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Tag: editor

FreeText: Freeware Notebook

FreeText (Version: 1.1) is a lightweight, freeware notebook. It is somewhat basic and it is probably best suited for taking quick notes and be able to organize them on a simple page.

FreeText offers the chance to create folders and subfolders or perhaps nodes in what it calls Logic Frames. A Logic Frame becomes a root node that can be expanded and collapsed and given a title. Inside the box that is then created one can start typing and also add comments anywhere by clicking Comment.

Tables and images are supported. Tables are initially 4×4 but row(s) or column(s) can be deleted by highlighting and added by highlighting and using copy/paste. Images can be added from a file – and saved to a file – and edited. The Edit button shows the list from the system’s right click context menu for images.

FreeText does have basic find and replace and all notes are automatically saved and backed up with the frt extention in the system’s Document’s folder. Additionally they can be exported and imported via the File menu for use between machines although they still retain the same frt extension. FreeText works on XP and newer, including Windows 8.

February 13, 2013
Vieas: Image Viewer And Editor

Vieas (Version: 5.1.5.2) is a freeware image viewer with some editing features, it can be considered a lightweight alternative. The image formats it can can read or open are gif (including animated), jpg, png, bmp, tiff and it can read from zip (and other archive formats via plugins). There are no plugins currently available (?). The output or save formats are the same with few exceptions such as animated gifs.

The program’s interface is not a typical one because by default it opens without a menu or toolbar and they are only shown when the mouse is moved to the top of the program window. A menu is also shown with a right click. Vieas remains an image viewer until the ‘Change to edit window’ button (or Tab key) is pressed.

Vieas features crop, resize, canvas resize, rotation, mirror, flip, equalize, gamma, brightness, contrast, highlight, shadow, color balance, hue, saturation, replace color, negative, blur and a few others. It can also print, stay on top, show exif info, set images as wallpaper and features multi-monitor support.

The program’s options are available when right clicking or when in the edit window, they include the following.

Choosing how the program starts, with its main window, edit window or full screen. Toggling the ‘Change the window size to fit a displayed image’ and slideshow interval. Various zoom options that control quality and size of the image and window. Various options for mouse controls such as what double click, left click, mouse wheel and other combinations do. For example double click to full screen. Up to eight placeholders to launch external files or folders. These will be available via right click —> Tools. A plugins tab to add any of the aforementioned plugins. Finally the option to associate various image formats with Vieas and add it to the Send to menu.

Vieas is available in both installer and portable versions and requires Windows XP and newer.

January 5, 2013
BabelPad: Feature Rich, Unicode And Freeware Text Editor

BabelPad (Version: 6.2.0.3) is a text editor or word processor that comes with a lot features, especially if Unicode, fonts or foreign languages are concerned. BabelPad supports rendering to make different language display properly, in particular it uses Microsoft’s Uniscribe services. It is made to ease rendering of different fonts, simplified and traditional Chinese for example. It supports CR and LF new line formats, left to right and right to left layouts, encoding like UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, ISO-8859-8 (Hebrew), ISO-8859-6 (Arabic), Windows CP 1258 (Vietnamese), EUC-JA (Japanese), TSCII (Tamil) and many more and saves files in some and auto-detects them in many cases too.

Other features are drag and drop files, multiple undo/redo and an option to auto-indent text as you type, open large files and not only do a normal find and replace but batch replace whole series of words (Edit —> Batch Replace). Text conversion is another part of its strength in Unicode. It can convert case for multiple encodings and languages, between simplified and traditional Chinese, HTML entities to Unicode characters and lots more like it.

Other tools included are font coverage, analysis and information to provide info about an open document or any section of one. An advanced character frequency and character map with 1000s of character and symbols. An Advanced Character Search tool (Tools —> Advanced Character Search) where it can scan an open document for every kind of character combination one can come up with (see image.)

BabelPad is less than a 3MB download and the few words above are just scratching the surface of the number of options available. It can run on Windows 2000 and newer and is made available in a portable version by portableapps.com

October 31, 2012
Aimersoft Video Studio Express Review And Halloween Giveaway

Video Studio Express is one of the many easy to use software from Aimersoft. I received the news that the developers are having a Halloween giveaway of the program – which normally costs $35 – along with discounts on some of their other programs. A brief review of the Video Studio Express follows.

As always working with such tools begins with importing the media, using the Add Media button. Video Studio Express supports most input formats including those from iDevices and others like AVI, MOV, MP4, MPG, MKV, FLV, WMV and audio formats like MP3, OGG, WMA, FLAC and others.

When importing one or more videos drag them to the time line and you will notice they can occupy any place in the time line so a video can start from any moment in time with its (if any) audio linked to it. If there is no audio the background music section, lower most on the time line, can be edited to add your own.

When more videos are added transitions can be added by using the Transitions button. Many are available to make the completed video look more professional. These include blind, merge, column split, drop, roll, wave, wind and others. A preview is shown when any one of the transitions is clicked. Optionally gaps between video can be removed using the Remove All Gaps button which is the right most one above the timeline. There is a split option as well. It is done by dragging the ‘indicator’ anchor to a point on the time line and clicking the Split button.

Click and highlight either the video or audio and click the pencil like edit button. Audio can be lowered and faded in or out. The video can be rotated, resized and its aspect ratio changed. Its brightness, saturation and contrast can edited. Additional available effects are emboss, gray, negative, old film and various deinterlacing methods.

When done click the Export button on the top right and choose device, format or Youtube. Videos can be saved for iPhones, iPads, PS3 and others or in one of many formats like mov, wmv, mp4 and even DVD PAL, SECAM and NTSC. It is also possible to upload videos directly to Youtube by providing login, title, description, tag and category details. Videos can be saved locally as a project as well.

Video Studio Express should work on Windows XP and newer. A Mac version is available too.

October 27, 2012
ToolWiz Pretty Photo: Fun, Feature-Packed Freeware Image Editor

ToolWiz Pretty Photo (Version: 1.5) is a freeware image editor with lots of features that place it very high when compared to other free, shareware and expensive editors.

ToolWiz Pretty Photo supports the more common picture formats and can also do screen captures. Screen captures, available from the File menu, are rectangular ones created with click and drag of the mouse. When an area is chosen a mini toolbar offers to save the capture, open or return to ToolWiz Pretty Photo’s window or add any of a collection of shapes, lines or text immediately.

ToolWiz Pretty Photo can merge layers, when objects are added to an image for example. It can rotate, crop and move layers to the back or front.

The Add Objects menu has a large collection of symbols in addition to lines and shapes such as rectangle and ellipse and others like cloud popups.

The Adjust Picture menu features the common resize, hue/saturation, color balance, curves, levels, brightness/contrast and invert. Additionally Add Frame adds a (configurable thickness) border that can be filled with a solid color or another image. A shadow can be added in a similar manner and the Picture Selection option allows the user to select and crop any part of an image. The cropped section can be a rectangle, ellipse, round rectangle or lasso (free form.)

The Beautify menu is the fun part of ToolWiz Pretty Photo. Available options include Add Wig, Blush, Eyebrows, Necklace, Glasses, Mask, Hat, Pupils and more. Various other effects are also available and include adding Mosaic Paint to an image. Color Paint is another which turns an image into grayscale and then allows the user to color section(s) of the image. Soft Focus Paint (shown in the image above) is another useful feature to blur out an image and then only reveal a part of it.

Image Filter includes 39 “art filters” such as Gothem, Kelvin, Nashville, Toaster, Lomo, Polaroid, Sunshine Beach, Old Photo, Early Bird, Brannan, White and Black, Closer Black and White, Emboss, Happy Tone, Color Emboss, Diabolical and others. Emboss, AntiAlias, Add Noise, Pencil, Split Blur, Motion Blur and Fill Light are here as well.

ToolWiz Pretty Photo requires Windows XP or newer, it is available in a portable version as well.

October 17, 2012
DtPad: Interesting Freeware Text Editor

DtPad (Version: 2.7.4.40) is a text editor with an interesting and potentially useful set of features.

The file menu can open a new document and paste the contents of the clipboard into it automatically. It can open a web page source by typing the address inside DtPad. There are options to save file(s) in zip format, save one as pdf or get or save documents in Dropbox using DtPad’s internal browser.

The edit menu can append text to existing files and ‘swap’ highlighted text with the contents of the clipboard. One can select text by multiple rows too.

The view menu is the place to launch the command prompt, hide or show an annotation panel (see image), launch a hexadecimal viewer/editor or a Windows hosts file editor.

DtPad also has a session feature that is not just save or restore but also can list ‘lost’ (those that were part of a saved session but may not exist anymore) files and more.

The search feature is a powerful one, options like highlight results are there so are number of occurrences and find or replace last and next occurrence. All come with regular expressions support. DtPad can also look for patterns like duplicate rows, capitalized words, html tags, IP addresses and email addresses. Not forgetting searching selected or highlighted words using google or wikipedia.

The actions menu is where tabs (different open files) can be merged and compared, indentation added, rows moved up and down, case converted, html converted to text and vice versa, space converted to tab, date inserted and lots more. Other interesting features like validating html and translating selected text too.

Options is the menu to toggle word wrap, choose file encoding and font plus export or import DtPad’s settings.

Tools is the place for launching external programs. Notepad and Internet Explorer are available by default but others can be added.

DtPad’s side panel has a notes section to keep text or notes that don’t belong in the files themselves, a tab explorer to move or sort open files, a file explorer to navigate and browse the system, a clipboard monitor, a calculator, a calendar, and another location for searching inside files.

The program settings (Options—>Settings) include options for the looks and feel of the program and others to add DtPad to the Send To, Open With and Windows 7 jump list menus.

DtPad requires Microsoft Windows XP or newer and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4. It is available in a portable version.

September 13, 2012
Alternate Pic View: Freeware Image Tool

Alternate Pic View (Version: 1.424) is an image viewer and editor. It has features common to most image viewers. By default the Folder view (show thumbnails and explorer tree) and Allow multiple windows (view images in tabs) are toggled off or disabled. Click their respective icons to enable them (see image).

Alternate Pic View does full screen capture (File—>Capture) and another more advanced method via its Tools menu called Capturer. Here all open windows are listed and the user can choose which to capture (see image). Under Tools there is a convertor and icon extractor as well. The former can convert to any one of bmp, gif, ico, tiff and others with any of resize, keep metadata, mirror, flip, swap colors, pixelize, sharpen, grayscale and alien effect.

Alternate Pic View can resave image by adding increments, for example if image.jpg is open repeatedly clicking File—>Save numbered (F7) will save the image as image__0000.jpg, image__0001.jpg, etc. Copy, crop and paste operation are available, for both whole images and selections. Its collection of effects are rotate, mirror, invert alpha, sharpen, blur, contrast/brightness, adjust color, noisify, pixelize, relief, negative, grayscale, redeye reduction, swap colors, alien effect and random. Using the effects menu one can change the image size, extend the canvas size or more unusually split an image – either by image coordinates or by selection area.

Alternate Pic View can also work straight from a scanner with Twain source and it can also do slideshows. In some instances Alternate Pic View is not the most intuitive. Two features only become apparent only when an image is right clicked in the thumbnail area. First there is an image compare feature which compares two images but it is not obvious how the second one can be chosen or if it works at all. Second there is the animated gif feature which again doesn’t seem to do anything other than let the user click forward or rewind to view each individual frame.

On the editing side it has color picker, pen, pencil, brush, line, arrow, fill, brush, rectangle, round rectangle, ellipse and freehand. Of note is that Edit—>Find pictures will scan a folder for image files. Alternate Pic View should works on all Windows versions.

September 3, 2012
LazPaint: Open Source Graphics Editor

LazPaint (Version: 4.8) is open source and is a good and very capable alternative to any full featured image or graphics editors. Some of its features are listed below using its menu as a reference and the images attached to this review highlight a few of them.

LazPaint can do multiple undo and redos and paste as and paste as new image. Selections are available as rectangle, ellipse and polygon, these are complemented with curve that can create complex shapes or areas based on initial and end points. Selections can be edited, rotated and there is also the magic wand to automatically select objects within an image. Change canvas size and flip are available too as is zoom which includes a ‘Smart zoom’.

Shift colors (Colors—>Shift colors) and Deformation (Tool—>Deformation)

Colorize and shift colors work really well and change an image smartly. Intensity, lightness, normalize, negative, linear negative and grayscale are equal or superior to other similar programs. Pen, color picker, eraser, gradient, fill, shaded shape (many available shapes with adjustable light sources), text, deformation (image is divided into any number of grids and then any section of the grid can be dragged to distort portion(s) of an image) and texture mapping take LazPaint into more advanced territory.

Filter are mostly the common ones with different blurs (radial, motion, disk, fast, precise), sharpen, smooth, pixelate, cleartype, contour and emboss all there plus plane. The latter comes with a warning that it is a slow process (see last image for what the first image image is transformed into using plane). Finally render adds any one of various objects over a selection or the whole image.

Plane (Filter —>Plane)

LazPaint is multi-platform written in Lazarus, has command line support and so can take advantage of the BGRABitmap library, read more at http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/LazPaint and http://wiki.freepascal.org/BGRABitmap. Input file formats supported are bmp, jpg, png, gif, ico and Paint.NET’s pdn and it can save to bmp, png and jpg.

Image in the screen shots is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/puksdesign/5896307147/in/photostream

August 28, 2012
Free Screenshot Capture: Freeware Screen Grabber

Free Screenshot Capture (Version: 1.5.0 tested) is a freeware screenshot grabber that does a bit more. Upon install it presents a wizard (see image below) where its options and features are available at a glance. It also tries to register its default shortcuts to use. There is a likelihood that at least one (Ctrl+Shift+C for example) is taken by another application but the shortcut can be changed to something else via the Change Shortcuts options available by right clicking the program’s tray icon.

Free Screenshot Capture can be invoked via its shortcuts and via right click and of course by clicking on the aforementioned wizard. It can capture the full screen, part of the screen, full screen with delay, an elliptical region and also the webcam. Additional tools include a protractor, color picker, screen ruler, screen magnifier, screen brightness – to change screen brightness and gamma – and a whiteboard. The whiteboard is somewhat confusing, it prompts the user to choose one of the tools (text, rectangle or ellipse for example) and that tool is drawn on the screen to reserve that section of the screen for annotation or text to add to a screenshot. It seems that it works only for a full screen screenshot but that is not obvious.

After a screenshot is taken the program tools become visible. They include blur, shape, line, arrow or text. These can be added to the screenshot. An external editor or Microsoft Paint can be opened to edit the image as well. One can also directly save or copy the image.

Free Screenshot Capture also features a touch mode for tablet devices, the user can switch to it by clicking on the hand icon on the far top right of the program. It runs on Windows 2000 and newer.

July 31, 2012
BImageStudio: Freeware Simple Image Editor

BImageStudio (Version: 1.2.1 tested) is a freeware and simple image editor with some basic tools and an unusual method of working with images.

Features or tools that are included are edit, resize, crop, rotate, flip, watermark (image and text), rename and convert. BImageStudio can work in batch as well. What is somewhat different about BImageStudio is how this is done. One must add individual or folder of images using the add button or drag and drop them. The black and white interface and larger than usual interface of the program shows thumb previews of the image(s) and the buttons under the preview(s) allow the user to view them in pane (like windows explorer), gallery (like windows’ flimstrip) and details (like an explorer list).

When one or more image is selected the operations are chosen from the left hand side. Everything can be done from this left hand side, however to ‘set filter’ – use the brightness, contracts, saturation, hue and gamma sliders – is left to a separate window.

The watermark is also added in a separate window and lets the user choose a position for the watermark, either set to a corner or a custom one. Renaming is basic and simple using a file name, separator and increment or counter.

Finally one must click the process button to start the operation. BImageStudio prompts the user to choose which operation to do first, second and later. For example if images are being renamed and resized the user must choose which of the two BImageStudio processes first.

BImageStudio works on Windows XP and newer.

June 17, 2012