Unsung Heros

A peek at an assortment of ten interesting but unknown free programs.

This week, a very random assortment of some fantastic freeware that I have had the good fortune to find tucked away in the trenches of terra incognita over the years, but not found the occasion or opportunity to write about.

Yankee Clipper III
http://www.intelexual.com/products/YC3/
If you’re tired of XP’s measly clipboard, please switch to this clipboard extender pronto. YC3 chomps up over 200 text and RTF, 20 BMP and metafile, and 200 URL clipboard entries—with no size limits. It saves and re-uses "boilerplate" clippings. Hot-key driven, drag-drop enabled, it can also “float” on top of other applications for quick pastes. You’re a chronic copy-paste champ you’ll wonder how you ever managed without something like this.

PowerPro
http://powerpro.webeddie.com
Mitely but mighty! This efficient and versatile launch bar cum menu cum tray icon facility incorporates a whole gamut of useful functions-- hot keys, mouse actions, menus, timer, scheduler, program window controls--to help you dominate your OS. It lets you send keystrokes to programs, run commands when windows first open, manage virtual desktops, extend your clipboard, create keyboard macros, manage folders, sounds, wallpapers, and screensavers etc.

Wink
www.debugmode.com/wink
A natty tutorial creation proggie ideal for demoing how to use software. It let’s you capture screenshots, record mouse movements, bung in other images, record audio/voice-overs, type-in explanations for each step, create a navigation sequence—replete with buttons, delays, titles etc.--to create a pro looking self-running tutorial or presentation. Wink output formats include Macromedia Flash, HTML, standalone EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML etc. Need we say more?

Nvu
www.nvu.com
Pronounced N-view, this is a freeware web authoring system running the FrontPage and Dreamweaver lane. It provides first class integrated web file management and good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editing capabilities. An uncomplicated interface, decent publishing controls, tabbed editing, spell checking, etc. are some of its true virtues. Newbies, please note.

Keynote
http://sourceforge.net/projects/keynote/
Keynote is a powerful, flexible, multi-featured, tabbed notebook with a tree-based interface. A file can contain any number of notes which appear as separate tabs--and each tab can hold its own tree of subnotes! So you can create only one file, jot multiple notes inside it and make it a three-dimensional notebook; i.e. multi-level, nested pages within a single note. Keynote supports rich formatting, hyperlinks, images, macros, and even Blowfish or Idea encryption. Wah!

Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
www.ultimatebootcd.com
UBCD4Win is a bootable CD download bristling with software that can help you repair/restore/diagnose most computer glitches. It contains a mind blowing assortment of tools and utes for almost every conceivable Windows requirement, ranging from applications and antivirus software to tools for disk and partition management, diagnostics, compression, recovery, network, passwords, shell features, system information, and stress test/benchmarking etc. All software included in UBCD4Win is based on a "pre-install" CD environment.

Crypt Edit
www.woundedmoon.org/win32/ce/cedit.html
A rather ancient multi-document word processor with enhanced cryptography features. It saves to several formats, encrypts/decrypts binary files with compression, creates desktop shortcuts for documents, inserts OLE-objects and pictures. It includes an e-mail client with an address book, spelling checker, built-in clipboard viewer, various converters, character map, autoformat tool and all kinds of jazz. Most thrilling replacement for WordPad if nothing else.

MP3Gain
http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net
Sick of thumbing the volume buttons each time you play a load of MP3s? Get an MP3 normaliser like MP3Gain. This adjusts MP3 files so that they all play at a more or less even volume. Allegedly, MP3Gain does not reply on peak normalization, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear. No re-encoding is involved, the adjustment is lossless and there is no drop in audio quality. Whoopie!

Loopnote
www.loopnote.com
It is a new discovery and I haven't spent time with it. But it sounds interesting so you can sample it along with me. Loopnote is multi-channel notification service over four communication mediums--RSS, e-mail, SMS, and IM. Seems a neat way to keep people in your circle "in the loop" about events, happenings in your life, and other info you want to feed your friends and associates--selectively or en masse.

JDiskReport
www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html
A very handy way to glean what is eating up your hard disk. This tool analyses your disk and presents stats in the form of easy to understand overview charts and tables. It provides different “perspectives” about your disk drives: Absolute and relative sizes, size distribution, distribution of modification dates, and distribution of types. Each perspective has a pie chart, a bar chart, and a details table. It also collates a list of 100 largest, oldest, and newest files.