Category: Software Reviews

FontViewOK Displays And Previews Fonts

FontViewOK is a simple no-installation 35KB program that displays fonts installed on any system. It is written by the same person who has brought us the “Quadro-View” file manager or windows explorer alternative Q-Dir.

FontViewOK is an often useful visual preview of fonts that acts as a tool to compare fonts and to see how they look like with any user entered text. Enter any text in the box near the top, choose the font size, color and style from the right of the box and scroll down to view the resulting previews. Alternatively use the drop down menu to navigate through all fonts.

Given the size and nature of the program that is all there is to it but one more sometimes useful feature that may be missed is that of printing and previewing the print. This can prove practical when one wants to see how the printed version of the fonts really look like. Download FontViewOK and many more small and sometimes useful programs that do everything from saving desktop icon positions to changing a file’s time stamp at the link above.

June 1, 2009
Writemonkey Is Soul Food For The Modern Writer

Writemonkey is described by its author as

Zenware for full screen distraction free creative writing. No whistles and bells, just empty screen, you and your words. WriteMonkey is light, fast, and perfectly handy for those who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter but live in modern times.

Writemonkey is a text editor where any writing, essay or note can be initiated while keeping a minimal look and feel. That is not to say Writemonkey does not have useful features but the full screen – which can be exited by pressing the Esc key – has a black background by default, or any other color using the preferences, and provides a good measure of quietness. To keep it in that serene look all settings can be accessed by right clicking on the ‘paper’ area so exiting from the full screen mode is rarely, if ever, necessary. It has many features that make it useful and interesting such as keeping a tab of number of words typed with the possibility of adding a progress bar to keep a running indicator of how close a user is to a word minimum or limit for an essay for example. This, with all other application settings, is accessed either in the relevant, in this case Progress, tab of the preferences or straight from a right click. On the same Progress tab there is also a timer feature to keep tabs on how long a project or writing is taking. Other notable and pretty rare and unique features include a Repository where unfinished notes can be stored and accessed later. Any text can be added to the Repository by highlighting it and then right clicking and choosing Move to repository. The Jump, a popup toggled on/off via a right click, lets the user move between paragraph and bookmarks within the document. One other, but certainly not the last, feature of Writemonkey is Replacements. This is a text replacement feature for re-using common words where triggers or hot keys are defined in the preferences.

Of particular note is that if a user does not associate .txt files with Writemonkey the only way to access the said files is by opening the Writemonkey executable itself and then clicking Tab and Ctrl to get a list of recently open and used documents. Alternatively Open With Writemonkey can be added to the Windows context menu or the Start with last opened file setting enabled in the preferences’ Open & Save tab.

Writemonkey is a no installation freeware and its executable file is less than 1MB. it is extremely fun to play with and has many simple yet interesting features. The features page has a more complete list and the application’s facebook group many screenshots. Writemonkey is also UTF-8, Unicode and ANSII capable, runs on XP, with .NET Framework 3.5 installed, and higher including Windows 7.

May 26, 2009
Appetizer Is Food For Your Application Launching Needs

Appetizer is described by its author as

…a free application launcher, or dock, for Windows

Appetizer is an open source entry in the application launcher list that includes the likes of 8Start, reviewed here previously, LaunchBar Commander from DonationCoder and many others. It is available in an executable and ZIP package portable. It also supports skins and plugins.

Appetizer, as it stands now at version1.3, keeps it simple. The first step in using it can be importing Start Menu and Quick Launch shortcuts using a special importer. Alternatively one can click on the + button (see image, showing Appetizer using the iAppetizer skin) or drag and drop program icons into the dock to create shortcut items manually. By right clicking shortcuts one can change the display name of the shortcut, change its path and icon and add special parameters that control how the application is launched. In addition to the aforementioned shortcuts can be added to ‘multi-launch’ groups. A multi-launch is often useful when one wants to open several portable applications (non-portable ones too) by clicking one single button. Here, using Appetizer, one can add many shortcuts to a group and open several applications simultaneously.

The configuration menu of Appetizer lets the user do the following: choose its language (18 available as of this review), keep the app on top, check for updates, change its skin, its orientation (vertical or horizontal), its icon size, its transparency, auto hide it after an application launch, run multi-launch groups on start up, add a hot key to hide/show the dock and enable/disable plugins. One of the useful included plugins is the one that opens the folder where the application being launched resides in. Once enabled a plugin becomes accessible via a right click on any of the shortcuts.
Appetizer is a very promising relatively new software and runs on Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

May 21, 2009
CSS-BuMa Generates CSS Menus

CSS-BuMa is described by its author as

CSS-BuMa is a program to create pure Cascading Style Sheet Buttons

CSS-BuMa is an alternative to the CSS Tab Designer reviewed here earlier in the year or the online CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) menu generators like CSSMenuMaker just to name one. Besides being a lightweight and interesting application it has an advantage over its online counterparts in that it is possible to save menus as re-usable projects. It does not create or generate multi-level menus however as it is limited to creating horizontal or vertical pure CSS menus.

Entering button captions or text and the accompanying links is the first step in creating a menu, adding them for as many menu items as needed, then collectively for the whole menu or each item individually various settings can be chosen and edited. (Almost) everything can be set and edited including text of course but also font, background color, position, letter spacing, height, width, margin and others. An integrated color picker can aid in choosing a color as well. The same is configurable to control the behaviour of the menu in hover and visited states. Additionally a background image can be chosen for one or all the items and its position and repeat state set as well.

In addition to the aforementioned feature of saving a menu as a project, with CSS-BuMa one can also save menus as templates where everything (color, font, etc.) is saved except the menu text. This allows future use while retaining something akin to a theme.

Finally the “Parse HTML File” tab supposedly extracts (in a “the address”;”description” format) links from an existing HTML file so the link targets can be automatically added to a menu that the user has created using CSS-BuMa. In my test of an HTML page with 10+ links only two links were parsed or shown so I am not sure about the usability of this feature.

Like many other programs from Sam Francke CSS-BuMa is easy to use even if it is not always updated anymore. It is cardware or freeware and it runs under Windows 98SE, XP and 2000.

May 18, 2009
PicPick Tools Is The All In One Design Tool

PicPick is described by its author as

PicPick is an all-in-one software for software developers, graphic designers and home user

and it packs a punch in a 942KB zipped download (an installer is available as well).
Unzipping and running PicPick opens an initial window that writes to an .ini file. Here one chooses one of the many translations available, set it to start with Windows if needed and configure hotkeys for many of its operations. After that PicPick sits in the system tray and its every tool is a right click away.

Whiteboard is a tool that uses the monitor space itself and is basically what it says. Using shapes, lines, arrows one can draw anything freehand and save the whole area which includes the desktop background. The Whiteboard also includes a screen magnifier. Show CrossHair displays the cursor position in x and y pixels on the screen. The interesting feature of this tool is that by clicking on one of point on the screen and then moving the mouse subsequent x,y positions are shown relative to the clicked point.
Show Protractor, as its name suggests, uses reference points created by mouse clicks and movement to measure angles on the screen. Show Pixel Ruler allows vertical and horizontal screen measurements, right clicking on it brings up its options which in the case also includes the ability to change its transparency to be able to use it as unobtrusively as possible. Show Magnifier enlarges areas the mouse is hovering on between 2x to 10x.

The color options includes Show Color Palette that acts as a reference for RGB, C++, Delphi and HTML color codes. With Open Color Picker colors are chosen and saved into the Color History where they can be saved in any of the aforementioned formats using the Copy Color As.

Capture Settings sets the output type (to PicPick itself, to clipboard and others), the image format of the output (JPG, BMP and others) and includes support dual monitors and auto scroll to capture whole pages like those that are not fully visible on the screen and have scrollbars. Subsequent to choosing the settings a whole range of capture possibilities are included in Screen Capture. Those include active window, fullscreen, region, freehand and what is called window control that captures the aforementioned whole page. As interesting and useful as PicPick is perhaps the best part is that even at that small download it also includes an image editor with all the usual features one may needs. Invert color, blur, rotate, crop, zoom, draw shapes and many more are all here.

An ongoing poll is running on the developer’s message board to vote for additional languages the program would be available in. PicPick is a very useful and lightweight image tool well worth a download.

May 13, 2009
SpaceSniffer Is An Attractive Disk Report Utility

As a follow up to this post reviewing 6 tools to view and analyze disk usage and this post on TreeSize here is review of SpaceSniffer. It is described by its author as

SpaceSniffer is a freeWare (or, better, donationWare) and portable tool application that gives you an idea of how folders and files are structured on your disks

SpaceSniffer is certainly one of the more attractive and fun to watch applications around. Upon launch and when a drive is chosen SpaceSniffer goes to work. As it does its analysis colorful (colors are configurable) rectangles appear in relative sizes creating a percent by percent 2 dimensional picture of the drive being analyzed.

Files and folders are given different colors as are free and unknown spaces. The latter 2 are excluded in the default analysis but that can be changed of course. If the program is left open while other changes are made to the system the affected folders are highlighted briefly. Single and double clicking a rectangle gives more information as it zooms to show a more complete picture, that is its subfolder(s) and contents, of the folder being clicked on. It is also possible to filter the whole drive or any other view for a more specific mapping of the analysis. For example by typing “<3months” (without the quotes) in the filter box only files that are less 3 months old will be shown.

SpaceSniffer runs on Windows 2000, XP and Vista and is a very useful 871KB zipped download. The download also includes a Quick Start PDF.

May 9, 2009
JetPhoto Lets You Manage Your Images

JetPhoto Studio is described by its author as

JetPhoto Studio is a feature-rich and easy-to-use digital photo software

With JetPhoto it is possible to organize photos into albums, and to archive and back them up as well. One can browse collections or albums in the usual thumbnail mode where not only it is also possible to add notes or tags to individual images or collections of images but it is also possible to star or favorite selected ones, view them by date either utilizing the file creation/modification information or EXIF details. Double clicking on individual photos takes the user to an (almost) full screen mode with some of the expected effects and tools included. Images can be made into a wallpaper or a screensaver, sepia effect can be added, the image can be cropped and watermark added just to mention a few.

One of the negatives of the concept of JetPhoto is that when it creates its albums it actually copies or replicates the photos. Perhaps it is possible to choose the album location (prompted when first creating it) to be in the same, originating folder that your images reside in but I did not test that possibility. Another unexpected behaviour or bug is that the magnifier did not always work in my usage, the icon did change to a magnifying glass one when the image was loaded into the full screen mode but actions -clicking and holding the mouse- had very little or no effect on the portion of the image the focus was on and even then that depended on the actual image size. A look at the program’s features pages explains

You can place your mouse pointer on an interesting part of a photo, press and hold the mouse button to reveal a magnifier which magnifies the image with actual pixels at full size of the original photo.

so perhaps this is not actually a full blown magnifier in the true sense of the word or is it?

JetPhoto makes it easy to search an album or across albums and besides the normal search criteria there are possibilities of searching photos by location if the photos have that info attached to them. To do that JetPhoto can connect to a map server to allow the geotagging of photos or to connect to google maps and generate KML or KMZ files for use with Google Earth.

JetPhoto adds a few attractive output options (see image) but some are either crippled by bearing the JetPhoto text in one frame (in the web flash gallery for example) and/or limits on the number of times they can be used to create an output. A PhotoJet server can be setup to store images online on any webspace using the program itself as a management interface. This is available as a sort of alternative to flickr, which the program itself also supports. JetPhoto runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP and Vista. A Mac OS X version is also available.

May 6, 2009
Depeche View Lets You Search For Text Fast

Depeche View is described by its author as

fast search tool loads all text file content from a folder into memory

Depeche View is capable of loading a very large amount of text in seconds and all into one window or instance of the application. In my usage I loaded over 100MB of text files in mere seconds. It does this by loading the files into memory so the program will actually show as a high user in the system’s task manager.

The real strength of Depeche View is in its other capabilities and the number of actions that can be taken with minimal, sometimes one, click. To start, Depeche View is a ‘search as you type’ application similar to that of Firefox’s search therefore eliminating extra typing and dialogue boxes. Some highlights (no pun intended) of the program are described in brief in the following lines. Shift-click on a word and all instances of the word will be highlighted. Right click on one instance of the search results to open a second window showing the search results leaving the original window for other searches or operations. Restrict the search to a case sensitive one by clicking the Case button to the bottom right of the program window. Click the Filter button in the same location to be presented with all and only the lines that contain the searched item. Use Showtab to highlight tabs and spaces in the opened files. Click Bookmk and then Alt-click a word to bookmark all instances of that word.

Depeche View has so many tricks and possibilities and even an Easy Settings button, the round object or button to the left of the bottom menu items. Pressing it deactivates such actions as the one-click search. It is not immediately clear to me why this makes the program easier to use but it is an option to try out.

As mentioned Depeche View has simply so many possibilities that can be played around with. Just as an additional example one can capture a clipboard item and perform a search for it. Read further in the ‘Further reading: help system contents’ section of the program’s homepage.

Depeche View can be used to search inside text files, within a folder, like in such things as source code, logs or simple text files and it can be set to read .bin files and hidden and system files as well, an extended edition can look into archive or .zip and .jar files too. It is freeware and doesn’t require installation.

April 30, 2009
RealWorld Paint.COM The Complete Image Editor

A relative unknown amongst the image editing freeware choices RealWorld Paint.COM is a surprisingly powerful and useful application. It is described by its author simply as

Web-graphic-master’s tool of choice

RealWorld Paint.COM makes it easy, barring the advanced functions used by

true graphics professionals, to scale the heights of the standard Photoshop. RealWorld Paint.COM is more than sufficient for most purposes. On launch the options are to create a new raster image, open an existing image, capture the desktop or open the clipboard stored image.
Going through the program one finds the usual requirements in crop, cut, zoom, rotate, mirror but also grid of various sizes that can be superimposed on images to make working on regions easier. Other necessities like border, transparency, color and brightness adjustment and not to mention bevel, drop shadow, fill, border, blur are all present and so is a good text editor with features like gradient text effects. The ability to import, export and use masks can be useful for organizing image editing tasks. Of course it is also possible to create layers with various filters and effect and import or export them. Of some importance is the multiple undo and redo available. Perhaps more notably it is also possible to work with photoshop compatible 8bf plugins (see images) and the ability to define, using an included editor (see images), plugins via the use of javascript. One can also use one of the few available or the one already included that takes screenshots. Perhaps a more unique feature to RealWorld is that
by right clicking an image the user can define mouse gestures (up, down, cross, circle, arrow, hourglass and many more) to automate everything from saving a file to shifting its hue.

More details can be read, discovered and seen by using this less than 7MB download and checking the software author’s wiki. Resulting images can be saved in the usual formats like JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG and others called ‘Layered image files’ and ‘RealWorld image files’ for images to be worked on later while preserving layers and effects much like other porfessional editors allow. RealWorld Paint.COM is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or 7 and is also available in a very convenient portable download. It is not to be confused with the better known PAINT.Net application however. On the DonationCoder forums RealWorld’s author explains the choice of the name in the following way

Yes, the Paint.COM name is controversial, a bit of a joke and something to counterweight the flood of .net apps. I am old school C++.

April 24, 2009
PhotoScape For All Your Image Editing Needs

PhotoScape is described by its author as

PhotoScape is the fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos.

The opening screen is an attractive and clear division of functions and features that can also be accessed in tab like fashion on the top of the screen. The program also displays random flickr images but this can be turned off.

The Viewer presents the well known explorer like interface with panes for navigation and preview. From there and via right click images can be set as wallpaper, become part of a slide show, rotated and double clicked to be viewed in full screen mode. In full screen mode a right click presents the aforementioned possibilities plus others like brighten, darken, zoom, and view EXIF info.
The Editor presents an ever growing number of filters. Most filters, and other effects, can accessed either via the accompanying drop down or by clicking on their respective buttons. They include the very impressive ‘Bloom’ and ‘Blacklight’ filters that give life and clarity to images. Here one can also resize an image, frame it, add line, objects and shapes onto it, apply a mosaic effect, apply free and preset crops, reduce red eye, and even reduce the appearance of moles. The Batch Editor can do all of the above on a set of images.
Page includes many templates to group a number of images into a page that can be saved. It is possible to drag and resize images to fit them within many sizes, mixes or shapes available. Frames and filters can be added as well to produce imaginative finished pages.

Combine is another form of the Page funtion described above. Here images can be grouped vertically or horizontally to produce a strip or multipage effect. Again many sizing and framing options are available here.
AniGif creates gif animations of course and with many required controls. Of course the delay between each animated frame can be controlled as well as the background color that fills any emtpy regions when the images are not exactly the same size. Additionally PhotoScape has 7 transition effects and crucially the ability to position images within the frames (center, top-right, etc.). The latter feature is important when the pictures are not the same exact dimensions and, when using some other animators, individual frames can be off relative to the next frame, but not with PhotoScape.
Print is sort of an extension of Page and includes various forms that let the user visualize different layouts and print images with configurable alignment, brightness and dots per inches (dpi). The finished product can also include such things as the file name under each image.
Splitter divides an image into different regions, be they configurable number of equal sized rows and columns or widths and heights.

Screen Capture, captures windows, full screens, rectangular regions and copies them to the clipboard or opens them in the Editor. It is also possible to repeat the last capture.
Color Picker provides the RGB or Hex value of any region via a zoomed and draggable ‘fountainpen’. PhotoScape also keeps a recent history of captured colors.
Raw Convertor, useful for DSLR camera images, converts raw formats (DNG, CRW, TIFF, etc) to the web friendly JPG. And finally Rename batch renames files with several renaming templates such as including the EXIF date, today’s date, numbered increments and others in the output file names.
PhotoScape, currently at v3.3, packs many features in a 14MB download and is one of the most complete freeware of any kind. It does not consume too much resources as it remained well under 40MB of RAM usage throughout extended use. As mentioned it is free, looking for donations, runs under all Windows from 98 to Vista, is actively developed and looking for translators as well.

April 20, 2009