Posted by Samer on April 5, 2011 in Compression / ZIP, Utilities |
When it comes to Zip/compression programs, there are so many excellent free options out there that I am constantly surprised when I receive emails from readers asking for “an alternative to Winzip”. (You can check out a list of excellent free compression software here).
That being said, the people behind Hamster Free Zip Archiver have created a software that is noteworthy in terms of the user experience it provides and the sheer “stylishness” of its interface. It extracts a wide range of compression formats (including uncommon ones), and features very nice integration with the Windows context menu.
This program is not perfect, however; it is much slower than it should be, at least on 64 bit machines, even as it purports to be optimized for multi-core processors; but it feels good and is the kind of compression program that a designer (rather than a geek) would create. Continue reading ..
Posted by Jason on April 2, 2011 in Productivity & Applications |
As the Web and the world have become increasingly data-driven, GIS is just another tool to process that data. GIS stands for Geographic Information System, a system which manages spatially-aware data. GIS is a booming sector even though it’s been around for a while and makes for a great direction to steer your career.
Data can be anything worth recording. For example, say I made a list of all the reported car accidents in my county. Each accident would be a data point and make for interesting conversation on an elevator ride, but that’s about it. Let’s say I got even more detailed with the data I collected and recorded what type of accident it was (rear-ender, head-on collisions, cross-over accident, etc.) and the GPS coordinates of where each accident occurred. After collecting enough data and putting it into GIS so I can visualize it, I might be able to conclude some patterns about the accidents and find solutions to reduce their number like lengthening an intersection’s yellow light, reducing the speed limit, or adding a street lamp.
[Editor’s note: this review was written by Freewaregenius contributor Jason H. Check out his tech blog: 404techsupport.com].
Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on March 30, 2011 in News, Shareware Turned Freeware, Software Updates |
Every month I try to find and present a handful of noteworthy software titles that used to be payware but have been released as freeware. This month’s installment is as follows:
HWiNFO, Spider Player, Spicy Guitar, Rising Security Software, A Form Filler, and Kidlogger PRO.
Note (1) that this is not an endorsement nor a review of these programs but merely a list. Unlike other posts on this site, I have not necessarily installed or tested these programs. (2) To check out last month’s installment of shareware turned freeware, go here.
Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on March 24, 2011 in Featured, How To, Kindle, PDF, xclude | Tagged ebooks, PDF |
If you have a Kindle 3 (the one with the 6″ screen) chances are that you love it, as I do. Except that reading most PDF ebooks and documents on Kindle 3 is rather annoying and can be downright impossible, with unreadable, miniscule text and lots of wasted white space in the margins. This is the case because the Kindle 3 attempts to display each page of a PDF document fully on its 6″ screen, and the zoom function seems like it was purposely designed to be as unpractical and un-user-friendly as possible, segmenting your PDF pages into strange quadrants that make reading a chore.
In this post I am suggesting that the best way to read a PDF on a Kindle 3 involves cropping it first so that the white space in the margin as well as page numbers and any text in the header and footer is removed. This process can in itself result in a PDF that is perfectly readable on the 6″ screen; but if not, I will also describe how to then convert your cropped PDF to the Kindle friendly AZW format, resulting in a continuous text, and without legacy headers, footers, and page numbers showing up as artifacts in your document. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on March 22, 2011 in News |
DonationCoder, as you may know, is one of the most vibrant communities on the net where software enthusiasts can interact with coders, and where a lot of interesting free software is born as a result.
Their 6th anniversary fundraiser is a month-long event, and every day this month they have come up with new, fresh content for their audience, from brand new freeware releases and updates for some of their more well-known programs to reviews and minireviews of freeware.
Go there and check it out right now; there’s only about 10 days left! Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on March 16, 2011 in Productivity & Applications |
If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to touch-type then you’re in luck; TIPP10 is a free typing tutor software for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It offers a complete set of lessons that can transform you from a beginner to an expert touch typist.
TIPP10 supports the English and German languages (as of this writing), and offers an “intelligent” feature whereby characters that are misspelled are repeated more frequently.
This software monitors and saves your progress and can provide all sorts of information about your touch-typing performance. It can track your progress in all manner of charts and statistics, such as strokes per minutes, duration, and even error rates per individual finger. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on March 9, 2011 in Blogging, Flash / SWF, PDF |
If you’ve ever wanted to publish a PDF in SWF (flash) form then read on: GPDF2SWF is a free tool that can do this very easily. GPDF2SWF is the graphical user interface for a tool called PDF2SWF, and is part of SWFTOOLS, a collection of SWF related command line executables.
This program can load up a PDF file then save it as a flash SWF file. It can do this for all pages in the PDF document or for selected pages, or it can save each page in the PDF document as its own SWF file.
GPDF2SWF optionally embeds a convenient flash player/viewer into the resulting SWF document which makes it easy to view and control the resulting flash file from any browser. It also outputs an HTML file with a little code that can load up and display the SWF file in a web page. Continue reading ..
