Posted by Samer on January 7, 2011 in Freewaregenius Picks, Productivity & Applications, System, Utilities, Wallpaper | Tagged Desktop Enhancements |
Okozo desktop installs flash-based animated desktop wallpaper on Windows Vista and Windows 7, utilizing DirectX 9.0c and Adobe flash.
Because they are flash-based, Okozo desktop animations differ from the "dreamscene" WMV-based desktop animations in that they can provide a wide range of interactive functionality, such as being able to respond to cursor movements, to display live information such as desktop calendars or desktop clocks or even content that is pulled from the internet. Another difference is the resource requirements: Okozo’s interactive wallpapers are low on resources (both memory and CPU use) compared to other animated wallpapers such as dreamscenes.
Note that Okozo Desktop will display its own ".okozo" format animations and not any SWF files, which limits its usefulness and range of possibilities. However, you can easily submit your flash SWF creations for conversion into Okozo files via the website. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on January 4, 2011 in PDF, Productivity & Applications | Tagged PDF |
Have you ever faced a situation where you needed to obtain editable text out of an image or a PDF file created from a scanned document? What you need in this case is "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) software that will literally "read" the document and try to identify characters and words visually, and FreeOCR.net is just such a program.
FreeOCR.net performs optical character recognition on images or PDF files that have a scanned origin. It can process PDF, TIF, BMP, JPG, and PNG files and provides an acquire function for running documents through a scanner. The simple user interface allows you to exclude non text elements (such as images or tables), although this has to be done manually.
For documents with multiple pages, each individual page has to be processed by the user separately, although FreeOCR will "pool" the output into a single text. FreeOCR.net is based on the open source Tesseract OCR engine and comes pre-installed with English support, although many other languages can be downloaded and added (including non latin character based languages such as Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, etc.) Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on December 28, 2010 in System, Utilities | Tagged Desktop Enhancements |
eXtraButtons is a free Windows Explorer tweak that adds a number of buttons to your windows title bar. Among the function provided: minimizing windows to the tray area, minimizing to a single common icon in the system area, or minimizing to “box” (i.e. a floating icon on the desktop). Other buttons provide the following: always on top functionality, roll a window up to the title bar, push window to background, set window to custom or pre-set transparency, and duplicate active application windows. Users can customize and mix-and-match the buttons theywould like to see, which can reduce clutter and provide only the functions that seem useful.
eXtraButtons is beta software and is still a work in progress. It currently works on Windows XP/Vista/7 32 bit applications; however, it will run in a 64 bit environment but will appear on most 32 bit applications within that environment. Note that the developers have indicated that they are aiming to eventually make it work in 64 bit environments and 64bit Windows explorer. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on December 23, 2010 in Graphics |
Do you have a huge photo library with a lot of duplicate images? Or perhaps you have multiple resized versions of the same image cluttering your hard drive and resulting in the same image appearing multiple times in slideshows, etc.
If so, check out Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder, a free program that can identify both duplicate and similar photos and present them visually side by side. It does not simply find identical files but images that "look" similar as well. It also calculates a similarity percentage that measures how likely it is that the images are indeed duplicates. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on December 16, 2010 in HD Utils, System, Utilities |
Macrium Reflect Free creates hard drives images and can restore them when you need it. It purports to be the fastest disk imaging software out there. It can compress your image such that it is much smaller in size than the actual hard drive partition, and can create a bootable recovery CD that can be used to perform operations on the system partition, or restore images in case your system becomes unbootable.
To access data inside an image, Macrium Reflect Free allows you to right click an image file and browse your data in read only mode and/or copy individual files or folders into your hard drive. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on December 13, 2010 in PDF | Tagged PDF |
jPDF Tweak is a free, open-source PDF editing app. It can merge PDF documents, convert them into printable booklets with multiple pages per sheet, extract, rotate, scale, or shuffle pages, add a background watermark image or page numbers, add or edit bookmarks, page transitions, viewer preferences, or document metadata, and encrypt and/or sign a PDF document.
This program brings all of these functions together to one place and presents them in a tabbed interface. It can process a single PDF document or multiple documents in batch. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on December 11, 2010 in Internet, Internet Utils |
If you don’t know LastPass, I would describe it as the ultimate free cloud-based password manager and form filler. While hitherto available as a plug-in or extension for other browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari), it has finally come to Opera with the release of the new beta of Opera 11, which (finally) introduces support for extensions.
For me, LastPass has come to be one of those indispensable tools that is one of the first things I install on a new computer (see the LastPass entry in my Freeware Top 30 post). Now, with support for Opera, I can finally seriously consider using it as my main browser, which is a good thing as Opera is a serious contender for being the best browser, and just may be the fastest browser out there (more info on this below). Continue reading ..
