This program will let you view/download stock data in real time and define portfolios of stocks and monitor their activity and profit/loss; but the WOW-inducing feature is the ability for users to define their own "Stock Indicators" and to have the program automatically deliver alerts based on these. For example, you can tell JStock to alert you by SMS if it finds a stock price that’s at the highest its been for the past 6 months. This may not sound too exciting if you just have one or two stocks that you are interested in, but JStock will do this for hundreds of stocks that you might want to monitor and define in its database. Here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: the main "Real Time Info" tab displays a list of stocks that you can monitor. Although it is pre-populated when you launch the program, note that you can delete stocks from the list and add just the ones you find relevant. Also note that you can select the country of interest and download the entire list of stocks for that country, which is very convenient. If your stock is somehow not showing you can add it to the database individually. JStock will now download price changes in real-time for these, and will even chart . Once you have your list, sorting by column headers can be a great help. I would say, however, that the list is in need of more filtering options (see my wish list below)
• Charting: right click on an individual stock and click "History" to receive an instant 10-year chart for the stock in question showing both stock prices and trade volume. You can also request a candlestick chart. You can limit the range of charted data by simply drawing a rectangle over the time period you are interested in with the mouse.
• Alerts: once you set up your desired "Stock Indicators" (see below) JStock can deliver SMS, Email, or system tray alerts based on these. SMS alerts are 100% free (you need to set up a Google Calendar account and register your mobile number; more info here). Alerts can be sent for stocks in your "real time" list, for an entire country’s stock market, for a particular board such as the NYSE, for a unknown "industries" (I am not sure exactly how JStock comes up with these), or, perhaps most useful, for the stocks that are user-defined in your database (choose "user-defined" industry for this one).
• Stock Indicators: JStock allows you to create your own indicators and use these to generate alerts. A visual editor is built into JStock that allows you to create these without any programming skills; however, it helps to know what you are going after . I simply re-created the indicator that was described in the help section and it was apparent to me just how powerful and versatile these indicators could be. The image to the right shows an alert that will be triggered when the stock’s current last price is the maximum it has been for the past 14 days. Very cool!
• Portfolio Management: this is where you can record transactions that occur on a list of stocks and keep track of your profit and loss. I did not really use this, but I imagine that it would be extremely value added
• Chatting: I was not able to find anyone to chat with; either there were no users online or I set it up incorrectly (although the set-up seemed super easy).

Wish list:

• Tagging: it would be great if you could create custom tags and associate them with stocks (perhaps in the user-defined stocks database entries), and then use these later for filtering/grouping, for alerts, or other operations.
• Filtering: I found it strange that are no means to isolate a stock or group of stocks in a list and view these in isolation. You cannot even type in a stock ticker symbol and filter it out from the list. What would be tremendously value-added is if you could filter each column Excel-style using certain criteria (e.g. only if the Chg% is larger or smaller than a certain value, etc). Of course you can currently create Stock Indicators and filter lists that way, but it would be so much more user-friendly to be able to filter on-the-fly.
• Downloading: ok so I charted the past 12 months for stock x; now can I please download these into CSVl? A strange omission.
• Chart range pre-sets: as in "the past week", "the past 1 month", "2 months", "1 Year", etc., to be selected from a dropown. Another very strange omission.
• Pre-defined indicators: it would be cool if the program with a few "clever" or value added indicators pre-defined, to get people started with indicators.

The verdict: this program one of the best in its category. It could use a streamlining of the user interface to make it more user-friendly, but it makes up for that in the power that it has under the hood and the sheer ambition of its covered functionality. Occasional or regular investors alike will find this program very useful and value added. Highly recommended!

Version Tested: 1.0.4i

Compatibility: Windows/Linux/Mac/Solaris

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 16.5 megs).

How would you like fairly capable text editor that nonetheless sports a minimalist, uncluttered interface? This about sums this program up. It sets out to combine some good features with a Firefox-like experience (Tabs, search/replace/go-to-line bars, crash recovery, and the ability to save and load entire sessions and multiple documents simultaneously). More notes below:

• Tabs: honestly, an indispensable feature. Although I will say that the tabbed interface looks better in the Visa environment (screenshot above) than in XP.
• Syntax highlighting: for INI, XML, HTML, PHP, & Java. Also gives you the ability to change the color scheme for each of the supported languages (see image to the right).
• Firefox-style search/replace: find-as-you-type. See the top screenshot above.
• Go-to-line bars: another indispensable feature.
• Session management: if you work with a number of documents at once, and would like to get all of them loaded simultaneously, Caderno allows you to load/save a group of documents at once.
• Unicode support.
• Crash recovery.

The verdict: the internet is not lacking for excellent freeware text editors to replace Notepad. Two of my personal favorites are PSPad and Notepad++, packed choc-full of features and options to satisfy every audience. However, I will say that many text-editors, probably as a consequence of being the primary tools of the trade for developers and programmers are becoming a tad too complicated and/or feature intensive, at least for the most of us who are either not programmers or would prefer a clean, straightforward interface. If this describes you then you will probably like this program. Recommended.

Version Tested: 1.08

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 1.46 megs).

If you are in need of a simple yet powerful tool that can split, join, or extract PDF pages and/or provide a number of other editing options then look no more: PDFTools will likely be exactly what you are looking for. PDFTools offers an excellent range of PDF related editing functions, all but two of which worked beautifully in my testing of this program.

I will present quick review of the various functions below, but really all you need to do to grasp what this software can do is glance at the screenshot above. The only function that is somehow missing (and which to me would have been obvious) is the option to add page numbering to a PDF document; and considering this tool already allows you to stamp a message or image anywhere you like on your document I am guessing that they simply did not think of it. Here are more notes on the various functions:

• Performance: I mention this first because it is very notably fast. I tested all the functions using a 250-page text and image intensive PDF ebook and the tool zipped through all the functions.
• Splitting and extracting PDF’s: can save each and every page to its own file, split even or odd pages only, split after a certain page (or after each user defined number of pages), or simply extract a user-defined section/range of pages as its own PDF.
• Join multiple PDF’s: choose your files, re-arrange them if needed, and join. Can merge PDF documents that are portrait and landscape formatted together into a single document without hitch.
• Stamp a PDF: you can insert text or an image anywhere in the document in the background on every page. PDFTools offers placement presets, such as top-right or middle-center, or will allow you to specify x and y coordinates for the exact location you want your stamp to be. Works very well.
• Re-arrange a PDF: *didn’t work for me*. Or I should say that while reversing the order of the pages worked just fine, re-arranging multiple pages on a single page resulted in the top 15% of each page being inexplicably shaved off. If it had worked it would allowed the re-arranging of 2, 3, or 4 pages to fit on a single page (for example for printing purposes to save paper). A handout option whereby the program adds a column on the right for not taking purposes worked very well though.
• Encrypt a PDF: allows you to define user privileges, such as printing, degraded printing, the ability to copy, change content or annotation, and others (see screenshot to the right). Note that you do not have to password protect your file even as you change user privileges.
• Decrypt a PDF: i.e. decrypt it by providing the password, not by cracking it. This developer’s website reports that this feature is broken in v1.3 and that it will be fixed. Mind you it has been a few years since this version was released in 2006.
• PDF Creator: creates PDFs from XML files; to quote the website, it “allows you to create a PDF document by specifying structure in a XML document”. More information on this here. For myself I didn’t delve much into this feature.

Wish list:

• Auto numbering: that empty space on the main interface is just begging for “automatic numbering” to be added there.
• An update with some of the aforementioned issues fixed. The program has not been updated since 2007.

The verdict: the closest thing I have to a criticism is that in order to use PDFTools you need to know ahead of time exactly the pages or page ranges you want to edit (i.e you will need to inspect your PDF’s using a PDF reader first). This is undoubtedly not a big issue given that PDFTools does not purport to be a reader (and offers so much powerful functionality for free), but I am keeping my fingers crossed that we will see a free visually-based PDF editing swiss-army knife style tool at some point (in the style of PDF Split and Merge).

But wishful thinking notwithstanding, I would say that all in all this is a very nice tool for PDF editing with an excellent range of functions. It is very similar to previously mentioned PDFTK Builder although I slightly prefer the user experience that PDFTools provides.

[Thanks to reader Anand for suggesting this review].

Version Tested: 1.3

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 2.76 megs).

I recently used created clickmaps of my new Freewaregenius theme in order to shed light on what people were doing on my site. The results were very interesting to me and, I would imagine, they would be interesting to a lot of readers, especially those who have their own sites or blogs. I therefore created this post to share these clickmaps as well as some of the insights that came out of them.

Disclaimer: the tool used to create these clickmaps is not free, and therefore shall not be named. The original version of this posting did mention it but I have decided to remove it.

I will present two out of three clickmap options here: heamaps and confetti maps (which appear as little dots). I have decided not to post site overlay screenshots  (little bars next to links that represent the amount of clicking activity). The confetti clickmaps are my favorite, as they can be really insightful, as are the heatmaps, but I don’t care much for site overlays (which are also supported in Google Analytics, btw, although generally speaking I would say the Google Analytics site overlays are crap).

The test:

• I looked at the Freewaregenius home page only
• Monitored 5001 visits which generated 1366 clicks on Jun 8th and 9th, 2009.
• Important note: the current version of the tool used is not able to record clicks on some flash and Javascript elements on the page. Thus it did not record clicks on the “Featured Article” widget on top of the page, or the carousel next to it. It is also unable to record clicks on Google ads, on flash videos, or the “random posts” section in the bottom.

The clickmaps: entire-site JPEGS are too long for me to display in this blog posting without making the clickmaps very difficult to read. Therefore I am showing results for (a) top of the page, (b) middle of the page, and (c) bottom of the page seperately.

Top of page images: see above

Bottom of the page:

Middle of page:

The findings: I’ll split these into three sections A/B/C

(A) Issues that I’d already suspected that the clickmaps confirmed:

1. The searchbox on the top right is used heavily
2. The numbered-page navigation near the bottom is used heavily
3. The thumbnails (screenshots) in the first few postings are clicked heavily
4. Thumbnails in general are clicked on heavily as the primary source of information, even in cases were the posts themselves are not clicked into.
5. Posts that have a more general audience, such as games or email clients, get  alot more clicks than specialized posts (such as WinCdEMu, which didn’t get clicked on one time during the test period).

(B) Insights that are new or that I wasn’t paying attention to:

1. Users click and interact with the tabs in the header under the logo much more than I thought they did. I am glad to see some clicks on the Sitemap; I didn’t think anybody went there.
2. Users click on the “Freeware Top 20″ tab like crazy.
3. Posts near the top of the page and posts near the bottom are clicked on heavily. Posts in the middle are somewhat neglected or skipped over.
4. The tabbed javascript widget in the sidebar (recent/most commended/recent comments), gets some good use, which is interesting to know.
5. Browse by category: only 3 or 4 buttons in the black “browse by category” section are clicked on to any significant extent; Freewaregenius Picks, Games, and (possibly) Media players.
6. “Click to read more”: the red link at the bottom of each posting is not clicked at all. Users prefer to click on the post title instead.
7. Tag cloud: is very seldom clicked, although this may be due to its placement towards the end of the sidebar.
8. Blogroll: the sites in my “favorite freeware sites” section are clicked on heavily. I am giving these guys some serious traffic.
9. Lists in the footer: of the three lists in the footer (”Recent posts”, “Most commented”, and “Popular this month”), only the latter gets any clicks.

(C) My future plan of action:

1. Making better use of the tabs in the header: I may add a second row of tabs and re-test to see how users react to that.
2. Reducing the number of posts per page: given that the posts in the middle are generally overlooked, while the ones on top and bottom get clicked, I will reduce my current 13 posts per page to something that might reduce or eliminate the middle altogether.
3. Freeware Top 20: I’ve decided to stop procrastinating and update the “Freeware Top 20″ already (hopefully by next week). I always knew this was a popular page that needed to be updated, but seeing all the clicks in the confetti map put it in better persepctive relative to everything else on the page.
4. Category navigation: the fact that categories are so seldom clicked on support an idea that I’d been wanting to implement for a long time, which is to reduce the categorization scheme to 8 or so basic categories with no subcategories.
5. Blogroll/links: I will be updating my link exchange policy pretty soon (unless your site is highly trafficked or has a high Google rank, I will not accept link exchanges. However I will give a link in exchange for contributing content to this site, but I haven’t figured out the details yet).
6. Tag cloud: seems to be completely useless. Am considering either removing the tag cloud and not bothering with tags, or creating a limited set of tags that may reduce the tag clutter. Do tags have any SEO value? If you know please share in the comments.
7. Lists in the footer: I will consider removing the “Recent posts”, and “Most commented” lists and replace them with something that may be more interesting to the readers, such as an “about this blog” section with my picture in it, and/or a poll or something of the sorts

   .

[Editor’s note: this review was written by Freewaregenius contributor Carbonize. Check out his tech blog here].

As a web developer, having a powerful and versatile text editor that makes my work easier is extremely important to me. Fortunately, there are a handful of powerful freeware text editors to choose from, and PSPad is my text editor of choice. One of the most notable features is PSPad’s syntax highlighting, which makes it easy to see if I’ve not closed a string or a loop. Moreover the built in FTP client means I can work on files on the server without having to download them using another program before editing them. And the function auto complete with attributes means I don’t have to go looking up a function online.

Features: the following is just a selection of the features and tools PSPad offers.

• Tabbed Interface: So you can work on multiple documents at the same time
• Auto Completion: Press CTRL+J to pull up a list of possible functions/tags based on what you have typed and have PSPad finish typing them for you.
• File Compare: So you can easily see what’s different between two files
• FTP Client: So you can edit files without having to download them to your computer
• HTML Preview: You can see what your web pages will look like using the inbuilt browser. You can also point it at a local web server to test your scripts.
• HTML Multihighlighter: Using this you can have PSPad syntax highlight HTML, Javascript, CSS and a chosen language (PHP, VBscript etc) when viewing a file.
• Regex Search/Replace: You can use regular expressions when searching and replacing text for more power.
• Spell-checking: twenty languages are supported (as of this writing) – download the appropriate language dictionary from the program page. Also allows you to set up a custom user dictionary.
• Portable: Can be told to save it’s settings in the program folder so you can carry it on your USB stick.
• Matching Brace/Tag Highlighting: So you can easily see where a function, loop or HTML tag starts and ends.
• Macro Recorder: Record keystrokes to cut down on repetitive tasks
• TiDy Library: So you can have your HTML/XHTML/CSS checked and cleaned up
• ASCII table: Quickly get the hex or ascii value of any character along with it’s HTML entity if it has one. You can even double click on the current character in the status bar to have the table opene up with that character selected.
• Code Explorer: Lists the functions, methods, tags in a file so you can quickly jump to them
• Color Translator: quickly convert a color from it’s name, hex code or RGB values into another format and have PSPad insert it where the cursor is.
• Eye Dropper: A very useful tool. Minimises the PSPad window and when you click the mouse it will insert the colour that is beneath the cursor.
• Lorem Ipsum Generator: Inserts Lorem Ipsum text. You can specify number of words, if you want it between paragraph tags and how many words per paragraph.
• Hex editor: Hard to explain what a hex editor is but comes in useful.
• Case Change: Quickly change the case of the selected text to uppercase, lowercase or just capitalise the first character of every word.
• Different Line Endings: Can read and write files using DOS, Mac or Unix style line endings.
• Compress HTML: Removes spaces and line endings from HTML files to make them smaller.
• Convertors: A huge range of convertors to so such things as convert text to morse code, characters to named HTML entities and many more.

I’d just like to talk a bit more about PSPad’s Auto Completion. PSPad actually has two different methods of auto complete. The standard one is Ctrl+J which just completes the function name or the HTML tag. But PSPad also has Ctrl+Space which will not only complete the function name but will also put in what attributes the function takes. With HTML tags Ctrl+Space will often open up a window where that shows all possible attributes so you can fill them in in the window.

CONS: here’s an overview on some of the issues that can be improved.

• PSPad’s syntax highlighter is not always perfect. I’ve never seen any errors in normal HTML files but occasionally it will mess up with PHP, specially when used as part of the HTML Multihighlighter
• No code folding. A lot of people on the PSPad forums keep asking for this but I see little purpose in it myself.
• Doesn’t highlight all PHP functions as functions but weirdly it does support them all in code completion. Although I recently sent the maker a complete list of PHP functions so hopefully that may change.
• Sometimes when saving a file via FTP PSPad will lock up and you have no choice but to wait for it to finish doing what it’s doing otherwise you may lose the file if you terminate PSPad.

The verdict: at the end of the day I have been using PSPad for years and finding myself returning to it despite testing other text editors (Notepad++, RJ TextEd etc). I have found that it has all the functions I need and more. All the tools you need are simple to find and a few I have not seen in other editors such as the eye dropper and color converter. PSPad just makes work a lot easier in a lot of ways and the author of the program is active in his forums to answer questions.

Version Tested: 4.5.3 (2298)

Compatibility: Windows All.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 3.43 megs).

[UPDATE: since first writing this review this program is NO LONGER FREEWARE]

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.
• Support: supports any file where HTML/XML type tags need formatting such as HTML, ASP, PHP, Smarty templates, XML. Also supports Coldfusion.
• Tags: will let you know about tags closed out of order and their position. If the number of closing and opening tags don’t match it will still guess where to indent so the formatting looks good.
• Portable: Nothing to install; just unzip and run whenever needed.
• Free: recently became freeware, although you will need a serial number (found on the site).

The verdict: at what it does, HTML Formatter is one of the best out there, if not the best. A very useful tool which can save you a lot of time and which delivers great results. Spread the word!

[Update Apr 10th, 2008: this program has now become shareware; however, you can still download and use the last available freeware version at the bottom of this review]

Version Tested: 2.11

Compatibility: WinAll..

Go to the HTML Formatter page. To download the last freeware version (2.11) go here (approx 616K).

This program is a little bit hard to describe: imagine that you’re browsing, say, Flickr, and that you are looking at a page full of thumbnails. Normally what you would do is click on the thumbnail and view the image, go back to the page with the thumbnail and click on the next image and so on. What PicLens offers is an alternate way of viewing the images that literally "takes over" and overlays itself on top of your browser window; your images will be displayed full screen and all thumbnails presented in a horizontal sequence that is quickly browsable on the bottom of the screen.

• How it works: whenever you are surfing on a site that supports PicLens, a little distinct arrow will appear on the image thumbnail when you mouse over it which signals that the images are browsable with PicLens. Clicking on the arrow will activate the PicLens image browser, while clicking on the thumbnail anywhere around it will open/display the image as normal. (See second screenshot).
• Browsing with PicLens: you can use the mouse or arrow keys to scroll through the images, as well as the navigation arrows to move/jump back and forth.
• PicLens on your site: this is possible. The developers of PicLens provide a Wordpress plugin for blogs powered by Wordpress (of which this is one). If you do not use Wordpress you can use "PicLens Publisher" on your site, which can create immersive slideshows. It will generate the code for you and allow you to customize by adding your logo and/or other audio/video files (and also seems to support Piclens style slideshows within RSS feeds). Moreover, it seems that visitors to your site or Wordpress blog can view the slideshows without needing the PicLens plugin if their browser is equipped with Flash v.9.0.28 or higher.

You might ask: is it really worth it to go through the trouble of installing this given that it only supports a handful of sites? If you use or visit any of the supported sites then the answer is a definite yes. If you do so only occasionally the answer might well be yes as well. Try it out for yourself and see how you like it.

Watch a video demo of PicLens below:

Version Tested: 1.5.17 beta

Compatibility: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac. Requires IE 6 or higher, Firefox or Safari.

Go to the program page download the latest version (approx 815K).

The screenshot above shows the starred items from one of my Google Reader accounts displayed in an RSS widget on the desktop (using Klipfolio). It also shows what the widget will look like when you publish it on your site.

To begin with I will assume that you (a) have a Google login and (b) that you are using Google Reader to read your RSS feeds and using the ’starring’ feature to denote those RSS articles/posts that you are interested in broadcasting).

First you have to make your ’Starred Items’ list public; the steps to do this are as follows:

1. Click on the ’Settings’ link in Google Reader
2. Click on the ’Tags’ tab
3. Check the box next to “Your Starred Items”
4. In the ’Change Sharing’ dropdown, select “public” to make the Starred items public.
5. Click on the ’view public page’ to view your very own webpage where your starred items can be viewed.

Now that you have a public page with your starred items, you have the following options:

• View the public page
• Email the link to your friends
• Add a clip to your site
• RSS: you can also locate the public page’s RSS feed and share that with friends or use it in your desktop based RSS program.

Viewing a page and finding the RSS link: your page once you browse to it should now look something like this (see screenshot to the right). This page also contains an RSS feed link (see the RSS icon in the middle-right); you can click that link in order to get to the URL that you will need to use in your desktop-based RSS reader.

Note that the feed seems like it might be an ATOM feed and not RSS. This should not matter as most RSS readers can handle ATOM and RSS both.

Adding a clip to your site: is as simple as can be. Click the “add a clip to your site” link and you will be presented with a page that looks like this one (screenshot to the right) that will contain the HTML code you need to paste into your site as well as what the widget will look like. You can specify the color of the widget as well as the number of items to display.

Go to the Google Reader site to set up an account.

Rating

Version tested: the site as of 9/18/2007

Feng GUI Viewfinder Heatmap is a free web service that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to emulate human eye movements and generate heatmaps for websites and images. It allows you to define a URL or upload an image and then superimposes a heatmap on it which displays the ’hot spots’ on the image or URL that the human eye will gravitate to.

This service can generate heatmaps that web designers, designers, or visual artists of all kinds can use to get an insight as to the areas and/or design elements in their images or websites that the human eye automatically gravitates to. Here are some notes on this:

• What is a heatmap: colored, semi-transparent areas superimposed on an image or snapshot of a website that identify the areas where the eyes gravitate to or tend to linger using warm/reddish colors and other areas less likely to attract attention using cooler bluish colors (with green as the middle).
• Usage: enter a URL address in the designated box or click the upload button to upload an image. After that all you have to do is click the ’Heatmap’ button to see the result.
• The Technology: the service employs the neuroscience concept of “saliency” and claims to “simulate human visual attention and create an attention heatmap”. From reading the site and blog you get the feeling that there is a high degree of confidence in the validity of generated results (i.e. that the modeling and the concepts are well established and accepted). There isn’t much information with respect to verifying the generated results or comparing with heatmaps made through actually observing the eye movements of human subjects. Face and text detection is promised but not employed yet.
• The output: there’s a little slider on the left of the generated heat map image that can be used to increase/decrease the contrast of the heatmap to make it more or less visible. Note that the generated heatmap will encompass only the top visible part of the website screenshot without scrolling down.
• Browser integration: you can install a Firefox add on to instantly generate a heatmap of the site you are visiting. You can also create a javascript bookmarklet. Go to the tools section.
• The gallery: a really cool section of the website that illustrates interesting visual concepts from so-called smart thumbnails to focal centers, etc.

So, what did I learn after generating a heatmap for Freewaregenius? That the orange lightbulb in the Freewaregenius logo is apparently the most attractive element to the human eye, followed typically by the screenshot thumbnail; nothing really unexpected but still I like this service if just for the potential for interesting insights. Check it out for sure.

Go to the Feng-GUI page.

Rating

Version tested: 4.1

ColorPic is a free app that allows you to pick any color from the screen and displays its code in HEX and decmial. It features a versatile color mixer and the ability to create and save color palettes. It also offers a number of others functions such as a customizable magnification area and the ability to snap to the nearest websafe color.

Most people working with websites and/or with design will invariably need a “color picker” program that can identify the color code of any pixel on screen. There are many such free programs, but of all that I have tried ColorPic is by far the best. Here’s what I like about it:

• Allows you to store captured colors inside pallets which you can come back to later (to the tune of 16 colors per pallet). You can create as many of these as you like.
• Snap to nearest websafe color: once you grab your color a little “websnap” button will appear close to its code on the ColorPic interface. Clicking on this will snap to the nearest websafe color. Very cool.
• Magnifier: this is available as part of the ColorPic interface. You can increase/decrease magnification or overlay a grid.
• Color mixer: click a tab in order to switch between the 4 nifty color mixer tools that are available.
• I like that you do not select your desired color using the mouse button; this means you can run ColorPic then go in and out of windows/pages until you find the color you want. Once found you can use the mouse or you can use hotkeys to capture it (use alt-tab to get back into ColorPic, F1-F12 to pick one of the available color slots, and CTRL-G to grab it).

There are many freeware color-picker programs around; I’ve tried a number of these from tiny, minimal programs to feature laden and top-heavy ones. What I like about ColorPic is that it manages to pack a very nice set of features into a very small app that uses just over 1 meg of memory.

Compatibility: Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, Me, XP, Vista (make sure to download the correct version for your OS).

Go to the program page to get the latest version (approx 579K).

Rating

Version tested: 1.0

View Source Editor is a tiny program that allows you to change Notepad from being the default editor when using IE’s “view source” function, and to replace it with the editor of your choice.

If you build, work with, program, or design websites then you’ve likely used IE’s “view source” function dozens of times to look at the code that is generating a web page. IE will typically open Notepad as the default text editor when you do this, which in many cases will prompt you to launch your preferred text editor then copy-and-paste the code into it before honing in on what you are looking for or working with the code.

View Source Editor will help you circumvent this unnecessary step. You will likely run this no-install program just once (or every time you decide to switch text editors), point it to your text editor, and be on your way. Its just a small thing but, as they say, the devil is in the detail!

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the program page to get the latest version (approx 157K).

Rating

Version tested: 3.0

Post2blog is a WSIWYG (what you see is what you get) blog editing and publishing software with advanced features such as a full featured word-processor-style editor, advanced image and table handling options, and live spelling checker and thesaurus. It supports a few dozen platforms including WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, and LiveJournal.

I first started using this program about 3 months ago when it was featured on the ’Giveaway of the day’ site. Since then I’ve used it to publish my Freewaregenius postings as my program of choice. I was therefore delighted to find out that Post2Blog was just released as freeware.

But let me back up a little bit: I’ve tried out around 5 or 6 freeware WSIWYG blog editing programs, and the two that stand out significantly from the rest (and the only two programs that handled Wordpress’ split post correctly) are Post2blog and Microsoft’s slick Windows Live Writer. Here are some noteworthy features that Post2Blog offers:

• Advanced WSIWYG editing: the full featured editor includes comprehensive editing options as well as support for tables and emoticons. I might mention the ’remove formatting’ option (Shift-Alt-R) which I use frequently. Note that all functions are hotkeyed for easy access. Edit offline and post whenever you are ready.
• Advanced image support: upload and format images (including creating thumbnails to custom resolution, adding captions, resizing the image itself, and adding shadows). Also supports uploads into Flickr and other online image resources (imageshack.us, picturelli.com, as well as FTP).
• Language resources: In addition to English, offers the ability to download dictionary and thesaurus resources for a number of language options, although these are somewhat counter-intuitive (at the time of this writing: Afrikaans, Brazilian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Norwegian, and Swedish). Spellcheck can be programmed to run automatically before posting.
• Integration into explorer and third party applications: right click on any file in explorer and send it to Post2blog; create a posting in Word and send it to Post2blog, or post directly from Internet Explorer, Firefox, RSS Bandit, or Sharpreader. There’s also an option to clean MS Word HTML if it doesn’t quite transfer correctly. For myself I never found this integration with other apps particularly useful as all my posts I create from scratch.
• Edit existing posts: can download any posted entry in order to edit/change it. This version 3 does this perfectly without mangling the post’s formatting.
• Portable: run from your USB drive.
• Quick Snippet: you can define quick snippets that are fired off whenever you type something in. For example, you can tell it to fire off a lengthy signature consisting of multiple lines of text whenever you type your full name. (It sounds nice in theory but I found little use for it in practice).
• Tagging: easily add Technorati, Del.icio.us, Buzzwords, and 43 things tags to posts.
• Adding Excerpts: highlight text and click on the ’excerpt’ button or otherwise automatically select the first 40, 80, 120, 150, or 200 words.
• Other features: set categories by checking the displayed category boxes , set date and time, set comments and trackback settings (on/off), automatically insert Amazon links and/or Adsense code into your posts.

Reasons to use this program instead of Windows Live Writer (v.beta 2): The thesaurus (which WLW doesn’t have); portable; multiple language dictionaries; generates XHTML posts; image quality can strangely be better than WLW at times; uploading images to online resources; explorer and external applications integration (although WLW’s has plugins that expand it to do a lot of this stuff as well).

Reasons to use Windows Live Writer instead of Post2blog: the new (beta 2) version of WLW can purportedly add/edit categories, which Post2blog doesn’ (from screenshots that I’ve seen it displays categories in their proper hierarchy as well, which is great); image manipulation is more advanced than Post2blog; a lot more options for working with and handling tables; plugin architecture means that WLW is ultimately more expandable; also, looks somewhat sexier than Post2blog.

The verdict: a good, competent program that does the job well. I’ve been using it for a long time and will probably continue to do so as my blogging app of choice. Highly recommended.

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the program home page to get the latest version (approx 9.33 megs).

Rating

Version tested: 2.4

Namu6 is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website creation and editing tool that can be used by anyone without any HTML or coding knowledge required.

I will start by saying that this is a beautifully designed program. Whenever I review programs like this I expect to spend a few days working with the program, reading instructions and going through tutorials before I can come to grips with it and/or get to a point where I can start generating results; Namu6 was so intuitive and so simple to use that I was a bit taken aback. As an added bonus it does a very competent job creating websites too.

Here are some notes on this program:

• The user interface: simple and uncluttered. There are a number of controls on the toolbar but you will not use these much; 90% of your interactions with this program will consist of selecting an element on the page and right-clicking to prompt a context menu that is relevant to the element you are working with. These menus are very well organized and somewhat sparse, but they manage to deliver most of the functionality that you need.
• The website theme: Namu6 will have you design a theme for your website (i.e. what the top banner will look like and how it will be formatted, what the text headers and different borders will look like, etc.) Once this is in place it applies to your website as a whole; i.e. the look and feel you create will be preserved across all pages. On the one hand, this makes your website consistent throughout, and the site will not be a mess of different colors and fonts. On the other, though, it also makes it very difficult to create different pages with custom looks and/or styles. Note that the program comes with a number of built-in themes and a you can download more from the website.
• Form vs. Function: Namu6 contains enough features/functions to deliver clean, competent sites that are as good as those produced by any for-pay WYSIWYG programs in its class (if not better). You can do a lot of things and all the features are streamlined into the overall economical design. On the flip side you will at times want to do simple things and find that you can’t (e.g. using gradients, changing background colors for certain parts, inserting tables, etc). Compared to other website creators Namu6 can feel a bit restrictive.
• HTML editor: there isn’t one, unfortunately, which can really limit what you can do beyond hammering out the basic website. What you could do if you want to install a widget or two or Google Adsense ads or anything else is to export to HTML and then use an HTML editor to insert any such custom elements into the site.
• Working with objects: most objects such as pictures, headers, and margins can just be dragged and resized at will, and pictures can be cropped right within the interface, which is quite nice.
• The cookie-cutter effect: websites created with Namu6 will look similar to some extent. To find examples, I searched Google for "made with Namu6" (by default the program embeds this string in the bottom of your site, although you can switch this off from the options menu). Check them out.

This program has a number of strenghs (a) the learning curve is short; you can hammer out a 4-6 page website in 2-3 hours, (b) it is very simple and straightforward, making it easily accessible to a wide audience, (c) the user interface is simply brilliant, (d) it can generate good solid websites that work and have all the elements that a website must have, and (e) it is fun to use. As a freeware website building program it is on the top of my list.

Compatibility: Windows 98, Me, 2000 or XP. Seems like it works fine on Vista as well, although its not stated as such in the Namu6 site.

Go to the download page to get the latest version (approx 3.9 megs). Also visit the program home page.

Version tested: 1.05

HTML GUI Tidy is a graphical user interface for HTML Tidy, a program that automatically optimizes HTML/PHP source code and fixes a number of common problems. It also arranges code so as to give it a reasonable indent-style layout.

I am not a programmer nor a developer, but ever since starting Freewaregenius I have learned a bit of HTML and occasionally found myself having to change, modify, and/or add countless parts of code. At times I would need to do something that was over my head or would have a problems with my site that would lead me to seek the help of our hotshot programmers at work. Typically, the first things these guys would go is dump my code into their favorite text editor then proceed to fix the visual layout; separating chunks of code, inserting and maintaining a hierarchy of indents and margins that just made the code look good and comprehensible. They then will go down the code removing unneeded code and checking for beginning and end tags to make sure all of these are present and correctly placed. In most cases, this exercise alone would either solve the problem or at least make it apparent what it was.

What GUI Tidy/HTML Tidy promises to do is essentially the exercise above. It will allow you to dump your code into the ’originial code’ tab, process it, then generate a new code inside the ’optimized html’ tab with the implemented corrections and optimizations. This tab also contains a third window that contains errors and information on where in the code they were found.

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

• Fixes a number of problems including missing/mismatched tags, adding missing items, fixing tags within lists, and replacing missing quotes.
• Proprietary attributes/elements/HTML extensions are recognized and reported.
• Layout changes are done according to user-selected pre-defined styles.
• GUI Tidy includes the HTML Tidy executable version from 11/23/2005.
• Note that there is another GUI for Tidy called TidyGUI, which is a different program.

As an HTML novice I do not feel like I can comment on this program with a lot of authority. What I can say, however, is that I’ve found it a handy tool for (a) getting quick code fixes done automatically, and (b) making the code and code layout look good and tidy. If you have a bunch of messy code I recommend you try running it through this; you will likely find it useful.

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the GUI TIDY page to get the latest version (approx 606K).
For more info go to the original HTML Tidy page and the HTML Tidy page on Sourceforge.

Version tested: 2.2.15.31

Free Monitor for Google is a small app that checks the natural search rankings of a URL (or multiple URLs) in Google for a list of user-defined keywords. For each keyword it can show a reference list of the top Google site results.

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

• This program will try to find your URL in the top result rankings for each of your keywords. The number of results it will search and display is user defined (i.e. you can tell it to look in the top 10, 20, 30 results etc).
• It will allow you to work with an unlimited number of keywords.
• For each of your keywords, Free Monitor for Google will remember the best ranking attained. It will also display a little up arrow, down arrow, or neutral arrow to show movement in ranking from the last time the search was conducted.
• Google search results are obtained from over 50+ international data centers.
• Note that there may be slight differences between your own manual search results and the ones obtained by this program. This is normal and may is caused by several factors (it is possible for you to do 2 consecutive searches on Google within minutes of each other and find slight differences in the displayed results).
• Results can be exported to CSV.
• Nag screen. Unfortunately, there is one. I like the simplicity and added value of this program enough to live with it, though.

If you are interested in SEO and in monitoring your site’s rankings on Google you will find that this little gem of a program is simple and extremely useful. .

Differences between free and paid version: The paid version of this is a much more powerful program that can also search Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. It will collect paid-search as well as natural search information. It also includes a keyword suggestion tool. (There are a few other, less important differences).

Compatibility: Windows 98, 2000, XP (no info on Vista).

Go to the program page to get the latest version (approx 1.27 megs).

Version tested: 1.0.1 (6) beta

Windows Live Writer is a true WYSIWYG blog authoring tool that can be used to write and edit blog postings (including pictures) locally and then post these online. It supports a wide range of blogging platforms including Windows Live Spaces, Wordpress, and Blogger. 

Let me start by saying flat out that I am in love with this program, mainly because it allows me to work on a blog posting locally and publish it when I’m ready. Here’s what you need to know about it.

Notable features : 

• WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get). It will download your site’s CSS and is able to preview exactly what your post will look like when published. The editing interface looks really good and is very well designed.
• Built in spelling checker.
• Instantly switch from normal view to the HTML code and to ‘web preview’.
• Tags Tags Tags! Enter tags straight from the Windows Live Writer interface. For Wordpress check out this plugin that will work with the Windows Live Writer tags for both tag and metakeyword support.   
• Nice handling of images, including a slew of unexpected options such as the ability to rotate an image, adjusting brightness, setting height/width of an image and the margin around it (if any), as well as a handful of border styles. It seems that you can import more effects capabilities through downloadable plugins. Paradoxically, for all of this I was unable to tell the program to use a thumbnail instead of the actual resized image, a glaring omission in my book.
• Tags Tags Tags! Enter tags straight from the Windows Live Writer interface. For Wordpress check out this plugin that will work with the Windows Live Writer tags for both tag and metakeyword support. 
• Relatively small and non-bloated (yes this is Microsoft we’re talking about folks).  
• Supports a wide range of blogging platforms including Windows Live spaces, Wordpress.com, Typepad, Livejournal, Movable Type, Wordpress custom installation, Radio Userland, Community server, Dasblog, Metaweblog API, Movable type API, and Blogger (Atom).
• Allows you to either publish a posting or post-to-draft.
• You can insert MS Live local maps straight from the interface. An interesting feature for some I’m sure (not so much for me).
• Plugin support; Microsoft offers a write SDK, which means everyone can make their own plugins. Some of these are listed here.

My Windows Live Writer wishlist: this software is still in beta, and I suspect many of the following will be addressed, but here they are all the same.

• Hard as I tried, I was not ablt to get Windows Live Writer to update a post to reflect changes that I did online AFTER publishing a post using Windows Live Writer.
• The ability to specify posting thumbnail vs. original image, the way Wordpress does it. I want a 9k thumbnail that can be clicked to show the 100k image, not a resized 100k image within every post.
• Currently, Windows Live Writer is unable to download previous posts past the <!–more–> tag, which is very strange and effectively makes it useless for editing already published posts. This has to be fixed urgently.
• For such a foray into WYSIWYG blogging, I am stumped as to why there is no support for creating tables on the fly. I mean if I AM using a local client it might as well be powerful.
• For posted images, Windows Live Writer creates its own folder structure within the Wordpress ‘Uploads’ folder. Which is okay, but I do wish that it stuck with the Wordpress folder structure instead.
• I wish the program has more warning dialogs such as “you are about to delete this post; both local and published versions will be affected, are you sure you want to do this”. Or something like that. This would have prevented my deletion of a published post

The verdict: One thing that I want to convey before I’m done is this program’s sheer coolness factor. Not sure what it is, but I really want Microsoft to fix the bugs/issues above so I can use this as my default blogging software. As is it probably deserves a 4 star rating but I am crossing my finders and giving it the benefit of the doubt and the max rating anyway.  

Compatibility: Window 98 or higher.

Go to the program home page to download the latest version. For info on how to set up Live Writer, go here or here (for Wordpress).

Version tested:  Beta

[Note: this review was written by my friend Navdeep Dhillon; see his personal blog here; also see Infact, the free ebook site he built with his team - The Freewaregenius]

Blogger is a free service owned by Google that allows you to publish your own blog and host in on Blogger’s own servers as a subdomain of blogspot.com or on a server of your choosing. Blogger beta introduces a dynamic blogging platform and other improvements such as tagging and drag and drop template modifications.

I recently started using Google’s new Blogger beta. Its definitely a big step up from the previous version of Blogger.One no brainer new feature is the introduction of tags. Perhaps a couple years late, but a welcomed new feature nonetheless. I was getting quite tired of loading my entries with keywords, and then relying on the search capability to “kind of” get tags to work. Another thing they seemed to have done a decent job on is the introduction of a UI builder to design and edit your blog templates. You no longer have to hack your way through convoluted HTML to introduce simple UI elements like a linked list. In general the UI builder seems to work, and not crash. But it does have its problems, the biggest being the confused state it winds up in if you do edit the HTML; unfortunately, this is innevitible if you upgraded your old blog as opposed to creating a new one from scratch. I still recommend rebuilding your UI template from scratch using the UI builder; of course, make sure to keep a back up of your original.

I recently started using Google’s new Blogger beta. Its definitely a big step up from the previous version of Blogger.One no brainer new feature is the introduction of tags. Perhaps a couple years late, but a welcomed new feature nonetheless. I was getting quite tired of loading my entries with keywords, and then relying on the search capability to “kind of” get tags to work. Another thing they seemed to have done a decent job on is the introduction of a UI builder to design and edit your blog templates. You no longer have to hack your way through convoluted HTML to introduce simple UI elements like a linked list. In general the UI builder seems to work, and not crash. But it does have its problems, the biggest being the confused state it winds up in if you do edit the HTML; unfortunately, this is innevitible if you upgraded your old blog as opposed to creating a new one from scratch. I still recommend rebuilding your UI template from scratch using the UI builder; of course, make sure to keep a back up of your original.There are also some nice widgets in the UI builder. One of my favorites is the RSS summary display; it allows you to put in an RSS feed, and then drag the element onto the blog display. The result is all the titles of the RSS feed show up so your users can click off onto this other blog. You can see an example on the new site I created at http://deep-art.blogspot.com – if you scroll down a bit, you’ll see an RSS feed called Chalo Bolo. Chalo Bolo is my main blog, so this element allows me to pull users interested in more general topics I write about. In general, the new Blogger is a big step up from the old, and better than other server side blogging all inclusive tools I’ve used. Nonetheless, I have a few items on my wish list for the next release:

* More customization ability on the RSS viewer. For example, I would like an option to include a couple lines of text from each article in addition to just the title. I would also like to be able to customize the number of articles displayed.

* Clean separation of content from blogs. Currently I have about 4 different blogs on Blogger. It is a real pain to post articles to different blogs, especially when I need to cross post. I would far prefer it if I could simply choose, for a given blog, which tags to automatically show in that blog. For example, my general blog Chalo Bolo, would show any articles regardless of tag, where as my art blog, would only show articles with the tag “art.”

* Future dated posts. I often write a number of blog posts at once. I would like to have these posts automatically posted over the next few days. It would be great if I could simply select a date in the future for a given post, and then have the post go live automatically on that date.

* Frequent Commenter Widget. Many people who post comments on the web, do so out of a self interest to drive traffic back to their site through an active link on their name. I would like to encourage this (minus the spammers of course), since it increases interest and traffic in my own site. It would be nice if I could have a widget that ranks in inverse order the most frequent commenter. Another idea is to enable users to vote on comments, so there could be a featured comment of the day.

* Ability to buy a domain name. Many of us are too addicted to leave Blogger, but would prefer to have our own domain name, and would prefer to do without the generic tool bar at the top of each blog. I would like to be able to pay a small amount, and have the DNS registration, migration, etc. all handled for me.

That’s it for now. I give the new Blogger 4stars out of 5. Unless you want to go the next level and highly customize your blog locally using client side software, I recommend going w/ Blogger.

Version tested:  1.2.25

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.

This app has some pretty nifty reporting capabilities as well. It can create a bar chart in a little window (see second screenshot) for a number of metrics (impressions, clicks, ecpm, ctr, and earnings), for different Adsense products and ad channels, across different date ranges. You cannot do cross charting of multiple metrics, but as far as I am concered SysSense is already going well above and beyond the call of duty for such a small program.

If you’re an Adsense addict (you know who you are) this is the program you’ve been looking for.

Go to the program page for the latest version.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a program that will browse all pages of a website looking for broken links, and present these in a multi-column sortable report that is easy to work with.

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.2i

If you have a website (or websites) then you know that the links you have on your website are (a) an integral part of the content of your site, and (b) that these are often unreliable, get broken, and have to be maintained on a regular basis. Enter Xenu’s Link Sleuth, a small and efficient program that will search for and find broken links for you (see screenshot above for a sample report). Xenu will also create a browser-based report than is also useful (see below screenshot).

Xenu allows you to save the project you’re working on, which you can then re-run later on or email it. According to the Xenu website, it also “Supports SSL websites (”https:// “) Partial testing of ftp and gopher sites Detects and reports redirected URLs Site Map”.

A handy little tool overall. Definitely Recommended.

Go to the program download page for the latest version. The Program home page.

Rating: 5 

Version: beta

I did a search on YotoPhoto and found a good number of very good hits. The pictures were located on another free stock pictures provider, but I was able to download them, although I had to sign up and create an account with that site to do so.

Sizes differ but all pictures that I came across were hi-res and print-quality. 

Go to the YOTOPHOTO site