For all your periodic table of the elements needs.
Okay, this might be kind of specialized, but I just had to include it because it’s so nicely implemented. I guess the only way to describe it is that it’s the nicest and potentially most useful periodic table of the elements I’ve ever seen.
These two spell-checking applications look almost exactly the same. So much so, that I wonder if they are the same code. Broken-notebook has a listing on sourceforge, so I’m inclined to think it must be the original.
In any event, these simple, online utilities act and feel very similar to using spell-check in a word professor. Type your text in the box. Click “check spelling”, and misspelled words are underlined in red. Click on the red words, and alternative solutions appear, nice and neat.
I need to be clear about this. This is by no means the best online dictionary. It’s the best, most user-friendly, dictionary application. For more authoritative word definitions, go to Merriam-Webster or Dictionary.com, both of which are great resources.
ObjectGraph Dictionary makes the list because it acts the most like a paper dictionary, only a lot faster. It uses the type-ahead technique, which Google made famous with Google Suggest. I found it interesting when used by Google, but ideal when used by a dictionary. If you haven’t seen this type of application yet, prepare to be impressed.
I have to admit. I feel a little sorry for MapQuest. For years, it dominated the online map niche. They were true innovators, and are probably the single most important reason I haven’t bought a paper map in many years. You might not be aware, but most alternatives, like Yahoo! Maps, actually licensed and re-branded MapQuest.
I have now completely abandoned MapQuest in favor of Google Maps.
GMail might be the application that precipitated the current onrush of AJAX applications, but GoogleMaps is the most universally useful. GMail is great and everything, but you can still use email without it. There is no real web-based alternative to GoogleMaps. There have been a couple companies that achieved a similar interface by using Java, even before Google, but they’re slow-to-load and more kludgy.
In GoogleMaps, Google achieved what most believed impossible, a quick, responsive, mapping application that lets you quickly drag your way around the map, zoom in or out, overlay satellite photos, use plain-speech address searching. All in your browser.
Recently, GoogleMaps has integrated with Google Local. This is a very good thing. You can easily search for businesses in a particular area like “dog groomers in eastern Tuscaloosa”. This comes as great news for all those eastern Tuscaloosa dog groomers.
Absolutely Free Software -
Best Free Web-Based Informational / Educational Applications
I know what you do. All those different passwords you need to register for those websites? You use the same one, don’t you? Your mom’s middle name, right?
It’s really hard to keep track of all the passwords and PIN numbers we need today. A password manager saves them all with a master password, so you only have to remember one. Then you can use a different one when registering at that cat-fanciers website.
I used to recommend PINs for this category, and I still believe it’s a great piece of software. However, KeePass is open source, meaning that anyone can view its source code to verify that the algorithms that encrypt your data are implemented correctly. For any type of encryption software, this is a big plus.
thanks to Kai Duebbert for the lead!
It’s essential to get email on the road. Both Mobility Email and Portable Thunderbird allow you to do this safely and securely. Again, without leaving traces on the host computer. Both programs are based on Thunderbird, and both are excellent.
As of version 2.4, AbiWord now has a grammar checker! Even OpenOffice doesn’t have this. Yet.
As impressive as OpenOffice is, you may rather have just a word processor. If you never use spreadsheets or make presentations, why bog your computer down with software you don’t need? AbiWord is the best of the free word processors. It starts up very fast, and uses very little hard drive space and memory.
This is quite remarkable. Clones of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that run in your browser. Very well. For free.
These are java applications and take about a minute to open up the first time you run them, but after being run once, they can be opened very quickly.
ThinkFree opens and saves to standard Microsoft Office formats: DOC, XLS, PPT. They can even save to PDF, something that MS Office doesn’t do yet. To make this clear, you open up local files and can save them on your hard drive. If you want to save them to ThinkFree’s servers, they give you 30MB of storage space.
One neat trick that this web app does is allow direct posting to your blog. This means you can use a real word processer to create your entries instead of your limited blogging tools.
All the standard word processing functions are here, including immediate spell-check, headers & footers, footnotes, field entry, tables, even a clip art gallery. Similarly, the PowerPoint clone, ThinkFree Show, looks and acts almost exactly like its Microsoft counterpart, with templates, animation effects, notes, etc.
I’m most impressed with Calc, the Excel knock-off. It has auto-correct options, 300 functions, chart wizards and auto-fill along with a variety of print options.
Truly impressive.
If your idea of organization centers primarily on to-do lists, this is the application to use.
Remember The Milk is very similar to BackPack, but it has a some different features, focusing more on lists than notes. You can create as many different lists as you want and schedule tasks in real English such as “next month” or “Tuesday 9AM”.
If you’re a user of the popular David Allen’s “Getting Things Done (GTD)” system, this is an excellent companion.
A few things make this online application stand out.
Other features include:
The interface is fast and clean and very intuitive to use. Highly recommended.
Web applications are becoming more popular as the sophistication of AJAX increases and as broadband becomes more prevalentv. Many companies are finding it profitable to offer free services to individuals while making money from corporate licenses.
If you don’t want or need a full office suite, take a look at Portable AbiWord. It’s much smaller than OpenOffice and faster, too. John Haller created this version of the excellent AbiWord word processor to perform even faster than the original.
Tiny(<100K), stand-alone BitTorrent client. It’s not quite as powerful as Azureus, but it uses much fewer system resources. It supports all the goodies: simultaneous downloads, rate-limiting, prioritization, etc.
A simple tool designed specifically for USB drives. In order to run the application, at all, you must enter the correct password. Then, specific files or folders can be encrypted each with their own, unique password. Simple concept, nicely executed.
OpenOffice Writer 2.0 vs. Microsoft Word 2003
The common wisdom of OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office can be summed up in a few, choice phrases.
OpenOffice is probably good enough for most users.
Microsoft Office costs several hundred dollars, but you can get an educational version for 150 without having to prove you have anything to do with education.
Hardcore Excel users don’t think Calc is good enough for their needs.
OpenOffice saves to PDF files. MS Office doesn’t.
Though OpenOffice can open and save to Office formats, tricky stuff like advanced tables or headers and footnotes might not format properly.
In other words, the general consensus is that OpenOffice might be good enough and might have a few neat features, but it’s not as good, and MS Office can be purchased for a lot less than the "official" price.
Let’s really break a few things down and take a look at what for most users is the most important component of an office suite, the word processor.
New! Updated October 5, 2005 - HovText is a much simpler tool than Ditto, but it does one thing that Ditto doesn’t do, it “removes any formatting from the clipboard. Any text in the clipboard will be pasted as raw text without any HTML code, font size, color or layout etc.” If this is something you need, well, you just have to have it. It also remembers the last 10 things copied to your clipboard.
Ditto is quite a bit more advanced. “It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ….. ”
So, take your pick. One of these tools will suit your needs.
KeyNote shares some functionality with EverNote, but isn’t as robust. It doesn’t store images or clip web pages for example. It does, though, provide an excellent outliner for text-only notes. For keeping lists, or text snippets with built-in encryption, this is a fine alternative.
Very handy tool to get an overview of how much disk space is used, how much is left, and where the files are. WinDirStat has three views to display its information, a directory list, a treemap, and an extension list which shows information about file types.
It’s difficult to explain how handy this can be unless you try it out. You can uncover all kinds of information. Remember that partially downloaded ISO that you never completely got? This tool is perfect for revealing that kind of forgotten disk usage.
Anybody that’s used Windows for more than a month is familiar with the fourth most common hotkey combination of all: Alt-Tab (after Ctrl-C, X and V). TaskSwitchXP adds some much-needed functionality, mainly by displaying a thumbnail preview of your running apps. It also has a few more tricks up its sleeve. Process and window management and the ability to minimize / maximize windows or groups.
New Standard Revolutionizes Portable Software —
I introduced the Best Portable Freeware List a few weeks ago, and the response has been tremendous. Portable Freeware, if you remember, is software that requires no installation and runs on USB drives: memory sticks, key drives, portable hard drives, even iPods.
Based on the email I’ve received, I can tell that the demand for a secure, “traveling office” is huge. Thanks to developers such as John Haller, who has developed portable versions of OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird, you can now take your work and play with you from machine to machine on your USB key drive, without leaving traces on your host machine.
It just got even easier.
Here’s a list of the very best free web development tools available.
Forget P2P music sharing, ebook warez, Google hacking, movie torrents. Get your lazy digital self down to the online L, where the legit, wired services surpass the pirate scene.
Libraries are online in a big way with music available for request, ebooks ready to download, games waiting for checkout, magazines, movies, and, oh yeah, books.
Opera was formerly adware and has just been released as freeware. Is it worth it to make the switch?
Firefox is a runaway success. With over a gazillion downloads (a gazillion and fifty-four, to be exact), it’s the most popular consumer open source application of all time.
Opera is the older sister that doesn’t get as much attention because she’s, you know, older. She’s not as much of a party animal. Until very recently, it cost you to take her out. Or at least, God forbid, listen to her advertisements. That’s changed, though. She’s not just cheap now. She’s free. Just like her younger sister, Firefox. … read more
It seems that almost every web page you view these days has Google AdSense texts ads spread across the top or down the side.
These ads have never bothered me. They are easy enough to ignore and besides, website owners are entitled to earn a living just like the rest of us.
However, lately some sites have started embedding the Google ads in the center of the page or worse still, right in the middle of a block of text. So I decided enough was enough and started looking for ways to block the ads.
It turns out that it’s dead easy to stop them. In this article I show you how.
Subscriber Troy Sims has just written to let me now about this deal mentioned on the Raymond CC Blog. This is for a full version of Spyware Doctor not the Google cut down version, it includes anti virus protection and the license is for 12 months. Here’s the link direct to the original blog article:
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/08/02/free-1-year-latest-spyware-doctor-with-antivirus-6-and-privacy-guardian-41-license-key/
I’ve also posted this to our reviews of free anti-spyware products
Looking for the best free BitTorrent program? If so you should read our editor’s updated review. Not only only does he tell you the best products but he also throws in some very handy usage tips.
Digital cameras may be the best thing since sliced bread, but almost all current cameras have a glaring weakness; they take poor photos in conditions where both brightly lit and dark areas feature in the same shot. Typically the dark areas come out black and/or the white areas get bleached
HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography is a technique that overcomes this problem. It works by combining several shots of the same scene taken using different exposure settings, into a single photo that is correctly exposed in both the light and dark areas. The results can be quite spectacular.
The good news is there are some great free software products that will do all the work for you. In this review our editors pick the best of the freebies.
Using a hotel computer, one in an internet cafe or airport is a risky business.
In this guide Gizmo shows you some practical steps you can take to make using a public terminal safer. There are no glib one line answers here but serious advice to address a serious problem.
I’ve been waiting years to find a program like this.
It fixes and cleans up failed software installation and failed installs.
We’ve all experienced the siuation; you install a program, don’t like it and try to uninstall it but something goes wrong.Worse still you can’t find the uninstaller!
You sit there thinking what do I do now?
Geeks can fix the problem by editing the registry. Now there’s no need as this program does the job for you. It’s one of several excellent freebies recommended in our section on uninstallers.
Many users believe that when they delete a file from their PC containing confidential information, that it’s gone forever.
Not so; in many cases it can easily be recovered. That means your confidential information may be visible to all.
In this article our editors suggest some free utilities that will delete your data permanently, so that it can never be recovered.
Also recommended is a nifty free utility that scrubs your PCs hard drives clean so you can sell or give away your PC comfortable in the knowledge that the next owner won’t be able read any of your personal files.