Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 3.1.6

Description: PhraseExpress is freeware system-tray resident macro engine that can insert user defined text and phrases whenever the user enters a certain text string or presses a hotkey combination. It can also function as a universal spelling checker for commonly misspelled words.

This program automates the insertion of phrases that are often used into any application. Here are some examples where this could be useful:

• I find myself very frequently typing in my blog URL into emails, forums, etc. that I participate in. With PhraseExpress I can set it so that whenever I type in  “fwg” or “press ctrl-shift-f” (as examples) my blog’s URL is pasted  instead.
• I could use PhraseExpress such that whenever I type in a phrase abbreviation (”btw”, “brb”, “fyi”, etc.) the actual phrase is inserted instead (not that I would, mind you; I like these abbreviations).
• PhraseExpress comes with a number of common misspellings pre-defined. For example, typing in “wriet” or “rwite” (two common misspellings of “write”) will immediately spring  PhraseExpress into action, and it will replace these with the correct spelling. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.1.1.b56

Description: Selfimage is an open source hard drive imaging utility that can create, compress and restore an image of a hard drive or partition. This is useful for backing up a hard drive as well as restoring it to an earlier state.

This program has some really cool features, as follows:

• Can create an image file of a partition that is currently in use.
• Can create an image of an entire hard drive including master boot record and all partitions (and partition table).
• Can create images that Windows doesn’t recognize or isn’t mounting; i.e. you can use Selfimage to manage images of partitions in a multi-OS PC.
• Can restore an image to any partition  -  even mounted ones - that doesn’t have open files. Read more »

Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 2.2.8 for Windows

Description: Gimpshop is a version of the GIMP open source image editing/processing application that features a changed user interface and terminology intended to replicate that of Adobe Photoshop. It is designed to enable users to transfer their knowledge of Photoshop to GIMP, making it an instantly useable viable free alternative.

GIMP, in case you haven’t heard of it, is the foremost free open source bitmap-editing application for the creation and advanced editing and manipulation of digital images. It is very high on the (small) list of contenders for the title of freeware Photoshop replacement.

GIMP offers a myriad of features including: 150 standard effects and filters such as blur, drop shadow, noise, etc.;support for layers, including transparent or semitransparent layers, channels, transparent or semitransparent images; the ability to create different brushes (in addition to the 48 standard ones); also supports (customizable) gradients; support for a wide range of selection of masking tools, including smart selection “magic wand” for contiguous regions; supports paths which can be named and saved, and auto paths created by an “intelligent scissors” tool. It also supports plugins and scripting (macro creation) either through the built in scheme interpreter or externally using Perl, Python, or Tcl (Ruby is coming soon), and offers file format extension recognition when saving.
Read more »

Rating: 4

Version tested: 1.3

Description: WinWorkBar is a free desktop-based personal information manager that combines a calendar and to-do tasks list with notes and popup-reminders.

If you’re looking for this sort of program you will find that WinWorkBar offers just the right mix of features to make it really useful without being too complex or overladen with features; everything this program has to offer is intuitive with virtually no learning curve. Here’s what you need to know about it:

• Very small footprint, low on resources.
• Combines tasks with a calendar and notes/reminders. Features a “today” view by default that will consolidate all your daily tasks/notes info.
• Docks into the right hand side of your Desktop and hovers into view whenever you mouse-over the edge of your screen (or optionally mouse-over and click). It is also accessible through the tray icon.
  Read more »

Rating: 4

Version tested: 1.0.0

Description: ExoSee is a decentralized, community-based filesharing program that allows for both public file sharing with the community and private file sharing with specific members only. It also supports its own XOC protocol that allows users to post links on the web for direct downloading.

This program will allow you to select up to four ExoSee “communities” to participate in at any one time. These communities typically have a theme, such as music, ebooks, or general filesharing.The ExoSee protocol allows you to both share a specific folder/folders with the members of your selected communities, as well as download any files that these users are sharing. I spent time inside some of these, browsing what people had on offer. It was mildly interesting but not much more; the value of these communities really depends on what the members are sharing, and whether or not ExoSee will ever achieve the “critical mass” that makes networks like Torrent or Gnutella successful remains to be seen.

If I had to I would guess that ExoSee communities will never take off in any significant way. If I am looking for a file I am a hundred times more likely to look for it (and find it) through Torrent or Gnutella P2P. Which is not to say that ExoSee isn’t potentially a great product; however, it is private sharing that I find way more exciting than the communities.
Read more »

Rating: 5

Description: “And Yet it Moves” is an platform/puzzle game where your objective is to get to the end of the level. The twist is that negotiating these levels involves rotating the game’s world it in its entirety 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise.

Rotating the world produces a nice, Matrix like delayed bullet-time effect, during which period you have to wrap your mind around the notion that the environment has changed, which is very counter-intuitive as our brains aren’t naturally wired that way. Nonetheless it makes for some very fun game play. Jump too high or get squashed by an object and you will be re-spawned to one of the many save points within each level. Make it to the end of the game without dying too many times, and you may be able to upload your high score.

For a platform game, this title manages nonetheless to be extremely original. This is because (a) the game just looks terrific, with an entire world made up of a collage of ripped paper that makes it look like a work of art, and (b) because the idea of rotating the world works well to add a very interesting dimension, and is very well implemented.
Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.5.0.207b

Description: Evernote allows you to create, edit, and categorize notes that you can type in or clip off of web pages (including text, images, formatting, and link). It also allows you to view and edit these offline.

Ever since I started Freewaregenius I have had to do a lot of research about a wide variety of free software. To keep notes, I was (and still am) using a hierarchical-notes outliner program to store and categorize all the information and links that I need to keep. The problem with most of these hierarchical notes programs, however, is that they are not designed to clip web content and preserve it in its original state; typically the formatting and images would disappear, the links would expand and would literally take over the entire text.

Evernote is similar to Google Notebook in that it is designed to clip content off the web, maintaining it in its original state. There are differences between the two, however, which mainly stem from the fact that Google Desktop is a web service while Evernote installs on your hard drive and saves all notes and web clippings locally.

Evernote will install a plugin into IE and Firefox that will enable you to clip any content by highlighting it and either right clicking “Add to Evernote” or clicking the Evernote button on the browser toolbar. You can also download plugins for Outlook and Thunderbird. Here are some of the most notable features Evernote has to offer: Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 0.3.8

Description: Screamer Radio connects to and plays a wide variety of live, web-based Shoutcast (MP3) , Icecast (OGG), and Windows media internet radio stations. It will also optionally record these streams locally to your hard drive.

Here’s what you need to know about this one:

• A small application that takes very little resources, perfect for running in the background and listening to the radio while doing something else.
• Supports hundreds of internet-broadcasted radio stations from all around the world.
• You can browse dozens of pre-sets by genre (also by region, laguage or ‘network’). Screamer Radio allows you to flag favorites for easy access once you’ve found something you like. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.2.0 build 260 final

Description: DVD Flick is a free, open-source DVD authoring tool that can convert and write almost any video file or files into a DVD (or ISO) playable on any hardware DVD player

This program will let you (a) combine a single file or multiple files into a playable DVD, (b) add subtitles, and (c) add secondary audio tracks. It has a number of definite strengths, as follows:

• Simple, straightforward interface design. It is remarkable how simple and intuitive this UI is, especially for a DVD authoring tool. This alone is reason enough for me to switch to this program.
• Will convert almost any video file, which means that you are extremely likely to be able to put any video that you may have on your hard drive on DVD. This is not to be taken for granted, as I recently tried to convert a video file to DVD using another favorite program of mine, AVI2DVD, only to find that it was not able to handle the audio.
• A partial list of supported formats are as follows: AVI, MPG, MOV, WMV, ASF, FLV, Matroska and MP4. Supported codecs are amongst others, MPEG-1\2\4 (Xvid, DivX, etc.), Windows Media Audio\Video. MP3, OGG Vorbis, H264, and On2 VP5\6.
• You can convert to ISO image on hard disk if you do need want to burn to DVD or there’s not one handy.
  Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 0.5.1.build 2845

Description: Mediacoder is a free universal transcoder that can be used to convert across many different audio and video formats. It offers advanced features including batch encoding and extendability through plugins.

If you’ve ever wanted a program that can convert any media format to another (audio and video), this is the program that you’re looking for. Here are some of the most important features this program offers:

• Fully standalone; all codecs, filters and/or media players it needs are built it. This means that (a) it will not install a bunch of codecs and filters on your system that you may or may not use or need, and (b) there is less of a liklihood that your conversions may suffer from any conflicts and/or problems with the codecs that may exist on your machine.
• Allows for batch encoding
• Allows you to convert audio across multiple formats. Reads and writes the following: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, AAC+V2, MusePack, WMA, RealAudio, FLAC, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, OptimFrog, AAC Lossless, WMA Lossless, WAV/PCM. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 5.2b

Description: Stickies is a desktop notes program that offers a slew of advanced features including timed alerts, logging of all activity, PDA support, notes sharing over a network, and emailing of notes from within the sticky application.

I initially set out to find a stickies program that offered simple features; with Stickies I found what I wanted and more. The following is a list of what this program has to offer.

• Lightweight and simple; doesn”t write to the registry or create system files.
• Allows for different color and size stickies and the saving of style “profiles” so you can quickly access these after initially creating them. Supports skins (downloadable from author”s site).
• Can associate alarms with each sticky note. You can set the date and time or you can just set an interval (e.g. after 1 hour). The notes will jiggle around hilariously at the set time, which is quite a nice effect.
• Can tell the note to “sleep” for a certain period of time, during which it will not be visible.
  Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.06

Description: ProduKey is a free program that can display the product ID and Product Keys used in your installed copies of Windows, MS Office, Internet Explorer, SQL Server, and Exchange server.

I’ve decided that I need to clean install Windows on my PC and re-build my system. Only problem is that although my laptop came pre-installed with Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003, I’ve somehow lost the CD’s that came with it. Which is not that big of a problem, really, as I can always use Windows XP and Office CD’s from work, and I can download the drivers needed from the Dell website. The only thing that remains is to find out what my serial numbers/activation keys are for XP and Office that I can use in my clean install.

ProduKey is a tiny program that simply unzips into a directory and delivers the Product IDs and Keys for Microsoft products in a single click. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.3.1

[Note: this review was written by my friend Mohammed Raei from Amman, Jordan; see his personal blog here - The Freewaregenius]

Description: Soldat is an action packed 2D third-person shooter that can be described as a ‘Worms’ variant in real time. It can be played solo or multiplayer online.

This game offers tons of weapons, maps, play modes, and opponents. You can play this game with anything from twin eagle pistols to a Gattling type machine gun. It is extremely fast paced, especially when you are facing more than 3 opponents. Objectives range from killing everything that moves to missions such as ‘capture the flag’ that have to be coordinated with a team of other human or computer controlled players. Read more »

Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 1.1.3

Description: Fileusage is a freeware program that provides up to four extra columns within Window’s explorer ‘detail’ view that show total size for files and folders and files, total number of files within each folder, and total percentage disk usage for each file/folder.

This program is similar to Folder Size in that it displays the size of folders in Windows explorer (which, in case you haven’t noticed, Windows doesn’t do on its own). This program can (optionally) also provide 3 other columns; you can elect to add any one or all of these four to your ‘detail’ folder view.

Here’s a quick summary of all four columns Fileusag can provide (note that all of these columns are sortable in Windows Explorer for quick reference): Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0

Description: CrashDoctor is a program that is designed to recover crashing programs, preventing them from causing damage. It can also optionally provide a debugging functionality for the crashing program.

It is likely that, as you read this, you are thinking “but do these things ever work?”. Despite the five star rating I am giving this program, I really don’t know the answer to this question. However if you are wondering whether you should bother with something like this or if it could be at all useful, consider the following:

• Crashes, as the author of this software points out, are the result of bad programming, and there’s little that this program (or anything like it) can do about that.
• There is a single objective of recovering a crashing program: to get to an “unfrozen” state as to be able to save or copy your work that you may have spent a long time on. Read more »