We find neat little apps all over the place and use them in our work, so we thought we’d share some of the best ones with BrainFuel readers. While most are for Windows, we do have a couple of Macs so you will see more for them soon.
“http://www.hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php” target=”_blank”>Enkoder Form
Stop spam with this script which encodes your email address so spambots can’t read it.
HTTrack Web site downloader
site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure.
Server Monitor
Is your website up right now? Are you sure? Use this handy tool to monitor sites, ip addresses, different ports, and so forth. It can send an email alert when a site is down.
LOMO Effect Photoshop Action
This is an awesome way to enhance your digital photos.
Amelie Effect Photoshop Action
A neat little Action that adds a tint of yellow and brightness/glow to your photographs. Click the link for examples and to download the Action.
TopStyle
This is the greatest program for editing cascading style sheets (CSS).
Pantone to RGB conversion
If you ever need to convert Pantone to RGB, this site has all of the colors including Hex and CMYK.
Picasa (like iPhoto for PC)
This is a great program, free two-week trial and then $30 to buy. It’s like iPhoto but for the PC and you can use it to sort and view all of your images. It has options to email, export, and some really basic optimize and crop tools. Nothing like Photoshop but it’s easy for simple image sorting. You can also attach keywords to your images and then you can search your images. I use this feature a lot when searching my 8000+ digital pictures.
Macromedia Studio MX
We use Macromedia products every day in our design and development work. Our favorites are Dreamweaver and Flash. Simply superb products.
Exifer
If you rotate your pictures after you take them, you might want to use Exifer (free). I’m using it to rotate my digital pictures instead of Windows or Photoshop. It preserves image details and quality (Lossless). Apparently if you use Windows to rotate your pictures it deletes the metadata (EXIF/IPTC) which stores info about your camera and picture details. More info on the site.
WebLog Expert
This is a great program (lite version is free and the Pro version is not too expensive) for analizing log files.
Adobe Photoshop
The greatest image editing application on earth. We also like Illustrator and InDesign, too!
dBpowerAMP
If you want to convert CD Audio, or WAV files to mp3, or a multitude of other formats, use dBpowerAMP (it’s a free program).
CloudMark
Tired of Spam? I get over 1300 spams a month and this new program will sync with the mothership to know which spam to delete. They say it is 75% successful. I say it’s more like 90%. Costs a couple of bucks a month.
Group Mail
When sending emails to a large group of people such as mailing lists, it is always a pain sending HTML or other formatted messages, and then dealing with SMTP limits your ISP may have. This program comes in three versions, including a free version, and it can do everything you’d want.
Karen’s Replicator
Another great app that is perfect for companies who need to regularily back up data over the network or on one computer. You can set it up to transfer files from any location to any location at a set time every day/week/month. It’s pretty neat. I’m using it every day for over 4 GB of data. Appears flawless.
KarenWare.com has some other free programs, too.
NetStat Live
A free program for Windows from AnalogX that shows your network trafic. It’s great if you are on DSL and you want to know just how much data you are sending and receiving.
IrfanView
A free image viewer for Windows that opens really fast and has a variety of slideshow options including mouse click in full screen mode through a directory.
EyeDropper 3.0 from inetia.com
This is a great free Windows eyedropper tool. I use it frequently. It minimizes to the taskbar tray and can let you get colors in CMYK, RGB, Web Safe, plus others.
CrossFont
This is a great Windows application that enables you to convert Mac fonts to PC, and vice versa.
StuffIt Expander for Windows
A great program that enables Windows users to extract files from .sit files plus a variety of other Mac compression formats. Check it out! It’s free.
Real Audio WAV Recorder
Using this free program, you can capture audio from a remote RAM file and it saves it to your computer as a WAV file. Very cool.