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If you’ve got images that require just a little tweak here-and-there, it may not be worth your while to get out the big guns, like Photoshop. Maybe all you want to do is to adjust a little here and there.

With ImageTasks, you can apply changes to hue, saturation, brightness, and color balance. Included are twelve graphic filters to help give you just the look you want. You can add a watermark to your pictures, resize or crop your images, and convert among many popular graphic formats.

ImageTasks features easy-to-understand controls, and online tutorials will have you up and running in no time. A batch edit facility allows you to make your changes to several images, and then to save over your original files or to output to new files.

ImageTasks doesn’t support transparency; it can’t process RAW images from your digital camera or animated images, although the publishers promise to support that functionality in future releases.

ImageTasks requires Windows XP.

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If you have a question about a Mac, you’re going to find the answer in MacTracker. Processor speed, original operating system version, expansion slots–it’s all here.

MacTracker is the ultimate resource for all things Macintosh. Starting with the Lisa (Macintosh XL), you can see every computer and Apple-branded Mac-compatible device, such as printers, displays, scanners, operating systems, and extras (remember the iPod, kids?) that came out of Cupertino: pictures, specs, and even room for your own notes, with links to relevant Web sites and documents. There’s even a section for Mac clones. You can create your own “Smart Categories” to search and group information based on your own criteria, including your notes.

Along with the nitty-gritty specs, there are some cool images included with MacTracker. The info page for each system has a picture of the system, and for the computers, you can play the “Startup Chime”, and for some of the older systems, there is also a recording of the “Death Chime”–not a happy sound, that. Interesting historical tidbits are included also.

MacTracker is available in versions for MacOS 8.5+, OS X, Win2k+, and even iPod.

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Fob is a cute little kitchen timer application. It’s not an alarm, it won’t count up, but it will count down and let you know when a particular interval has elapsed. Fob just sits quietly in the Dock, counting down for you.

While you can set Fob on an ad hoc basis for timing this or that, its real power comes in the form of presets that you can create. Do you always let your tea steep for six minutes? Create a “tea” preset, and then next time you just select the preset, and you have your six-minute timer.

You can set multiple concurrent timers, so you can monitor more than one activity at a time.

The alarm itself is configurable. Alarms can be a one-time thing, or they can repeat. When time is up, you can have an icon bounce in the Dock, play a sound, or even run a program when the countdown gets to zero.

Fob is compatible with all flavors of OS X.

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As you know, when you’re online or working on your system, you leave tracks behind. Temp folders and files, search history, browser cache, autocomplete items–they’re all out there.

Free Internet Window Washer deals with all types of history data on your system. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Opera browser are all supported, as are toolbars and searches for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Data from Microsoft Office, popular IM clients, and may other applications are included. With over 100 plugins available, you can probably clean up after yourself for almost any application you’ve run on your system.

You can decide which items to delete by tweaking the settings for Free Internet Window Washer. If you want to save your cookies, but get rid of your browsing history, a couple of clicks sets you up. An “extra secure” mode is offered, that makes it virtually impossible to recover your cleaned-up files. You can configure the app to run at preselected intervals, so that you can clean up your mess even when you aren’t thinking about it.

As an extra added bonus, there is also a “boss key” that allows you to hide all your browser windows with the click of a button. Not that you’d ever need that, right?

Free Internet Window Washer supports all versions of Windows from Win95 forward.

Download Free Internet Window Washer 2.0

While it’s been available for Windows for quite some time, Mac-o-philes have never been able to use the Google Desktop–until now.

With Google Desktop, you increase the power of your searches, beyond what’s available to you with Spotlight. You can do a thorough search of your Mac’s files, while at the same time including your Gmail and browser history as part of that search. Conversely, if your are doing a Web search with Google and it turns out that you already have a relevant item on your local system–perhaps a document you downloaded just last week–it will also appear in the Google results page.

Google Desktop indexes your local files, so that it can look for relevant results when you run a search. As with the out-in-the-world version of Google, the Desktop app creates cached versions of these files. This means that if you happen to delete a document from your system and need to get it back, there is a good chance you will find it in the cache, saving you a lot of extra grief.

In much the same way that you can start local and expand to the Web, or vice versa, you can invoke Google Desktop locally, by pressing the [Command] key twice to bring up the Quick Search Box, or you can click on the Desktop link on the Google homepage.

Installing the application adds a Google Desktop preference panel to your System Preferences, configuring Google Desktop so that it will work best for you.

Google Desktop for Mac is, as with many Google tools, strictly speaking a Beta release, so you should heed standard warnings about not relying on it for mission-critical application. Google Desktop requires OS X 10.4+.

Download Google Desktop for Mac

Scanning documents into electronic documents can be a pain. Fire up the scanner, open Photoshop, scan your document, save as a .pdf file, and on and on. Wouldn’t it be easier to cut some of those steps out of the process?

Enter Scan2PDF. This app does only one job, but it does it well. Fire up Scan2PDF, scan your document, and save it as a .pdf file. It’s that easy.

Along with being able to scan and save your document, you can also manipulate your image. Rotate it, resize it, even scan multiple documents to make a multi-page .pdf. Scan2PDF also allows you to convert various image formats into .pdf files.

Scan2PDF is a German program that has been (mostly) localized into English. The leftovers that remain auf Deutsch are fairly easy to understand.

Scan2PDF runs on Win9x and later.

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Fish is an aquarium simulator for Macintosh systems. With Fish, you become the master of your underwater domain, adding fish of various tropical species and customizing the underwater environment to your liking. You can control the numbers and speed of your fish, as well as their sociability and even the speed of their metabolism. Feed your fish manually or automatically, and if the unthinkable happens–the inevitable “trip to the toilet” that befalls many a tropical fish–you have a Revive Fish button that will re-animate your piscine casualties.

Along with a normal human’s-eye-view of the onscreen action, you can choose from several other camera angles, including a fish cam, that allows you to view the world from the perspective of any of your fish. A full screen mode is available, making it easy to get totally caught up in your undersea world.

You can save your fish and aquariums from session-to-session, and there is even network capability, allowing you to share your fish with other users via Rendezvous.

Fish is compatible with all versions of OS X.

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If you have a stack of DVDs and a pile of VHS tapes, or wish that you did, then Coolector may be just the ticket.

Coolector is actually three applications in one. First, it’s a movie encyclopedia, with a database of over 30,000 movies and nearly 70,000 people. Figuring out who directed Lawrence of Arabia, or what scripts William Goldman put together is easy. With cross-references between people and films, you’ll be an expert on Hollywood’s best.

Second, it’s a video collection manager. Once your collection gets to a certain size, you may start to forget whether you actually own this film or that. With Coolector, you won’t have to dig through the stacks and piles–you will be able to check and know immediately whether you already have a particular film in your collection.

And finally, it’s a shopping tool. Coolector helps you locate movies online and even helps you find the best price. If you want both the widescreen and full screen versions of The Big Lebowski, Coolector may be just the tool for you.

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One of the great things about using computers in education is that with carefully crafted software, children can think they’re merely having fun, when in fact they are actually learning. Making any subject matter fun and interesting can go a long way toward engaging children in the education process, and help to reinforce the lessons they learn through teacher instruction and working through textbooks.

Math Games Level 1 for Windows, presented by the folks at Quiz-Tree.com, is a way for students to work with addition and multiplication with numbers from 1 to 12. Rather than just a rote memorization of facts, Math Games has learners interact with the computer in learning how to put numbers together. With a couple of clicks, users can select two numbers and an operation–addition or multiplication–and see what the resulting answer is. Images and controls on the screen are big and bold, so this application is especially suitable for younger students.

Math Games Level 1 for Windows is free for personal use.

Download Math Games Level 1 for Windows

USB flash drives are an easy, convenient way to carry files with you around the office or on the road.

Did you ever misplace one? What happens to your data then?

PicoCrypt is a tiny (13KB) application that will encrypt and decrypt text and binary files on any Windows system from Win95 on up. Using Blowfish encryption with a 128-bit key, PicoCrypt is small enough to load onto your flash drive along with your documents, so you never have to worry about your private data falling into the wrong hands.

Because PicoCrypt never writes your password to your system–hard drive, thumb drive, whatever–you keep security just that much tighter. When you encrypt a file, your original file is replaced with the newly-encrypted version, so you don’t have to worry about picking up after yourself. This also means that if you forget the password, you will never ever get your document back, so choose carefully!

PicoCrypt supports file selection via both drag-and-drop and browsing to a file on your system. PicoCrypt uses no installer and doesn’t touch the Registry, so you really can move it from system to system with no problem.

If portability and security are both important to you, you may want to give PicoCrypt a spin.

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