Posted by Samer on February 7, 2011 in Money & Finances | Tagged Data Visualization, Excel, MS Office |
CleanCharts is a free add on for Microsoft Excel that can tweak your Excel charts in several different ways to make them more visually appealing. It provides five areas of improvement: removal of “chart junk” (i.e. unnecessary formatting), fixing axis labels and scaling, fixing font sizes, doing away with 3D elements, and changing the color scheme to one that provides better contrast and is more visually appealing (see screenshot above right).
CleanCharts can process charts singly or in batch across an entire workbook. Note, however, that it may not be the optimal one-size-fits-all chart formatting solution, especially for charts that have already been significantly modified and/or improved manually. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on January 29, 2011 in Audio, Audio Conversion, Freewaregenius Picks |
While there are many free programs that can rip CD’s and perform audio file conversions, many of them do not support multi-core processing. For most modern PC’s this means that the software does not utilize the full processing power of your machine, resulting in longer encoding and conversion times (significantly longer if, say, you were processing a large audio library).
Fre:ac is a versatile, free, and feature-rich audio converter and CD ripper with multi-core optimized encoders. It can convert to/from most major audio types (MP3, MP4/M4A, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, WAV, and Bonk). Other functions include ripping audio CDs and downloading metadata from online sources (CDDB/freedb), playlist 
creation, and encoding into a single file. (Note that the program used to be called BonkEnc before the name was changed). Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on January 27, 2011 in Icons, System, Utilities | Tagged Desktop Enhancements |
Have you ever wished there was an easy way to view and/or copy and save icons that reside in libraries or executable files? With IconViewer you can do this straight from Windows Explorer, by right-clicking properties on a file that contains icons (e.g. DLL, Exe, or ICO files) then going to the new “Icon” tab that IconViewer inserts in the file properties dialog.
IconViewer enables you to preview all icons contained in your files for all their different sizes, and to easily save individual icons to your desktop. IconViewer is free and works on both 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on January 22, 2011 in File Management, System, Utilities |
FileBucket is a free file and folder organizational tool that allows you to collect files and folders from several locations into a single “virtual basket”, then perform a number of operations such as moving or copying them to another location.
Aside from Copy and Move, other possible operations include deleting items in the basket, creating shortcuts to them, or saving the list with absolute or relative paths. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on January 20, 2011 in Internet, Internet Utils, Torrent / P2P, Web2.0 |
Have you ever wondered where in the world (literally) your torrent downloads are coming from? Whether you are downloading from people in adjacent states or countries or whether your file is being delivered from across the globe?
If you use uTorrent (and by all means you should be), you could use an add-on (or "App", as it is appropriately referred to in a post iPhone world) called uMap that can display your download sources/peers on a scrollable Google map. You could scroll the map across your screen and hover over the different sources marked on the map to see exactly what files you are downloading from which location. The net effect is really very cool.
To get this set up, follow the following instructions: Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on January 18, 2011 in PDF | Tagged PDF |
Ever wanted to crop a PDF document or eBook? Briss is a freeware software that allows you to do this visually, by drawing rectangles over the page layout of your PDF. It works great in conjunction with ebook reading devices, to remove excess margins and hone in on the text or content of the document, or for cropping multiple columns of text to create a page out of each for example.
This program is designed to crop PDF pages in batch, but makes a distinction between odd and even pages, as these are often aligned differently in documents (such as ebooks). It will group all the different page sizes in your document together and will require the user to make cropping decisions for each group of pages that is of a similar size. It also provides the option to exclude certain pages or page ranges from the cropping action.
Briss is multiplatform and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on January 12, 2011 in News, Uncategorized |
Every year the folks over at Donationcoder sponsor an annual "New Apps for the New Year" event where they showcase a number of freeware programs. The programs usually run the gamut, from utilities to games to productivity software.
NANY in many cases provides fertile ground for original and unique software concepts to appear. This year there are 36 entries and some really interesting titles, with a YouTube video explaining and elucidating each. Check out NANY 2011 here. Continue reading ..
CleanCharts is a free add on for Microsoft Excel that can tweak your Excel charts in several different ways to make them more visually appealing. It provides five areas of improvement: removal of “chart junk” (i.e. unnecessary formatting), fixing axis labels and scaling, fixing font sizes, doing away with 3D elements, and changing the color scheme to one that provides better contrast and is more visually appealing (see screenshot above right).
