Rating: 5

Version tested: 0.98.32a

[Note: this review was written by my friend Ala Diab from Amman, Jodran. Ala is primarily a musician but also does website design and has an avid interest in 3D graphics. He has performed his brand of computer-driven electronic music (and contemporary experimental Arabic/electronic music) in multiple venues across the Middle East and Europe.]

Description: Wings3d is a subdivision-modeling program that specializes in box/organic modeling. What it lacks in features it compensates for in simple, readily-accessible tool set for shaping and fine-tuning a model.

I have a confession to make: I’m a 3d graphics junkie. I’ve always wanted to get into 3d modeling even on a very basic level. To be able to visualize ideas in a clear, straightforward fashion. Lacking the attention span and the deep pocket to learn, I was on a quest to find a tool that was relatively simple, intuitive, low-cost and light on computer resources.

In my search I avoided trying demos of feature-rich, three-digit priced monoliths like Maya and Max, I googled with keywords like: free, 3d, model …etc. Until my search lead me to a little gem, Wings3d.

You start with a 3d, single-view window devoid of anything but a couple of icons at the top bar to decide which part of your model you want to manipulate: vertex, edge, face and body. Each of those levels has its own ’contextual’ menu of parameters to change that’s accessible by clicking on the right-mouse-button. To begin, you right click anywhere on the screen to reveal a set of ’primitive’ 3d objects. Your choice depends on your final product but for most applications a cube should be a good starting point. After that, you use a set of modifiers to change the shape of the box: copying, scaling, extruding, beveling to name just a few.
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I am honored and humbled that Freewaregenius was chosen ’Site of the Month’ for March at Donationcoder.com.

Donationcoder is home of some of the best titles reviewed on Freewaregenius, including Process Tamer, Mobysaurus, and (one of my absolute favorites) URL Snooper.

Go here to see other site of the month selections, or check out their entire repertoire of software titles and their cool best-of blog. But that’s not all; they also have quality software reviews (both freeware and shareware) and one of the “most active” user forums on the internet. One of the most intriguing initiatives is the custom-made software forum (if you have an idea for a cool program, that’s where to go to post it). Donationcoder, as the name implies, is one of the few sites in the world that is entirely funded by microdonations.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0

Description: Verman’s Art Generator is a little free program that can convert image files into ASCII art. It can output both black and white text files or convert into full color ASCII art and back to JPG again.

I am not sure why, but I like the idea of converting images to color ASCII art (see my text-image.com posting). This program does this extremely well. Here are some notes:

• There are 2 modes, ASCII art and “text mosaic”. The former converts your image to black & white text files. The latter converts to colored text and outputs as JPEGS.
• You can choose between 5 quality output settings, from ultra low resolution to ultra high resolution (this is for both “ASCII art” and “text mosaic modes.
• For “text mosaic” and whether you would like color or greyscale output. You can also input in a custom text string that will be used in the conversion. You can also set the size, style, and type of font.
• Processing is blisteringly fast, even for high res images set to ultra high resolution text mosaic output.
• The output/results for both modes is very impressive.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.2

Description: WinsockXP is a little program that can restore internet and network connectivity in the event that it is lost due to the corruption of registry keys. It does this by restoring the TCP, Winsock, and Hosts file to their default, working settings/values.

Yesterday, it happened. I was installing new software that I was testing out for Freewaregenius, when this one program (which shall remain unnamed) errored out and refused to be launched upon installation. I was using Altiris SVS to install it, as I do for most of the programs I try these days, and I thought that maybe that had something to do with it (I’ve noticed that a handful of programs do not install well with SVS, and will work only if installed normally). This particular program looked respectable and well designed (at least in terms of the screenshots that I saw of it)…. so I decided to take a chance and install it normally. Again, it didn’t work. The same strange error. I quickly uninstalled it with Zsoft Uninstaller, my favorite uninstall program, and decided to moved on.

But then I noticed that it had become impossible for me to get on the internet, or get any access to the network at work for that matter. My network admin person at work took a look and confirmed that the reason I couldn’t connect  was because something was changed on my machine. Naturally, the first thing that came to my mind was …. yaaaaaay!! I finally can test WinsockXP, a program that I had looked at and read about many months ago and that I was not able to test first hand. Until now, that is.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0

Description: JOCR is a little program that can capture an image from any part of the desktop and perform optical character recognition (convert images to text) on the contents. It is free to download and use but it uses a resource provided with MS Office, and requires that Microsoft Office 2003 or higher be installed on the machine where it is used.

If you’ve ever wanted to work with text that is presented as an image JOCR may be what you’re looking for. Note that JOCR is designed to capture text/image clips straight off the desktop, rather than being a full fledged document/scanner manager. Here are some notes on this program:

• Works remarkably well; OCR conversion is instant and the results are respectable (no OCR recognition is ever 100% accurate)
• Can clip any area or window on the desktop, or the entire desktop.
• Results are dumped into a notepad text file, where they can be edited and/or clipped.
• Does NOT require JAVA (despite the name).
• Extremely small footprint; very low on resources.
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Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 2.0.003 Beta

Description: Schmap Guides are fully interactive travel guides that cover a myriad of cities across Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These freely-downloadable travel guides are available for dozens of cities and contain detailed, beautifully presented maps and photos. They also contain searchable information for the relevant city including its history, neighborhoods, entertainment, cultural offering and sites. Schmap guides provide their own offline content as well as numerous relevant online links (for example to Google maps, weather resources, Wikipedia, etc.)

Right off the bat I want to say that, even if you’re not travelling, make sure that you absolutely check out the Schmap city guide for the city that you live in (or close to) if it is available. Click here for a current list. These guides are jam-packed with interactive information that is very well presented and fun to interact with, and are a great way to explore a city. Note that there are themed packs that cover subjects like ’Romantic Getaways’, ’’The Great Outdoors’, etc. that you can download as well.

The info: the one thing which struck me immediately is the range and breadth of the information available within each Schmap guide. This ranges from the prerequisite historical and neighborhood information to detailed information about each location and event that includes picture(s), contact info (telephone, address, email, and URL), as well as an informative essay review - for each and every listed place or event! The sheer breadth of the information is one of the main underlying strengths of these guides.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.3

Description: Polyglot 3000 is a small program that can recognize the language of any text, phrase, or word that you provide to it. It can recognize over 400 different languages. Let’s say you’re surfing the web and come upon a website or article that interests you, except its in some foreign language you can’t identify. You know you can use a resource such as Google translator (or gTrans) or Babelfish to get a quick (if rudimentary) on-the-fly translation; only problem is, you don’t know what language you’re dealing with to translate from. Polyglot can quickly provide you with this information simply by pasting a phrase or two of the unrecognized text into its interface. Here are some notes about this program:

• It’s blisteringly fast: language identification is instant. I tested it with Italian, Arabic, and Spanish.
• Can display Unicode and ANSI encoded fonts. I am guessing that this means that the font for the language you paste in will be displayed correctly. I found that with Arabic script, although the characters displayed correctly (after I manually changed the font), the text was garbled and unreadable. No matter, since the language was identified correctly anyway.
• You can set Polyglot 3000 to check for the 100 most popular language instead of its entire range of known languages. Not sure why you would want to do that, though.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.5 Platinum

Description: gTrans (short for Google Translator Interface) is a free, memory resident program that can do on-the-fly text translations using the Google engine. It is a small program that can be accessed through the system tray and supports multiple-language translations.

Ever found yourself humming a song and wondering what the words to it would sound in, say, Spanish? No, me neither, but this would be a very easy thing to do with this program. Here’s a summary of the most notable features:

• System-tray access: clicking on an icon in the system tray will cause a window to pop-up where you can paste the text you would like to translate (or you can simply right click and select ”translate from clipboard”) . Another window will appear with your translation; its as simple as that (see screenshot).
• Alternately, you can install gTrans as an Internet Explorer tool button for use straight from the browser.
• Can translate to/from the following six languages: English, Italian, German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.
• If your text is not tranlsating properly you may have selected the wrong language; use Polyglot to identify the language you are working with.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.4.82

Description: Ybook is a free ebook reader that visually ’simulates’ the look and feel of an actual paperback (see screenshot) and supports TXT, HTML, RTF, PDB and PRC ebook formats. It provides a number of useful features such as bookmarking, search, and custom formatting capabilities. It can also connect to and download titles from the Project Gutenberg database of free ebooks.

Quick survey: would you rather download ebooks in PDF or TXT formats?. I am guessing that there isn’t a single person out there who would choose the latter, even as TXT files are typically much smaller than PDFs in terms of Kilobytes. The reason for this is that, even as text ebooks constitute most of the free ebooks offered (legally) on the net, they really are just text dumps of the books and do not offer much by way of formatting or visual appeal. Enter Ybook, a program that makes it much easier to work with the TXT ebooks as well as any of the other supported ebook formats. Here are some observations on this software:

• The virtual paperback concept works well. It actually makes reading an ebook easier and more straightforward.
• Bookmarks: yBook allows you to set multiple bookmarks as you go so you can easily come back to the point in the text where you left off. Also performs autobookmarking as you go along.
• Formatting: you can customize exactly how your virtual paperback will look, including font size, margins, empty lines between paragraphs, etc. If you don’t like the off-white aged paper background you can change that as well. If you don’t want the 2 panel paperback look you can use single panel mode instead.
• Clipboard: you can use yBook to read anything copied into the clipboard, or alternately copy any page into the clipboard.

Project Gutenberg: Read more »

Rating: 4

Version tested: 1.5

Description: Picture Resizer is a small, free program that can Resize JPG image files in batch simply by dragging and dropping selected JPG files on the Picture Resizer Executable. Size and quality options are determined by renaming the executable and inserting a handful of commands in the name. It is possible to multiple instances of Picture Resizer to the Windows’ “send-to” context menu, with different settings for each.

This program does not have a user-interface; all conversions are done by dragging and dropping JPEG files onto the executable (or, alternately, Picture Resizer can be used through the command-line-interface). The reasons I am featuring this tool on FreewareGenius is as follows

1. It is possible create multiple copies of this executable that do different things/have different resize settings.
2. The authors have managed to squeeze so much functionality into this little program; you can really do a lot with at just by renaming it (see below)
3. Image processing/resizing is done through a powerful, high-speed resampling algorythm optimized for high quality conversions and works well with gamma-corrected pictures.
4. Most importantly (and the clincher for me), you can use this program to quickly add different resize functions to the Windows context send-to menu (see screenshot & instructions below).

Here’s what you need to know about this program: Read more »