With our usual subject-focused Web Packs we certainly miss out on some of the other interesting freeware around, so we figured why not have a special one just for some of the other interesting software I’ve stumbled across but never found a suitable home in our web packs. There is no particular order or subject here, just 25 random picks I think are genuinely useful and unique.
Follow these links for our other ‘issue 271 web packs:
Digitise and organise your music!
Protect your PC from Internet threats!
The unsung freeware Heros!
Issue 271 game demo roundup!
Each individual file has its own set of attributes and metadata. Within Windows Explorer there are many different locations to access and change these attributes. With Attribute Changer you can adjust so many options from one location such as; dates and time for photos, files and folders. You can also change permissions for files and folders, so you don’t have to navigate the vast properties menu.
RBSOft’s range of enhancements and tweaks are well worth checking out, but for now let’s focus on the Right Click Cascading Menu Creator. No prizes for guessing what it does but you may not realise just how useful it could be for you – right-clicking is the most convenient way to simplify and optimise navigation and browsing and having the option to create and customise files and folders within a right-click menu will save you a lot of time. The interface is simple to use and you can even attach your choice of icon to your items.
There’s often a lot of paper wasted when printing emails and web pages, when what you only want is on one page, you end up with two or three other pages that go straight in the bin. It’s such a common compliant that some bright sparks came up with a solution. iPrint installs as a virtual printer driver making it universally compatible with any software with a print function. Send your pages to iPrint first and through it’s preview you can selectable delete pages from the print job. What’s more, up to four pages can be shrunk and printed on a single side of A4.
Keeping all of your files and folders in check can be tricky business. Some people save everything to the Desktop, leaving it cluttered an unusable. The same goes for the Documents folder and with external storage becoming ever more reliant, most people will need help in this department. Step in Belvedere, which as an automated file manager that will enable you to clean up your act with ease.
The humble Windows Clipboard has been a steady companion to us for some time now and yet it has never been given the wings it deserves to expand and become more. Well not by Microsoft anyway. ArsClip has been developed over the years into what is now a very useful program. With the swift press of a hotkey of your choice you can open the program and start pasting all manner of files, not just text.
Thumb previews in Windows are useful, but for some reason Microsoft only saw fit to support a small number of file formats. If you don’t find yourself frequently working with the more popular formats you’ll want to install SageThumbs. We can’t even begin to list the files supported simply because there are 162 of them, that’s 224 extensions in total.
Jotting down some notes in Notepad or Sticky Notes is quite a static affair; you make your note, you save the note and then you refer to the note when needed. Pretty simple stuff really, but if you have multiple notes and ideas things can get a little confusing. With wikidPad you can do a lot more. This program is effectively a live wiki. You create the note and within the note you create a WikiWord that can be called up between notes. Your information can be cross-linked and your ideas may become reality all the more quickly.
Having favourite sites saved in your browser is great, but when you are using multiple computers and different browsers, it gets a little more complicated. Favekeeper changes all that by allowing all of favourites to the cloud where they can be picked by on any machine. You can sync your favourites and bookmarks over different browsers too.
Webmail is all well and good for numerous reasons, but what if you could utilise the storage that it has to offer. Gmail Drive Shell Extension holds one solution. It can turn your Gmail account into a virtual drive that can be accessed straight from Windows. Each file uploaded appears in your Gmail inbox as an email with an attachment containing the file.
Now I know this happens to everyone. You are browsing the web and you notice something that you want to look at, but you put it off till later. How many times have you forgotten what it was that caught your eye in the first place? Pocket is simple, you see something you like then you save it for later. It could be anything from articles to videos leaving you to access it anytime, anywhere on any device.
Although the contrast between dark and light certainly adds drama to many games, there are times when you need to see the darker areas of your screen. In single player this can be a cumbersome enough process, having to back-up to the main menu, then the options screen… hardly conducive to the atmosphere. In multiplayer games, you’ll be dead by the time you’ve made your adjustments. Gamma Control gives you control over the levels with semi-custom hotkeys, allowing you to increase, decrease, reset to default and last used settings by pushing a couple of keys.
We’ve all been there – you recognise a font and you want to use it, but you simply can’t remember what it’s called and therefore you’re stuck. It would take an awfully long time to click through every typeface you have, and you’d probably get fed up before you’re even halfway through. FontViewOK displays custom text in every font you have installed along with it’s name and allows options for colour, size and style, enabling you to scan through and find the typeface you need.
If you’ve ever had to write anything and keep to a deadline, you’ll know that procrastination is the mother of failure. And who is procrastination’s mother? That’s right – distraction. Writemonkey is designed to eliminate distractions and allow you to focus on writing what you need to write. By stripping away the visual elements of things like Word and OpenOffice, yet retaining the powerful features and functions, Writemonkey leaves your creative mind free to create, safe in the knowledge that everything can be taken care of later on.
Over the years of using your PC, there may be many programs and plugins that are not getting updated regularly. This can cause all sorts of problems down the line and you may end up spending a long time looking for the out-of-date objects, then a long time finding the updates, downloading them etc… It’s a good job, then, that the free tool Patch My PC is here. This portable application will check what’s on your PC against its list of common third-party applications, then flag it green if it’s up-to-date, red if it’s out-of-date and black if it isn’t installed. It also provides tools to uninstall multiple programs and manage startup applications.
One of the most infuriating things when transferring a large file from your computer to a server online is if your browser crashers. Avoid this painful experience by using this app, which features automatic download URL generation, (and deletion URLs if the filehost supports it) login support for filehosts where you have accounts, upload histories.
The internet is perhaps most valuable as an instant research tool, collating a gigantic wealth of information and study for anyone to access. However, the big search engines will often return multiple results of a similar nature and ranked results appear in the same order every time. This can make it tough to find which results are pertinent. iMetaSearch uses Latent Search Algorithms to group results into interest groups, making it easy for you to sift through and ignore links that are irrelevant to what you need.
It can be argued that are some handy features in Mac OSX, such as the ability to change the colour of folders. It might sound simple, but it can be a great way to improve productivity. FolderIco Free enables you to choose from a wide variety of colours (far more than in OSX) and you also have the option to attach icons to folders too.
It only seems like yesterday that we were all going out and buying blank tapes to record our favourite radio programs. Well, those times are upon us once again. TapinRadio is a very simple program that can locate radio stations and record them at the press of a button. This program can be very useful for the visually impaired with the inclusion of a screen reader.
The Text-To-Speech system within Windows can be very handy for the blind or poor sighted, but you are tied to your PC. Bablabolka is an app that allows you to save the text as a multitude of audio formats. It also allows the TTS system to read more than just system commands and text files. It can also read other popular file types such as DOC, EPUB, HTML and PDF.
The internet is a great place to be educated, watch our favourite movies and film clips, listen to music and keep in touch with friends. It is no wonder that our children use the internet a great deal too, but do you know what your children are doing on the web when you are not there? KidLogger is a program that collects a journal of activity on computers and mobile phones, so you can keep an eye on what the kids a re doing online.
If you have a file of which the format is unfamiliar and unable to open; whether it’s an graphic, document, media file, or archive! Open Freely deal will handle it with ease. This application supports over 100 file types, as it’s soul purpose in life is opening the files you can’t.
It can be quite frustrating to scroll content in multiple programs and windows, as you need to activate the window first. With WizMouse you eliminate the need to have the window active as it will allow you to scroll whatever window your mouse is over. It can also enable mouse wheel functionality in applications that do not support mouse wheels.
Yet Another Media Meta Manager runs in the background to populate your stored movies and TV shows with accurate and relevant information, making it easier and more rewarding to browse in a media centre/HTPC environment. Monitoring folders for new media it will hunt down artwork along with metadata (information about the meida, such as director’s name, year of release, a brief synopsis etc) and can save automatically save playlists for playing back multiple file movies and TV series.
If you’re used to texting on your mobile phone, you’ve probably grown to love (or hate) predictive text input. Texter is a lightweight background application for Windows that brings predictive text input to your word processing, email writing and note-taking. It is customisable with your own Hotstrings, so you can set up what your quick keystrokes are and what they should be replaced by. Once you have it configured how you like it, it will save you a lot of time and stave off the tedium of typing out recurrent phrases in full.
Designed to work with DropBox, this is a powerful mod that will allow multiple clients PCs to read and write the same shared data simultaneously. Invaluable when you need several machines to access up-to-date data at once. Kind of like Steam Cloud for your desktop.
Posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2012 at 10:08 am under Web Packs. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
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