Posted by Samer on May 8, 2011 in System, Utilities | Tagged Windows 7, Windows Enhancements |
We’re all familiar with the column headers in Windows explorer “detailed” folder view, that can be clicked on to sort files, or right-clicked on for custom filtering. In Windows 7, however, these controls are only available in the “details” view, and have been removed from all other view modes. And while this might be a good idea from a purely aesthetic point of view, it takes away functionality that can be very useful and practical.
If you miss and want this functionality back on all file views (and not just “details” view), Explorer7Fixes can provide it quickly and easily. File sorting and filtering can be made available across the board on all file view modes, and, moreover, it really doesn’t look bad at all. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on May 4, 2011 in Productivity & Applications |
OfficeTabs adds tabs to MS Office applications Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, allowing for tabbed navigation across several open documents in the manner familiarized by Firefox or Chrome, etc (see screenshot above)
The free version allows for personal, non commercial use, and provides a number of options such as the ability to place tabs on top, bottom, and even left or right of the main display area, clicking on the empty space next to a tab to start a new document, customizing the style and color of displayed tabs, and a few other options. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on May 3, 2011 in Productivity & Applications |
Do you ever wish you could save paper by printing two (or even four) pages of a document on a single sheet of paper? Or perhaps the document you are printing contains a lot of pages that you don’t really want or need; wouldn’t be great if you could exclude these from being printed in the first place?, which will not only save you ink and paper (and the planet), but will also produce a lighter, more accessible hard copy that only contains the content you actually want to read.
iPrint is a virtual printer driver that can deliver all of this. It is similar in concept to well known shareware software FinePrint, and although it isn’t as feature-rich as that software, it nonetheless does a wonderful job and, importantly, is 100% free software. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on April 30, 2011 in News, Shareware Turned Freeware, Software Updates |
As if to prove this site’s slogan (“Someday all software will be free”), every month I feature software that used to be shareware but turned freeware (check out the first and second installments of these). This month, four programs:
Vectorian Giotto, Shortcircuit 2, PC Login Now, and AbpMon.
Note 1: the “star” program here which you have to check out is without a doubt “Vectorian Giotto”, a flash (SWF) creation tool. Note2: these are not mini reviews of the software presented here and in many cases I have not tested these on my machine.
Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on April 27, 2011 in Launchers, Utilities |
MadAppLauncher is a simple, free tabbed launcher. It supports up to 10 different tabs, with 30 slots each that can hold program, file, or folder shortcuts. Each slot is mapped to a key on the keyboard and can be launched by pressing that key .
I personally like tabbed launchers because of the prospect of using them as substitutes for a cluttered desktop (i.e. to replace the disparate icons that exist on the desktop with icons organized/grouped in tabs). This requires that the tabbed launcher be fairly simple and easy to interact with, which in this case is a very good description of this software. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on April 24, 2011 in Featured, Graphics, How To |
Have you experienced a situation where an image you are interested in using is smaller than you would like it to be, whether it might be for printing purposes or for use in illustration projects or even for usage on the web, etc? Typically, straight-enlarging of an image comes with too much of a degradation in quality, with visible pixellization and undesirable artifacts, and a general loss of detail.
This post will describe a process that can lead a different outcome. To be clear, the steps described here will not magically produce a perfect image out of a source which (by definition) is far from optimal. Rather, what is on offer here is the prospect of processing the enlarged image algorithmically to get a much better/cleaner looking resized image than otherwise would be the case.
Nor is this post about manual image processing or Photoshopping techniques. The tool used here is a free software called SmillaEnlarger, and it can perform image enlargement quickly and easily (and automatically) in one or two clicks. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on April 21, 2011 in File Management, Productivity & Applications, Utilities |
Depeche View is a free program that can search and edit multiple text files simultaneously. It allows users to jump to instances of a search string that may exist across a number of different files, provided they are placed in the same folder. It will search all text files in a folder, including log files, source code, database extracts, etc. It is extremely fast, and can load up to 1000 files in memory simultaneously and display them continuously in a single window.
But Depeche View offers a number of features that enhance the user experience, such as quick creation of bookmarks and/or “remark lines”, multi-pane view (for viewing the text simultaneously from different vantage points), appending new text from the clipboard or even other files or folders, and a host of quick shortcuts that make power-searching your document(s) a breeze. This program is free for personal, non-commercial use.
Continue reading ..
