importing via DVD barcode, but I'll forgive that since the app is free. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Other Movie Cataloging tools you might want to try include:
Movie Collector does the best job at finding foreign films.
MediaMan an elegant solution for managing DVD collections.
Media Catalog Studio for cataloging both audio and video.
There are a ton of solutions for aggregating online streams into a sort of desktop television of channels, all with varying quirks. Some forego quality content for quantity of channels. Others frequently fill the channel roster with Webcams that never update. TVUPlayer doesn't concern itself with quantity or Webcams. Instead, a short list of quality streams is provided in a clean simple interface. Channels include ESPN, Disney, ABC, FOX, NBC, CNN, USA, Comedy Central, Animal Planet, Telemundo, Al Jazeera and MLB TV. Around 40 channels are included. Video images are viewed in either a small 320x240 window or at a maximum size of 800x600, which is large enough considering most of the streams aren't meant to be seen full screen. The interface is locked down, so you can't add any new streams or delete ones you don't want, but you can create a list of favorites to avoid scrolling through the channel list. If you happen to have original video content, TVU Networks also has a tool for broadcasting your own channel into their interface. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
AptDiff is a tool for visually comparing two text or binary files. With color coding you quickly view differences between two files, with convenient support for merging differences in either direction. AptDiff also supports exporting the side-by-side comparison of file differences to an HTML page for either publishing to the Web or simply for having a clean comparison of the two files. For rolling back, simply backup the files before you make changes. Color coding is fully customizable so you get the look that makes the most sense to you. I don't know if there's a size limit on comparing the files, but I tried two files at just under 1MB each and they opened with no problem. If you work with lots of text this is an invaluable tool for finding changes made between multiple document versions. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
If you have Mac OS X envy, but aren't ready to make the "switch" you might consider adding Mac-like features to Windows XP or Vista. My Expose assists in adding one Mac OS X feature, mimicking the application browsing found in the Mac Expose app. By hitting a hot key on your keyboard, My Expose gives you a quick at-a-glance view of every open window on your system, which is far more useful than alt-tabbing your way through a dozen open applications. Mac users in the crowd will get no disagreement from me that My Expose is nowhere near as elegant as the real thing, but as a free desktop tweak, My Expose does a solid job of providing a clever Mac-like feature. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
Flickr is the one Web service I wouldn't want to live without. I store most of my photos there and I'm always finding cool photos taken by other people. Flickr provides a photo uploading tool, but it's not automated. FlickrSync provides an automatic way to sync photos between your computer and your account on Flickr. Set up rules to sync photos based on title, date taken, description, or tags. Synchronize all the information about your images between FlickrSync and Flickr. Browse local photos on your computer or your sets of images on Flickr. FlickrSync takes Flickr to a whole new level. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
If you're a Thunderbird mail user and want calendar integration with your mail, Lightning is the way to get it. This add-on builds on the standalone Sunbird calendar app and integrates it directly into the Thunderbird interface. Calendar items can be linked to email and tasks giving you integrated personal information management. All the standard month, week and daily views of tasks are available with color coding for easy organization. Calendars are in the standard iCal format. Additional support for device synchronization to Palm, Pocket PC, iPod and various cell phone devices makes it simple to keep your data with you no matter where you are. Holiday calendars are available from Mozilla to stay up to date on upcoming events. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista Mac OS Linux $0.00]
MP3 files recorded directly with a voice recorder often require some editing. Many MP3s downloaded from the Internet need editing to trim unwanted sections. Both of these scenarios result in better quality audio when the MP3 is not re-compressed after editing. Enter mp3DirectCut, which provides an interface for directly editing MP3 files without first converting to a PCM audio format. mp3DirectCut speeds up the MP3 editing process in a number of areas, providing direct access to cut, copy, and remove sections of an MP3 in a non-destructive editor without ever needing to recompress. This saves time, disk space and eliminates the generational hit of decompressing and recompressing your MP3 files during editing. Note: If you install mp3DirectCut on Windows Vista you will need to run the installer as administrator. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
I download a ton of stuff - movies; music; software; images; documents. By default, all these digital files end up in the same directory if you use the download manager built into Firefox. MoveIt2 helps keep all this stuff organized, without needing to specify a location every time I download something. With MoveIt2 running in the background, I can automatically move music files to one of my music library folders, PDF files to the place where I store electronic documents and photos to the place where I like to keep pictures, without ever manually intervening in the process. If you run an FTP site, MoveIt2 is even more useful because you can have people upload files to a common location and MoveIt2 automatically sorts them based on certain criteria (of course, this assumes your FTP server is running Windows). The free version only supports 5 simultaneous watched actions, which for a single user is likely more than enough. For complicated file moving rules, a pay version of the software supports unlimited manipulations. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Download CD Recovery Toolbox Free
There's nothing worse than losing files, whether it's hard drive failure, a failed memory card, or a DVD that now reads like a coaster. I recently had someone ask how to recover video from a DVD camcorder disk that failed. CD Recovery Toolbox is the solution I recommend for getting data from almost any damaged or corrupt DVD or CD, because it's been successful every time I need it. Like most data recovery, there's no guarantee you'll get 100% of lost data back, especially if there's physical damage to the DVD or CD you're attempting to recover. If there's a chance you can get data off the DVD, CD Recovery Toolbox will find anything that's there to see. Even if Windows won't read the contents of the disk, there's a good chance CD Recovery Toolbox will find the missing files and save any salvageable lost data. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
If it weren't for financial software automating most of my finances, I'd be buried in a monetary mess; I need expense reports and cash flow statements to help me keep things organized. For simple cash flow tracking, apps like Quicken and Microsoft Money might be overkill. Byteko FineAnces offers features at the simple end of the spectrum, providing a solution for tracking inflows and outflows of cash from one or more accounts. Track checking, savings, credit cards or even the cash expenditures from your wallet to get a better picture of where your money goes over time. For loan accounts you can track the process of paying off debt as well. For a more feature-rich free accounting package, the appropriately named Free Accounting Software may do a better job of meeting your needs, but for barebones financial tracking, FineAnces gets the job done. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
The power management built into Windows doesn't offer much customization in what gets turned on or off on your system under various configurations. I occasionally find it useful for conserving my laptop battery life, but often Windows power management is more hindrance than help. Local Cooling offers a solid alternative to Windows power management, with a number of handy features. The app automatically turns off your monitor, shuts down or hibernates your PC, and offers a very important option to suspend shutdown when specific applications are running. That last feature is a must because I've lost information due to aggressive power conservation features in the past. I don't necessarily buy into the purported greenhouse gas reduction estimates generated by Local Cooling, but it does offer statistics regarding energy reduction over time, including a competitive feature where you can compare your power savings against the community of other Local Cooling users. [Windows 9x/XP/Vista $0.00]
I'm changing locations often enough I finally decided it was easier to get a BroadbandConnect card than deal with the hassles of various networks failing in the middle of something important. If a dedicated fast connection isn't in your budget, but you still want the convenience of quick configuration, NetSetMan may be the tool you were looking for. Instead of editing network settings at home, at work, and elsewhere, NetSetMan helps you perform on the fly network configuration, saving time in setting up your network connection as you move from place to place. Two awesome features are storage of settings for default printer and configuration of network drives, so you never end up printing to nowhere or slowing down your Windows Explorer as you wait for non-existent resources to timeout. Store up to 6 different locations, including IP address, DNS, subnet mask and default gateway. If you need a corporate solution or more than 6 location settings, there's also a pro version of NetSetMan with additional volume licensing options. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Wavosaur is a lightweight audio editing application with VST support. All the basics are covered here, including support for multitrack audio files, trimming, adding effects, making loops, and normalization. Most processing settings are also available for batch conversions, making Wavosaur a handy tool for applying the same settings to a bunch of files. I like are the option to remove silence in a batch, which is a convenient way to speed up spoken word audio without altering pitch. A vocal removal preset also scrubs music files of vocals, so you can make your own karaoke tracks in a batch. The vocal removal doesn't always get chorus sections perfectly scrubbed, but it shouldn't hurt your ability to sing over the top of the file. The application runs as a completely standalone executable, meaning you could put it on a thumb drive and use Wavosaur anywhere. The user interface is generally more intuitive than the popular freeware app Audacity, but the two make nice companions rather than being replacements for each other. While Wavosaur doesn't bundle all the features of things like Sound Forge and Audition, it does most of the common audio tasks well at a price neither of those two apps can touch. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Download Video Accelerator for YouTube
One of the worst parts of all online video playback is the wait. I generally have an incredibly fast connection available and yet I'm still waiting for files to playback. YouTube is one of the worst offenders because their playback is designed to feed you small file chunks as you need them. Video Accelerator for YouTube solves this problem by placing multiple requests for file parts, getting files to load and playback faster than they would without Video Accelerator for YouTube. By using this app, you spend more time watching video and less time waiting to watch video. A built-in search makes it easy to find videos from your desktop and bookmarking makes it easy to find videos you liked for a second viewing later. The premise is the same as other download accelerators - open more requests for the same file and get the whole thing faster. As of this writing, Video Accelerator for YouTube only speeds up video playback times for Windows XP and Windows 2000, but Vista support should be coming soon. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
If you connect your iPod to more than one computer on a regular basis or if you move tracks between computers, you've seen the iTunes message offering to delete files from your iPod. This is theoretically Apple's way of protecting themselves from being associated with piracy, but it's a lousy user experience in almost every case. YamiPod provides a great alternative to the iTunes interface, running as a standalone app for managing songs on an iPod. You can even copy YamiPod to your iPod and run it from any computer. Copy songs to and from any Windows, Mac or Linux computer with YamiPod. Update and manage playlists. Play songs from your iPod through your computer speakers. Add lyrics to songs. Manage existing notes or add additional notes all from one central interface. YamiPod is a solid alternative to iTunes as an iPod interface, but you can use it in combination with iTunes so that you get the benefit of multiple computer connections as well as iTunes interfacing for paid downloads. [Windows/Mac OS X/Linux $0.00]
Download SoThink Movie DVD Maker
Free DVD authoring software is hard to come by. Many of the free apps I've found are buggy. SoThink Movie DVD Maker is among the best of the free solutions available for DVD authoring. The app converts most formats, including AVI, MPEG, WMV, MP4, RMVB, MOV, and 3GP to DVD. Basic video editing features like trimming clips and combining smaller clips into a larger movie are also supported. When your video is ready for DVD you can burn straight to disk. The default video format is PAL, so if you are authoring home movies created in the US, you'll need to change the defaults for NTSC support. This is especially useful in combination with something like Windows Movie Maker for Windows XP, which includes no DVD burning support. While the app will work with Vista, the Vista DVD Maker application has a better burning engine and far more features for authoring DVDs. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Time lapse video is something I've always found fascinating. Take a series of images from the same place over the course of a day, week, month, etc., and then build them into a video to express the time change in a matter of minutes or seconds. JPGVideo is a simple app designed to make a time lapse video from a series of stills. JPGVideo is billed as a tool for Webcam images, but JPG files from any camera source will work. The only restriction is that the images must all be the same size (all must be 640x480, or 1280x960, etc.) The software will inject the JPG file name into the video as data relating to the frame, making it easy to keep the sequence organized. You define how many images per second of video, which determines the rate of your time lapse sequence. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Search for any term in any document instantly using a hotkey with Transfz installed. If you're reading along in a Web page or text document and find something you want more information on, Transfz will help you search automatically for the specific word or phrase in any of your favorite search locations. Search Google, Wikipedia, a dictionary site, Yahoo Answers or anywhere else that has built in search capability. In addition to the search capabilities, Transfz also assists in clipboard management, processes text (converts upper to lower case, performs search and replace), adds dates, and provides character count information. While you could easily perform these same tasks using a more fully featured task automation tool like ActiveWords, Transfz works great for what it does. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
Digital music downloads may be the future of music, but they come up short in several ways. You don't get the liner notes for the album to find out who did what in the song. You don't get the weird thank yous and photos of the band from the road. Worst of all you don't get any song lyrics like you do with CDs. There's no telling a bathroom on the right from a bad moon on the rise or Bingo Jed had a light on from a big'ol jet airliner. If you're curious about the words to a song, Lyricsnapper can help you scan the lyrics of almost any song. I say almost because I did find a few indie bands with songs Lyricsnapper didn't have. Where Lyricsnapper really shines is in its ability to connect lyrics for songs playing back in iTunes. If you play a song in iTunes, Lyricsnapper will automatically download them. You can then add the lyrics to the Info of any track in your iTunes library. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
Face Control from Redfield plugins is a Photoshop compatible plugin for making modifications to facial expressions and tweaking the overall appearance of someone in a photo. For slight tweaks, like making a smile a little stronger, you can get decent results. For more dramatic effects, the adjustment gets a bit strange. I generally prefer my Photoshop filters to have a more granular level of control, but for a quick way to take a few pounds off someone's face, or tweak their smile just a little, Face Control isn't too bad. The biggest downside to the tool is that it doesn't deal well if you select part of a busy background when doing the tweak. Also, you need to preselect the section of the photo you want to tweak before opening the filter or you alter the entire image. You can see a sample before and after image below. Compatible with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro and any other app that supports Photoshop compatible plugins. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
All of the video apps supporting HDV suffer from the same problem - if the app barfs on your video, you waste a bunch of time recapturing the content. There's also the issue of having all your files trapped in your video editor's format, with no easy way to work with clips and segments of the video somewhere else. Enter HDVSplit, a app specifically designed to capture HDV video, split the video based on scenes, and provide custom labeling for the clips. This provides the flexibility to use only the segments you need in your video editing app, while also allowing you to circumvent any of the glitchy sections of your video tape (if any exist). The software only officially claims support for the HDV camcorders from Sony, although it should work with any of the HDV camcorders currently on the market. If you have several m2t files already on your hard drive, HDVSplit will process all of them and do scene detection as a batch. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
FontPage is a godsend for viewing fonts on your system. It provides a quick snapshot of any installed font in the Windows Fonts directory, letting you see a font at any available size. You can view a font in bold, italic, underline and even a 3D mode. If you want a handy hard copy reference, the software will print a sample page of any one font or print samples of every font on your system. There's a neat preview feature to compare two fonts side by side. In addition to previewing fonts installed on your system, FontPage also previews fonts not yet installed, helping you decide whether to install them or not, or leaving you the option to save memory by uninstalling little used fonts. If you work with text in applications ranging from Word, to PowerPoint, to Photoshop, to video editing apps, having FontPage as a handy resource will save you time the next time you need the perfect text. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Not long ago I touted the virtues of using CompanionLink for Google Calendar to keep your Outlook calendar in sync with a Google Calendar. Post something in either place and the software automatically links up the calendar dates, giving you quick access to your appointments from virtually anywhere. If you want to abandon your Outlook, Palm Desktop, Group Wise or Lotus Notes calendar altogether, or simply have a clean solution for uploading calendar appointments to the Web without two way synchronization, CompanionLink now offers the free gMigrate as the perfect solution. You can of course do this manually by exporting calendar data and importing it into your Google Calendar, but the gMigrate app makes this seamless, saving all the extra steps. It also gives you a chance to try out CompanionLink performance, in case you decide you want the two-way sync down the road. Enter your gmail address and password, choose your PIM, and migrate in one easy step. A free Google Calendar account is required in order to use the software. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
IsoPuzzle provides data recovery from damaged CD and DVD data disks. It isn't very often that I have a CD or DVD that goes bad, but when it happens, I like to have a way to recover data. IsoPuzzle provides one method for recovering data from CD or DVD media, reading the contents from remaining good sectors and writing the data out to an ISO which may be mounted and read from ISO disk mounting tools like Dameom Tools. Currently the application only supports data disks with 2048 byte sector sizes, so you can't recover things like music CDs or SVCD movie disks, but any recovery option is better than none at all. You also need Nero's WNASPI32.DLL to mount the CD drive in the IsoPuzzle application (linked from the IsoPuzzle Website). While this application has plenty of room to grow with additional features, if you're in a pinch it may just be the thing that recovers an important file from a damaged disk. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Most DVD drives ship with basic DVD video playback; generally either a very basic version of WinDVD or PowerDVD. The best features, like support for additional video formats, always require an upgrade to a paid version. AVS DVD Player includes a majority of those paid features for free, including H.264, 3GP, most flavors of MPEG-4, and the WMV-HD formats. Bookmark management for finding your favorite spots in a DVD is probably the most interesting feature in AVS DVD Player. A simulated surround sound support will make stereo files sound like 5.1 or 7.1 surround (or at least a decent approximation). Support for PAL and NTSC for all regions is included but is limited to 4 format changes on the drive just like the other software apps.
Typically, finding stuff on your computer is easier when using a desktop search tool. There are times when printing the contents of a folder or disk come in handy. If you back things up to DVD, a paper record of what's on each disk (or a PDF of the printed list) can be quicker than sticking each disk in your DVD tray. Creating a paper record of MP3 or movie files makes a portable catalog of what you have when you're searching for something new to add to your collection. PrintFolder helps make these lists easier, adding a print option to Windows Explorer for creating lists of folder contents. Lists may be comprised of file names only, or other details like date modified, file size, and other file properties. In a perfect world, all our data would always be at our fingertips. Since this isn't a perfect world, having easy access to printed lists still frequently comes in handy. PrintFolder Pro offers additional options not found in this free version [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download Office Accounting Express 2007
Microsoft appears to be attacking Intuit's QuickBooks head-on with Office Accounting Express 2007. This free accounting product supports all the basics of business accounting, including integration with ADP payroll services, integrated support for invoicing through Paypal for eBay businesses or other online transactions, and support for integrated credit management in conjunction with Equifax. A partnership with Chase handles online credit card processing, so you get the equivalent of a virtual point-of-sale. The big limitations in the free version of the product are in reporting and analysis tools. If you need things like 1099 reporting integrated in your accounting package, Microsoft expects you to buy the full version. The free version also limits you to one user, as opposed to the mutli-user mode found in the full version of Office Accounting Professional 2007. If you're already a full time Microsoft Office user, integration with things like Outlook's Business Contacts Manager, Excel spreadsheet exports and document customization via Word will all have a definite appeal. Online banking is also integrated and support for importing files from Quickbooks, While there are plenty of scenarios where your company might be better served by the full version of this product, for most small businesses, Office Accounting Express 2007 will certainly look like an attractive accounting solution. A few of the integrated pieces, like the ebay posting, requires a free Office Live account with Microsoft. The price of free in this case is registering the product, but if you're looking for a solid accounting solution, that may be worth the price. [Windows XP/Vista $0.00]
I'm constantly on the lookout for new ways to extend my Media Center. jkOnTheRun tipped me off to TVTonic over the weekend. It's by far the best looking interface for adding subscription audio and video content from RSS feeds to Media Center. The interface supports any audio or video format you can play in either Windows Media Player or QuickTime, which covers almost everything. A nice list of pre-populated channel selections is included for browsing, although you need to subscribe to get any of the actual videos. Add your own favorites to the list of channels, or make your own video channel and add it to the collection.
Adding a Flash movie to a PowerPoint presentation typically requires some custom VB scripting in order to successfully control playback during a slideshow. Swiff Point Player makes the process easier for SWF files, adding a custom button the Insert menu in PowerPoint to automatically add any SWF file to your PowerPoint presentation. Using Swiff Point Player, you get seamless Flash playback in your PowerPoint slides, similar to what you get with other standard video formats like AVI or WMV. If you need to playback an FLV file, like the ones served on YouTube, you'll still need to convert the file or get some custom programming done, but if you want to add some eye-popping SWF graphics or a SWF movie to a presentation, Swiff Point Player has you covered. It should go without saying that PowerPoint is required. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
One of the biggest frustrations of people who record and edit audio is the amount of time it takes to fix volume level issues. If you record two people, one of them is invariably softer than the other in the mix. You might turn your head away from the microphone to look at a distraction or have the microphone pointed away from the source. This even happens to the pros on occasion. To solve this common frustration, Gigavox created The Levelator. Essentially, the software examines a WAV or AIFF file, looks for volume inconsistencies and fixes them. It's a bit geekier than that under the hood. The Levelator handles both the gain optimization on a file and RMS normalization to make sure the volume level is consistent. The output is a new file, so you can always go back to the original if you need to. The software runs on both Windows and OS X and is free for personal non-commercial use. While The Levelator can't do anything to make your podcast more interesting, this is the first tool I've ever seen that makes almost anyone sound like they hired a top-notch engineer. If editing audio has been holding you back from podcasting or making music, give The Levelator a shot, you'll be surprised by how simple it is to sound great. [Windows 2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]
To demonstrate how simple this is, I took an audio file recorded with my M-Audio containing wild volume inconsistencies. Below is the process of using the app, and the before and after screens of the WAV.
Original file data
Converting the file
Completed conversion
Original file and The Levelator output file
WAV after using The Levelator
Audio Tagging Tools is one of the more complete audio tag editors I've seen, with a number of batch and single file editing features to make managing tags on large audio file collections a snap. Clean audio file names to conform to your naming convention (not the convention assigned by your download source. Tag and rename files en masse. Modify ID3v1, ID3v2 or both when changing audio file details. Audio Tagging Tools also includes a handy duplicate file finder, making it easy to eliminate wasted space consumed by extra files. The app supports mp3, ogg, wma, flac, ape, asf and the standard playlist formats like m3u, wpl and pls. A scripting engine supports a ton of features not directly exposed through the UI. A few of the features could be more intuitive, but if you have a large audio collection, you'll catch on to the workflow process very quickly. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
For anyone with a Nokia phone that supports FM Radio, Oxygen Software has an app that lets you edit the FM station list on your phone. Download updated station listings from around the world through Oxygen's regularly updated stations library. Edit the list to exclude stations you don't want on your phone (you know, the ones you never listen to). Configure presets so favorite channels are merely a button press away. And transfer all the data between your phone and PC anytime you want. Oxygen also has a full sweet of other apps for managing almost every aspect of virtually every Nokia phone made in the past several years. If you can't live with out your Nokia phone, chances are, Oxygen has an app you'll also find indespensible. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
With an interface vaguely reminiscent of older versions of Paint Shop Pro and a sold set of tools, Photobie is an all-around image editing and graphic design app with a ton of potential. The interface, while similar in some ways to the old Paint Shop Pro, lacks some of the polish of many years of refinement in that application. A lack of interface polish is made up for with an overwhelming number of tools not commonly found in free image editors. Irfanview has many great features and some overlap with Photobie, but the sheer ability to easily lock out and manipulate multilayer images makes Photobie a contender in my book. PhotoFiltre gets a leg up in the usability department, although Photobie has a few features not found in that wonderful freeware find as well. While all the basics like cropping, image color correction, resizing, batch processing, and basic filters are there, Photobie really shines in including multilayer editing with layer locking and full support for Photoshop compatible plugins better than any other freeware tool I've seen. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
If you have a portable application set on a USB drive, having a start menu for all those apps comes in handy. PStart is among the best of the portable start menus I've seen. Optionally, you can install PStart as a replacement for the Windows Start menu, but overall, the portable application for this app is what makes it shine. Choose which items to display on the PStart menu, including other apps on your USB drive, documents, folders and frequently used files. A built search function helps launch apps on both the local hard disk and on a portable drive. A notes feature keeps notes stored on your portable drive so you have them just a click away wherever you are, complete with color coding and style changes. By defining key commands or mouse triggers, you can pop the PStart menu with a shortcut just like the built-in Windows Start. Most parts of the application are configurable. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Many of us keep a whole ton of information "in the clear" on our PCs. If a hard drive or laptop were ever stolen, the number of passwords, credit card details and personally identifying bits of information compromised is likely to be a staggering figure. I know of many people who use a plain text file to keep track of their entire password list. Instead of leaving all this info in the clear, LockNote offers an option for securely locking down passwords and anything else you put in a text file with AES 256-bit encryption. LockNote may be used to create new encrypted text files or to secure existing text files by simply dropping them on the LockNote application. I personally prefer to keep large chunks of data secured using a encrypted partition with something like TrueCrypt, but if you only need to secure small bits of information, LockNote is a quick and easy solution to safely lock down data. It also runs from portable thumb drives, so you can take your secure data with you and retrieve it from any computer. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Roxio MediaTicker offers Windows XP users the chance to add a Vista-like feature to Windows now. The app puts images in a scrolling stock-ticker style sidebar, with three size options. The sidebar appears on top, bottom, left or right side of your screen depending on your preference. You're currently limited to choosing only one folder (including any subfolders) with My Pictures being the default. Selecting any picture from the ticker will give you a larger preview of the image with an option to email the photo to a friend, set the image as your desktop background, or print the image. The beta of the next version includes support for RSS feeds in the ticker. You can bypass registering the app by hitting cancel when you launch the application for the first time. The one potential downside is Roxio is reserving the right to occasional feed announcements into the ticker at some point in the future, which is their tradeoff for making the app free. [Windows XP $0.00]
Not to be confused with the other iTube! for Mac OS X, which is designed for easy location of online streaming video, this iTube makes downloading YouTube videos easier for Windows users. Put in the URL for the YouTube video you want to download, iTube converts the video to an iPod compatible MPEG-4 file and automatically adds the video to your iTunes library. The premise is simple, just paste in a URL and let the conversion magic happen, but it's a much better way to manage viewing of YouTube content offline than something like KeepVid, which merely grabs the Flash file and puts it on your desktop. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
While Windows Movie Maker is a fine solution for putting together movie projects and editing Windows Media files, it can create more overhead than you need for simple editing tasks. If you like the simplicity of VirtualDub for editing AVI files, Movica provides a similar simplicity for editing WMV, ASF and MPG files. As a front end for command line editing tools AsdBin and MpgTx, Movica provides you with all the fundamental tools for clipping files from a larger video clip, copying pieces of video file, or combining several clips into one larger movie. The visual interface for editing is Windows Media Player, coupled with some effective keyboard shortcuts. While Movica is still in beta, it's a viable solution for most basic video editing of WMV, ASF and MPG video files. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
If you download concert files distributed in FLAC or APE formats, you've likely run into .cue files before. These files provide a roadmap for finding individual songs in a large file during playback. The .cue files may also come in handy if you have a full-length album recorded as one giant file. Instead of manually editing each track, you can search through the file, find track start and stop times, and then edit the file automatically using CUE Splitter. CUE Splitter reads a .cue file, and splits a large audio file into smaller files based on the information in the .cue file. CUE Splitter currently works with MP3, WMA, FLAC, APE and OGG files, so chances are good that it can handle virtually any audio you throw at it. Individual files are named based on the contents of the .cue file, or by creating a custom text string prior to running CUE Splitter against an audio file. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Whether you're part of David Allen's cult of Getting Things Done or you simply want to prioritize your projects by folder, Folder Marker solves a common problem. There's no easy way to visually identify a folder other than changing its name. With Folder Marker, you can add a visual priority to a folder, just like an email message, identifying folders as low, normal or high priority. It's also possibly to use workflow designations like planned, half-finished or complete. More identification is possible by marking a folder work, important, temporary or private. All these folder designations may be changed using the right-click menu on the fly, saving tons of time in tracking your work. Whether you've got 43 virtual folders or you simply need a handful of useful tracking tools, the color coding and prioritizing with Folder Marker will help make you more efficient and productive. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Contact management is one feature that keeps me sticking with Outlook as my integrated personal information manager. Kurlo is the first application that might change my mind. I like Thunderbird as an email client, but it's lack of serious supporting features leaves me crawling back to Outlook for full support. Kurlo is a portable contact manager optimized for taking your data with you. Kurlo installs and runs on a Windows computer or on a USB drive, making it a traveler's companion for remote access to information. Support for multiple users makes Kurlo useful on shared computers, but the real power is in taking your data with you. It tracks contacts at both the individual and organization levels, so you can see all the people at a single company. Address label and evelope printing is useful if you need to send snail mail. Birthday and special event tracking helps to keep in touch with timely information, and email support makes it easy to send messages to a person or group. As a companion to a mail client like Thunderbird or on it's own, Kurlo helps you stay organized. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
When you boot any iPod, the screen looks exactly like every other iPod on the planet. Uniformity is nice, but customization makes it easier to get exactly the experience you want. iPodWizard provides customization, allowing you to modify a number of iPod appearance features. Modify screen fonts to make them easier (or more difficult) to read. Tweak onscreen graphics with images from your personal library or unique designs from a collection of downloadable iPodWizard bundles. And modify text so you can make you iPod menus look the way you want them to. If you don't like the changes you've made, you can revert to the factory default settings and start over. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
And of course, don't forget to backup your iPod.
If you've ever asked yourself, how can I convert my music files into ringtones, ToneThis is likely the answer you're lookng for. Cell phone ringtones are the biggest boon to music companies and carriers ever conceived. While people won't pay for full songs, they will pay a buck for a few seconds of a song (if it will act as their ringtone). In most cases you don't need to buy ringtones. Instead, an app like ToneThis will convert your MP3s to a compatible format, send the file to you in a message, and make it a snap to install the file on your phone. Most United States and Canadian carriers are supported (if you're outside North America, I'm not sure if it works). ToneThis also creates wallpaper images from photos and other images in your personal photo collection, using the same convert and upload concept to bypass carrier limitations. Phones are already expensive enough - here's one way to save a few bucks and maybe even reuse a song or two from your CD collection in the process. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
One of the biggest annoyances in buying a PC from Dell, HP, eMachines, Sony (and most of the companies I forgot to list) is all the trialware junk they install on a new system. Your computer manufacturer is getting paid on both sides. You pay for the computer, all these companies who want you to use their software pay to be part of the shipped version of Windows. Getting rid of it all takes time and is almost impossible in some cases. I typically wipe the drive on a new machine instead of dealing with this issue, but that's a hassle too. I know of one case where HP installed an anti-spyware product without an uninstall option. Enter The PC De-Crapifier. It doesn't get every trialware product installed on OEM machines, but it gets a bunch of them. [Windows XP $0.00]
Download Redfield Water Ripples Plugin
Creating realistic water ripples in photos can be a trick when trying to simply manipulate the features of your photo editing app. It's much easier to find a plugin to do all the heavy lifting. Redfield created the aptly named Water Ripples plugin to help with this exact problem, providing plenty of customizable effects to tweak the perfect water ripple in your outdoor photography. If you don't want spend the time customizing, a randomization feature gets you most of the way there without fine-tuning. Also check out their Craquelure plugin and Sketch Master manipulation tool for further image editing ease. All plugins use the Photoshop compatible architecture, which works with most image editors. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
I've tried many free image capture alternatives and I still come back to SnagIt as my ultimate screen capture solution. WinSnap is the latest in a long series of apps that has some of the features I love, but lacks a key ingredient here and there to really save me time. WinSnap does a great job with still image capture of everything from standard square windows, to the more unconventional skinned windows common to media player apps. Support for drop shadowing, watermarking, color alteration and background customization make WinSnap a useful solution for making screen captures look pretty. I'd like to see a few more editing options built in, because it's still easier to edit and output a screen capture in the same app, rather than launching an external editor to finish the job. Output formats include JPG, PNG, GIF, TIF and BMP. You'll also need a solution for recording movies of your desktop, like CamStudio, in addition to WinSnap. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
With a recent influx of video projects, I'm finding myself butting up against the capacity of my primary hard drive, which means I need to shuffle files off to on of the several external drives on my network. The trick is quickly finding which files and folders make the biggest impact on available space before moving, which is a hassle with the way Windows Explorer operates by default. For detailed system information, including growth over time and predictive resource consumption, I swear by Disk Triage. When I want quick information, I want to go straight to Windows Explorer and find large folders and move them to a new drive. For that task, I count on FolderSize, which replaces the standard Size column in the detail view of Windows Explorer. Instead of needing to right-click on a folder to view its properties, I can see the actual size of a folder in Windows Explorer, in context, with FolderSize installed. Sorting by size filters the big stuff to the top of the heap and my problem is solved quickly without any extra steps. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Windows Explorer before FolderSize shows only file sizes in the size view.
Windows Explorer with FolderSize adds the Folder Size column, displaying sizes for both files and folders.
The battery monitor on my laptop is almost useless. It seems to go from almost full to almost empty without refreshing in between. After seeing the battery monitoring app included with Thinkpads, I've been on a search to find something as good for my non-Lenovo branded laptop. Notebook BatteryInfo comes close, providing a great visual indication of battery status in the taskbar, along with a number of useful details about the current state of power on your PC. In addition to how much power you have left, Notebook Battery Info provides details about the battery capacity, how much power is consumed, battery manufacturer, the wear level of the battery, and for the ultimate power geek everything is displayed in fractions of Watts, volts and amps. Color coding for battery information is customizable to match your desktop theme or to add visualization that will offer appropriate warning. Details are displayed either in the taskbar or in a pane that pops up when you hover over the Notebook BatteryInfo icon in the system tray. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Download Microsoft Private Folder
If you keep your bank records or other potentially sensitive information on your computer, using encryption of some kind is a must. I'm continuing to recommend TrueCrypt as my favorite solution for encrypting data in Windows, because it's got many configuration options and it's actively improved by the developers. TrueCrypt supports features like keeping your encryption key on a thumb drive and a number of features geared toward obscuring data. At the same time, Microsoft's newly released Private Folder is easier to setup for the average user, with encryption designed to lock down one folder per user on a shared computer. After downloading and installing the app it creates a folder called My Private Folder where files are stored in encrypted form anytime you are not logged into your user account. Private Folder requires Windows XP SP2 and authentication through the Genuine Advantage program. [Windows XP $0.00]
Download STOIK Cameraphone Enhancer
STOIK is well known for making a number of imaging solutions for both video editing and photos. The STOIK Cameraphone Enhancer applies a number of filters and effects to automatically clean up images taken with the camera on cell phones. While you can use any image editing software to edit and enhance cell phone photos, Cameraphone Enhancer is quite useful because it's optimized for the kinds of quirks unique to camera phones. STOIK applied their imaging expertise to process photos using filters, color correction and overall cleanup of less than perfect images taken with a cell phone camera. While this doesn't entirely solve the two most common problems with camera phone images, which are low light shots and blurry images, it does help clean up those shots that were almost good but flawed in some minor way. If you already take great photos with your cell phone, STOIK Cameraphone Enhancer won't make them any better, but for camera phone shots that need some assistance, there's almost nothing better. [Windows 2k/XP $29.00]
Download HSSVSS Home Security Video System
HSSVSS is a motion detection home security system using a digital camera, Webcam or DV camcorder. The software runs in the background and relies on the cameras optical sensors to detect motion within the range of a camera's vision field. When motion is detected, the software automatically starts capturing either time-lapse movies or full motion AVI movies of whatever is moving in the camera's field of vision. A two camera mode supports recording two angles or motion detection in multiple rooms. All recordings are time-stamped to provide exact times of motion for intrusion detection reports. Export images to the Web via FTP, email surveillance reports, or output the video signal to a television. This is a very affordable solution for setting up home surveillance systems with image quality only limited by the cameras connected to the software. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
One of my favorite features of Flickr (which I consequently rarely use) is the ability to tag photos with detailed information. For instance highlighting someone's face to identify them by name, or calling out objects in a photo. This is all limited to the constraints of Flickr, meaning you can't use it anywhere outside the service. FotoTagger puts this concept on your desktop, allowing you to add comments to a photo and store them in the JPG content space. When you're browsing photos in any other image browser, the FotoTagger tags are invisible. When using FotoTagger, you see all the tagged details. If you want to publish your tags to the Web, FotoTagger creates a merged image, overlaying the tags on top of the image, to create a new composite. While this might seem strange at first, it's a cool way to annotate images in a meaningful way. For instance, upload an uncommented version of a photo and then the commented version directly below to create a sort of context to the untouched image. This is particularly useful for people like me who create tutorials online, but also comes in handy if you want to call out certain people or things in a photo when posting it to the Web. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Instant Media (I'M) offers one of the most usable alternatives to iTunes for subscription audio and video. From a directory of audio and video shows, I'M supports searching and subscribing to content in both MP4 and WMV formats as well as MP3 and WMA audio. Instant Media seems to shine at the playback experience for downloaded content, integrating the play experience directly into the software via either QuickTime or Windows Media, with videos scaled up for fullscreen playback in some cases. There's also support for something their calling Internet High Definition content, which is being billed as 16:9 HD content in MP4 or WMV formats with 2048 kbps video at 1280x720 resolution. Like other subscription apps, Instant Media downloads new shows in the background as long as you leave the application running. There's a very basic media library designed to add music and video files, but the overall experience for that part of I'M is still very remedial. The only thing that seems to be lacking in the subscription experience is the ability to sample shows before downloading them. At the moment, I'M either subscribes you to a feed or doesn't, leaving out my preferred method of video consumption - random sampling. For those who love to subscribe, Instant Media is definitely worth a closer look. [Windows XP $0.00]
With the recent addition of free inbound and outbound landline calls, Skype is aggressively working to dominate the voice over IP calling space. It still needs a few features to make it a useful replacement for traditional phones and PrettyMay picks up the majority of that slack. PrettyMay acts as an answering machine for Skype, playing back pre-recorded audio when you're not around. Voicemails can be automatically forwarded via email. Play music in the background of a call or inject recorded audio into a Skypecast. Voice messages are fully exportable as either MP3 or WAV files. The app switches sound devices in mid conversation without dropping the call, so if you're talking on a microphone and getting feedback from speakers, you can switch to a headset without needing to call someone back. At the moment, recording time is limited to 30 minutes, but in most cases that's plenty. If you use Skype for online calling, you need PrettyMay to act as your personal automated phone assistant. To hear PrettyMay in action, feel free to Skype me - I'm jakeludington. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
With millions of videos on thousands of sites around the Internet, it's hard to ever find something you actually want to watch. YouTube may have a few gems and your friends probably point you to something cool now and then, but most of the time watching online video amounts to wading through a sea of junk. LePlayer takes a different approach, providing a desktop interface to the world of online video. Instead of being limited to what's in the Google Video database, or what's on YouTube, or the latest MySpace postings, LePlayer searches against over 1.6 million videos in over 2000 categories, helping you find and watch the movies you want to see. This makes it easier to locate videos for specific events, news items and online programming, but still needs some improvement. There's no bookmark feature, so you can't easily come back to a video site. And there's no save function, although I'm sure there are ways around that oversight. Bottom line: LePlayer is a solid tool for video discovery, although it needs a little improvement before it's a full-fledged video management option. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Schmap Player is like having a user-friendly travel guide on your computer. Integrating maps, photos, reviews and online content in a unique way, Schmaps offer an easy way to explore a city. Landmarks are included in city tours. Restaurants are synced up with reviews to help you know where to eat. Pre-travel planning is made easier with the inclusion of hotels, as well as key city locations, so you know where you need to stay to be close to what you want to do. Virtual tours provide a map walk-thru of destinations, along with some background. Bookmark your favorite destinations to create your own virtual tour. If you need a paper version of the Schmap content, it creates your own customized guidebook, including your bookmarked places, along with corresponding maps, photos and reviews. For even more information, the Schmaps link you directly to driving directions, user reviews and search for additional data from online sources. As of this writing, their are currently maps available for about 30 U.S. cities. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
If you have a large MP3 collection, you need an easy way to access your music wherever you happen to be. Sure you could buy a 60GB iPod and carry songs in your pocket, but that's not entirely practical. Vibe Streamer steps in and provides a convenient intermediary, streaming files from your PC to anywhere you specify. Access control can be via password protection, by restricting certain IP addresses, or by grouping user accounts to let additional people access your tracks as well. If you happen to have your own podcast, this is one solution for providing on demand streaming of files to anyone who might be interested in listening. A skinnable interface makes it easy to create your own look and feel for what people actually see while listening or browsing your files. File queuing, shuffle and repeat are all supported in addition to standard playback functions. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
I have mixed feelings about the new Google Browser Sync. The premise is keeping all your Firefox settings synchronized across every computer you use, including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords. This is good in theory. I know there are plenty of times when I find something on one computer and then have to remember which computer in order to find the resource again. My concern comes from the implementation. In order to keep passwords, bookmarks and everything else in sync, the information is uploaded and stored on a Google server using the same Google account used for GMail, Google Talk and all the various other Google applications. Storing passwords and browser history on Google's servers might be completely innocuous - a convenient repository of information. On the other hand all that information is definitively identifying in detail about where you go and what you do online. Google explicitly says in the terms of use, "Google may access, preserve, and disclose information regarding your use of the services if required to do so by law or under other conditions set forth in the Google Privacy Policy." This gets scary if you ever end up getting divorced and your future-ex subpoenas your Internet history as some sort of proving ground for a relationship turned sour, or more importantly if the government decides they want to investigate a large block of Google users for patterns of behavior.
Keeping things in perspective, Google lets you choose what is or isn't synchronized using advanced configuration. Google offers encryption for all this data, but fails in letting us know whether they hold a master key to decrypt it on their end. From my view, I'm inclined to use something like this to store my tab groupings to easily open them on any computer, bookmarks for the convenience of accessing them, encrypt both, and pass on trusting Google to store passwords, history, and cookies on their server. Bottom line, if you opt to use Google Browser Sync, I recommend caution. [Firefox for Windows and Mac $0.00]
Download Google Video Player for Mac
The Windows version of Google Video Player has been out for awhile now. In the last few days, Google finally made a Mac version of the player available, with all the same bells and whistles of its Windows counterpart. For most videos on the Google Video site, you can get by without needing their player, but if you ever want to purchase a video, Google Video Player is required. One thing they do better than other video players is include a scene browser, which shows the key frames in a video and lets you click to a point in the video using a visual queue. This is similar to the way QuickTime shows you screens when you fast forward, but with it laid out as a series of thumbnails, it's easier to find the section of a video you want to fast forward to. Another useful advantage is automatic resume of downloads when you need to close the player and return later or if there's network congestion between your PC and the download you're trying to access. Google claims you can skip ahead in a video, even if the section you want to see hasn't been downloaded yet, but that particular feature results in buffering, which is no different than any other video experience. [Mac OS X 10.3.9+ $0.00]
Cross-platform video conferencing is one of those things that never worked well outside enterprise class software. Apples iChat AV made video conferencing for the masses seem like a reality and AIM made strides to try and offer a video component, but everything in the consumer space tends to fall short in communicating between Mac and Windows computers. SightSpeed changes that with PC to PC and Mac to PC video communication. The app also records video for video blogging. Video mail messages of 30 seconds in length allow people to leave messages. If you prefer to only use audio, that's supported too. Think of this as the Skype of video communication, with outstanding image quality and convenient conferencing between your Mac and PC friends. The basic version is free. If you want to communicate with multiple people simultaneously, SightSpeed Pro is available for $49.95 per year and includes a free Webcam. I doubt SightSpeed will replace Skype as the favorite app for online communication but it certainly raises the bar for everyone else trying to break into the space. If you have relatives who live a long way off or need to communicate with remote business partners, this is the most affordable solution for long distance face-to-face communication. [Windows 2k/XP Mac OS X 10.3.9 $0.00]
After recently recommending a solution for downloading YouTube videos, Video Downloader 2.0 offers a better method via Firefox plugin. The principal is the same - Video Downloader 2.0 reveals the location of download videos for over thirty different Internet sites, including YouTube, MySpace, iFilm, Google , Current TV, Blip.tv and a bunch of sites I've never visited. Instead of needing to copy the link somewhere, using the Video Downloader Firefox plugin, simply visit a page with a video, activate Video Downloader and reveal the download link to virtually any video. Chris did one better and found someone to create an Internet Explorer bookmarklet so you get the same functionality in browsers like Maxthon.
Image viewing apps have been around for ages. Picasa remains my favorite image viewer for it's sheer elegance, but it has a few faults, like slowing down when you have thousands of images. WildBit Viewer seems to shine in this respect, handling fairly large loads of image files with great speed. EXIF, IPTC data from Photoshop, and image details imbedded in TIFF and JPEG are all supported. The software includes several different viewing options with multiple thumbnail sizes and fast zoom through slider functionality. A slide show mode offers 171 different transitions to build complex image slide shows. Editing functionality handles all the basics of resizing and image tweaking, but certainly isn't a full featured image editor. Multiple monitor support provides for fast-switching between two montiors. Over 60 image formats are supported in the viewer. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
One of the frustrations in posting lots of videos on your site is slow page load times. When a page is loading three or four or more videos, the wait time for everything on the page is dramatically slowed down. One way to solve this problem is to post an image linked to the video file, which results in the video opening in a new window. A second option is to use a Flash file that calls a second Flash file when clicked. If you want a hybrid version of these two options, Cinegage created Video Playing in Place (vPIP). The app supports playback of Windows Media (wmv, wma, asf), QuickTime (mov, mp4), Flash (flv and swf), 3GP and MP3 formats. You paste some javascript in the header portion of your Web pages or blog and then use the automatic link generator to link an image file to the video you want to play when clicked. This dramatically decreases page load times, because you aren't waiting for video files to load on the page, which is especially important when working with several videos. vPIP also keeps the video playback on the same page, instead of opening a new window or player like using a similar trick with QuickTime. The only potential downside is increased buffering when a person clicks to watch a video because the video wasn't preloading on the page while the rest of the page loads. If you post videos on your personal blog, MySpace account or Web site, Video Playing in Place is worth trying. [Platform Independent $0.00]
vPIP example:
Photo editing apps tend to come in two flavors: free with a painful to use interface for all but the most basic tasks or fee with a marginally better interface for all but the most basic tasks. (Before you write to tell me how many things Irfanview can do, I love the app for what it's good at, but doing any of the heavy lifting involves a ridiculous learn curve and an abysmal interface.) PhotoFiltre spans that gap by offering a full-featured image editing suite. The app sports almost as many features as commercial packages like Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop Elements, without a price tag. All the basics are here like clone brush, paint brush, text tools, cropping, color correction, etc. PhotoFiltre also includes batch processing for a wide range of filters, sizing tweaks, transformations, and a handful of other operations. The interface is reasonably intuitive, handles basic tasks like a champ and delves into advanced photo editing in a way that makes photo editing seem almost painless. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Organizing your writing often easier with visual tools to assist in the process, especially if you attempt to combine multiple files into a greater project. Papel helps with this process, creating a free form organizational space for clustering text files in a way that makes sense to you, a little like the way mind-mapping helps organize information. Papel includes a text editor for creating new files, a spell checking utility and thesaurus, which create a reasonably comprehensive suite for writers or people who want to organize things in a less restrictive manner than what's supported by Windows Explorer. Papel can import text files created using other programs and also supports a folder hierarchy for segmenting details about your writing project. Fans of Douglas Adams will love the cheeky nod with Papels home at BeingArthurDent.co.uk [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
If your digital camera takes photos in RAW format, you need a way to view them on your PC. One option is the Difiapro.com Free RAW Viewer app, which looks like a Windows Explorer window with support for view most image types, including CR2 and CR RAW file formats). Simply browse to the folder containing RAW image files you want to view and the app pulls in thumbnail previews of the image. Click on any image for a larger preview. In my testing of the app, it seemed to have issues displaying images on the desktop, but all other locations worked as expected. Several applications offer a more full-featured viewing experience for CR2 and CR images, but for a lightweight image viewer, this app gets the job done nicely. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Microsoft Research is always releasing these clever little tools that never make it into final software products. Group Shot is a great example of this. The app is designed to take the best elements of several photos and use them to create the perfect photo. For instance, lets say you've got two virtually identical photos of your family. Composition is identical, the lighting is the same. One looks better than the other except for your spouse blinking. Everyone's eyes are open in the other shot, but it just doesn't look quite as good. Instead of accepting the sub-par picture or keeping the blink shot, you can marry them together with Group Shot to make one great photo. The app also works to eliminate stuff from the background of a picture by replacing it with the background of a similar photo. [Windows XP $0.00]
Remote file management is neither exciting or fun, but it's very necessary if you have a Web site of any kind. I've long used a combination of Filezilla and SmartFTP to handle all my FTP needs, but I'm rethinking this after spending only a few minutes with WinSCP. For one thing, WinSCP operates via secure connections by default, which means I'm not sending FTP passwords in the clear. You can edit remote files using either a built-in file browser or by assigning an external application (like a text editor) to the task of editing files. On save, WinSCP automatically uploads changes back to the server. An onboard shell component is an amazing time saver. If you're in FTP mode, simply open a shell window from within WinSCP and it automatically logs you in as the FTP user for secure access over SSH. A copy path feature makes it easy to copy and past the current path from the FTP side to the shell side for quick navigation. If you manage more than one server, multiple instancing will help you keep track more than one server at the same time. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
One of the things I find frustrating while I'm working is getting a phone call, locating the phone, and discovering that I didn't really want to answer the call in the first place. One solution to my dilemma is to incorporate caller ID directly onscreen so I don't need to step away from my computer for something I never wanted in the first place. PhoneTray provides my solution displaying caller ID, identifying specific types of calls with custom ringtones and rejecting the calls I don't want. If you know a call is from a telemarketer, PhoneTray can play a custom message telling them to remove you from their list or simply block their call. You need a modem with voice support connected to your phone service for PhoneTray to work and you also need to subscribe to the caller ID service from your carrier, which is standard in most phone plans these days. The only downside I see is lack of support for Vonage type VoIP solutions due to the modem requirement. A Dialup version of PhoneTray of the software adds Internet call waiting for a small fee. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download StudioLine Photo Basic
StudioLine Photo Basic imports photos directly from your digital camera or storage card, storing them in a database similar to competitors like Picasa or Adobe Album. Supports both IPTC and Exif to provide detailed access to all aspects of image tagging. You can define keywords and descriptions for each photo, build categories and generally micromanage your images to your heart's content. A built-in suite of tools for auto-correcting images, including red-eye remove and basic color correction are included as part of the package. Email images, print from within Photo Basic or upload Web galleries of specific images. One key advantage over using something like Picasa is a very open interface for uploading images from within the application. You're not locked into the Blogger/HELO world supported by Picasa. CD and DVD burning is also included as a standard feature. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Webcams come in handy for monitoring all kinds of things around the house. You can see who's at the front door. Check the weather. Make sure your dinner isn't burning on the stove. Or simply just aim the camera at yourself for a digital mirror. Having the image up onscreen at all times might get in the way. VideoThumb solves this by tucking away your Webcam image to the system tray until you actually need to see it. Simply click the tray icon to show the image, then click again to send the image away. You can switch sources and customize display size to fit your needs, with an optional digital zoom for taking a closer look at something on screen. The software also works with a DV cam connected to your PC. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
If you need a free alternative to the Windows Media Center experience, Yahoo! Go TV might be almost what you're looking for. Re-branded from the recently acquired Meedio, Yahoo! Go supports picture browsing, video playback, music, and DVR functionality for recording your favorite shows. What makes the software unique is built-in support for searching Yahoo! Video and Flickr photos. Baffling to me is the lack of clear support for Yahoo! Music Engine purchases, which are more effectively supported by using Windows Media Player. Here's another case of Yahoo buying a product without considering an integration strategy. In general, I'd recommend spending a few dollars on Sage TV or Beyond TV rather than bothering with Yahoo! Go, unless free is your only criteria. [Windows XP $0.00]
If you travel with important data on your laptop, finding ways of securing that data is crucial. Encrypting your entire disk is one way to get the job done, although this often becomes a hindrance for things like launching email. Another solution is to create significant speed bumps for anyone who might steal your laptop by simply making it easier to format the drive than to access data. Double Password adds an additional speed bump, without dramatically reducing your own ability to use your computer. The software creates a token that's stored on a USB keychain drive and requires the drive be connected to the computer either at logon or all the time depending on your own level of paranoia. This is similar to token security systems at a DIY level. At the moment the software is free although it appears they are also planning to offer a fee version in the near future. [Windows XP $0.00]
The Autorun feature of mounting external drives is something of a mixed blessing. In the case of the Sony Rootkit fiasco, having Autorun turned on probably helped many unsuspecting users install the rootkit when they put a CD in their tray. On the other hand, when you're trying to install new software from disk or always want a consistent experience from a particular disk, Autorun is genuinely useful. Using APO USB Autorun, you can add Autorun functionality to any USB thumbrive, creating a setting to automatically launch a playlist, HTML page, or anything else stored on the disk. The process is simple and makes for easy configuration of disks with a few simple clicks. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
File renaming is one of those tricky things that takes time but you want to get right. Irene is a renaming wizard to process single or multiple files and rename them based on your defined criteria. If you have 500 images from your digital camera, you can rename them using file properties or something more meaningful to your needs. MP3 files may be renamed using tag info. All changes are reviewable before making them permanent. Add prefixes or suffixes, base names on file properties, change case, use keyword replacement, or provide sequential numbering to file names. Many command line options are supported. Irene runs as a standalone app so you could even run Irene from a thumb drive. I'm still partial to ReNamer, but this is a great alternative. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Open Adobe Reader. Go ahead, I'll wait. And wait. How long did it take to go from clicking on the icon to launching the application after waiting through the splash screen that scrolls by a million things I simply don't care about? When I want to read a PDF, I don't need to be reminded how great the people at Adobe think they are; I just want to read the PDF. One way around this is to use Foxit PDF Reader, which launches quickly to read and print PDF files. PDF bookmarking, text selection and browser integration are still supported, so you aren't missing out on any of the features Adobe offers (with the exception of support for DRM protected PDF files). If you'd rather read PDF files instead of waiting for them, Foxit PDF Reader may be the solution you were looking for. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
In radio days gone by the term cart was shorthand for cartridge, as individual music selections were stored on cartridges for organization and playback. Sonicart plays of the antiquated name, creating a virtual audio cart system to organize a series of tracks and add breaks for voice over. With Sonicart, create a basic playlist of tracks, save the playlist for future use, interrupt the playlist with voice and commercial breaks and generally do all the on-air things a traditional radio station might do. If you want to create an Internet radio stream or a podcast with a multiple music selections, sequencing music files becomes vital. Sonicart is an affordable way to cue audio with automated control over interrupting and organizing a playlist for producing shows of all types. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Blocking MySpace isn't really something I have to worry about at my house yet. I finally took the plunge and signed up for MySpace just to see what the fuss is about. So far I'm finding it to be just another place to post on the Web, but I haven't used it much either. As the most popular destination online, there are bound to be MySpace detractors. SaferSpace offers a solution for keeping your kids (or anyone) off the MySpace site by automatically closing any browser window containing a myspace.com url. Administration allows you to provide access to accounts on a per user basis. If you want to keep you kids off of MySpace, the best thing to do is probably supervise your kids and communicate (the stuff parents should be doing anyway). If that doesn't work, there's SaferSpace, which blocks access to MySpace from any computer it's installed on. If your kid tries to visit MySpace, they get a message saying it's blocked. Of course there's no password for the service, so make sure your kids don't have user access to kill services or the whole concept falls down. The latest version of .NET is required. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
I'm a huge fan of the window preview option found in TaskSwitchXP, which comes bundled with Windows enhancement XPize. It gives me a visual of the page I'm switching to in the center of my screen. Visual Task Switch provides another way to preview windows before switching by popping an image preview near the taskbar similar to the feature in the upcoming Windows Vista. Overall, both methods save you a little time because the visual check makes it easier to determine you're opening the correct window instead of blindly flipping between dozens of open panes. Add this to the list of features you now get in Windows XP without needing to wait for the Vista upgrade. [Windows XP $0.00]
I'm guilty of leaving page numbers off of most of the PDFs I create because I never print them and I rely on the bookmarking feature in Adobe Reader for quick navigation. If you download a PDF created by someone like me and want to add your own page numbers to the file, A-PDF Number is the easiest way to get the job done short of installing Adobe Acrobat. The software includes three styles of page numbers for whole numbers, upper case Roman numerals and lower case Roman numerals page identification. Add prefixes to your page numbers, choose from left, right or center number placement and modify page number color to anything you prefer. An offset feature lets you choose which page of the PDF to start numbering. The company also makes a slick app for converting PowerPoint files to PDF. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download Voice Mail Compressor
Typing is almost always a more succinct way for me to communicate, but sometimes voice adds a layer of context and personalization you just can't get from the written word. Voice Mail Compressor simplifies that personalization, making it easy to record and send voice email messages to anyone email address. The app supports WAV, MP3 and GSM output with compression up to 16 times the normal file size of a WAV file to effectively keep audio file sizes down. The recipient doesn't require any special software to listen to messages, they click on the audio file and your message plays in their default audio player. You do need one of those cheap computer microphones at a minimum to make this work. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download Duplicate File Finder
The name of Duplicate File Finder pretty much tells the story. The app helps you locate, organize and potentially eliminate duplicate files on your system. You choose a set of search criteria to match your needs for the duplicate search and Duplicate File Finder provides a results list. Compare files by name, size, extension, location and file contents. If you're doing an image search, the results pane also includes a thumbnail for quick comparison so you can see if IMG_0012.jpg is really the same photo as MomsBirthday2006.jpg without opening the images. If you simply want a catalog of duplicates, the software outputs results as text, csv and HTML. In general, I'm still partial to DupKiller, but this is a great alternative. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Many solutions attempt to make it easy to manage the video recording from Windows Media Center Edition, but all fall short in some small way. MyTV ToGo could score the best overall app rating if they'd create a watched folders option for outputting converted files automatically. In the meantime, the latest release of DVRMSToolbox gets my vote for best conversion tool, in spite of lacking an option to convert files for iPod or PSP playback. Other features make this forgivable. The key combination is support for converting files to either MPEG-2 or WMV while stripping commercials in the process. You end up with a smaller file and no commercials at the same time, which is a win for Media Center users. The other key feature is background processing and automation, which makes setting up overnight conversions a no-brainer for those of us who want our media ready to go while we are sleeping. Free also has a certain ring to it, although I'd gladly pay for the same feature set in a version of MyTV ToGo, because the interface is well worth the price. [Windows XP $0.00]
One of the potential hassles of digital video is figuring out exactly when something was recorded and at what point on your tape it was recorded. Digital video cameras datestamp video as it's recorded, but few applications expose this data in a way that makes it usable. Timecode seems to get lost in transfer from tape to computer with consumer applications, including Adobe Premiere Elements. Assuming your video import process didn't purge this useful data, DVdate reveals it, providing some valuable metadata about your video, if you want to re-import only a specific section of footage from a tape or if you want to document events. DVdate also exposes the header information in DV-AVI files, converts DivX and MJPEG AVI files to DV-AVI and can overlay datecode info on the screen if you want to see datecode displayed during playback. One killer feature of DVdate is the ability to repair sync issues by fixing framerate problems introduced during capture. It also flips video between DV-AVI type 1 and type 2, which is necessary for interoperability, especially if you imported video using Windows Movie Maker and want to use your footage in any other app. Overall, DVdate is one of many video apps that no digital video editor should be without. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
One of my biggest gripes about Windows Media Player is their isn't a lightweight interface without all the extra tabs for ripping, burning and shopping for music. There's mini-mode, but even that is inelegant for many things. I want something that's little more than a playback window for video. MView SE accomplishes this nicely, with a very slim set of play controls and support for all the media types playable in Windows Media Player. In addition to the tiny footprint around your media, a set of single button keyboard controls makes play control reasonably easy with F for Fullscreen, M for Mute, O for Opening a new file, P for Play or Pause, and S for Stop. There are a ton of additional keyboard controls for fast forward and rewind. A built in sound record function captures audio from whatever is currently playing in MView. MView also supports multiple instances so you can watch more than one video at the same time. One key feature lacking from MView is support for either M3U or PLS playlist files. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
I won't use anything other than Sonic MyDVD for creating DVD slideshows because they managed to bump the standard limitation of 99 slides per show all the way to 1000. While I don't typically need a 1000 image slideshow, 99 slides can be very limiting and is a huge waste of space on a 4.3GB DVD. If you're looking for a free DVD slideshow authoring alternative, DVDslideshowGUI may be just what you need. The app is a little rough around the edges, but it's effective at putting together a slideshow if you're on a budget. All the requiste tools are included like adding Ken Burns style pan and zoom to images, support for backgrounds and music, text titling of photos, transition effects and the necessary step of exporting your finished slideshow for DVD. A television safe viewing guide helps avoid getting your images cropped on screen due to overscan issues. If you want to add a slideshow to a DVD authored using DVDAuthorgui, you need DVDslideshowGUI. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
The Sourceforge project archive has a seriously powerful command line DVD authoring tool appropriately named DVDAuthor. It does motion menus with audio and video. It handles mixed aspect ratios and can combine PAL and NTSC on the same disk. Subtitles and multiple audio tracks are supported. DVDAuthor even imports some typically unsupported video streams. It does all this for free, which would be the greatest thing in the world, except it's a command line solution. Fortunately someone stepped in and created a graphical interface for DVDAuthor with the even less imaginative name DVDAuthorgui. The grapical interface doesn't expose every feature of DVDAuthor, but it works and provides enough functionality to create usable DVDs from your movies. You still need an app to convert your video to MPEG2 first and if you want tons of authoring features, a solution like Nero or Sonic MyDVD is far superior, but for basic DVD authoring DVDAuthorgui will get you from MPEG2 file to shiny disk or ISO in a few simple steps. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Possibly the biggest frustration in watching digital video is getting the files to work. Invariably, you download something and your computer doesn't have the necessary codec to play it back. GSpot has long been a favorite solution for identifying issues with AVI files, but it doesn't include any way to resolve whatever the issue might be. MediaInfo ups the ante by providing information about virtually any video file type you throw at it and goes the distance in linking off to a related site where you can download what you need to playback a file. For instance, if you download an OGM video file, MediaInfo shows both the video codec used and the audio codec used, with links to the appropriate site for downloading each. It also shows you any of the descriptive tag information of the file. The only thing that would make MediaInfo better is to make it a Windows Media plugin to trap errors in the player and tell you why a file won't play instead of the cryptic error messages Microsoft provides currently. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
If you watch Anime on a regular basis, chances are you are also storing a few videos on your hard drive. RealAnime specializes in converting DivX Anime files to other formats, although it's not limited to only converting anime files. Open the app, select the anime video you want to convert, choose your settings, and output an optimized file using x264 and AAC for an optimized video experience. RealAnime also supports RMVB output associated with RealVideo 10 via Helix, Vorbis audio and OGM wrapper files in addition to MP4 and Matroska MKV. If your original file includes multiple tracks of audio or video, RealAnime supports selective output for both. While the app was written with anime in mind, I tested it with other video files and found the results to be solid. If you need to convert multiple files, a better option is MediaCoder [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
If you have a cable box with built in HDTV PVR, the FireWire connection on the back of the box may be your gateway to accessing the recorded files. The cable companies are typically required to make all ports on a cable box functional and there are a number of online projects around working with the PVR boxes over FireWire. In many cases, you will need an app to work with the HDTV transport stream files once you record a few shows. HDTVtoMPEG2 is that solution, with features for eliminating commercials or unwanted sections of a recording and the ability to convert HDTV transport stream files to a standard MPEG2 file playable in Windows video apps. If you want a more user friendly experience, a shareware app like VideoReDo may be a better option, but for basic HDTV transport stream edits, HDTVtoMPEG2 is up to the task. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Download DivX Web Player
Create an embedded DivX Video
DivX has long been a popular movie download format, but streaming DivX video online was never really possible. DivX Web Player solves this problem by providing a browser plugin to stream video inline. Unlike past DivX efforts that hit Windows first and often take some time to filter into the Mac community, DivX is coming out of the gate with support for browser playback on both platforms simultaneously. The DivX team makes it easy to setup, providing a simple Web form where you paste in a link to your video, put in the width and height and they generate the code for your Web page. The first time someone watches an embedded DivX movie, they need to install the browser plugin, but after that, they are good to go. If you're simply interested in watching streaming DivX content online, you can download the plug-in so your computer is already prepared when you first encounter embedded DivX.
When you outgrow your hard drive and acquire a new one you need an easy way to move all your stuff. Sure you can copy files and folders one or a few at a time, but that doesn't handle tranfer of all your apps and settings from the smaller drive to your new big drive. HDClone handles this transfer process automatically, cloning the original drive to the new drive. HDClone creates a bootable disk with an operating system on a floppy, CD or USB drive. Before transfer, create the bootable drive, and then reboot to the HDClone OS for a graphical user interface for drive cloning. HDClone is compatible with IDE, ATA, and SATA drives (both internal and USB connected). The only downside is the HDClone OS does not support USB mouse or keyboard interfacing, so you will need to make sure you have the PS/2 connector stuff on hand. A more advanced fee version of HDClone is also available, but the free version is effective for most transfers. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Someday I want to stop thinking about converting audio and video between formats. Until that happens, having the right conversion tools makes all the difference. MediaCoder unifies many of the readily available open source conversion tools into one interface with tons of pre-configured output options to simplify audio and video conversion. While I'd still like to see more options, like DVR-MS and TIVO files, MediaEncoder handles most conversions like a champ, supporting a massive list of input options (including unprotected ripping) and output to all the popular formats, including: AVI, MPEG, MP4, PMP, H.264, XviD, DivX, MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, APE and WAV. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a truly universal media conversion tool, but for free MediaCoder does better than most. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Democracy Player is the release name for the Participatory Culture video aggregator formerly known as DTV. The app comes pre-loaded with a number of channels, featuring video from a variety of publishing sources including video blog darling Rocketboom, PCulture's own Video Bomb and Kevin Rose project Diggnation. You can subscribe to any video blog with an RSS feed, choosing to download individual episodes or auto-downloading everything published on a particular channel. What makes Democracy Player particularly interesting is Participatory Culture's focus on creating an end-to-end experience for video publishing, with Broadcast Machine acting as a channel creation tool, Video Bomb providing a marketing vehicle for published video and Democracy Player as desktop interface for consuming video. All video playback in Democracy Player requires necessary codecs (Windows Media, QuickTime, Real, DivX) for playback. [Windows XP $0.00]
From the name of the app, you'd think this was a list making tool for some coalition against reading. Rather Books2burn is a smart solution for Mac OS X users wanting to convert text-to-speech. The app converts any text file to uncompressed AIFF audio using the on-board Apple voices. After converting text, you can convert the AIFF files to MP3 or AAC using iTunes to reduce file size for more use on your iPod. For much better voice quality, I highly recommend trying out the Cepstral voices, which are also Mac compatible and offer much more human sounding voice translations in a variety of world accents. My one complaint with books to burn is lacking better ability to fine to voice pronunciation in the app, which makes perfecting pronunciation of obscure tech phrases and sci-fi names complicated. [Mac OS X $0.00]
Few things are more frustrating than losing data to a corrupted media file. I recently ran into a corrupt WAV file on a Compact Flash card and couldn't copy the file because after a few seconds of file transfer the copy process failed. Enter WAV Saver, a simple utility designed to salvage audio data from WAV files (more alternatives for this process coming soon). The app works by copy the contents of a WAV file to a new file, saving whatever bits are possible. If the WAV merely has corrupt headers or didn't properly mark an end of file, WAV Saver should copy the whole thing to a workable file without a hitch. In cases where the storage media is the problem, WAV Saver is fallible and can only copy a file up to the point where an error is encountered, but it is a better solution than losing WAV data altogether. In some cases, repeating the operation a few times results in capturing more of the audio file, depending on if the corrupt sections of a drive are merely flaky or truly damaged. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
FTP is one of the workhorse solutions I rely on but spend much time thinking about. As long as SmartFTP or Filezilla make it easy for me to upload and download, I'm not likely to change my habits anytime soon. At the same time, there are moments when I'd love a right-click option to quickly upload a file from Windows Explorer. Using Upload Express, I get the convenience of right-click uploading. By configuring a few of my common upload locations, I no longer need to load an FTP app for quick file uploads. This won't replace any of my heavy duty FTP file transfers, but for some of the repetitive tasks it simplifies my upload needs. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Sometimes the winning bid on eBay isn't the steal you hoped it would be. On occasion, the price on eBay ends up being higher than the price through traditional retail channels. Instead of second guessing and digging through hundreds of shopping sites and comparison options, Pricepirates pulls in eBay bid prices and compares them against shopping comparison sites, Amazon Marketplace for a more complete picture of your shopping options. Tabs make it easy to flip between search results. Results may be tracked with a feature that stores searches. Advanced eBay search options with item previews, your eBay watchlist, email notifications and favorite searches are all supported from inside the Pricepirates interface. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download BadBlue Personal Edition
Setting up a Web server at home can be tricky. The options built into Windows XP are less than ideal and finding the right app to help you out is confusing. Once you get the server configured, there's still the difficulty of securing your computer, making sure your network is locked down and figuring out how to connect to the server from outside your router. One of the best personal Web servers I've ever tried is BadBlue Personal Edition. It's great whether you want to share files on your internal network or provide limited access to files to the greater Internet. The software adds a search function to any directory you share, offers a wizard driven interface for configuring shared files and folders, handles slideshow presentations of photos, and can act as a P2P server in some configurations. Password protection options let you lock down files and folders to keep things secure. If you want to share files with a select group of people, this is an easy way to setup access control. A number of preview features for Microsoft Office documents are available to demo, but require the paid version for full support. The downside to this free version is banner ads display on Web pages as part of the deal. While you still need to operate with security in mind, BadBlue PE goes a long way to setting up a home PC as a Web server for virtually any application. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download Comskip
Tweaking Comskip
Depending on which PVR option you use, fast forwarding thru commercials or skipping them altogether can be a huge hassle. Unfortunately, tools for routing around this problem remain scarce. Assuming your PVR solution records in MPEG-2, one option is the rather convoluted paring of Comskip and Comclean. Comskip is a command line tool to detect commercials in MPEG-2 video while Comclean is a companion tool for removing the detected commercials. With some careful reading of the directions you can get the process down to a science, but this is definitely not meant for the casual user. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Web publishing tools like Movable Type and services like MSN Spaces and Blogger make it so that I avoid most HTML coding these days, but there are still times when I edit HTML. An earlier build of First Page once held the position as my favorite HTML editing tool. The Web has changed a ton since the previous release of First Page, with the incremental improvement to most of the Web programming languages and wider adoption of CSS for managing page elements. First Page 2006 catches up with most of these changes, adding great support for CSS, along with a ton of power tools for PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion and Perl. First Page now supports a ton of pre-built scripts for things like creating popup pages, scrollbars, image thumbnailing, rollover images, and auto-generating photo albums. Link checking feature looks for broken links on your pages, color theme tools help create pages with complimentary colors, built-in FTP and one of the better find-and-replace tools for text in the Web design space. Whether this version will remain valid for another 5 years remains to be seen. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Who ever invented the ringtone market is a genius. Millions of people would rather download a song for free rather than paying for it, but many of those same people will pay $1 to get a fraction of the song on their phone. H-Lounge Hyperscore aims to even the odds a little, providing a tool and accompanying community to support creating your own ringtones. The app provides a slightly convoluted system for composing music for your phone, combining a drum beat generation tool and musical tone generator into a rather complex interface. Placing notes and beats in the interface is relatively simple, but resizing windows and lining everything up to sound productive is better left for a sequencing tool like Cubase or Project 5. This is an acceptable first effort for a content creation category desperate for tools, but I'll likely stick with converting my favorite songs using DataPilot Pix'n Tunes. I'd rather compose for a phone using something more like Apple's GarageBand or possibly Cakewalk Kinetic. In the long run, the company aims to make money sending your creations to a phone for a fee, but currently this feature remains free. The company asks for an email address on download, but there's no clear benefit to providing a valid address. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Download Free iPod Video Converter
The name of Free iPod Video Converter pretty much sums it up. This is a free app for converting most of the popular video formats (AVI, MPEG, WMV, RM, RMVB, DivX, ASF, VOB) to iPod-ready MP4 video files. The app is entirely wizard driven, stepping you through the process of adding video files, choosing video and audio quality settings, and adding title and author data for the file. Conversion supports queuing up several video files for conversion, before processing all files in a batch mode or you can convert files one at a time. File names are preserved during file conversion by default, although you can optionally choose a different name and location for converted videos. If you'd rather not think about the complexities of video conversion, this is a solid app for iPod video conversion, with simple good, better, best quality selection. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
In a recent tutorial, I provided instructions on grabbing a still image from a video file using VirtualDub and Windows Movie Maker. Another free option, recommended by subscriber Elfi, is Video2Photo. The app accepts input from a variety of "live" sources, including digital video cameras, live streams, TV tuner cards, and Webcams. Video2Photo also processes AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and still image formats. Essentially, you locate the section of video you want to grab a still, apply some effects (like deinterlacing and color correction) if desired, and outputting a finished image file. A pre-buffer option is available to capture high-motion images. Free registration is required to get rid of nag screen and image watermark. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Conversion between PAL and NTSC format video is among the more complicated problems to solve in video editing. If you've got a PAL format video you want to play back in the NTSC world, you need to do some complex transformations in order to get a compliant video stream. DGPulldown aims to solve this problem by performing a 3:2 pulldown to convert your existing PAL video at 25fps to an NTSC video stream at 29.97 fps without altering the actual speed of the video in the process. To make the process work, you start with a PAL video source, separate the audio and video with a demuxing tool, deinterlace the video if necessary and resize to 720x480 (standard DVD resolution). Next encode your video source to MPEG-2 at 25fps. Running DGPulldown after this encode step makes the conversion to NTSC at 29.97 frames per second possible. The last step is to recombine the audio and video using your favorite DVD editing app. Not for the feint of heart, but it gets the job done and the result looks better than previous hacks for PAL to NTSC conversion. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Web Album Generator has long been my favorite solution for creating an online image gallery. A recent update to the app keeps it firmly placed in that #1 position. Import photos into the interface, add captions and titles to the images and output a finished Web image gallery complete with navigation and thumbnail images of each full-size image. All you need is a place to host the files and FTP to get them there. The app also handles image rotation and resizing, sorts your images and supports CSS for creating custom Web page layouts. I'm lazy enough I switched to Flickr to handle my personal image hosting, because it automates everything, including integrating into other Web sites, but for free, Web Album Generator is the best DIY app for creating your own photo library. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
If you've ever copied a large group of files from one location to another, anticipated the 10 minutes remaining as a perfect time to get coffee, returning 15 minutes later to find the process stuck with 9 minutes to go because one of the files had issues, you need Ycopy. Instead of stalling the copy process, Ycopy continues transferring files in the background, providing an error log for any files with copy issues on completion. This isn't a replacement for drive imaging tools to backup an entire hard drive, but if you need to transfer 50, 100 or 100,000 files from one place to another on your computer, Ycopy will save you the hassle of figuring out where you left off, what went wrong and why your copy operation stopped making progress. Microsoft includes a similar feature in Windows Vista, offering more elegant file transfers following the 20th anniversary of Windows; with Ycopy, you won't need to replace your current OS just to get a better copy function. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download MSN Search Toolbar Enterprise
I like the current MSN Search Toolbar implementation of tabbed browsing better than the beta version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7. At the same time, I'd rather not install the Windows Desktop Search on my laptop, which is where I have primarily used the MSN Search Toolbar. It turns out I can get the Toolbar, disconnected from Desktop Search by downloading the enterprise version of the MSN Search Toolbar, which is distributed separately from Windows Desktop Search. The enterprise version of the MSN Search Toolbar also sports a bunch of improved features over the consumer version. Ctrl+Tab flips between tabs. You can automatically open a folder full of favorites as a group of tabs. Double clicking on a tab now closes a tab (just like Firefox) and a middle-click (with compatible mouse) opens a link in a new tab. Tabs open in either the foreground or background depending on which option you choose. Essentially, the enterprise version of MSN Search Toolbar is a useable implementation of tabs in IE7. [Windows XP $0.00]
One thing that improves both Windows Media Center and the Media Center Extender concept is add-ins that makes Media Center the focal point of entertainment. AV Music Game helps take the geek out of Media Center with a guessing game add-in. The game starts by selecting a playlist or all music in the Media Center music library, requiring contestants to listen to a track and guess the name of the song and artist. After guessing, a Jury feature reveals the answer and the room full of judges determines if respondents answered correctly. A second game option lets you guess artist and album based on seeing a segment of the album art. [Windows XP MCE $0.00]
If you've ever copied music files from one folder to another or over the network, the album art generally doesn't come with the files. If you copy a playlist of tracks using Windows Media Player, you'll end up with a stack of songs all in the same folder with either the wrong album art of missing album art. AV Media Copy transfers songs based on your Windows Media Player playlists, transferring songs while maintaining the original folder hierarchy, album art and all music. You'll save time looking up music data and re-sorting files into the correct album structure. The software developer also makes a handy album art repair tool. [Windows XP $0.00]
If you want remote control access to the music collection on your computer, but don't want to invest in a Windows Media Connect device or Windows Media Center Extender, take a look at WIremote. The software adds a Web interface to the computer with your music library, giving you access to change songs and playlists from any computer, PDA or device with a Web browser connected to your home network. Multiple connections are supported so you can battle family members and housemates for control of the soundtrack. Access is provided on port 6060 on the IP address of the installed application. The software is free, but must be restarted once every sixty minutes without free registration. Windows Media Player 10 and .NET are required for functionality. [Windows XP $0.00]
With plenty of DivX and XviD video content available for download, there's also a common need for converting those video files to DVD. DIKO is one of the easiest solutions I've found for converting DivX video to DVD. You essentially point DIKO at an AVI and the app sets up the video for authoring. Choose from an authored DVD with no menu, or menus generated from one of two bundled menu generation apps. The app supports approximately 2 hours of video on an SVCD and 10 hours of video on a DVD, although, I recommend against this because the author's idea of good quality and mine are apparently quite different. It installs a few free apps, like AVISynth and VirtualDubMod, providing an efficient polish to these otherwise complex tools, making DIKO a solid solution for turning your digital video collection into DVDs. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Converting a series of images to a video file is one of the best ways to put together a digital slideshow. My favorite app for this process remains Microsoft's free Photo Story app, with pan and zoom effects and a few quick photo fixes. If you don't need a ton of special effects, using ImageToAVI is a great alternative. The app converts a collection of JPG, BMP or GIF images to AVI in a number of preset profiles ready for importing in your favorite DVD authoring suite to save on disk. Configurable options include a border around photos, length of time to display each still, aspect ratio and background music. There's also a zoom feature, but I'd avoid it since the options for zoom control are very limited. Used in combination with the free Video DVD Maker, you can quickly crank out simple photo DVDs with minimal effort. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download Designed for Media Center Edition list
Building your own Media Center PC is entirely feasible even if Microsoft isn't clued in on the fact that users shouldn't need a new copy of Windows XP just to run the Media Center code. For about $130, you can pick up an OEM version of XP Media Center Edition from a handful of legitimate retailers. Making sure you have compatible hardware is a little more complicated, because the list of supported TV Tuner cards is smaller than many of the MCE competitors like Beyond TV and SageTV. Fortunately, Microsoft just released the Designed for Media Center Edition approved hardware list, including a recommended list of DVD decoders, graphics cards, TV tuners, remote controls and wireless routers. Microsoft Word is required to read the file and it will prompt for a password, but opens in Read Only mode. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
With Seattle currently registering 24 (or is it 25) straight days of rain the weather seems to be easily predictable in my world. We're closing in on the 33 day record with all the anticipation of breaking a fifty year old record consecutive game hitting streak. Other places on the globe get a little more variety which means you might want to know what's going on. Weather Pulse is a great free desktop app with weather information, combining satellite images, a 10-day forecast, updated hourly forecasts and a number of weather alert options. Satellite images may be sent via email to keep less obsessive friends and neighbors aware of weather patterns in their part of the world. Add custom tracking for radar and weather information and keep tabs on everything from the system tray. A wallpaper option displays the latest satellite update as your desktop wallpaper. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Still in the very early stages of development, Mozilla's calendar app, Sunbird, already looks like an excellent addition to their suite of Internet tools. Like other calendaring solutions, you can add events to your Sunbird calendar, schedule recurring events, set alarms to remind you of events and view your appoinments and meetings across a range of different panes, including day, week and monthly views. The major component missing from current offerings is the ability to sync your data with a portable device, like your cell phone or PDA, making it hard to take your schedule with you. Hopefully syncing is a feature that's coming soon, rather than a feature that's completely forgotten. As a partner to Thunderbird, this makes Mozilla a better solution than Outlook Express for lightweight personal information management. As an Outlook and smart phone user, I'm not ready to give up my current level of integration, but if you don't need syncing, Sunbird is a likely calendar solution for you. Calendaring is also available as a plugin for Thunderbird and Firefox. [Windows 2k/XP Mac OS X Linux $0.00]
As a content publisher, one of my frustrations is trying to make sure every potential listener or viewer has equal access. I like many of the things Windows Media brings to the table in terms of sequencing playlists and creating a great viewing experience, but the Windows Media Player for Mac users leaves the Mac OS X experience lacking. Flip4Mac helps solve the weak Windows Media support on Mac OS X by providing a conduit for WMV content to play in the QuickTime player on OS X. A number of authoring components at Flip4Mac make it easy for content producers to offer both Standard Definition and High Definition video. For $9.99, the player component was reasonably priced, but not equitable, considering Windows users get a solid Windows Media experience for free. Now Mac users get an improved Windows Media experience, using the familiar QuickTime player, and the Flip4Mac WMV playback components are free. No word on whether Windows Media DRM is supported, but lets assume no. [Mac OS X $0.00]
Google is getting serious about their suite of Windows software applications. We're all familiar with the Google Toolbar and Google Earth certainly has a certain cool factor to it, although the usefulness is certainly questionable. Picasa is by far their best app, with a slick set of image management tools. Now Google is bundling all these apps with the Google Pack Screensaver and Google Desktop in one combined download. Third party apps Firefox, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Adobe Reader and Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition are also available in one massive collection of apps. Probably the best reason to use Google Pack over downloading the files individually is the Google Updater, which notifies you of updates for all the apps included in Google Pack. I personally avoid any system product with Norton's name on it because my own experiences haven't been that great, but the rest of the apps do work as described. Using Microsoft Antispyware in combination with Ad-Aware SE also keeps you better protected than relying on Ad-Aware alone. [Windows XP $0.00]
One of the biggest space wasters on your hard drive is likely duplicate files. I know I'm notorious for copying the same file to multiple places, promptly forgetting to clean up my mess. Finding duplicates is a lengthy painful process without the help of software to do the heavy lifting. DupKiller effectively seeks out and eliminates duplicates leaving you in control of which dupes to keep and which ones to purge. A standard scan looks for matching file sizes, names and dates to rapidly locate most duplicate files. Better accuracy results from using the content matching mode, which takes considerably longer but tracks down duplicate files that might be named differently while containing the same information. You can customize the duplicate search to eliminate specific files, preview images before deleting and filter on a variety of criteria. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download Video Edit Magic Express
I'm accustomed to the storyboard and timeline modes of video editing common to apps like Windows Movie Maker and Adobe Premiere thanks to many evolutionary steps in video editing over the past 10 years. For people who aren't interested in fussing with the intricacies of non-linear editing applications, Video Edit Magic Express offers an intuitive alternative. The software relies on a more common method of cut, copy and paste similar to office applications. Capturing video from your digital video camera is similar to other editors, without complicated options for settings you're unlikely to use. For output, choose between AVI, MPEG video ready for burning to VCD or DV-AVI (the format of digital video cameras). A collection of effects and transitions are included for adding professional touches to your movies. Those familiar with other video editing applications will certainly recognize distinct similarities in editing methods, but the terminology and straight forward approach sets Video Edit Magic Express apart as a simple solution for editing your movies. The trial version never expires, but registration is required to output your movies. For a more complete set of video editing options, a full-featured version of Video Edit Magic is also available. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $39.95]
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is one of the most useful scanning features when it works. SimpleOCR works better than most free OCR apps I've tried previously, effectively scanning printed pages and converting them to text or Word documents with a very low margin of error. If you're a software developer, SimpleOCR is also available to license for inclusion in other applications without the royalties typically associated with OCR software bundling. A trial version of Charactell's Softwriting handwriting recognition software is also included, for scanning in your chicken scratch. While the handwriting recognition isn't as good as the stuff built into Microsoft's Tablet PC operating system, it also doesn't carry the price tag of needing a special computer to make it work either. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
With digital cameras heading toward a standard of 8-10 megapixels in most of the mid-range line, printing photos at large sizes is no longer a luxury limited to the elite group purchasing top-of-the-line SLR digicams. Posteriza takes advantage of photo printing capabilities by turning your digital shots into larger-than-life posters and banners. The software will print several 4x6 or 8x10 sheets as tiles which you can combine to form a full-sized poster. It isn't quite as smooth as using Digital Camera Poster Creator, but Posteriza is free, which makes up for most potential shortcomings. Posteriza automatically creates margins for overlapping sheets to paste them together in larger sizes. A frame option prints a border around the outside edge of the image. If you don't have the budget for a photo printer capable of massive prints, Posteriza is an affordable solution. The software works with virtually any standard paper size. Another option is to create a set of JPG files which may be printed at any print facility to reduce your printing costs. Be sure to consider something like Ink Saver to avoid using more print resources than are absolutely necessary. Make sure you use the highest resolution setting on your digital camera for optimal results when enlarging any image for print. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
After seeing the list of most popular articles, with an tutorial on Sony's PSP at number 1, it's not completely surprising to see an app for the PSP as the most popular freeware application of 2005, followed closely by another PSP and iPod friendly app, 3GP_Converter. The rest of the apps are an even mix of media files and general purpose utilities for improving PC functionality:
PSP Video 9 converts movies for PSP
3GP_Converter converts movies to 3GP and MP4
Unlocker releases locked Windows processes
STOIK Video Converter converts MOV and other formats
Index Dat Spy locates index.dat files
GSpot video codec detective
TrueCrypt encryption software
MediaMonkey music and movie manager
ClamWin Free Antivirus virus protection software
SmartClose automatic application shutdown
The previous list of top 10 games included an error that shortened the list from 10 games to 8. The corrected list is now updated with all 10.
MPEG-4 is fast becoming the most popular video distribution format thanks to the growing numbers of iPod video and PSP owners, combined with all the consumer electronics devices with DivX support. Creating an MPEG-4 file with all the right settings gets confusing, especially with all the options for creating an AVI wrapper file with DivX or XviD, or adding h.264 video to an MP4 container. If what you want at the end of the day is an MP4 file, you need an easy way to get there from whatever your original format happens to be. Command line app MP4Box is a complex and capable app for creating MP4 files, but command line options get confusing, unless you're addressing them from a graphical interface. YAMB provides a graphical front end to MP4Box, creating a sensible solution for joining audio and video files, adding subtitles and chapter markers, splitting or joining MP4 files and getting detailed information about each file. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Printing paper versions of registration information, order confirmations and map directions really starts to pile up the stacks of paper. In most cases, I simply print to PDF when I want to keep track of any important details. My files are automatically backed up every few hours, so I always have a spare copy and if I really need a paper version, I can create one from the PDF. Otherwise, I've saved a piece of paper from the shredder and don't risk losing the data in a stack of household clutter. BullZip PDF Printer is a free solution for creating PDF files from any application in Windows. Instead of printing to a sheet of paper, use PDF Printer to create a digital replica of the information you need to store. The software requires the free Ghostscript PostScript to PDF converter, allowing for output to append an existing PDF, create a new PDF, and automated printing using batch processing. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
If your laptop keyboard layout leaves you jabbing for a non-existent or misplaced Windows key, you know exactly how important re-mapping your keys can be. Of course, many desktop keyboards also give you a bunch of extra keys that come in handy, as long as you can quickly re-map them to suit your current needs. If you don't like the location of the arrow keys, certain functions or even the placement of special characters, KeyTweak re-maps your keyboard in a few quick clicks. The only real limitation is full re-mapping of any macro keys (the ones that launch things like IM and your email client), which are typically controlled by the software shipping with your keyboard. Macro key re-mapping doesn't work with all keyboard because each implementation is different. Another nice feature is the option to create keyboard profiles, so you can create a set of keyboard changes and save them as a group to be recalled later. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Having to re-encode a video file after making a change is one of the most frustrating aspects of digital video. Encoding takes long enough the first time, why go through it twice if you don't need to. If DivX or XviD MPEG-4 video saved as .AVI files are the format you need to edit, MPEG4 Modifier is your solution. Change aspect ratio, pixel aspect ratio, user data and interlacing all without re-encoding the file. Possibly the best use for MPEG4 Modifier is to unpack packed bitstreams, which are used to make it easier to edit DivX files in apps like VirtualDub, as well as increase some compatibility with DivX 5, however, packed bitstreams are also known to introduce additional errors. If you're playing back a video file that's jumpy or if you try to playback a video on DivX compatible hardware player and the video fales, MPEG4 Modifier will likely fix the problem by unpacking the bitstream. If you need to make changes to other MPEG-4 video without re-encoding, an app like QuickTime Pro may serve you better, but for simple changes to DivX and XviD formats, MPEG4 Modifier gets the job done. .NET is required for installation. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Download Videora iPod Converter
Convert your videos to MPEG-4 or H.264 video ready for iPod Video playback either individually or automatically from a watched folder. The software will convert most standard video formats, including AVI, MPEG, WMV, VOB, MOV and Tivo ToGo. Videora is significantly faster than the iPod conversion supported in QuickTime Pro and any of the standard MPEG-4 video conversions are also compatible with Sony's PSP (although the companion PSP Video 9 is more practical for PSP owners). Setup for Videora iPod Converter includes a bunch of configuration options, including customization of your own video profiles. In most cases the default options should work nicely. Advanced users will appreciate the options to customize FFMPEG flags and AVS Scripts. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Video DVD Maker is a straightforward app for capturing video and burning DVDs. The software accepts virtually any video capture device, including DV cameras over FireWire, Webcams and TV tuners. After capture, you can re-organize clips, import additional clips and output a fairly simple but playable DVD. The interface for importing video clips is a little confusing if you are only using video already located on your hard drive, but standard capture from camera, edit and burn is quite well organized for basic steps. The software supports burning video to CD, DVD and dual-layer DVD. If you want fancy menus, you'll need to invest in other software like Sonic MyDVD, Nero Vision Express, Roxio Easy Media Creator or one of the many other capable DVD authoring suites. For free, Video DVD Maker handles the functions of capture, edit and burn quite nicely. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
While there's plenty of debate suggesting XviD does better job of encoding files with a similar AVI MPEG-4 wrapper than the DivX company does themselves, the tools DivX releases are generally more user friendly. If you ever encoded a movie with the original Dr. DivX, using one of the default settings, you are already well aware of just how simply converting a movie from any format to DivX is. Awhile back, DivX changed their software line-up, kicking Dr. DivX to the curb in favor of the new and improved DivX Create bundle, which includes a bunch of drag and burn tools for easily converting video to DivX. If you don't feel inclined to spend the $20 for DivX Create, you can still get most of the functionality using the newly free Dr DivX 2.0. The software has a few kinks, but generally provides the familiar easy to navigate interface for converting video files. If you get confused by all the options in other open source video conversion apps, Dr. DivX 2.0 beta will take some of the confusion out of conversion. [Windows XP $0.00]
The development team behind Audacity keeps making it better. Audacity recently updated to version 1.2.4, which includes a handful of bug fixes and minor feature enhancements over the previous version. Most of the enhancements are minor interface improvements rather than any serious feature enhancements. If you want to try new features, take the beta version of Audacity 1.3 for a spin. For creating and editing audio clips, Audacity is the most affordable place to start. It offers all the basic features a multitrack editor should include, without bloating the software with features you might never use. Unlimited extendibility via VST plugins creates the foundation for comprehensive audio editing. Mac OS X and Linux compatibility make this the only truly cross-platform audio editing solution on the market. Recent updates add a VU meter to the toolbar and expose more commonly used features via convenient buttons. Each track now boasts separate pan and gain controls, for optimal mixing during post production. Normalize, Compressor, and Repeat functions are a vital part of core functionality. Previewing of effects prior to applying them to an audio track saves time having to undo changes. Audacity supports 16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit audio. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
New in 1.2.4:
The File menu now includes a list of recent files.
The "Generate Silence" effect now prompts for a length.
Audacity is now built with Vorbis 1.1, which features better encoding quality and file compression.
Dragging sound files into the Audacity window now works on Mac OS X and Linux, as well as Windows. (Before, it worked only on Windows.)
Better support for certain audio devices on Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger"
The "View History" window can now discard old undo levels to save disk space on Windows. (This previously worked only on Linux and Mac.)
"Preferences" command is now in Edit menu.
"Plot Spectrum" command is now in Analyze menu.
Audacity 1.2.4 Release Notes
RSS is the information delivery tool keeping me on top of all the information I read daily. Without it, I'd be lost. While Firefox handles RSS auto-discovery, letting me know I can subscribe to something, with relative ease, it doesn't elegantly add feeds to my RSS reader of choice (currently FeedDemon). Feed Your Reader steps in and elegantly adds one-click subscription functionality to Firefox, eliminating the messy copy-and-paste steps required to get from Web page to RSS reader. If you need to stay on top of information for your job, hobby or just want to keep abreast of the latest news, Feed Your Reader makes subscribing painless.
With one million and one ways to get weather information from the Internet to your computer, it's hard to decide which method is the best. Forecast Fox is a Firefox extension designed to integrate weather delivery into Firefox so the details are always a glance away. Weather data is powered by AccuWeather.com, which includes radar images and severe weather warnings. Weather data is good both for U.S. cities and international listings, providing more information than many other free tools. Customizable forecast ranges, toolbar position and depth of tooltip data are fully customizable. A profile system stores data about more than one city, making Forecast Fox convenient for business travelers or people who simply need to know the weather situation on vacation.
Ever had an experience where you were looking at a Web page, the browser crashes and all 20 pages you had open are suddenly gone? I hate it when that happens. SessionSaver prevents lost windows and information by saving all open Firefox windows, tabs, typed text and everything when the browser closes. Reopen Firefox and you pick up exactly where you left off. Manage multiple sessions to save groups of open tabs. TextSaver feature keeps track of text typed in Web pages. RemoteSync feature synchronizes your browser sessions between multiple computers. Keep in mind this is a potential security risk if you use a public computer, because other people could also open your sessions, but for personal use SessionSaver might be the single best reason to dump IE and switch to Firefox.
If you're used to the window closing behavior in IE, where clicking the Red X in the corner closes the current browser window, getting used to closing tabs might be tricky. One way to make closing your tabs easier is to add a close button to each of the tabs using Tab X. This Firefox extension puts an X in the right corner of each tab, making it simple to clear out tabs when you no longer need them. You can still close the current tab using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+W, but you get the added advantage of closing a tab out of sequence with the click of your mouse.
Firefox before Tab X:
Firefox after Tab X:
One of the key reasons I don't use Firefox as my primary browser is page compatibility. I visit a ton of sites that don't play nice with Firefox. If you want the added features of Firefox without the inconvenience of needing to constantly run in dual browser mode, IE Tab saves the day. When you need to access an IE only site, this Firefox extension launches a new tab embedding IE inside Firefox. You never leave your current browser while getting all the advantages of having both browsers running side-by-side. There are a couple of quirky things I encountered on pages that open everything in a new window, but in general, this is the best of both worlds for getting Firefox tabbed browsing and the flexibility of accessing IE only pages.
If you frequently download anything from music to movies to software to just about anything, you want to know the status of downloads. Firefox includes some basic download management, but knowing exactly what's going on can be a trick. Download Statusbar is a Firefox extension designed to keep track of download progress. Like most extensions, Download Statusbar autohides when not in use, handles single click pause and resume, pauses or resumes all downloads simultaneously and copies the source URL to the clipboard among other handy features. If you download a ton of files and use Firefox, you need Download Statusbar.
For all the high tech fun of owning the latest gadgets, there's a certain thrill in creating your own low tech precursor to modern movies. Flipbook Printer extracts still images from AVI movie files and prints a flipbook from the screens. I can remember having storybooks as a small child with little mini cartoon images in the bottom right corner of the page. Flip the pages quickly and you got motion graphic series similar to watching an animated cartoon. Flipbook Printer makes it easy to create your own flipbooks from any AVI movie file on standard Avery business card paper. Granted, the business card pages might get spendy if you use more than a few images. Just print the series on regular paper and use scissors if you're on a budget or don't want to bother with tracking down custom paper. Think of this as the analog equivalent of the iPod video; if your four year old drops it won't break (and he'll probably like it just as much). [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
BitPump is possibly the easiest to use of the current crop of BitTorrent clients. If you've never used a BitTorrent client to download files before, all you really need to know about BitPump is it just works. Those familiar with BitTorrent are aware of some of the potential complications of home networks, firewalls and port configuration common to BitTorrent clients. AnalogX, a freeware company known for simple interfaces with outstanding results, created BitPump with all of these common frustrations in mind. In addition to automatic firewall configuration and NAT traversal, BitPump includes other features optimized for making BitTorrent download user friendly. A few features setting BitPump apart from the competition include right-click menu access from IE, torrent caching for quick startup, SendTo contextual menu addition and auto downloading. The big missing piece in my book is the ability to watch RSS feeds for automatic download of torrent files enclosed in feeds. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
In general, Firefox loads pages faster than Internet Explorer. Why settle for marginally faster when you can tweak speed settings and dramatically enhance page load times. Fasterfox makes great use of Firefox prefectching capability by loading links in the background using idle computing cycles. It also tweaks a number of network performance settings on your PC to help improve throughput. And blocking of those annoying Flash pop-ups on pages makes sure you aren't waiting for an ad to get to the meat on a page.
Magpie Direct download for Firefox users
I download a ton of audio and video. Samplings from podcasters, video blogs, free MP3s from band Web sites and other random Flash movies and entertainment are all part of my daily searches. I'm in full gathering mode when I'm searching for new media stars. There are plenty of download grabbing tools capable of finding files when I'm in searching based on keywords, but when I find a band Website or cool short films on a site, I don't want to bother with dozens of right-click save target as operations. Using Magpie in Firefox, I can automatically save all the files of types I specify, like MOV, WMV, MP4, MP3 and WMA by using a keyboard shortcut. Magpie saves me time. It also has a neat trick of downloading all the files in a numbered sequence.
Download Bookmark Synchronizer
While I make a point of subscribing to most sites via RSS so I don't need to revisit them, I do still bookmark many sites so I can quickly refer to them when I need the service or information provided. Keeping track of those bookmarks across the several computers in my house is a nightmare. If you have more than one computer, Bookmark Synchronizer is the perfect solution for keeping bookmarks in check. You do need a place to FTP files (your ISP provided Web space works nicely for this).
If you click on a Mailto link, like the feedback link in the sidebar of this site, the browser attempts to open a desktop mail client like Mozilla Thunderbird or Outlook Express. If your primary email account is something like Gmail or Yahoo Mail this doesn't work so well because you can't actually send mail. WebMailCompose addresses this by overriding the mailto behavior in Firefox. The default solution is to open Gmail, but you can also use Hotmail, Yahoo and several niche clients.
I'm doing a ton of reading lately, both fiction and non-fiction. It's a great escape from the hours I spend online. While there are plenty of comparison shopping sites I prefer the immediacy of comparison happening as I'm looking for information on an author or book. Book Burro extends Firefox by providing price comparisons from most of the popular online book sites while I'm looking up the book on any site. Book Burro remains hidden in the background when not in use, dropping down an unobtrusive list of prices from stores when I'm shopping through titles.
Download SilentNight Micro CD Burner
With hundreds of CD and DVD burning options, it's hard to get excited about yet another app for burning. SilentNight Micro CD Burner gets my attention because it's portable. The standalone executable file requires no installation, runs from a USB keychain drive (or your hard drive) and lacks the overhead of more complicated apps like Nero or Easy Media Creator. When all you want to do is make a copy of a disc or back up a few files, this app saves you the time of waiting for all those extra features you don't need to load in the background. Micro CD Burner creates CD-Audio disks, in addition to data disks and also creates ISO files if you want to make a CD or DVD image. If you want to author a DVD you need a burner with more features, but for all other burning tasks SilentNight Micro CD Burner is more than enough burning power. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
The clipboard remains one of the most unappreciated features Windows. It's the funnel of information from one file or process to another. There are a ton of fancy clipboard tools to facilitate copying from all parts of your Windows experience. Copy2Clip is much simpler. It focuses on copying filename and path information to the clipboard, with a number of settings for what you paste. Sort file names by file size, name, full path or flip Windows '\' path names to Unix style '/' paths. I find Copy2Clip particularly useful for writing tutorials, but it also comes in handy for things like creating batch processes, cataloging photos or filling in URLs to reference photos online. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Archiving files to DVD-R or CD-R is one way to free up hard drive space, but it might slow you down later. What happens when you need to retrieve something from one of those shiny disks? Unless you have an excellent cataloging system, chances are you insert disk after disk into your CD tray until you locate the one with the file you need. The method works, but what a senseless waste of time. LS MyLib provides a better solution. The app creates an index of all your disks, keeping track of which files are on which disk. As long as you label each physical disk uniquely, you can search the contents without ever inserting the disk in your tray and retrieve the correct disk from a well-organized catalog system, just like a librarian. The software does all the necessary cataloging. You'll look at data backup in a whole new light with LS MyLib. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Once you install more than a handful of applications on your computer the Start menu becomes unruly. Creating a folder hierarchy helps, but even managing your own organization system becomes quickly convoluted. Take control of your applications with JetStart, the Start menu replacement, type-ahead search and application launch toolbar designed to make finding and launch frequently used applications more efficient. The free version is limited to a pre-defined set of five categories, which still dramatically assists in cleaning up a messy Start menu. The paid version includes customizable categories, Startup Manager control and a set of hotkeys for Winamp. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
One of the tricks to getting great looking videos is proper calculation of bitrates, aspect ratio and the size of your video frames. Depending on the format you plan to save your movie projects, you get better results with the help of a calculator app like Aspect, rather than guessing at the settings. Some codecs don't support certain aspect ratios and bitrates well. If you crop the edges of a movie, the aspect ratio is completely thrown off, creating a non-standard size in many instances. Using a calculator app makes sure you make the changes you need without rendering your video unwatchable when you convert it. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
When you playback analog video sources through your PC, a number of factors result in some really ugly video. In many instances, the video is improperly scaled and interlacing looks lousy on a computer monitor. Video noise further deteriorates the image quality. Timing issues like improperly converted frame rates often result in what's know as judder (a rather jumpy image distortion). DScaler aims to fix all these problems during playback using complicated mathematics instead of the expensive hardware usually required to improve image output. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
If you need a single reason to get a Bluetooth phone - Salling Clicker is that reason. The app works as a remote control for almost anything on your PC. You can browse and change songs in Windows Media Player and iTunes. Browse playlists, select song by album or artist and generally play DJ without going back to your computer. With Bluetooth's approximately 30-foot range you can be on your patio controlling your tunes from a lounge chair. Flip through PowerPoint slides using your phone to advance the slides. Mute your PC volume. Control DVD playback. All the advantages of a remote control without the hassles of needing to be in range of IR. Support for over 90 Bluetooth phones and most Windows Mobile 2003 devices, including my Audiovox SMT5600. [Windows XP/Mac OS X $23.95]
I have all my packages delivered to a site away from my house so they aren't sitting on the front porch getting drenched in Seattle drizzle. That includes both personal packages and the stuff I get from companies who want me to review their products. Some of these packages are time sensitive, but I don't want to hit refresh every 20 minutes to see if the Out for Delivery notification is switched to Delivered. Parcel Tracker solves that problem, adding pending packages from FedEx and UPS as calendar items in Outlook. Parcel Tracker checks the online services for me on a schedule, providing notification via Outlook's appointment reminders when the package shows up as delivered. Outlook XP or 2003 are required for functionality. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
One of the big hold-ups in switching between email programs is converting all your address book entries between applications. If you choose the right combination of apps, you can occasionally switch your address book, but only if the stars are aligned with Mercury. Dawn acts as the go between for most address book formats, including Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, Opera, Palm, Pegasus, Juno and legacy formats like Corel WordPerfect Address Book and Pine. Instead of wasting time retyping or living with an inferior mail app rather than dealing with address book switching, Dawn makes the conversion process almost seamless. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Occasionally I create DVDs and want to share them with other people. This requires one of two basic solutions: sending a burned DVD through the mail or creating an ISO file and posting it online somewhere for the recipient to download. Neither of these scenarios is perfect. Sending DVDs through the mail requires extra time and the expense of postage. Sending an ISO requires a long upload time followed by a long download time (even if a solution like BitTorrent is used). The other alternative is to output the video in a compressed format like WMV and send a link to the file location. This last alternative is great if all I'm trying to send is a video. If I invested time in creating menus for the DVD, added some extra stuff to my movie and generally put time into the whole package, sending just a link to a video download won't cut it. ratDVD bridges the gap for this problem, acting as a tool to compress an entire DVD into a smaller package, menu navigation, special features, alternate language tracks, AC-3 audio and all. The file size is still bigger than a video-only download, but DVD sizes are cut dramatically. Depending on the settings you choose, quality suffers little with the end result being a virtual DVD available for playback from the hard drive or converted back to a DVD playable in any consumer drive by burning a disk. The creator of the software made it with the intent of compressing commercial DVDs, but the net effect is a great app for reducing the file size of your own stuff too. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
If your computer is anything like mine, keeping track of everything running in the background is a nightmare. I've acquired a number of useful apps over the years that I simply can't live without for various reasons, but when I'm seeking out a problem, I can't always identify what's what. What's Running helps sort out all the processes currently in memory, identify active IP connections, and make Startup modifications. All these features are readily available through onboard solutions like MSCONFIG, DXDIAG and the Windows Task Manager, but What's Running puts them all in one convenient location. This is like an ultra-lite version of The Ultimate Troubleshooter, with a requisite lite price tag. I don't personally use What's Running to manage system processes, but it's good enough I consider it a worthy alternative. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
MIDI audio is one of those fun formats that just never go away. Many of the polyphonic ringtones used by cell phones are MIDI files. Some of the more interesting sounds of the 1990's were given life through MIDI audio. If you want to take MIDI with you, the iPod support is a little lacking. Fortunately, apps like MidiMeow handle coversion of MIDI to MP3 or OGG like a champ. The process is a little slow because MIDI is an audio description format, so your computer needs to read the file, interpret it and play the sounds as it generates the MP3. Not a perfect solution, but a small price to pay for some electronica-to-go. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Windows XP is getting long in the tooth thanks to five years with the same user interface. Many elements in Windows XP looked crusty the day it hit the virtual shelves thanks to a severe lack of attention to the details making the interface. Icons, splash screens, animations and other subtleties of the operating system are carried forward as far back as Windows 3.1. Instead of looking at those ugly old icons until you upgrade to Windows Vista, give 'em the boot and XPize your system. It seems like such a simply thing, but appearance really does make a difference in how it feels to use Windows on a daily basis. Side-by-side screenshots of something as simple as the animation used during the file copy process tell the tale. [Windows XP $0.00]
Macromedia Adobe has a good shot at owning the online video market, with Flash being the one format ubiquitous across Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and most of the handheld device platforms. The could take a big chunk of the desktop video market too, if they'd simply come up with a decent way for people to watch videos locally. I don't want to launch my browser every time I save a Flash file. Luckily other people are picking up the slack and making this possible. FLV player supports local playback of flash video, making it a compelling option for testing files before uploading to a server. It's not quite on par with the SAPlayer included with the full version of Flash, but is an acceptable substitute considering there are no other options at this point. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Centered Systems Second Copy is the solution I use to keep files synchronized between a backup drive and my primary file folders. In my mind, the $29.95 price tag is cheap insurance to make sure I don't lose important files. The cost of losing something is considerably higher. I realize not everyone wants to pay for file protection. A less versatile free option is Easy2Sync. The app is billed as a way to keep files synchronized between two computers, but it works just as easily to sync between two drives. A scheduling mechanism automates the comparison and transfer of files. The disadvantage of the freeware version of Easy2Sync is it won't synchronize subfolders, only top level files in a folder. If you have a subfolder, it requires a separate configuration. Not a showstopper, but certainly less than ideal. Upgrading to a registered version removes this limitation, but if you plan to pay, Second Copy is a better choice. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Adding effects, creating custom keying, layering backgrounds and building your own animated sequences in video typically requires both creative talent and expensive editing packages. While there's no software in the world capable of eliminating the need for creative talent, Jahshaka does a great job replacing the need for the pricy tools required for typical special effects rendering projects. This doesn't mean people already comfortable with working in environments where video keying, animation design and video coloring are going to abandon their current toolset. Jahshaka brings the rest of us access to these features without needing to mortage our lives to have the necessary tools. Non-linear video editing is currently available only to Linux users, but the rest of the feature set, including video paint, keying, color correction, 2d and 3d effects and a system for sharing files privately across a network are available for Windows, Linux and OS X. [Windows 2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]
Thanks to Markus for reminding me I'd never featured this.
The Fonts folder in Windows is one of the overlooked relics unchanged in more than ten years of Windows evolution. Sure, Microsoft has added ClearType support and OpenType compatibility, but the folder where fonts are managed is suffering from arrested development. There's no font management to speak of. If you want to browse the fonts in the folder, you need to double click each file to see the preview or install an additional application. AMP Font Viewer fills that second role, providing a quick preview of every font in the folder, while also allowing you to browse fonts that aren't currently installed. The viewer will handle installing and uninstalling fonts, while also supporting a temporary install feature to keep system memory from being wasted by extra fonts you rarely need. Some of the advanced features are only available to Windows 2000 and XP users. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Recording streaming radio seems to be one of the more popular requests these days. Total Recorder remains one of the slickest options for this function thanks to built in scheduling. If the $11.95 for Total Recorder isn't in your budget, consider XstreamRadio as a reliable alternative. It doesn't offer scheduled recording, but it does an effective job of recording live streams to either MP3 or WAV format. The app includes a long list of streaming stations from around the globe as well as supporting streams added by you. The player takes up little room on the desktop in either the full mode or minimized ticker mode. The ticker streams headlines from news sources like BBC, NBC, CNN and CNET. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Vector drawing is something I aspire to being good at someday - at least on a basic level. I'm not much of a freehand artist. I'm more of a doodler inclined to store my creations in the waste bin (both physical and virtual). I'm fascinated by tools that enable me to be a hack at drawing with my computer. This is an area where high prices keep the average person who just wants to doodle out of the game, making it perfect for an open source app to come along and level the playing field for those of us who never made it to art school dropout status. If you've got a Wacom tablet or Tablet PC, this is a perfect way to hone your skills with a digital pen and virtual paper. Support for all SVG standard features like alpha blending, shapes, transforms, gradients, grouping, text and clones should be enough for most vector drawing applications. Import and edit EPS, PostScript, JPEG, TIFF, PNG and BMP files. Export to SVG-compliant vector formats. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
I can't live without my keyboard shortcuts. Since MS-DOS first introduced me to options like Ctrl+C copying, I continue to rely on shortcuts to keep my fingers on the keys. All keyboards are not created equal, which means the keyboard on my desktop has better key placement than my laptop. It also means when I'm using a laptop, I'm stumbling to find a Windows key that should be located between Ctrl and Alt in the bottom left corner and isn't. The workaround for this is to re-map keys to fit your needs, instead of sticking with the default configuration established by the manufacturer. Depending on where your keyboard came from, you might be able to re-map from QWERTY to DVORAK or switch a few hot keys. To make a more permanent switch, you need software to map your keys to new functions. SharpKeys is almost a perfect solution for this. To create a new key map, simply press the key you want to change, then press the key you want mapped to that spot on your keyboard. You can also disable keys (like Caps Lock) to prevent usage if they get in the way. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Photoshop and Photoshop Elements pack so many filters and presets into the core application it seems like there's no need for plugins anymore. Despite all the presets, I continue to find plugins with features extending far beyond the basics. virtualPhotographer extends the core configurations of mundane things like B/W conversion, making it simple to flip to grayscale or any single color variation. The plugin also offers around 50 presets tweaking soft focus and contrast settings, as well as some slick artistic effects. The image tweaks provided in virtualPhotographer are possible using built-in components in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, but using the plugin makes it easier. Compatible with any app supporting Photoshop-compatible plugins. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
I'm an infrequent buyer and seller on eBay. I prefer the immediacy of searching craigslist for what I want and buying it with minimal negotiation. When I do find something I want, I refuse to pay too much for it. I also hate losing auctions, because I don't want to invest the time in looking for something comparable. Prospector Lite is almost a perfect solution for my own eBay search habits. It searches across categories to provide better results than searching directly on eBay.com Prospector saves results for frequent searches. The Lite version is limited to 30 searches daily and 15 snipes per month, which is more than enough to last me for years. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
One of the things I recommend prior to doing any audio or video editing is shutting all unnecessary applications down. A few years ago, a freeware application called EndItAll was the perfect solution for this; it shut down everything you didn't need running without turning off important system services. EndItAll now costs about $6 from PCMag.com or you can subscribe annually for access to all the PC Mag downloads for $20. There's nothing wrong with the price, EndItAll is useful, although slightly limited in some feature areas. Last week I found SmartClose. It does the same thing and a whole ton more (Lockergnome beat me to posting it yesterday) for free. In addition to shutting down open applications, SmartClose takes a snapshot of everything currently open, so you can relaunch to your previous state when system intensive operations are complete. Specify a list of protected apps that never get closed by SmartClose. Close IE and Windows Explorer windows and restore them when you finish with an operation. And for those pesky programs that don't want to shut down gracefully, SmartKill will free up your system resources in cooperation with the SmartClose action. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
I archive hundreds of files to CD and DVD every week as I back up various projects and cycle old files off my hard drive. One important part of the process is quickly calculating the best configuration of files to fill my disks. Burning apps show you when you are near or over capacity, but most of them don't tell you the best combination of files to fill your blank media. SizeMe takes any group of files you select, tells you how many CD or DVD blanks you need and groups the files in optimal clusters to combine the most files on the fewest disks. If you burn as many disks as I do, this can be a huge time (and space) saver. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
When I think of the perfect panorama viewer, I think really big screen. Of course that's wishful thinking that translates to really big price tag, but I can dream, can't I? WPanorama helps address the problem of easily viewing panoramic shots on your hard drive by including slick features like horizontal auto-scrolling with custom time controls. The app generates an AVI from the horizontal scroll giving you a panoramic movie suitable for inclusion in your next video project. Depending on image resolution, you can choose to base panoramic viewing on the actually dimensions of the still photo or your own screen settings, depending on which makes more sense for your particular needs. A bundled screensaver solution automatically uses all the auto-scroll features of WPanorama to display on or more panoramic shots in motion while your screen is idle. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
After grumbling about the lack of apps with support for easy DV playback to some of my fellow Windows Media MVPs, I was greeted with this clever solution from The March Hare. It recognizes FireWire connected DV cams automatically. The app supports full VCR-style control over DV tape playback, including single-frame forward and reverse. You can copy a single from to the clipboard. The app also supports devices like Webcams, if you change a setting. It scales properly when monitor resolution is swapped and the app will display video in fullscreen mode. All video playback maintains proper aspect ratio, so there's no weird issues with widescreen video being stretched to fit your standard 4:3 monitor. [Windows XP $0.00]
Unless you disabled Autoplay you're probably familiar with the dialog box that pops up every time you insert a CD, connect a portable music player or connect an external drive containing media files. The list provides some available options for playing back or viewing the contents of your media. Sometimes this list builds up a few leftovers from installing programs and later removing them. More frequently, some of the apps you might want to associate with this list aren't found in the list. Autoplay Repair tweaks this list, providing a very convenient interface for modifying Autoplay preferences. Remove items you prefer not to see, add new programs to the list and customize Autoplay display order from one hand interface. An included Registry backup tool allows you to revert back if you don't want to keep changes. .NET 1.1 required. [Windows XP $0.00]
Something I almost never think about is the information I might be sharing with other people when I send them a Word document or Excel spreadsheet. Sure, I might share the text contents of the document, but that's the point of sending it. Depending on the document, you might be sharing a bunch of stuff you never meant to send. For instance, if you tracked changes in a document, there might be some of the changes still sitting in the doc and they might contain information you didn't want anyone to see. The document properties contain useful bits of info, like Author name and the title, but depending on the context you send the document, these could be incriminating details or you may have included something in one of the other fields never meant to leave your desk. There are steps you can take to flush hidden info from your files prior to sharing them with others, but it's a good idea to make sure there's nothing left. Enter TRACE! by Workshare. The app scans Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, as well as email and Web documents for data that might be considered harmful if left behind. The company hopes you'll be impressed and purchase document control technology but TRACE! serves a helpful purpose without any add-ons. Office 2000 or newer required. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
Download Photoshop Album Starter Edition
Adobe recently released a new version of their free Photoshop Album Starter Edition, which is almost too basic considering all the features packed into Google's free Picasa app. Minor photo editing like red eye removal, auto color correction and brightness adjustment improve photo appearance. Share photos by emailing or sending to cell phones. Print images to online photo services or as print-on-demand photo books. Photo sorting organizes images based on a variety of criteria including camera date stamp. While the included features work very well, Picasa gives you similar options and integrated blog posting, better management options and a long list of features Adobe provides as part of the pay version of Photoshop Album. If you're looking for bare bones photo management created by a trusted name in imaging, Photoshop Album Starter Edition certainly fits the bill. If you want effective photo management, better to look elsewhere or spend a few dollars on the commercial version of this app. [Windows 9x/2k/XP]
Many of the photo editor plugin developers offer smaller collections of free plugins to give you a taste of their larger plugin selection. PhotoFreebies is exactly that, a taste of the comprehensive PhotoWiz plugin set. Featuring a handful of useful plugins that complement the existing toolsets of Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Corel, etc. Included in the collection are a Black and White conversion that outperforms the embedded version in most photo editing apps; Desaturation Gradient; Histo Fix; Remove Transparency; a customizable Sepia; Luma Negative and two RGB channel converters. Upgrading to the more fully featured PhotoWiz is entirely optional but this is definitely a solid addition to any photo editing suite. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
B/W: Turns the image into grayscale, but with a better method than the one available in Photoshop or PSP. Works like the B/W button in ColorWasher and FocalBlade. No Dialog.
Desaturation Gradient: Gradually desaturates the image in four possible directions.
Histo Fix: Like in ColorWasher it fixes a chopped histogram by interpolating lost image information. There is an option to regain 1/2 bit, 1 bit or 2 bit of image information. Works only on 8bit images.
Remove Transparency: Makes a transparent layer fully opaque. No Dialog.
Sepia: Lets you apply uniform or colored sepia effects. Includes 5 effect types, a color slider and a ContrastFix check box. A sepia effect of this quality isn't that easy to achieve in Photoshop or PSP.
RGB2HSL and HSL2RGB: Converts the RGB channels into HSL channels without leaving RGB mode. That allows you to manipulate the HSL channels. The second plugin converts the HSL channels back to RGB. No Dialog.
RGB2YCC and YCC2RGB: Converts the RGB channels into YCC channels without leaving RGB mode. That allows you to manipulate the YCC channels. The second plugin converts the YCC channels back to RGB. No Dialog.
Luma Negative: Turns the image into a negative without changing the colors. Has a dialog with a slider.
KarenWare has long been a source of great freeware. Once-A-Day is one of the many great apps available for managing repetitive tasks. Instead of remembering to launch specific programs or visit places like your bank Website on a daily basis, Once-A-Day can be your personal reminder, automatically launching the tools you need to get the job done. Simple configuration sets up your automated tasks. Once configured, you never need to remember to perform the automated tasks again because Once-A-Day remembers for you. Sometimes it's these simple fixes that make computing so much better. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Gmail and Hotmail/MSN are both changing the online storage landscape with increased storage capacities associated with mail accounts. While it doesn't always make sense to mail yourself a large file attachment, making use of 2GB of free space is a convenient way to keep non-private information accessible from anywhere in the world. If you encrypt files ahead of time, you could probably store private information in your Gmail account as well. Hotmail/MSN support only works with a premium account, while Gmail just works. Depending on configuration settings, you can automatically connect to the online storage on Windows Startup and partition some of the space to prevent completely filling your account. .NET is required. The roam drive interface does display banner ads on the bottom of the screen, which is potentially annoying but doesn't make the service unusable. An ad-free pro version is expected in the future. Thanks to David for the tip. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Stitching multiple images into one large image is an art form. Even with the best image stitching tools it takes a great deal of practice to get good at creating panoramas that look realistic. While a few tools purport to do this seamlessly (pun intended), all of them require some work to master image stitching. Hugin offers a similar steep learning curve, with a stunning payoff once you get the hang of it. By defining control points on each image, you precisely determined the connecting points of two or more photos in forming one larger image. The app works with Windows Mac OS X and Linux, making it a cross-platform image stitching tool. If you've ever captured several shots of the perfect landscape or cityscape, but haven't found the right app to combine them altogether,Hugin may be just the solution you are looking for. [Windows 9x/2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]
Downloading streamed content so you can watch it offline is something plenty of apps are promising. Some offer scheduling of the record process. Some offer a way to capture streamed content the publisher never intended for you to access. In many cases streamed content is made available via a playlist file do to some arbitrary decision that had nothing to do with attempting to protect the audio or video from theft. When you want to find out the real location of a video or audio clip streaming from a site, you can save the playlist file and open it in a text editor or you can use an app like URL Snooper to track down the location of the audio file. Instead of searching around for the download link manually, URL Snooper tracks down links automatically. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Having access to EXIF data associated with an image is great because depending on the camera and associated gadgets used in the imaging process, you can find out many interesting details about your favorite images. There's plenty to learn from seeing what type of camera was used and the various camera settings configured at the time one of your favorite pictures was taken. I still haven't found the perfect solution for viewing digital image EXIF data. Many apps provide support for EXIF viewing, but I find each one lacking in some capacity. Opanda IExif is appealing to me because it integrates with either IE or Firefox, giving me an EXIF viewer built into the browser. It also provides full support for GPS data, which many viewers I've tried recently ignore. In addition to supporting the latest EXIF standard, Opanda also supports most of the EXIF extensions from the major digicam manufacturers like Sony, Nikon and Canon. I'm not entirely convinced that IExif is the perfect solution for my EXIF browsing needs, but at least it offers a decent breakdown of the information I want in an accessible fashion. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Capturing screenshots is useful for a variety of reasons. Maybe you want to prove you beat your favorite game. If your name got mentioned on a popular Website a screen capture is a quick method of archiving in case the site doesn't keep an archive forever. Documenting strange error messages for tech support is another valuable reason for using screen capture tools. The primary reason I use screen captures is to show people how to do things with computers. Whatever your reason for taking screen grabs, Screenshot Captor provides some great tools for getting the job done. The smart auto-naming feature works, but it isn't as smart as I'd like it to be, essentially just naming a series of shots in sequence. Embedded text comments are a nice annotation feature. A slick sidebar in the Screenshot Captor provides quick browsing of previously captured images, which is great if you're working on a series of captures. It supports multiple monitors. While the editing functions aren't on par with my favorite capture tool, SnagIt, Screenshot Captor offers many of the advanced features I expect from screen capture solutions and the sidebar image browser is definitely a major plus. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer
The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) scans for missing security updates for Windows, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media player. It also runs test for macro vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office applications, in addition to testing for password security strength and a number of other issues vital to securing your data. A older version of this app has been kicking around online for several years now. Depending on which apps you run on your system, you may want to stick with the older version a little longer. Older Microsoft apps like Office 2000 and the entire line of 2000 server products are no longer supported by the new version. Still, if you're trying to harden your defenses, this is a good place to start in establishing guidelines for a well defended system. MBSA will point out places you haven't locked down unused services, identify missing patches and make recommendations for tighter security practices throughout your computing environment. [Windows XP $0.00]
Download Free Accounting Software
Accounting software packages seem to be one of those computer tools that make you pay and pay and pay. Microsoft Money and Quicken both offer incremental upgrades slapped with the upcoming year in hopes you'll upgrade to a newer version of your checkbook register, complete with more upsells and complicated features few of us will ever use. Free accounting is quite capable of handling the basics for both personal and business use, with a full complement of banking, bill paying, invoicing, CRM, vendor management, sales tracking and all the subaccounts a small business owner might ever need. The interface looks familiar for anyone who previously used one of the commercial products. The only annoyance factor is a banner ad inside the app, but it's not spying you (the ads are embedded), which is no worse than the constant service upsells found in the Intuit product line. The information database is based on Microsoft's MSSQL which makes it highly portable. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Voice over IP products seem to keep springing up. Unlike some of the other offerings, which represent niche alternatives to traditional instant messaging clients with audio support, Gizmo has its sights set on competing with Skype. The message is, we do all the things Skype can do, only our network is open to interfacing with other client applications. This is potentially compelling if you know other people using SIP phone software, because you don't need to have them download Gizmo in order to place a call. The large install base of Skype, this may be an uphill battle that end users don't care about. Time will tell. In my test of Gizmo, it passed through my firewall and NAT without issue. For those who prefer the feel of a traditional POTS phone, Gizmo supports a number SIP phone hardware devices, most notably one from D-Link. CallOut supports direct dialing traditional phone numbers at 1.8 cents per minute in the US, with rates under 5 cents per minute in many countries. CallIn provides a phone number people using regular phones can access for a minimal monthly fee. Voicemail allows you to readily drop a message to anyone who doesn't pickup your call. Built in call recording makes this a potentially interesting tool for podcasting. An interesting mapping feature shows you where in the world the person you're talking to may be located. I'm not ready to hearld Gizmo as the replacement for Skype, but interoperability between VoIP systems is a must if we are ever going to replace traditional POTS with something more portable. [Windows 2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]
I rely on a variety of audio tools for handling my day-to-day editing tasks, but there are times when I'd rather not load an entire file into memory before I snip a few seconds from an hour long track. Wave Splitter saves the day in this regard because I can grab the audio segment I want without wasting all the load time of pulling the entire file into memory and tracking down the exact section I want. The app works by defining a start and end point to the clip you want to create and then snipping that audio segment from the file. You audition the selection prior to clipping it, to make sure you get what you want, and then import the new clip into your favorite audio editor or sequencer. The app was perfected several years ago, so it hasn't received any new updates. It does what it should without any hassle and remains one of the best tools for the job when one of the more full featured audio editors seems like the wrong tool for the job. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
While I'm partial to the quality of mapping data provided by Microsoft Streets & Trips when I can't access one of the only mapping solutions, I also like experimenting with other mapping tools. GPS TrackMaker supports most major mapping formats, including maps downloaded from online services and many of the formats released by GPS receiver companies like Garmin and Magellan. The software is designed for creating waypoints on images, route plotting, and recognizing scanned maps for use with a connected GPS. Tracklogs calculate distance information and average speeds over the course of a trip. Real time navigation supports most GPS receivers capable of making a PC connection. Over 100 GPS units are supported, including the popular models from Magellan and Garmin. The software is free for non-commercial use. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
This tiny app automatically generates a random playlist of MP3, WMA and MID files. By scanning your system for available audio files, OneClickPlay gathers details about your music collection and then spits out a playlist based on pre-determined settings. As long as your media player of choice supports M3U playlist files (Winamp, Window Media Player, and iTunes do) The latest collection of application switches launch one random video from your collection, to be played in your default video player. If a particular folder contains audio or video tracks you prefer to excluded from randomization, just let OneClickPlay know prior to randomizing. An improved GUI with more detailed counters. Instead of buying an iPod Shuffle to guess at which song is coming next, just install OneClickPlay and randomize your collection automatically. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
swf2avi has been around for awhile, but it's still one of the better free swf-to-avi conversion tools. Convert Flash to BMP, JPG sequences, or AVI video. When converting to AVI, all ActonScripts and movies are included and executed. Following conversion, the resulting AVI can be edited in any of the popular software video editors. In order to get the application to run, you'll need the VB6 runtime libraries, which may already be installed on your system. Convert one SWF file at a time or batch convert a collection of files. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Almathera made some cool stuff in the Amiga days and for their Photoshop plugins to still be available is something of a small miracle. According to Jolyon Ralph, who operates the Mysterious Ways site where these plugins now reside, "Currently this software remains copyright but can be distributed in a NON-COMMERCIAL manner freely. You may use the software for commercial purposes (ie design work), but you must not make money through selling copies of it." The collection contains shape, bevel, halo, drop shadow, grayscale, warp, lightning and puddle effects. The interface certainly has a "classic" look to it, but the plugins are still a useful part of graphic editing history. These plugins should work with Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks, Photoshop and any other apps using the Photoshop plugin standard. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Six freeware plugin collections, additional brushes, Photoshop specific actions, and a variety of textures are among the offerings from Cybia's design tool collection. Plugins include slick looking mezzo and gain effects, color blasting, color swapping, alpha blending, and a variety of other color modifying techniques. Versions are available for Windows and Mac users, with a more limited set of tools for Linux users. This is one of the larger collections of free photo manipulation tools. Depending on which set you select, they may be compatible with photo editors like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks and Corel Draw; or they may work in video tools like Adobe Premiere. [Windows 9x/2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]
If you haven't accidentally formatted the Compact Flash or SD card from your digital camera before making a backup of the photos, chances are you will. When it happens to the precious photos of your baby's first birthday, or the chance meeting of Halley Berry in the airport, Zero Assumption Recovery will be waiting in the wings to save the day. Specifically designed to assist those of us with an itchy delete finger the wizard-style interface steps through the recovery process, aiding you in getting important image files back without any hassles. Current recoverable files include TIFF, JPEG, GIF, CRW and Exif. The next time your images go missing, make no assumptions, just aim for recovery. [W9X/W2K/XP $0.00]
Every so often, I'm guilty of typing in a password on screen and then promptly forgetting to file it again where I can get it back again. This can be especially annoying when the password is saved on your system, so the login still works, but you can't get to the password to get it back again. Enter Asterisk Logger to save the day by revealing the hidden password behind those asterisks displayed on screen. The software effectively overrides the password masking feature of any onscreen box normally displaying asterisks in the password field showing you the real information and logging it to a file with a data stamp letting you know when the password was recovered. Like many apps in the password recovery category, this type of software also has the potential to be used for evil; someone accessing your computer could just as easily use Asterisk Logger to obtain your password on specific sites, so I recommend using the app to recover what's needed and then uninstalling it from your system to remove the temptation of abuse (realizing of course that this or any other password recovery app could be re-installed in the event of a system compromise). If you've ever forgotten a saved password, this can be a data-saver. If you need to recover passwords from IE, you'll need a different app. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Give your images that dream sequence feel with this imaging softening tool. This is a great way to get a traditional film soft-focus effect using your digital camera. If you're interested in photography as art, or if you just want to add some pizzazz to an otherwise stock photo, Dreamy Photo will give you the effect you crave. Soft-focus is a great way to draw attention to one element of your photo while fading out the rest of the image into the background. Add ghost contrasts and zoom in on specific segments of an image for that absolutely dream-like photo. And who knows, softening an already blurred picture might give you free reign to say, 'I meant to do that.' You must provide a valid e-mail address to get this plug-in, which appears to be compatible with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro and Corel Draw. [Windows 9x/2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]
Download Emsa Bandwidth Monitor
What kind of download speeds are you really getting when grabbing those big video files from your favorite entertainment service? Is your ISP really giving you all the upload speed they claim to deliver? Emsa Bandwidth Monitor keeps track of traffic on your PC network card, showing total transferred bits both up and down and average transfer speeds. Specific details are broken down by card connection type, which can be useful for dual-connection machines or when switching between wireless and wired connections. This is also a quick solution for grabbing MAC address settings and more granular information about the type of traffic on your network, without needing to load more complex tools. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
If you've ever tried to extract a still image from footage on your DV cam, you know the resulting image likely looks something less than photo-quality. This is primarily because video cameras simply aren't meant to deliver still image resolutions. QE SuperResolution uses some clever image interpretation to help improve this, examining several frames of video data around the still image you select to create a more complete representation of the still you want to save from the video file. While this doesn't deliver results equivalent to taking shots with a 5 megapixel still camera (or even a 3 megapixel cam for that matter), it does deliver improved results that might even be print worthy at small sizes. The next time you capture something with your DV cam that looks like it would make the perfect slice of time, instead of settling for a grainy image, try QE SuperResolution to beef up the image quality and output a more accurate still. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
If you're an iTunes user with two or more machines (one needs to be a Mac) playing back your favorite tracks can be as simple as setting up this remote connection. While it's already possible to discover the library of iTunes tracks on another machine using existing controls in iTunes, playing those songs back on their home machine by selecting them from the browsing machine is not an option supported by Apple. iTunesRemote solves this problem, giving you remote access to any other iTunes install in your house through the use of client-server technology aimed at making your remote system ready for network browsing and remote playback. The textbook example of this is sitting on your couch with a laptop and not wanting to leave the comfort of your couch to switch tracks on the desktop in the other room. Streaming through those lousy laptop speakers doesn't seem like a great alternative, so why not play the tracks remotely instead? The server side must run on Mac OS X for this app to work. The program is still a little rough around the edges, but gets the job done. [Windows 2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]
When I first found out about FireANT, I was ecstatic. An app designed to subscribe to sites regularly posting videos is a dream come true in my mind, especially since there are a bunch of sites now regularly publishing new video shorts daily (RocketBoom being my favorite). At the time, FireANT was available for Mac only, with a Windows version coming soon. The Windows version is here and is everything I could have hoped for in a video subscription app. A built in directory connects you with any sites currently offering subscription video. Support for manual subscriptions via the Web makes it easy to discover sites not listed in the directory. And Yahoo Video search results are also supported. Choose to download movies or view them in the embedded player built into the app. The only downside to the app is somewhat minimal content offerings at present, which presents an opportunity for ambitious video artisans looking to gain an audience. .NET is required. [Windows XP/Mac OS X $0.00]
http://www.bmath.net/dc/index.html
Several collections of image filters are presented in the DC Plugin Filters collection ranging from patterns to edges to some clever distortion effects for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and the other image editors using the plugin standard. New versions were designed for FilterMeister, with older versions available for Filter Factory. Dubbed care ware by the author, it's suggested that if you find these plugins useful, you should donate something to your favorite charity. In addition a great deal of the site is dedicated to the author's religious views, which may or may not be compatible with your own. If you need to add unusual effects to your photos, this is a collection that will get the job done. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
When your network connection gets slow, is it because of something the cable or DSL provider did or are you bogging down your network connection with too much information? The only way to know how much data is coming and going from your network is to set up monitoring tools to track the data. Windows includes a feature limited network monitor as part of the operating system, but it never provides a clear picture of what's actually happening on your network. NET Traffic Meter delivers an in-depth look at all the traffic generated by sharing files using BitTorrent, downloading the latest movie trailers, streaming Internet radio, sending email and surfing for the latest apps to enhance your system. Audio alarms and on screen alerts send you warnings when traffic spikes or something on your system changes. These alerts can be an early warning sign that your system may be infected with the latest junk mailing virus or that you are openly sharing a file you never intended to provide for the convenience of everyone on a peer-to-peer network. Get a handle on where the bits and bytes on your system are coming and going. .NET Required. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
A five-pack of freeware plugins for VST compatible audio editing. Sound effects, a flanger, modulation, WAV file transposition, and tremolo, all in one convenient package to extend your audio editing needs and give you more options after the initial recordings have been tracked. These may come in handy for producing a podcast or doing audio manipulations for recording or movie soundtracks. This set of tools is a great extension of Audacity's built in effects, though you need to enable VST support prior to instaling them. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download Xero Graphics Plugins
Four collections of Photoshop compatible plugins totaling 36 image altering effects add a variety of artistic options to photo editing projects. Selections perform tasks like cleaning up washed out skies (Skycleaner), adding moonlight effects (Moonlight), injecting fog into a picture (Serious Fog) surreal blurring effects (Bad Dream), and liquid metal transmogrification effects (Titanium). The plugins were primarily designed using Paint Shop Pro, so fans of that program should feel confident in compatibility. Other apps like Fireworks should also prove compatible for creating photo effects. A set of still images designed to be wallpapers for 1024x768 resolutions is also available from Xero. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Since my recent grumbling about the lack of a decent free option for cleaning up potential privacy leaks via system files, I've discovered Sweepi. This app removes deletes all the temp files and auto complete data that might lead a snoop to your personal information. It clears Log files, temp files, cookies, various recent items lists, password autocompletes, history data and a whole host of other places you wouldn't want to leave your personal file laundry sitting in the open. It includes Sweepi Slicer, which overwrites data nine times during the delete process, which makes most data unrecoverable (although 21 times is claimed to be the magic number for true permanent deletion). Sweepi ShortCutter eliminates short cuts that may have been left behind by apps you deleted or moved. Sweepi BootManager helps eliminate start up items if you prefer something more graphical than MSCONFIG. Three modes of operation provide varying levels of cleanup customization. Overall, Sweepi is a solid free solution for performing basic disk cleanup and privacy protection routines on temporary files. The interface needs a few feature enhancements, like better clarification of items being checked in the wizard, but for free this is currently the best option available. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Belarc Advisor provides a quick snapshot of the state of your computer. Easily discover hardware details like memory installed and type, board manufacturer and BIOS version, logical drives, available free space, additional drives and connected printers. A full list of every application installed on your system, including Microsoft hotfixes, license keys for any registered software and third-party software from commercial, freeware and shareware publishers. Security status provides an overview of the state of system security, including virus protection (it failed to detect the virus protection installed on my test system), Microsoft Security Updates and general Center for Information Security benchmark security test results. The security audit is one of the more telling features of this app, providing warning signs for things like password length and age of your password. It warns against common permissions issues and other security holes providing access for malicious software to execute itself on your system. If you are curious about where possibly security issues may exist on your system, Belarc Advisor isn't perfect but it's one of the best tools I've seen for keeping your system optimized for avoidance of malware and potential security leaks. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
I continue to hold up the Mac OS X cataloging app Delicious Library as the quintessential tool for organizing books, DVDs, console games, VHS tapes and CDs. It's the most elegant organizer on the market. Not a reason to throw out your Windows box and buy a Mac, but definitely something I covet as a Windows user. Chris ran across MediaMan last week and after some close examination it comes close. In fact, I'd wager the developer of MediaMan took a fairly close look at what makes Delicious Library cool when he was putting together his own app considering some obvious similarities. The number one thing that makes MediaMan a winner is the option to use a webcam to scan UPC codes on books, DVDs and CDs. Most cataloging tools require you to either type or in the case of shiny disk media, you might be able to insert the disk in your DVD-Rom drive for identification. Data is drawn from various Amazon locations around the globe, so you get both localized data and a reasonable guarantee of accuracy. Numerous sorting options are supported for more accurate representation of your collection. A loan tracker shows you who is borrowing your stuff. Because the Amazon collection lacks some indie music and movies, eclectic tastes may still turn up no results, but this is true of all products in this category. An export feature keeps your data portable. Both elegant and effective, MediaMan is my new cataloging tool of choice. [Windows 2k/XP $39.95]
One of the cool things about Microsoft employees is they are all Windows users (with the possible exception of the Mac Office team) just like us the rest of us. If Windows doesn't do something very well, or if no one is offering a product to address a particular feature needed by the entire Windows user base, someone inside Microsoft is likely a good candidate to address the problem. In this case, Edit DVR-MS Metadata is specific to the subset of Windows XP Media Center Edition users. To my knowledge, none of the metatag tools address the need to edit the tags inside DVR-MS files created when recording television. Stephen Toub, who is a .NET coder and fairly prolific writer on .NET programming issues created this little tool to easily tweak the tags in DVR-MS files. The interface is very basic, but it gets the job the done. If you happen to be a programmer, he's also got a great article on jumping through video time code using your remote, which offers enough detail that even a non-programmer might be able to figure it out. If only Microsoft did a better job of publicizing this stuff. [Windows XP $0.00]
For photo editing beginners, or users who need basic tools to tweak their images, VicMan's Photo Editor remains a sensible solution. Built-in image enhancement functions make it easy to turn a photo into an artistic creation, from one of twenty file formats. Basics like resizing, cropping, color correction, and a variety of image transformations are included, along with the freeware collection Harry's Filters from Plugin Galaxy. The latest version includes support for Photoshop compatible filters, multiple brushes and gradients, and an improved rendering engine and interface. Scanning and printing are also built in. When you're ready for more features, an upgrade with GIF exports and cloning features is available. [ Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Brandon says, I read something about Google Web Accelerator speeding up my browser, but now it isn't available. Does this actually work? How can I get something to speed up browsing now that Google stopped offering their program?
Web acceleration has been around for a long time. Even with broadband connections, we typically end up waiting some fraction of a second for a page to load. It's typically made up of two important components. One part of the process speeds up the time it takes for your computer to find the location of a particular site. The other part of Web acceleration actually loads Web pages in the background while you do other things, so you aren't waiting for the page to load. In some cases, Web acceleration compresses things like images to reduce file size, further speeding up page load times, which may speed up browsing but generally makes pages look fairly ugly. I personally don't recommend using any of the compression methods because the overall quality degradation just isn't worth the fractional seconds of load time you save.
One of the most obvious ways to boost your page load time is by decreasing the amount of time it takes your computer to look up Web addresses. Each time you type http://www.domain.com into the IE or Firefox address bar, the computer sends a request to the Domain Name Servers provided by your ISP to translate www.domain.com into the numerical address of that site. Each on of these requests takes some fraction of a second to perform, often about 1/10 of a second. When the result of the request is returned to your computer, it then loads the page in the browser window. Using a software app to cache this DNS lookup request on your machine can eliminate almost all of the lookup time required, because instead of waiting for a computer somewhere else to find the information, the browser gets the information directly from your PC. Several apps act as a DNS lookup intermediary, some free and some shareware. Probably the best of the free tools for this purpose is FastCache from AnalogX.
The second component of Web acceleration, downloading pages in the background can be achieved in one of two ways. An artificial sense of background downloading is achieved by using tabbed browsing. Firefox and the Maxthon overlay for Internet Explorer both offer the option of loading pages on new tabs in the background while still viewing the current page. I say this is artificial because it requires the act of clicking on a link to open the new tab. In many cases this type of solution is good enough because you may not be finished with the page containing the link anyway. True Web accelerators actually pre-load a certain number of pages linked to the current page when you first load the page. In effect, the accelerators are clicking the links for you and loading them in the background in anticipation of you later clicking the link. With this type of acceleration, you get a more instantaneous gratification because the link you click is immediately available.
The best app I've found for pre-loading pages is LinkFox, which is part of the TweakMASTER PRO optimization suite. LinkFox does an awesome job preloading Web pages under all kinds of scenarios. TweakMASTER PRO also includes a DNS caching tool that is effectively comparable to FastCache, along with a bunch of tools that provide information about your PC network connections. TweakMASTER PRO is not free, so you need to determine whether speeding up your browsing is worth the money, but if you're looking for a way to optimize all aspects of your browsing, you'd need several individual tools to get all the performance tied conveniently into this one optimization suite and as far as I know, the Google Web Accelerator is the only thing that really compares for improving page load times. FastCache will definitely shave time off your browsing without spending a dime, so either way you come out ahead.
One excuse often flaunted by people who frequent file sharing services is the idea that file sharing offers a way to try out new music before wasting money on something they later hate. This idea has merit but is ultimately invalidated by the fact that most of the music available through the popular file sharing services is popular music widely available through legitimate means of acquisition at affordable prices. The true discovery of new music is made by stepping outside the realm of popular music available a mass market retail, instead listening to musicians flying under the radar of popular radio and mass market distribution. This is concept behind Indy, a custom radio app that randomly finds independent music online for you to listen to and downloads it to your hard drive. As you listen to songs, you are provided with the option to rate them. Ratings are used to determine what other tracks you might like based on the preferences of other anonymous users who also rated similar songs highly. So far, in several hours of listening to Indy audio, I've discovered some seriously cool music I previously had no idea existed, ranging from jazz, blues and alternative rock. As a song is playing, Indy integrates a link to the band or musician's Web site, so you can find out more about the artist. Granted my personal listening tastes are a bit more eclectic than most but I can assure you this is one of the best finds I've made in ages. If discovering new music is your thing, Indy will get the job done. If you're an independent artist looking for a way to have people you’re your music, Indy is looking for you. [Windows 9x/2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]
Learn to read music notation with key signatures. This application writes a note on a music staff and sounds the pitch of the note, and then you find the note on an onscreen piano keyboard. Accuracy is scored, so that you can benchmark your ability to pick the correct notes as they are played. Pitch may be modulated to simulate notes further up or down in range. Also included is the ability to play a note on the keyboard and see where it appears on the music staff. The creators of this freeware app also offer a variety of other commercial pitch training products. [W9X/W2K/XP $0.00]
Download FastStone Screen Capture
Screen capture apps frequently go beyond the traditional role of grabbing images from the desktop and offer a variety of enhancements for control over an assortment of image manipulation options. FastStone Screen Capture is no exception. The core function, screen capture, supports grabbing images in BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, PCX and TIFF formats. In addition to image grabbing, FastStone also includes a capable image browser with an even longer list of supported formats. Several useful image editing features including crop, rotate, flip, resize and color adjustment round out the feature set. While I find all these image editing features a necessity for any useful screen capture app, they also come in handy for providing a lightweight image editing alternative to powerhouse apps like Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop. While I personally prefer the usability and extensive list of features built into SnagIt for all my own screen capture needs, FastStone does a fine job of delivering the basic requirements for most screen capture tasks. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
xp-AntiSpy exposes several useful tweaks to Windows XP in one common interface. It also offers a common interface for disabling many of the auto-update features built into various Microsoft applications deemed privacy invading by some of the more paranoid PC users. A few of the features, like clearing the pagefile at shutdown, cleaning your Internet cache and cleaning history of recently used documents can help protect your privacy. Deactivation of Scripting Host, disabling ActiveX and turning off Javaccript are potentially useful in keeping you protected, although they may introduce a level of annoyance if you aren't using an alternate browser like Firefox. Many of the features found here are available in a variety of other apps (most of which aren't free) or may be accessed manually by interacting with specific programs. If massive interface tweaking isn't your thing, then xp-AntiSpy may do the trick for handling some of the more common security and privacy tweaks. [Windows XP $0.00]
Antivirus is one of the key components of computing that should be automatic. Translation, antivirus is one area where Microsoft should be bundling software into every shipping version of their operating system. Instead we get trial versions shipping with OEM hardware from places like Dell and HP with renewal rates much lower than they should be. Each of us is at the mercy of every other computer user connected to the Internet's ability to secure their system. That's not economically feasible for some and not technologically feasible for many. It's in every other computer user's best interest to eliminate the possibility of virus infections because no viruses means fewer junk mail messages, less time wasted on trying to recover infected machines and more time to devote to more useful computing developments. AVG is gracious enough to offer a free version of their antivirus product, but it isn't updated as quickly as the full version and always seems to hog resources on any system I install it on. I'm finding ClamWin to be the most attractive free solution for Windows antivirus protection. It's based on the Clam AntiVirus engine, providing a simple user interface for integration into Windows and email clients like Outlook. The Clam AntiVirus engine is used in many enterprise production environments, so you're in good company. ClamWin scans files, supports scheduled scanning, receives automatic virus database updates and does all the key things you expect from antivirus protection. One downside to this particular app is that Windows XP SP2 does not recognize ClamWin and continues to report lack of antivirus on your system with ClamWin installed. If you already use an antivirus product, stick with it for as long as it keeps you safe. If you need an affordable antivirus package, or need something to recommend, ClamWin Free AntiVirus makes a good choice. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
FreeMind is a free tool for handling mind mapping. Mind mapping is one of the hot buzzwords in organizing information. Conceptually, you use a mind map to visually organize just about anything you might normally put on a to-do list or in an outline. At the center of your mind map you post the core idea you want to map. Traditional outlining tools assume everything is linear, with a major concept gradually sub-divided by various headings, subheadings, and details about each of the subheadings. In a traditional outline, if you have 10 headings, it may be tough to see them all simultaneously because the subheadings for the first few points likely push the later ones of the screen or on to the next page. With a mind map, the center of the screen or page becomes the central idea, with headings and subheadings spreading out providing an easy view of the core concepts with an expansive view of any one concept available for quickly accessing the small details that make up the bigger concepts.
FreeMind supports all the basics of mind mapping, providing a mechanism for organizing ideas and outlines into nodes and sub-nodes, gradually spidering your personal universe of information about a topic from the center. The app is somewhat basic, lacking integration with apps like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice, which makes importing existing organizational items somewhat challenging. For these more advanced features, a commercial app like MindMapper may be in order. FreeMind does do a good job of importing outlines from apps like MS Word using copy and paste. If you already have an outline in place, FreeMind does a good job of retro-fitting that outline to a mind map without too much need for correcting misplaced items. FreeMind supports imbedded links, making mind maps an easy way to reference Web pages. Navigation supports map folding, which is similar to the idea of an expanding folder list in Windows where clicking on the top level folder reveals its contents. Custom icons may be used to help designate specific node types within the mind map. For my own mind mapping needs, I'm finding FreeMind to be more than adequate, readily supporting my organizational hierarchies and replacing some of the other crutches I typically use for keeping my ideas organized. I find it to be a particularly useful way to outline book concepts and am currently experimenting with how a mind map might work for laying the foundation for something like a fictional work. FreeMind does support exporting a mind map as HTML text or as a map viewable through a custom Java applet. [Windows/Linux/ Mac OS X $0.00]
IrfanView remains one of the best free image manipulation tools available. It offers a lightweight shell for viewing and editing images, with full support for all the major image formats. Batch conversion options make processing multiple images a snap, file browsing works both on an image-by-image basis as well as in a slideshow mode. Editing features like crop, resizing, saving as alternate formats, color depth manipulation and rapid browsing of entire directories are standard for many years. The latest release hit the download sites on April 22, with the addition video zooming, EXIF data viewing for TIF files, multiple monitor optimization, improved PNG output and an overhaul of some of the application hotkeys. If you've never tried IfranView as an option for quick photo corrections this latest version is a good opportunity to check it out. If you're a long time IrfanView user, make sure you upgrade to the latest version for the feature enhancements added in this latest version. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Both Windows Media Player and iTunes have key commands for adjusting volume up or down making it easy to keep your hands hovering over the keyboard. Windows Media Player uses F10 for up and F9 for down, while the iTunes volume controls are Ctrl+Up Arrow and Ctrl+Down Arrow. In either case, you need the application to have focus on your desktop in order to make the shift. iVol gives you control over the system volume from the scroll wheel of your mouse. The volume control supports direct adjustment or requires the use of a hotkey in combination with the wheel. Hold down the Shift key and scroll the volume up or down. Use Alt with the scroll wheel to control a specific system volume, like Line In, CD Player, Wave, Microphone or any of the other potential sound sources supported by your sound card. One of the things I really like about this configuration is the ability to modify the volume increments so you can make volume adjustments on a more incremental level. You do need a scroll wheel mouse to make this work, so if you haven't already discovered the joy of scrolling, here's another excuse. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
USB keychain drives, Compact Flash and other removable flash media types are an incredibly convenient way to transfer files between computers or when on the go and working from public terminals. There also very small and easy to lose. If you transport personally identifying information on a portable drive or if you are toting company secrets it's a good idea to use encryption. Of course, those aren't the only reasons you might want to encrypt information; encrypting data on your laptop drive or the hard drive on your home PC is another solid way to help prevent against further damage in the event of a lost or stolen computer. One of the easiest ways to encrypt a drive is to use the TrueCrypt open-source disk encryption application. The app provides a wizard interface to walk you through the steps of encrypting a drive. TrueCrypt supports AES-256, Blowfish (448-bit key), CAST5, Serpent (256-bit key), Triple DES and Twofish (256-bit key) encryption algorithms. It also supports algorithm cascading, which allows you to encrypt with one method and then encrypt with a second method, which slows down disk access but also makes it much harder for someone to break the encryption. An added layer of encryption provides more protection by allowing you to create a hidden encrypted volume inside another encrypted volume. A hidden volume comes in handy when you've got someone asking you for a password at gunpoint or when you don't want anyone else to know you've secretly got a collection of ABBA songs on your hard drive. The hidden volume may be stepping into the realm of ultra paranoid, but it's theoretically a safer way to make sure if someone breaks the password on the encrypted drive that they don't find the information you are trying to protect, although I'm sure Hugh Jackman's character in Swordfish would still find a way in. To mount a TrueCrypt drive, you do need the TrueCrypt.exe file available to mount and decrypt a protected volume. One way around this is to leave a small portion of your drive unencrypted and store the 400k executable in the clear, so you have access to the information on the drive or carry a second drive with TrueCrypt keeping anyone who finds your drive from knowing what encryption scheme you are using. I use TrueCrypt on a 64MB thumb drive and when I haven't mounted the drive, it appears to be an unformatted drive to Windows XP. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
I've seen several hardware video DJ consoles designed to make controlling and mixing video tracks in the past, but those are pretty pricey for anyone who is a hobbyist. The hardware generally requires DVD's that are then 'scratched' like a traditional turntablist might do with audio. Neuromixer's AVmixer Pro brings the concept of video mixing to your PC, allowing you to simultaneously playback two video clips, either in loop or by cross-fading between the two tracks at appropriate points in a performance. The interface makes it easy to zoom in on segments of a particular video, loop a segment or an entire video, adjust playback speed and video appearance and set the whole thing to music. If you want to impress (or annoy) your friends at a party, combining this app with a projector and the Prelinger Archives might be a clever way to pull something off. An option to save your creations means you can practice your video scratching skills in private and save out the results to show off to the world as produced files. If you ever wanted to become a video performance artist on the scale of audio collage masters, Negativland, this is an app you need in your video toolset. Or if you want an easy way to combine two video clips for later use in another project, this is easier than trying to do the same thing in a traditional video editor. Of course, you could just have fun with it. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Browsing anonymously can be a smart decision for a variety of reasons. If you live in a country where it's illegal to visit Web sites that take a stance in disagreement with the government, for instance, you might not want that activity traced back to you. If you're participating in a study about the long term effects of depression on you ability to function in the workplace, you might not want your employer to draw a parallel between you and the study for fear of termination. Military personnel stationed in a hostile country might need the ability to communicate without drawing attention to their location when every network packet in a particular geographic area is being closely scrutinized. Depending on who you are, these scenarios might seem a little out of touch - I'll never be in any of those situations, you might be thinking to yourself. What about companies using marketing data like geo-location to mine your information; that's not necessarily a desirable intrusion. Or maybe you want to download a file, but aren't certain of the consequences long term. I'll bet everyone named in a file sharing lawsuit wishes they had downloaded anonymously. Tor provides online anonymity for browsing, sending instant messages, emailing and downloading through a system called onion routing, which anonymously connects your computer to the information you are trying to get at the other end by routing your Web requests through a sequence of servers that don't individually know what information is headed where. The result is you get the information you want, while the traffic analysis tools have no idea where you are located. Tor plugs into a browser like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, providing configurable anonymity for everything you do online. Don't count on this to be a painless experience though; configuring Tor is not without its complications. Browsing is also slowed down from the experience of directly connecting your machine to any given point online. The tradeoff is not having people know where your data is coming from or where it's going. While anonymity can't protect you from making stupid mistakes or infecting your computer with a virus, it provides an Internet experience free from snoops who want to know where information originates.
Microsoft has this unexplainable way of releasing free tools with no fanfare and little direction as to their purpose. A recent example of this is the Windows Media Professional Exhibitor. The app is designed for dual monitor usage, presumably optimized for situations where you want to play video content back on a projection screen while still being able to access a playlist of files on the machine controlling the video, which is perfect for laptop presentations or road warrior product shows. Specifically made available for exhibitors at NAB 2005, the app works well with video cards designed to handle DirectX Video Acceleration for playing back HD content. The installer interface is a little clunky, hiding an OK box behind a giant monitor indicator, which makes it a little confusing to install the app, but once you get past that little quirk, it works as expected, providing full screen playback of virtually any video you throw at it. On the control side of the equation, you are limited to adding video files to a playlist, creating new playlists and saving playlists. It provides a looping function so your videos start over at the beginning once you've cycled through all the content, which is another bonus for video playback on a conference floor. This is certainly one of the best ways to avoid the embarrassment of showing your desktop to a roomful of people. Be careful to check the video resolution before adding a file to the playlist though, the app only plays in full screen which means 320x240 video will get blown up to fill the screen on your 1024x768 projection. It could have been my perception, but video stretching seems to work better using this app than the native Windows Media Player 10 install, even though they are using the same video rendering software behind the scenes. The download is a bloated 25MB because the package includes .NET; in theory if you need the app, you've already got broadband. Hard to say if this thing will still be around post NAB, better grab it while you can. The download link is on the bottom right of the official NAB 2005 home for Windows Media. [Windows XP $0.00]
Get more info on the Syncbox II
Transferring data between two USB devices almost always requires a computer in the middle. This isn't convenient when you filled up your camera's Compact Flash card while you're on an outing and you want to take more photos without deleting any of the memories you already captured. Or if you need to share a file on a keychain drive, but don't want to transfer it to a PC first. When you don't want to deal with transferring files across a computer, Syncbox II will do the job for most file transfer needs. To transfer a file, connect two USB devices to the Syncbox, select individual files for transfer and move the files between devices. File browsing is performed on a monochrome screen, which is more than functional for a quick transfer between a camera and a keychain drive or transferring songs between two USB connected portable music players. The Syncbox II could act as a transfer agent between two USB hard drives, although you might drain the three AAA batteries quickly. At 4 ounces and 2.3x3.4x0.9 inches Syncbox II easily fits in a pocket, purse or camera bag waiting for the moment when data transfer becomes necessary. If you don't need the screen and just want to do a mass transfer of files, there's the original Syncbox, which also connects USB devices for quick transfer.
Of the multitude of download helpers out there, I haven't found one with options I really like until recently. A recent annoying issue with my Internet connection led me to trying LeechGet as a solution for downloading. While the creator bills the app as having an Outlook-like interface, I find it far more elegant than the Outlook interface and much easier to navigate the feature set. What makes LeechGet better than other alternatives, from my perspective, is ease of configuration. It's easy to assign threads to a particular download (which determines how quickly you can grab a particular file). It's easy to assign a location for a specific file or specify a location for downloads from a frequently visited site. A queue timer automatically starts downloads after a specific time, while a sleep function lets you line up the queue without starting to process any downloads. You can easily import or export a list of URLs of downloadable files for use elsewhere. Create profiles to manage various download scenarios and even configure default behaviors for finished downloads of specific file types, including running a virus scan. There are plenty of download management apps out there, but LeechGet is my new favorite for grabbing large audio and video files.
The need to know where your recordable DVD media originated from steps into the realm of super-geeky. It can also come in handy if you want to figure out why those generic disks you purchased as part of a rebate from the local electronics store just won't seem to work in your DVD player. With a regularly updated database of manufacturers, DVD Identifier works by placing a recordable DVD in your burner and letting the app read the information from the disk. The manufacturer name, which isn't always the brand name slapped on the packaging is displayed, along with write speeds and capacity. Support for DVD+R, DVD-R and DVD-RAM media is included, with additional information about your burner's writing capabilities included as well. This works to identify standard 4.7GB disks as well as the new higher capacity dual-layer disks too. While this likely won't improve your ability to sleep at night, you can now bore your friends at the water cooler with detailed trivia about burnable DVDs like, 'did you know the Verbatim Digital Movie DVD+R disks are made by Mitsubisi?'
Dealing with naming issues is one of the most tedious parts of keeping track of files of all types. It gets worse when you do a dump of 100 files at a time from your digital camera or are trying to sort through all the audio files piling up in a directory of stuff you recorded with a portable recording device. ReNamer is one of my new favorite tools for dealing with file naming issues. It handles all the tedious stuff and automates workflow handling individual files or entire folders, selecting a pre-configured series of steps and waiting for the output. For instance, if you take a bunch of photos on your weekend trip to the mountains, just import the photos from your camera and automatically run through changing the name of every file to something like April2005_Mountain_Trip_001.jpg, April2005_Mountain_Trip_002.jpg without the hassle of actually typing or copying the sequence. There are some apps designed to batch rename photos and music, but as a comprehensive batch renaming solution for all file types, I've found no app with more versatility.
Lossless compression is something that seems like it should be an oxymoron. After all, when an uncompressed audio file is compressed to a format like MP3, some of the dynamic range of the music disappears. Lossless compression really amounts to applying better mathematical algorithms in shrinking the file size, rather than eliminating information in the process of making the file size smaller. I've been a FLAC fan for a long time, particularly because of it's solid cross-platform support. Lately, I've been using Monkey's Audio to archive giant sized audio files because I can shrink files to an even smaller size without any quality loss, which is quite useful for archiving backup copies of things like the weekly radio show, or uncompressed versions of live recordings. A few plugins support playback of APE files directly in players like JetAudio and WinAmp, but I'm more inclined to use the format strictly for archiving my audio at the smallest sizes possible without losing any quality in the process. Using Monkey's Audio Compression, I can usually store at least two album's worth of material on one CD-R, or around 12 album's worth of tracks on a burned DVD without the quality loss of a compressed format. Even if you plan on storing all your uncompressed music on a network drive, APE files make a good method for getting double the amount of file capacity, without the quality hit of lossy audio formats.
A full-featured zip tool is something that really should come with Windows. Why Microsoft or OEMs like Dell and HP haven't included real support for unzipping files on every machine is a mystery to me. Windows XP includes a compression tool in the operating system, but it's feature limited to the point where it doesn't handle most of the compression tasks I want it to. QuickZip supports 44 different compression formats, handles encrypted zip files, includes scripting to support file backups, includes movie and image browsing and includes a slick bookmarking feature for keeping track of zipped files easily. With support for uncompressing .sit files from Mac users and the .rar format popular for compressing video files QuickZip handles virtually any file compression need most people encounter. Searching in archives and virus scanning on extraction improve your ability to stay safe and organized. A mass renaming feature quickly handles file naming issues. All of this in a free package makes QuickZip tough to compete with for all but the industrial strength compression user. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download Desktop Album Display
Desktop Album Display is a creative music launching widget for playing back songs from your music collection using WinAmp. Install the app, select individual albums, configure the size of the album cover and Desktop Album Display puts the covers on your desktop. Click on any of the covers to launch the tracks from the album in WinAmp. While this doesn't necessarily give you better access to your music collection, it's a cool way to make use of album art providing quick access to your favorites at the same time. When you need a fresh batch of tunes, simply choose a few new selections an rearrange your desktop. This may not be an app meant for neat freaks, but if you find yourself putting sticky notes on everything in site, having a few sticky album covers on your screen will feel right at home. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
If you are holding out on trying one of the online radio recording apps until somebody writes a free one, RadioAgent24 may be your opportunity to go for a test drive. The documentation is poor and it needs to be started twice to register the Windows Media Player plugin used for recording to WMA. By copying the lame_enc.dll file from the LAME encoder into the RadioAgent24 directory, you can also record tracks to MP3. The app works by recording anything playing on the soundcard, so radio stations from iTunes and any of the Windows Media premium services, like MSN and Napster, record just as easily as Shoutcast stations. The app links directly to MSN Music, Choice Radio and MSN Radio as recommended sources of music. It is of course somewhat suspect in regards to whether or not legal to record Internet radio in individual tracks, but in many cases you get what you pay for because the stations are broadcasting in the 96kbps or less range, which probably won't sound as good as recording the music stations tied into your cable subscription. ReplayRadio is a better experience overall, but for a free app, RadioAgent24. [Windows XP $0.00]
Download Visualizer Photo Resize
Photo resizing is one of those time consuming tasks best left to software. A few hundred images on a digital camera can take forever to crop to a size people can easily preview without needing to add an extra Internet connection to get the original image files passed along to friends and family. Visualizer Photo Resize does a slick job generating smaller versions of a directory of photos, saving the new versions to a new directory and leaving the originals unharmed. Change the aspect ratio, adjust the size and choose a watermarking method to add a copyright or to make them less attractive to uninvited downloaders. A stretching feature will scale images up to an unmatched aspect ratio, although I don't recommend using it. A ton of right-click edit features let you tweak individual photos prior to doing batch adjustments. Email images directly from the app via your default mailing program. The biggest downside is Visualizer Photo Resize only works with JPG images. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Grabbing the audio from a video file and saving it as an MP3 is the only trick this app knows, but it's a useful feature for many situations. While you certainly could open most MP4, MPEG, AVI, ASF, WMV and MOV files in a video editor and save out the audio as a separate file, that's a ton of overhead and extra work for something that should be simple. Let's say you have a training video, for instance, and you want to listen to the audio from the video while you jog. Or you want to share the audio from a video online, but don't want the overhead of sharing the video. This is a quick and easy way to extract the audio portion of a video file in a format that is compatible with virtually any computer or device. Just choose a bit rate between 32 and 320 kbps and go. It does not rip audio from DRM'd video. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
There are plenty of reasons you might want to boot a CD or DVD image from your hard drive rather than having to load the CD each time you use an application. If you have multiple licenses for a software application, it's more convenient to access the disk across your home network via a image on a networked hard drive than it is to dig through a stack of CDs until you find the right one. Two common uses for this type of application are to launch games that require you to keep the game CD inserted in your tray while playing or to create a virtual library of DVDs so you can access them from your hard drive. While the game and movie companies would prefer you not do this, because they assume that all imaging of their products results in theft, there are plenty of times when you are better off leaving the disk at home and taking an image with you. For instance, if you want to watch several movies on your laptop while traveling, bringing all the DVDs and their protective cases wastes precious carry-on space. An image on your hard drive takes up virtual space, but you don't have to worry about scratching the image, leaving it behind in a hotel room or having it ripped off by someone from the hotel staff. As the software EULA clearly states: This program is NOT freeware. If you don't use this program for commercial purposes you do not have to register a license and are allowed to use this software for free. That means free for personal use, but if you want a network CD emulation tool for corporate purposes, you'll need to get a license. Of course, you also need a CD/DVD burning tool capable of creating image files, like Nero, CDBurnerXP Pro, Easy CD Creator or one of the numerous other alternatives. UPDATE: Recent versions of DAEMON Tools attempt to install the WhenU Toolbar following installation of the app. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
One of the tricky parts of managing a large music collection is dealing with missing album art or album art that's just plain wrong. None of the music applications have figured out a bulletproof system for always finding album art. Even the services providing the information, like Gracenote and AMG don't offer a consistent method for updates (although AMG does make their system obvious). As a result, your music files get no information or wrong information associated with them. Windows Media Player provides an interface to access this information, but associating the right images with a particular audio file is tricky. Album Art Fixer for MCE and WMP offers a solid alternative to making corrections to audio files. By tying into Google Images and Cover Target a quick search of the Internet typically finds the correct album art for a given music track. The interface also provides an option to correct song title and album title information. If a particular track is orphaned from the rest of an album, Album Art Fixer offers a pointer to place the file where it goes. While this isn't the perfect solution to missing image data for your music, it makes it easy to update file information without needing complicated steps. The app is donationware, so it reminds you how many files you've fixed and asks for donations periodically. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Palette's interface is slightly confusing at first, but one you figure out the subtleties it works admirably as a tool for composing music with MIDI instruments. Composition is based on methods of motive development. A system of mouse gestures makes selection of pitch, chord type and arrangement based on movements rather than clicks, which actually improves note placement after a little practice. I know from past experience with other composition apps that I frequently clicked in the wrong spot when placing notes, which is solved with the mouse movement method. A wide range of MIDI instruments are supported with preview playback at any point in the composition process. Building songs on a phrase-by-phrase basis may not make sense for experienced composers, but for starting out with music composition, this is an easy way to go. The app lacks a traditional installer instead containing all files in a folder easily placed anywhere on your system. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Orb was announced last year as this cool app designed to connect you to your home media via any portable device. If you have a laptop and you're on the road, you can connect to Orb. If you have a Pocket PC, Windows Mobile SmartPhone or any other portable phone with support for Windows Media Player or Real Player (except Palm OS devices) you can connect to Orb. Originally the service had a fee associated with it after a short trial service. As of today, the service is free. Basically the service works by installing a component on your home system and a component on your portable system and connecting between the two. The home system needs Windows XP with a 2.4GHz processor and 512MB of RAM because of the hefty media load generated in streaming content to your portable, but these are features available in the $300 range currently, so it's only a matter of time before most every PC meets the required specs. If you want access to live TV, you also need a tuner card installed so Orb can transcode the TV direct to your phone or laptop from anywhere. This isn't just a one way funnel though. If you have a camera phone you can put your pictures back to your home system using the Orb interface without needing to mail them as an attachment. If you like the idea of having access to your music and movies from anywhere you can get broadband access, give Orb a try. You do need to register for access, which is a requirement to make the service work properly. [Windows XP $0.00]
A43 File management utility offers a clever alternative to the native Windows Explorer. The file browsing component includes a feature to create your own favorite folders list and the search function is a cleaner alternative to that annoying search puppy. Built-in zip compression extraction including the ability to unRAR files is definitely appealing, if you don't need your own copy of WinRAR for compressing files and folders. A text editor isn't as fully featured as something like UltraEdit, but does an adequate job of tweaking text. A hex viewer provides quick access to peering inside music, movie and compiled binary files to get more information about the files. Using the multiple pane interface is easier for manipulating directories than using numerous instances of Windows Explorer and who could overlook the quirky charm to the A43 icon, which looks like a Windows 3.1 directory tree. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
NetFlix is one of those services people love enough to extend into a platform unto itself. Several online tools keep track of your NetFlix queue and publish the results to your blog, which is great for letting other people know what you are watching. In most cases, having your movie selections on the desktop for your own use is more convenient. myFlixer provides feedback for your NetFlix account including queued movies, recent returns and impending arrivals. The app sits quietly in your system tray waiting for your to make updates to your NetFlix accout. Movie art and descriptions for upcoming flicks in your queue are also just a right-click away. With any luck future support will be added for other competing services. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
While it's true Windows Vista added a calendar to go with Windows Mail and Thunderbird has its Lightning calendar plugin, having an all-in-one personal information manager is still a better way to go. If you're using Outlook Express, you will definitely find the lack of calendar and detailed contact info to be a frustration compared to the features of EssentialPIM. I rely on calendar and contacts features to keep my life from becoming too chaotic almost every day. EssentialPIM acts as an organizer, capable of keeping track of calendar events, notes and vital stats for people that you meet as your walking down the street each day. No email client comes with this PIM, but fortunately, clicking on any of the contacts launches your default mail client. I'm still using Outlook for my own information overload, but for those with no need for a pricey information manager, EssentialPIM is up to the task. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
One of the features I find lacking from Windows Media Player is the ability to easily share audio and video on one PC to a second PC in your home. Everything to get the job done effectively is a hack. On2Share is a plugin designed to make the process of sharing media files between computers easier. In theory, by installing On2Share on all the computers in your home, you can find the library of each machine and automatically create additional playlists with files listed on those machines. This works as long as you keep Windows Media Player open on all your machines all the time. If you close Windows Media Player on one PC, other PCs in the house no longer have access to the music and movies on that computer. With Service Pack 2 installed on any of your machines, if you use the Windows Firewall you'll need to add UPnP and Windows Media Player to your exceptions lists in order to share the files between machines. Once everything is configured, playback works just like it normally does in Windows Media Player, with the exception of being restricted to the playlist designations created on the host machine. In my testing I was even able to play tracks downloaded from Napster as part of their $9.95/month service (not Napster To Go). While this isn't a perfect solution for sharing media between multiple PCs it gets the job done with limited hassle, although the initial configuration may give you a few headaches. Compatible with Windows Media Player 9 and 10. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Said the moon to the planet, "I'm strangely attracted to you." There's nothing strange about the magnetic pull of one body on another when examined through the eyes of science. If you've ever wanted a better understanding of why objects fall toward the ground instead of rising up into the sky or contemplated the way Earth remains in orbit around the sun, this app will help find the answer. Create spherical bodies and establish attractions between them. Build your own solar system with more than 16,000 planets, add rings to planets, create double stars and more. This app has been around for a few years, but it's remains a fun gravity simulator.
While I'm capable of singing, the number of cocktails required to put me on stage in a karaoke bar exceeds the number of drinks I can safely consume in an evening by at least 5. I'll save my vocal exercises for my morning shower or the privacy of my own car. If you happen to be a karaoke hustler headed for the world championships, this app will help you brush up on your skills without needing to hit the Wednesday night stage at your favorite watering hole. Edit lyrics to construct your own word layouts for better emphasis, manage playlists, playback songs in full screen, add custom colors to lyric scrolling and support for KFN, MIDI KAR, LRC and CDG+MP3 files. Create your own karaoke tracks from MP3s. Cheesy animated backgrounds behind the lyrics are an added bonus. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
This page orignally reviewed an app called MDM or My Digital Movies. This was a great free app for cataloging both DVD collections and digital movie files with a number of solid features. Since publishing the review in March 2005, the site appears to be no longer available online and I can't find anywhere the app is still available for download. If you're looking for a tool to catalog your DVDs or digital movie files you might want to try one of these applications instead:
EMDB is a freeware app for cataloging DVDs.
Movie Collector does the best job at finding foreign films.
MediaMan an elegant solution for managing DVD collections.
Media Catalog Studio for cataloging both audio and video.
Below is the original review included on this page:
I've hesitated in recommending any of the free movie cataloging apps because I've found each one to be lacking when compared to shareware solutions. The app to beat, in my mind, remains Delicious Library for Mac OS X users, but Windows doesn't currently offering anything quite as elegant. I'm personally a huge fan of Movie Collector, which means everything else gets compared to it. MDM comes close to matching the features, which seems to be a challenge for free applications. The wizard for adding new movies works as long as the movie you're adding is in the Amazon catalog. The Loan Manager includes a reminder system and a link to send email to let friends know you want your movies back, which is helpful if you are the loaning type. The app tracks DVD, SVCD, VCD and DivX as major category types, which is a testament to the popularity of the digital format. A feature to play movies stored on your hard drive from the application is useful if you store lots of movies on your hard drive. Searching your existing library works quite well. Searching for movies originating in the United States works like a charm. I tried some obscure titles and all of them were found. The one criteria where this app doesn't perform well is in cataloging foreign films. I'm a big fan of Chinese, Korean and Japanese cinema and the Internet database used by MDM doesn't find many of my favorite films. I'll be sticking with Movie Collector for the time being, but if you're seeking an acceptable free alternative MDM gets my vote. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Some patience and a ton of drive space are required to make the most of the NASA World Wind app, but the results are stunning. View satellite photos with remarkable detail of everything from your neighborhood to the Great Wall of China. You might not be able to make out the car parked in front of your house, but the level of detail is absolutely astounding. Topographical detail of terrain is incredible, streets and buildings are viewable, even distinguish individual trees on the side of a mountain. If you're fascinated by geographic formations on Earth, this is one free software tool you need to make part of your collection. A 3D rendering engine provides the detail and requires a solid video card to render the images. Blue Marble view offers true-color imagery of the entire Earth. Land Sat 7 is a collection of satellite images taken from 1999-2003. A quick search of place names directs the software to a locale nearby known landmarks and municipalities. NASA SVS includes some animations to demonstrate the powerof hurricanes and other atmospheric changes. Coupled with the space exploration app Celestia, which provides planetary rotation and change at the solar system level, you could easily become an authority on terrestrial and extra-terrestrial events, if only in your own mind. [$0.00 Windows 9x/2k/XP]
In a world with too many software media players with similar features, it's not often I'll bother recommending an alternative to the major industry options. What jumps out at me as special about this app is support for FLAC and Monkey's Audio lossless compression formats, which both deliver sound far superior to the typical MP3 or WMA compressed file formats found on most download sites (JetAudio should also play WMA lossless, which offers comparable audio quality to FLAC and APE formats. The other key feature setting JetAudio apart from other players is support for conversion between 10 different audio file formats; if an audio file isn't in the format you want, switch it to your favorite playback format within the JetAudio interface. Karaoke fans get synchronized lyric playback with fully searchable access of Leo's Lyric Database. JetAudio delivers a simplified UI for basic playback with skinning and a solid visualization set for those who prefer a flashy player. The one thing to watch out for on installation is the need to uncheck any file formats you don't want to associate with the app; there is no uncheck all button. The basic version is plenty for most users, but a pro version is optional if you want features like silence detection and noise filtering for audio recording, audio trimming and record mixing and MP3pro encoding. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
The idea of a community application where other users submit content that's automatically downloaded to your hard drive based on pre-defined criteria is definitely a cool concept. Metacafe is a service that delivers videos and games to you based on category criteria you select. The media files are somewhat random and are submitted by other users of the Metacafe community. There's a three day grace period before new users may submit content. As part of the community, you can post comments on files, rate files, send clips to a friend and save out your favorites from the program. Videos range from humorous clips, to music videos, to animations, to movie trailers. Movies are in a variety of formats, so you may need additional codecs on your system to consume everything. The service claims to run all files through a virus scan prior to sending, which should keep the network free from potential pollution. Metacafe is one of those cool media resources that will probably be outlawed someday due to stupid copyright infringements by the users. [Windows 9x/2k/Xp $0.00]
There's no easy way to add ID3 tags to audio files flying below the radar of the CD database services. Tag editors simplify the process but all of them come up lacking in some way. AudioShell lacks the capacity to batch edit ID3 tags, but it really doesn't need to. After installation, right click virtually any audio or video file and quickly edit the files properties without the overhead of an additional app slowing down your system. AudioShell is the best app I've found for adding Album Art to a file. The shell interface provides a quick snapshot of media file properties and a neatly organized interface for making changes. If you record and tag your own audio this is a perfect addition to your suite of media tools.
When you need to combine multiple video or audio files into one continuous file, MediaJoin is a workhorse. It supports most popular formats, including: MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and WMV. In addition to joining files, the app can also inject audio ID3 tags into the final output file. Configure bitrate settings, frequency and convert to stereo or mono. All standard Windows Media Encoder settings are supported for WMA and WMV output. Video is resizable to common dimensions for the output file. AVI output is configurable for various codec types including DivX. While it can be nice to have an all-in-one conversion tool, the simplicity of MediaJoin makes combining files clean and painless. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
I'm always slightly skeptical of any application that purports to modify the sound characteristics of an audio file without permanently altering the audio file. I got burned too many times in the past from bad Winamp plugins that permanently hosed audio files. MP3Gain is the real deal, tweaking the gain on your MP3 files to prevent massive discrepancies in volume between tracks without corrupting the file. The application will normalize any group of audio tracks, from albums to random collections of MP3s on your system using the replay gain algorithm. Read on for the geeky details about why MP3Gain works
As explained by the creators of MP3Gain: "The mp3 format stores the sound information in small chunks called 'frames'. Each frame represents a fraction of a second of sound. In each frame there is a 'global gain' field. This field is an 8-bit integer (so its value can be a whole number from 0 to 255). When an mp3 player decodes the sound in the frame, it uses the global gain field to multiply the decoded sound samples by 2(gain/4). So if you add 1 to this gain field in all the frames in the mp3, you effectively multiply the amplitude of the whole file by 2(1/4) = 119% = +1.5 dB. Likewise, if you subtract 1 from the global gain, you multiply the amplitude by 2(-1/4) = 84% = -1.5 dB."
There's also a version available to convert AAC audio files, as well as a Mac edition of the app. Bottom line, this free replay gain analysis tool is the best app I've ever tested for evening out the volume of MP3 files across a group of applications. Someone deserves credit for pointing me to the app, but I'm at a loss as to who it was. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
With subscription audio and video content increasing in popularity, finding a tool to effectively manage subscriptions is important. After subscribing to an RSS 2.0 podcast feed, Doppler automatically downloads on a schedule set by you or only does a manual check when you request an update. The app syncs with Bloglines subscriptions, so if you already have a list of feeds offering podcasts, you don't have to reacquire all of them. Password-protected feeds are supported as well. In order to avoid download redundancy, Doppler skips files with duplicate names by default, which keeps you from wasting space and helps to avoid wasting the publisher's bandwidth. A search tool checks against a database of known podcasts to make subscription convenient, although several of the more popular podcasts seem to be missing. File types are fully configurable, which is important for getting the right content compatible with your preferred media player of choice. While I personally prefer the podcast management built in the latest version of FeedDemon, Doppler is the best free alternative for Windows users. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
This voice overdub and slideshow generation tool offers a slick method for quickly generating a narrated photo montage or documentary-style movie presentation with narratives and a sound track. Creating the voice tracks is incredibly simple - just load your movie or photo, press record and start talking. When you finish recording, DubIt will save the combined video and recorded audio track as a movie. Slideshows are limited in features to adding audio and a single color background, but the workflow is very straight forward which is great if you simply want to organize a series of pictures into a movie format. Audio quality may be chosen from one of three quality settings and final movie output may be AVI, RM, or ASF format files for later viewing. As a convenient tool for overdubbing audio, this is among the best I've found. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
VoIP doesn't need to be a replacement for your phone line (although it certainly can be), it can merely extend your reach to people outside your affordable calling range. Softphones make it possible to call people in other countries without incurring the charges associated with long distance. Firefly hasn't gotten the same buzz as Skype, but in my opinion it's better. Like Skype, Firefly does user to user calls by assigning a user ID and adding contacts to your calling list. Firefly offers built-in voicemail for people to leave you messages when you're not online. A music on hold feature if you need to put on caller on hold while talking to someone else. If you have access to a VoIP PBX system, like Asterisk server, you can connect to both the Firefly network and the PBX. Call recording is as simple as recording everything from your soundcard (What you hear, in Creative speak). The interface is fully skinnable and the phone supports multiple callers simultaneously. It also supports add-on phone hardware for your PC. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
I'm frequently asked how to extract a section of video from a DVD without having to bring the entire movie into a video editing app. One of the easier tools to use is Chopper XP. It's been around for awhile, but it still does the job better than most. The interface makes it simple to open a DVD file from a disc or from VOB files on your hard drive, drag to the exact position in a movie you want to extract a clip from, mark the start and finish points, and output the file to your hard drive as another VOB file. You'll still need to convert this new VOB to another format to do anything useful with it, but this is a decent way to grab a few frames of video without messing with convoluted interfaces and bloated software. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Download Media Catalog Studio Lite
As digital music and movie collections grow, keeping track of the details of the collection becomes a Herculean task. It becomes hard to discover at-a-glance what format a particular audio or video file might be encoded in. Playlists can grow unmanageable with a way to easily find the ones associated with each of the player applications installed on your machine. Keeping a list of what you have on each drive isn't realistic without software to manage all those media files. Knowing what bitrate various songs and movies are encoded helps decide which version is the one to save or dump, but keeping track becomes a hassle. One of the most common problems is the inevitable creep of duplicate files that find their way into folders you don't even remember creating. Media Catalog Studio handles all this information overload with ease, providing color-coded reference to each media file type on your system. Detailed graphical reports of file types, encoding, year of release, frequency, albums, artists and genres offer a quick snapshot of your entire digital entertainment collection. This free version of the software is functional for tracking music and movies on up to 5 different drives, which is enough for most users.
Anyone fearing Google's acquisition of Picasa would have any negative impact on the application can rest easy. The latest version just arrived and it's awesome! All the photo organization features still work just as well as they did in the last version, without annoying picasa.ini files popping up everywhere on your system. Slideshow creation is a slick new feature, which makes for a nice presentation tool when coupled with built in CD and DVD burning. Blogger is now fully integrated, making posting to a photo blog seamless. Movie generation outputs MPEG-4, DivX, or uncompressed AVI footage from any collection of photos. If there was a way to sync with my mobile phone, this might be the perfect photo management app, without cell phone support it still comes darn close. [Windows 9x/XP $0.00]
Download Powerbullet Presenter
Creating mini Flash presentations is a cool way to add value to any Web presence as long as the presentation doesn't overpower the functionality of the site. While there are more complex tools capable of handling flash creation on a grand scale, Powerbullet covers the basics with ease letting you create motion graphics to add meaning to a demonstration or some cool effects to emphasize a point. The free version of this app covers the needs of most users, which a for fee version adds some versatility like: Support for rollover button effects, custom navigation buttons, external file linking, button action commands to control built in features of Flash, and timed animations. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Real-time simulation of known space brings the universe to your desktop in 3D. Travel through the solar system watching planetary changes in real time or at accelerated speeds. Adjust star visibility to focus in on specific celestial bodies. Travel to other solar systems and examine planetary activities. Planets are synchronized in real time with current clock or may simulate rotational patterns in the past. Most controls are mapped to keyboard shortcuts making it easy to navigate galaxies without the interruption of dialog boxes. Record AVI movies of planets or screen captures useable in any video editing application or as wallpaper for your desktop respectively. This is one app you'll want to view the built-in demo to get a full understanding of all potential features. Whether you have a personal interest in space or want to teach your kids, Celestia is a comprehensive look at planetary systems, stars, asteroids, and other bodies beyond the reach of life on the third rock from Sol. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
A required tool for anyone downloading lots of video from the Internet, GSpot is a codec detective capable of telling you which codec is required for viewing a specific AVI movie. By checking a database of 350 video and 150 audio codecs, the app scans your drive for available codecs, compares the video file header information for codec requirements, then lets you know whether you're PC has the required codec. A render feature examines the file to make sure you don't have any wonky filters in the play path causing playback to fail. By examining the file size, it lets you know whether pieces of the audio or video track are missing, which is also a possible cause of playback failure. Data about video aspect ratio, resolution, bit rate, frames per second, interlacing, and audio info for up to three separate tracks is all available too. Export the information and send it to someone with more tech expertise if you need help or simply copy the name of the codec into a Google search box and download the required file to make your video play correctly. Use in conjunction with AVIcodec to optimize your video viewing experience. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00 - Suggested by Keith B]
For multi-track audio editing on-the-cheap, nothing beats Audacity. Most of my audio recording is simple voice work, either for narrating a demo or just rambling my thoughts into a recorder. For simple voice work, or doing quick edits on stereo audio tracks, WavePad is a great lightweight alternative. This app supplies most of the features I used in most in Sound Forge (pre-Sony buyout) without the bloat. WavePad records in mono or stereo. Projects are saved as WAV, MP3, VOX, RAW, AIF, or AU formats, with the ability to open many more file types, including AAC and WMA. A batch converter lets you apply pre-configured tweaks to a mass of audio files (for instance, if you want to normalize a group of tracks to the same level). Bundled effects include high-pass filter, normalize, amplify, reverb, noise reduction, auto gain control, fade in, fade out, speed and pitch shifting, insert silence, reverse, and more. CD ripping pulls in tracks automatically. CD burning makes backing up audio easy enough. Supports audio up to 96 kHz and 32-bit. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
Numerous options exist for burning CDs and DVDs. While I prefer to use a polished authoring solution for movies I plan to watch, CDBurnerXP Pro does the trick for most other burning needs. It creates audio CD's with or without the standard 2-second pause between tracks, it create or burn ISO files, and makes bootable discs. Pile on a few audio features, like ID3-tag editing, wav-to-mp3 conversion, and cover printing for labeling cases, and you've got a no-nonsense solution for backing up files to CD or DVD. Sure, there's no full fledged audio and video editor built in to this burner, but you also won't get the frustrating incompatibilities found with some burning software either. No bloat, just a good clean burn. The app is compatible with all versions of Windows released from 98 on, although some features are specific to XP. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
For simple video edits, like splicing out a section or adding several clips together, AviTricks offers a lightweight alternative to resource intensive options like Windows Movie Maker and Adobe Premiere Elements. It will do video capture from source material like a VHS player or Webcam. Rubber-band style editing of audio makes adjusting levels a simple matter. Editing is non-destructive to the original source video files. Output is either AVI, DivX format AVI, or WMV. AviTricks lacks advanced features like auto movie creation, and effects and transitions (it offers a few of each), but for cuts, comp and editing raw clips, it will definitely do the trick. Available effects may be layered. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
http://www.pixelchain.com/video2photo/
Grab individual frames from a video source and save them as photos on your hard drive. While virtually every video editing app can also do still photo grabs from video files, Video2Photo does it without all the overhead of running a full featured editor. Open an AVI, WMV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX, Video CD, or SVCD movie in Video2Photo, play or fast forward to the point where you want to grab a still, and export. The software also supports cropping, color correction, and a variety of image processing effects. If you are exporting several stills, Video2Photo can output an HTML thumbnail gallery for easy sharing on the Web or make a SWF or AVI movie of the stills. Free registration is required to disable the watermarking on images. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
With the myriad of video and audio formats available, it's hard to know which codec is required to play which file. Just because a video has the .AVI file extension, doesn't mean you've got the necessary video decoder to play it back. With AVIcodec, you can find out which codecs are installed on your PC and export the list as a CSV file for use in Excel or as plain text so you can provide the details to a tech support pro. AVIcodec goes further to identify which codec is required for individual media apps on your system and will point you to the site where the codec may be downloaded whenever possible. The ap is currently available in 12 languages. If you've ever downloaded a movie or song, only to find out you can't play it, this app will put an end to your frustration. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
http://www.alparysoft.com/products.php?id=8&item=14
Video noise occurs while recording, transmitting or re-recording video to different storage media or file types, deteriorating the quality of the original movie. Alparysoft Cleaner removes the interlace effect from video and reduces noise levels. In most cases using the denoising and deinterlacing filters improves the quality of videos. Alparysoft Cleaner interlace removal uses the MPEG video compression algorithm to locate missing image data in video files and replace it, which provides a better interlace removal than most apps, without the loss of video information associated with typical interlace removal. The denoising process reduces video noise, making it easier to get better compression from your video later when you save the files for the Web. This app can't make bad video look good, but it certainly helps correct some common mistakes made in the video transfer process. Uncompressed AVI format video is the only supported file type for the Amatuer version of the cleaning tools. Alparysoft also offers plugin versions of the denoising and deinterlacing for Ulead, Adobe, and VirtualDub video editing applications. [Windows 9x/2k/XP]
I'm not sure what the theoretical limit for total connected users might be, but the idea of Internet radio peers sharing bandwidth to distribute a stream is certainly well within the concept of smart radio broadcasting. Streamer isn't currently offering any content I consider must listen radio. On the other hand, the technology is perfect for distributing your own radio broadcast to the masses. Current stations seem to be pirate outfits broadcasting commercial music and copyrighted content in definance of distribution rules. Don't let this stop you from creating something more unique featuring music from artists who don't have major label backing. The software uses each additional listener's Internet connection to balance the bandwidth used, allowing the number of potential listeners to grow as the number of actual listeners grows. The pirate component works by disguising the stream's point of origination. For more detailed info on what makes Streamer tick, read the How it Works section of the site.
http://www.reindeergraphics.com/free.shtml
Reindeer Graphics offers a small collection of free plug-ins, recently updated with a Select Edges feature for detailing edges. TabbedText is a file format plug-in. The Reindeer Graphics Custom Filter is designed to apply Photoshop convolutions. Adaptive Equalization implements a technique for increasing the local contrast of images by reducing overall dynamic range. Enter Magnification adds a bar in the corner of the image, indicating the amount over actual size that the image has been magnified for easier viewing. All of these files work with Mac OS X, Windows 98+, and Mac OS 9.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow
Nothing is more frustrating than attempting to play an audio or video file in Windows Media Player and getting the missing codec error message. Codecs are the software encoder/decoders required to play media files on your PC and there are literally hundreds of them. Like other types of software, some codecs are well written, while other codecs will cause your media player to crash and burn. Despite its propetual alpha status, ffdshow is a smart collection of codecs for playing audio and video files on Windows. It supports a wide variety of media file types including DivX and XviD. Most importantly, ffdshow is widely accepted as one of the most stable codec collections available. A new version was released in October, further improving on an already solid foundation. The install may not seem like it does anything to your PC, but using the ffdshow codecs is certainly a better alternative than many of the alternatives floating around the Internet. For more detailed information on ffdshow, visit the project Wiki. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]
UPDATE: As of January 2009, the easiest way to play MPEG-2 files in Windows Media Player is to follow these steps.
If you have trouble playing MPEG-2 files (DVDs, SVCDs, MS-DVR files recorded by an XP MCE machine) in Windows Media Player 10, this app may help you identify compatibility issues with the MPEG-2 decoders on your system. According to Microsoft: "If you encounter a problem while using Windows Media Player 10 to play a DVD or to synchronize (copy) recorded TV shows to a Portable Media Center or other device, use this utility to verify that you have a compatible MPEG-2 decoder installed on your computer." What I found was that out of 15 codecs I tested, none of them were completely compatible with Windows Media Player 10. Before you get alarmed, I should point out I have no problem watching movies from DVD or MPEG-2 files with the current codec set on my system. The machine I did the majority of my testing on does have occasional issues converting MPEG-2 video to WMV format using Windows Media Encoder, but that was true prior to the installation of Windows Media Player 10.
I'm experimenting with publishing ebooks in a new format, including some free guides on a variety of video production options. This free reader will be required, which facilitates better presentation than Adobe Reader, while still allowing immediate access to the content. The footprint of the app is tiny, providing much faster load times than Adobe Reader or Microsoft Reader. Need an incentive to check out this new format? How about 9 free ebooks with tons of Xbox cheat codes and a guide on modding the Xbox? These guides aren't available in any other format. I currently have a shareware version of my Converting Vinyl LPs to CD guide, which gives you an idea of where I'm headed with these new books. I welcome any feedback, positive or negative about your initial impressions of my new publishing tool.
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/
Vector drawing programs aren't known for being free. Microsoft acquired Creature House, makers of Expression, in 2003. The latest version, which is billed as a Beta, is available for download simply by completing a short survey. Expression includes tools for creating illustrations and animations for either print or Web mediums. The palate of tools is reminiscent of Adobe Illustrator, with more emphasis on freehand drawing. A tablet would probably work well for interfacing with the application, making it easier to translate drawing skills to the screen. Tools include dynamic lifting and scraping, reflection mapping, fringe texturing, anchored strokes, and effect lines for simulating motion on still pages. If you are a budding artist, this app is a must download.
http://www.richardrosenman.com/photoshop.htm
Image editing using the base tools included in your favorite photo editor is great until you find a complicated task without a bundled solution. I almost never run into problems until I try to create something artistic from a photo, and then all bets are off. Plugins are often the best way to save the day, eliminating the voodoo required to tweak settings to find the solution. Chances are, someone else experienced the same issue you did in the past. If that person is a programmer, they might have a plugin to help you out. Richard Rosenman offers 18 free plug-ins and 2 shareware tools for solving a variety of image editing tasks. Any application with Photoshop Plugin compatibility can take advantage of these tools. [Photoshop/Fireworks/PSP $0.00]
Link love to Digital Media Minute
Avid is the longtime standard in professional video editing. Many pros still swear by Avid as the only editing solution, the same way audio engineers heap praise on Pro Tools. I'm certain pro editing solutions like Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro are just as effective, but it's futile to attempt conversion of an Avid zealot. To find out what all the fuss is about, Avid Free DV provides an affordable indoctrination. Features are slightly limited, offering only 2 video and 2 audio tracks, compared to the 8 or 24 tracks offered by the two higher end editing apps from Avid. Only 16 effects are included and titling is limited to very simple options. Output is limited to QuickTime MOV files. Even with these limitations, the real purpose of Avid Free DV is an introduction to the Avid editing timeline. Considering Adobe Premiere offers no way for you to test drive editing, this may be a sure solution for getting users hooked on editi