Description: FLV Extract is a free program that can save video and audio files from FLV files in their original formats without decompressing or re-compressing.

If you weren’t aware of it, FLV files are containers that house audio and video files which may be encoded in any number of formats. FLV Extract gives you the ability to unpack the video and audio files without needing to re-encode or re-process.

This little program will be very useful if you (a) are downloading music from music-sharing sites in the FLV format, or (b) need to demux the audio or video from FLV files.

Converting FLVs to MP3s is possible using a number of programs such as Super or Any Audio Converter; however, these will perform re-encoding operations which take time and in most cases require that the user make a number of quality and format decisions. With FLV Extract, however, the extraction happens in a flash and is almost instantaneous, and the files retain the format and quality with which they were encoded. Here are more notes on this program:

• Nothing to install: just unzip and run.
• The UI: a simple dialog with 3 options: extract video, timecodes, and audio. All you need to do is to drop files onto the app for processing.
• Performance: you can drag multiple FLVs onto FLV Extract and they will be processed immediately within the space of a second (or a few seconds at most).
  Read more »

Description: Phun, described as a "2D physics sandbox", is a free physics game where the user can construct the entire game environment using combinations of objects and then observe and tweak how the various creations/objects interact.

This is one of those programs that can be described as not being a game, but a toy. There is no goal beyond unleashing your imagination and building up a world of objects and then seeing how they interact together, then tweaking and re-building again when you get a sense of what actually goes on in the interaction. A lot of the fun in Phun comes from the many surprises that you will invariably encounter when the objects do things that you wouldn’t have expected. Here is more info on this program:

• How it works: draw and create your objects and environment, then press the "play button" and watch as your objects fall , collide with each other, bounce, and do whatever it is that they will do. The physics in this game are remarkably well done; things behave as you would expect them to,
• The user interface: what makes this game so easy to get into is that everything - everything - is done through clicking an object and right clicking to manipulate it. Aside from a toolbar on the left hand side that selects the various actions and objects you can use, all of the functions and options that you need to manipulate objects are a right click away in the context menu.
• Objects: include anything that you can draw with a brush such as a square or rectangle or any irregular object that you can imagine. Or you can select defined objects such as a plane, circle or box, or functional objects that do specific things such as chains, hinges, or springs you can attach to things.
• Object properties: everything from friction to bounciness and density can be defined for your objects. You can also set whether they collide with stuff or whether they liquefy on playback. Other things you can define: whether your world has gravity, and whether there is air friction.
  Read more »

Description: uvLayer is an Adobe Air application that allows you to watch, collect, and share videos from a cool desktop-based interface. It can also log into your Facebook account and allow you to share videos with your Facebook friends simply by dragging and dropping them on your friends’ icons.

If you are serious about collecting videos, or serious about sharing them with your friends (or both), you should definitely check out uvLayer. What it is is a desktop interface that handles videos as thumbnailed-objects that can be dragged into folders on your uvLayer desktop. The end effect is really rather pleasing; so much so that even if it never occurred to you to (a) create collections of favorite videos, or (b) start sharing these with friends on Facebook, you might be persuaded to start doing so. Here are more notes on this program:

• The user inferface: looks very good (see screenshot). All videos and drag-and-droppable. You can move your videos into stacks on the uvLayer desktop or sort them within folders. You can also drag and drop them to share them with your Facebook friends.
• Video sources: the uvLayer help file indicates that the videos are obtained from YouTube and Truveo (with more to be added in the future). It would be cool if in the future uvLayer can function as a sort of meta search engine
• Search: naturally, this is the most important function. Search results are displayed as thumbnails in virtual folders, and mousing over these will deliver more info on each video in the form of a tooltip. Keeping the search folder on the desktop acts as a saved search.While the general coolness factor is undeniable, uvLayer might not be the most efficient way to search for a specific video if you prefer to quickly eyeball a page of results for all relevant info.
  Read more »

Description: WinFlip is a free program that brings to Windows XP the ALT-Tab 3D task-switching flipping function that’s featured on Windows Vista. It allows you to press a hotkey and flip through all open windows using a cascading, isometric visual representation.

Adding to the long list of apps that have copied all manner of bells and whistles featured in Vista, WinFlip brings to you one of the nicest ones, in my opinion, the quirky 3D application switching interface.

There are multiple programs that deliver this functionality to XP, including “Shock Aero“, previously reviewed on Freewaregenius, and “Shock Aero 3D”, designed for PCs with good graphics cards. Winflip has the distinction of very competently delivering this functionality while using very low system resources to do so. Here are some more notes on this program:

• How to start Winflip: press the keyboard shortcut (Alt-Q by default) will launch Winflip, while pressing it again will return to your normal desktop display. You can optionally click on one of the sides of the screen to invoke (this is switched off by default), or use a circular mouse gesture (an interesting function, but not my cup of tea).
• How to Flip: once inside the Winflip task switching screen you can use the arrow buttons or the mousewheel to switch apps. Each window also has a little letter labeling it (A,B,C,D,etc), and you can simply press the letter on the keyboard to jump to that window.
• Memory use: slightly over 1-meg (about 1.5). Compare this to the 15 megs that the non-3D version of Shock Aero uses.
  Read more »

Description: Photoree is a web-based recommendation engine for images. It can learn what kind of images that the user likes by serving images and asking for a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down or no rating, and can use this information to point the user to images/photographs that it thinks he/she will like. It is based on a database of more than 1 million indexed images.

Do you enjoy good photography? Maybe you frequently find yourself downloading images or wallpaper backgrounds because of their artistic merit? If so then you probably visit Flickr and you probably are aware of the fantastic photography that can be found there. The only problem is that it can be quite time consuming to surf Flickr or sites like it in order to find the best stuff, and this is where Photoree, a recommendation engine for images and photographs, can be very useful. To quote the site: “Photoree is to Photos what Last.FM is to music and StumbleUpon to websites”. Here are more notes on this web service:

• The image database: the site states that Photoree has a database of more than 1 million images. All the images seem to share 2 characteristics (a) they all originate from Flickr, and (b) they are all under the Creative Commons license. Oh, and (c) they are mostly very good. All images are linked to their page on Flickr, where you can find out more information if you need to.
• Rating: Photoree will serve images to you based on what it learned from your previous ratings. Images which you “thumbs up” will be saved in your favorites. Curiously, once you rate an image up or down Photoree will let you skip rating a couple of images but will force you to make a judgment call after that, which feels weird at times but certainly makes the process more efficient.
• Your favorites: you can view these as pages of thumbnails in a grid, and can either share them with everyone, with people who have registered with Photoree only, with your contacts only, or just yourself. Note that you can add people as contacts very easily and at will.
  Read more »

Description: JRiver Media Jukebox is an advanced music manager that has recently turned 100% freeware. It provides most of the tools that you will ever need to play and manage your audio library, including audio format conversion, CD burning and ripping with online tag and album art support, full smartlists support, a tag editor, Ipod and device management, podcast support, sound recording, ad-hoc album art downloading, visualizations, skins, and extendibility through a wide range of freely downloadable plugins (including a pre-installed Last.FM audioscrobbler plugin). It supports most audio file formats.

Yes you might have heard of this program and yes, it is now released as 100% no-strings attached freeware. This program is a perfect replacement of ITunes and if you were looking for a single program that can do it all (or at least do more than 90% of what you might want to do with your audio library), Media Jukebox is it. It also looks and feels pretty darn good to boot. Here are some notes on this program:

More info on this program:

• The User Interface: is one of the nicest aspects of this program. Your audio tracks or albums can be displayed in list view or a very pleasing tiled thumbnail view. One of the more useful features is filtering pane split into 3 sections (genre/artist/ablum) which allows you to check boxes to filter your music, and is very useful when you are trying to fix or manage your library’s ID3 tags.
• The context menu: most operations can be done by selecting multiple tracks (using CTRL or Shift-clicking) then right-clicking to access the function you want (e.g. converting tracks to other formats, managing album art, group tag-editing, sending to a device, etc.) Generally speaking this makes for a very intuitive way of working with your audio library.
• Tag editing: has everything you would expect from a tagging program, including file to properties and vice vera, and various cleanup functions (e.g. underscore to space, etc.) One thing I like is that you can set it such that it automatically updates the database to reflect changes to the tags that are done externally with other programs.
• Normalization: optionally built in on playback. Make sure to perform an audio track analysis on your library which will help this process (right click to library tools/analyze audio, or use advanced tools from the tools menu).
  Read more »

Description: Noiseware CE (Community Edition) is a free program that can remove or greatly reduce noise from digital images while keeping the details. It is different from most image processing software that employ simple methods such as median filters in that it employs a sophisticated yet fast algorithm that uses the “adaptive noise profile capability” and sharpening function to deliver excellent and quick results.

Image noise is a kind of grainy look/degradation that can be found on images which significantly reduces their quality, and is often the result of under-exposure (i.e. not enough light) when the image is taken. The good news is: NoisewareCE can deal with this problem extremely well.

There has been a proliferation of programs that manipulate, fix, sharpen, focus, and perform many other such optimizations and enhancements to images, so much so that when I come across image-fixing programs these days I largely gloss over them unless they have something that stands out. I am not an expert on image filters and this is somewhat unfamiliar territory, but what drew me to this program was (a) the promise of a sophisticated filtering technology that is apart from what you usually get with most programs, and (b) the image gallery of results displayed on the developer’s website (see here, and here; click on the before and after tags under each picture for a comparison). Also see a couple of before-and-afters that I made myself.

More info on this program:

• How to use: simply load your image and process. Typically the only decision you will need to make is to choose a pre-defined filter from the filters list. Once processed you can save the resulting image, by default it will save under the same name and append “_filtered” to the name.
• Filter pre-sets: include default, landscape, night scene, portrait, film grain effect, and a handful of others. If you do not feel like messing with these, go with the default filter. (Note: the paid version offers the ability to tweak and save custom filters).
  Read more »

Description: Piky Basket is a Windows shell extension that adds the ability to add different files and folders from multiple locations into a virtual basket from the context menu, and then perform file operations on all of the basket’s contents at once.

This program differentiates itself from the many shell extensions that provide file copying, moving, and path copying by introducing the concept of a file/folder basket. Simply put, a basket is a temporary (virtual) place where you can consolidate all the different files and folders that you want to work with, then copy, move, or delete all of them at once.

For example, imagine that you are re-organizing your files and would like all files that belong to a certain project to be in a distinct folder for that project. With Piky Basket, you can browse all relevant folders and simply place the files/folders to move in the basket, then once this is done you can move all of them at once into the project folder.

Here are more notes on this program:

• The basket: can contain files or folders from any location. You can actually view the contents of the basket by choosing the “select files” (see 2nd screenshot). You can view files either grouped according to each instance of adding files to the basket or as a simple list.
• Available basket functions: copying and moving basket contents. You can also delete the files by choosing “select files” and pressing delete.
  Read more »

Description: WordFlashReader is an open source program that promises to increase your reading speed (of electronic texts) by multiple factors, as well as increase your comprehension of them. It will flash the words within a text in sequence (individually or in chunks) on the screen in large font, with pauses for punctuation. WordFlashReader can open and display multiple text and ebook formats.

I am 36 years old, and one of the facts of life which I have come to terms with is the following: I will never read all the books that I would like to read. In fact, I will most likely never read all the books that I have already purchased, hoping that I might someday get to them. Unlike some people (my wife, for example, who can zip through books) it simply takes me too much time to read a book; there is simply too much thinking, reflection, and daydreaming involved for me to get through texts as efficiently as I would like.

Which is why this program piqued my interest as soon as I lay eyes on it. What WordFlashReader does is open and display electronic texts such that only one word or a chunk of text is displayed in large font on a dark background at any one time. The flashing word(s) move through the text in quick succession, with some considerable degree of control allowed the user in terms of display speed, size of the displayed chunk, and the behavior of the text with regard to punctuation. This system of reading is supposed to have the following effects:

• Comfort: it is supposed to be more comfortable on the eyes than the normal method of reading. Although it takes a bit of getting used to at first, I can see that how this might be the case.
• Efficiency: because the stream of words served is constant and uninterrupted, the user is forced to keep with the pace, although he/she can control the display speed. If you are going to use the program you will be forced read in a constant and efficient manner.
• Comprehension: the program pauses for punctuation, which is supposed to increase comprehension.
  Read more »

Description: IArtwork is an Itunes add-on that scans your Itunes library for available album art. It can then either downloads all missing album art en-masse and/or allow you to manage individual album instances individually.

Although Itunes is equipped to download album art, it requires you to have an ITunes account and be logged in order to download album art. It also tends to be extremely picky about how the music is tagged if it is to download album art at all. And even if you get the album art downloading to function properly, you still need to manually flip through all of the albums individually to search and download album art, which requires quite a bit of work on the part of the user.

What IArtwork can do, on the other hand, is scan you library for all album artwork, download all missing album art sequentially, and display everything in a list. The user can then go down the list and individually intervene/edit any entry that may have been processed incorrectly and/or attempt to manually locate/identify albums whose album art was not found automatically. Here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: clicking on the IArtwork shortcut will launch both IArtwork and Itunes. It will present you with a “you have x albums with no artwork message”, and give you the option find/update them.
• En-masse editing: you can scroll down a list of album art and optionally remove the album art or manually intervene/change the available album art. The list allows is a very good way to quickly go over your entire music collection and fix/edit it (see first screenshot above).
• Manual intervention: clicking on an individual entry will open a dialog where you can adjust the search string, flip through the results, and hone in on the correct album art which was not automatically found. Works very well.
• Artwork downloading source: the artwork is downloaded from Amazon.com (update: previously this was unknown to me but the developers were kind enough to email me and let me know).
  Read more »

Description: F-ab is a player for online videos and other flash animations where, instead of a URL, you literally ’tune into’ channels that are broadcast over the internet in the manner of a radio dial. It offers more than 1200 such channels as of this writing, with the possibility of adding your own (including YouTube channels) to the mix. F-ab also has a flash-based videoconferencing component.

This program, as you might have surmised from the text above, is somewhat hard to describe. I knew instantly that I wanted to post it on Freewaregenius if only because of being so interesting, although for all intents and purposes it is hard to see why a user might be inclined to be browsing channels on F-ab rather than on a video sharing site or any of the free video/TV broadcasting programs that have proliferated recently. There are a number of ways in which this program is unique; here are some notes on this program:

• What it is: F-ab downloads and delivers specific content in the manner of a video sharing service. It is not a player for SWF or FLV player.
• Interactivity: Has an interactive dimension beyond the experience provided by video sharing, as it not only broadcasts flash video (FLV) but flash animations (SWF’s) as well .
• The content: there are 4 categories: advertisement, art, science, and sport. I wasn’t really able to see any single thread that connects the different channels on offer, except perhaps that the animations tend to be artsy and “hip”. A lot of the flash advertising animations seem to be there because they are interestingly made rather than as ads.
• Changing the channel: you can do this by moving a dial. F-ab can support up to 10,000 channels (from 0000 to 9999 on the dial); it currently is up to the 1200 or so channels. It doesn’t really work very well when most channels do not have content. The best way to browse F-ab is to go to the public “search” section and browse the categories/channels there, which are displayed in a list.
  Read more »

Description: Netlicious is a desktop client that can manage your del.ici.ous account. It offers a number of useful features including a built-in browser, quick posts and tag editing, exporting your bookmarks to HTML/XML, a search box, the ability to add URLs from the browser, and others.

Del.icio.us, if you just landed from another planet, is a social bookmarks manager (i.e. an online bookmark management and sharing service). Netlicious connects to the Delicious API and creates a local copy of your bookmarks and tags. It allows you to perform any number of operations within the Netlicious interface that are instantly reflected online, including adding, removing, or editing posts or tags. Here are some notes on this program:

• Browsing your bookmarks: one of the most interesting features that Netlicious makes available is the ability to scroll down your list of bookmarks with an arrow key and instantly view the URL inside the Netlicious browser. This makes for a very efficient way to quickly flip through your favorites and/or keep up to date.
• Views: clicking on a tag (or Ctrl-clicking multiple tags) will filter the posts in your view accordingly. From the ’view’ menu, you can also filter whether to see public posts, private posts, or both.
• Exporting to HTML/XML: honestly this is one of my favorite features, insofar as the HTML file serves as a launchable, clickable list of all your Delicious bookmarks.
  Read more »

Description: HTML Formatter can instantly format unstructured, messy code into an indented, cleaned-up logical structure. It can process a wide range of code types including HTML, ASP, PHP, Smarty templates, XML, and Coldfusion.

If you write code you already know how important it is to have a clean, organized layout. This can not only make your code more intuitively readable (by you or someone else), but can also have an esthetic, pleasing angle as well. The problem, of course, is that formatting and cleaning up code can consume a lot of time; wouldn’t be simply perfect if there was a tool that could simply read your code, figure out its logical structure, and format and clean it up for you? HTML Formatter is precisely such a tool.

I’d previously written about GUI Tidy, a frontend for the very well known HTML Tidy. A quick comparison between the results obtained after running a snippet of messy code through that tool and through HTML Formatter showed the latter clearly superior. While GUI Tidy’s output had broken links and the occasional unformatted clutter strewn about, “HTML Formatter” re-structured the code almost perfectly. And although I only occasionally write code you do not have to be a programmer to see, at a glance, the improvement that this program can lend to messy code.

Here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: you can drag and drop a single file, multiple files, or entire folders on the program icon for processing. HTML formatter will then save re-structured versions of your files with “_Indented” added to the file name. This program has no GUI (or user interface of any kind, for that matter).
• Customizable: you can edit a config file in the HTML Formatter folder in order to manipulate some of the program settings (e.g. what part of the code and which tags gets processed).
• Structure: indents code, supports nested divs/nested tables, adds missing tags, formats your code and gives it a logical structure.
  Read more »

Description: Amok DVD Shrinker is a free program that can compress decrypted DVDs to smaller, user-defined disk sizes without any noticeable reduction in quality. It is designed to enable the copying of commercial DVDs stored on nonstandard media in order to fit them on a standard 4.7 gig writable DVD.

Imagine the following scenario: you’ve just successfully decrypted a DVD and copied it to your hard disk, but when you try to burn it to a DVD you realize that the decrypted data exceeds the 4.7 capacity of your burnable media and will not fit.

If this has happened to you then Amok DVD Shrinker is what you need. Not only will this program quickly and easily compress the DVD on your hard drive into any size that you want with no apparent loss in quality, but it will also preserve all the elements of the original including menus and extra features (or, otherwise, if you specify that you are only interested in the main title it can do that as well).

More info on this program:

• The User interface: is simple and straightforward, with only a limited number of decisions that the user is asked to make (see below).
• Performance: in my test, Amok DVD Shrinker successfully compressed a 6+ gig DVD into 4.7 gigs in 20 minutes (with the quality/speed slider pushed past the mid-point to favor quality over speed, and the preview window enabled). The Amok site states that Amok DVD Shrinker is faster than the well known DVD Shrink, and although I did not scientifically compare these two under the same conditions I remember that DVD Shrink, hitherto the freeware standard bearer for this kind of task, typically took hours to process anything, not minutes.
• User input: the user is only required to make 4 decisions, as follows; (1) the desired output size (e.g. 4.7 gigs for a normal DVD), (2) whether you want the only main movie or the whole DVD with menus and features, (3) whether you want all the different language tracks included or select a singe audio track from the dropdown, and (4) the user’s preference for speed of processing vs. performance on a 5 point scale.
  Read more »

Description: FeedCrier is a free web service that delivers RSS feeds into your IM client and works with AIM, MSN, and Jabber/GTalk. It can also provide a widget for your website that your readers can use to quickly subscribe to your site’s RSS feed and have it delivered into their IM clients.

If (a) you use AIM, MSN, or Jabber/GTalk, and (b) there is a site or news source that you follow religiously and like to be instantly notified in real time whenever updates are published (e.g. Freewaregenius ), you can use FeedCrier to deliver these RSS updates straight into your IM. Or for example if you publish a blog and would like to be instantly notified whenever there’s a new comment you can have your comments RSS delivered to your IM client in real time. Here are more notes on this service:

• How it works: all you have to do is add ’FeedCrier’ to your buddy list within your IM client. From that point forward you can add RSS subscriptions in 3 different ways (a) through your IM client itself, (b) using the FeedCrier site or a FeedCrier widget featured on a site, or (c) using a FeedCrier bookmarklet that you can add to your favorites.
• Interaction with FeedCrier: there are 4 commands; help, subscribe [URL], unsubscribe [URL] and list, which lists all of your RSS subscriptions. These simple commands allow you to quickly and easily manage your account, and I found them to be easier to use that man anging your account through your account page on the FeedCrier site. The URL used can either be the site URL (in-which case FeedCrier will attempt to find the RSS feed on its own), or you can specify the RSS feed URL itself.
• Adding a widget to your site or blog: is extremely easy; you can generate a little code snippet that does this that you can insert into your site.
  Read more »