Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.35

Description: Powerbullet can create animated flash presentations containing text, graphics, and sound. It features a drag and drop interface and a host of pre-packaged animation and transition effects. Results can be viewed in a browser or exported into a self-running executable playable on any computer.

The learning curve: spend some time experimenting with this software and you’ll figure out how to do most of the things you are interested in in very short order. Powerbullet has a very different feel to it from MS Powerpoint, though (using Powerbullet feels somewhat like working with a word processor).

The user interface: there are a number of toolbars with buttons stacked on top of the page; however, you can right click on an object to instantly edit its properties, set animation effects, create an HTML link, or even edit an object’s HTML. This makes interacting with objects extremely easy, and really makes a world of difference in the user-friendliness department.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.4

Description: Imagicon is a small program that performs image to icon conversions as well as image conversions across all the supported formats (BMP, PNG, JPG and ICO). It features a simple drag and drop interface.

I was looking for a simple program to convert PNG’s and JPG’s into Icon (ICO) files and found this one. I chose to post this program over a number of others primarily because it supported converting a a number of popular image formats (BMP, PNG, and JPG), whereas most of the others I looked at typically converted a single format only (usually PNG). Here are some notes on this program:

• Simple interface: first define the output image settings you want (convert to icons by default), then simply drag and drop an image or multiple images onto the program dialog for the conversion to take place.
• Fast: very efficient conversions compared to other image-to-icon programs that I have tested.
• Icon settings: 32×32 by default, but can be set to any icon size setting (16×16, 48×48, 128×128, 64×64). You can also enable/disable transparency support within icons.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.5.00 beta

Description: SmallStock is a memory-resident program that monitors user-selected stocks on the NASDAQ exchange in real time and displays alerts in the system tray whenever a set of user-defined criteria occurs. It can also track your portfolio of stocks and report on any incurred profits or losses.

This program was created for the casual, non-professional trader as a means to track and report changes on stocks of interest. It is extremely intuitive and easy to use straight away with no learning curve to speak of. Here are some notes on this program:

• Watch list: allows you to add any NASDAQ stock to your watch list.
• Alerts: user-defined alerts that pop up in the system tray area based on any/all of the following 5 criteria: price rises or falls to a certain value, increases or decreases to a certain value, or volume of trading exceeds a certain level. (See second screenshot for alerts).
• Alert frequency: for any of your criteria, you could ask to be alerted every time the event occurs, to be alerted once a day, or just a single, non-recurring alert.
• Stock selection: what I like about this program is that stocks are selected via a pull-down menu which is filtered by whatever you enter in the box for ’stock name’. For example, if you’re typing in "Google" it will immediately jump down to the Google entry by the time you have typed in "goo". You will easily be able to select your stock without having to look up its stock symbol.
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Rating: 4

Version tested: 4.1

Description: Engauge Digitizer is an open-source program designed to convert charts or maps provided as images into numeric data which can be exported as CSV and manipulated using Excel or other programs.

Though the internet offers large amounts of data on every conceivable subject, in many cases numeric data is presented in a chart that is only accessible for viewing as an image file. Engauge Digitizer offers a quick and easy way to import all sorts of charts (including maps) and convert these into a very good approximation of the actual data they represent. Here are some notes on this program:

• This program requires the user to manually identify certain basic information on the graph. For example, you will need to click on 3 points on the 2 axes of a graph (as well as their intersection point) and manually enter the values for these.
• Engauge supports 2 modes of data identification; manual digitization and automatic digitization, as explained below.
• Manual digitization, as the name implies, involves going over a chart and manually placing enough points on it as to eventually have an adequate representation of it. In this scenario you need not worry so much about removing unwanted information from the image since you placing the points yourself anyway.
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Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 2.05 beta

Description: Widdly is a free tool that allows you to download and analyse data for stocks, indices, macroeconomical data, currencies, funds, and other financial instruments. It is designed to allow the publication of financial analysis on the widdly.com website and sharing these with a community of users. The tool has a heavy focus on charting and provides numerous charting-related features and options. You can publish your own analyses and/or browse other people’s, with the basic objective of creating a forum-style conversation where members of the community rate the analysis and leave comments.

Widdly.com is aims to bring together a community of financial-analysis-minded users who can publish and share financial analyses. The idea is that users can rate the various published analyses within a 5-star rating system in order to validate the published content. These analyses consist of elaborately constructed charts which may or may not have a sentence-long caption underneath. You have to create a user account to download and the tool will automatically log in every time you use it.

What’s really cool about this program is the ability to instantly download historic data going back 3 years for any conceivable stock and/or financial instrument. You can choose from a multitude of different chart types and charting options; the array of charting possibilities is nothing short than dizzying. These include moving averages, time-series forecasting, trends charting, standard deviation and variance charting. volatility charting, volume/volume based charting, and many, many more. I should also mention the option to outline trends or identify significant event manually on the chart itself, much like you would with any drawing program. What I really like is the ability to overlay the charts for multiple stocks for comparison. Of course you can save any analysis or chart that you build and update it with more current data as you go along. You can also export downloaded data into CSV for analysis with another application such as MS Excel.
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Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.2.25

Description: SysSense is a system-tray based app that will retrieve data periodically from Google Adsense accounts and display real time notifications of your latest account information.

If you have a website (or websites) where you use Google Adsense you might want to check this one out. SysSense is resides in your system-tray and updates you on various account metrics. You can use it for multiple accounts (it allows for an unlimited number of accounts).

SysSense will periodically flash your information in a notification balloon (see screenshot) or can be told to refresh at will and display the latest adsense numbers - no need to log into your account(s) in a browser. Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.0

Description: Textwedge is a program that splits text files (including CSV files) into smaller chunks.

Textwedge does this row-by-row in a number of different ways:

• Split text by “number of lines per chunk” (e.g. you could set row count per file to be 30,000 if that’s what you need)
• Split text by “chunk size” in bytes
• Split text by lines containing a certain search string (you can define multiple search strings for this one)
• You can also filter out rows containing certain search strings.
• Textwedge will (optionally) preview what it will do before doing it by marking out different chunks and/or lines that will be filtered out with different colors. Read more »