Free Download A Day

They're all files. Whether you're talking about documents, images, web pages, applications, or any of dozens of other chunks of information on your system, what you've got is a bunch of files. Whether it's your vacation photos, or the specifications for your next project, it'd be nice to have a way to keep track of all of these guys.

You can always organize files by dropping them into appropriately-named folders. That works fine until you have a file that belongs in two different folders. Now you have to crate elaborate lists of shortcuts, aliases, symbolic links, or other "tricks" to let a file live in two places at once. Or maybe you can start "tagging" files with TaggedFrog.

TaggedFrog is a tool that lets you assign tags to your files. Now when you flag a file as being part of the "Smith Proposal" or the "new product rollout", it doesn't make any difference where the file lives, because TaggedFrog will keep track of them all for you. Just choose a file—or files—and drag them into the app, assign some appropriate keywords, and you're done. Now it's easy to keep track of which files belong to which project, and that lets you focus on getting your work done, instead of getting bogged-down in the minutia of file management.

TaggedFrog is a Windows application. It runs under XP (SP2) or Vista, and requires Version 2.0 of the .NET Framework.

Download TaggedFrog

There are lots of tools that will help you find an image online. Type in some keywords, and they look for images that seem to be relevant to those terms. That may mean that the images are a part of some collection, or that they appear on web pages that include those terms in their text.

What if you need to go the other direction? Suppose you have an image and you want to know where it came from? Now you're not searching for text associated with a particular image—you're actually looking for that image itself. While handy, that's really not something that's been available before.

Enter TinEye. Upload your image, and TinEye digs through its database to see where your file came from. Certainly they don't have every image from the Web in their system, but their database is constantly growing. By looking at your image and creating a digital "fingerprint" of it, they can then take that and compare it with other images they've already indexed. This allows them to correctly identify images—complete or partial—that match yours, even if it's been cropped, color-adjusted, or even rotated. They don't depend on facial recognition technology, watermarks, or any other particular part of the image's content.

TinEye is a free online service.

Download TinEye

While maybe it's not so true any more in the day and age of self-serve gas, way back when, you used to be able to drive into your local service station and tell the neatly liveried attendant to "check under the hood." If you tried that today, there'd be nobody to address it to, and even if there were, they might well laugh at you.

Your computer's another matter. While you may not be having any specific big deal problems, there's always that nagging sense in the back of your mind that things could run just a little bit smoother. So who do you ask to "check under the hood" on your favorite desktop or laptop machine? You might want to give DiskHeal a look.

DiskHeal is a tool you can use to tune-up and tweak your system. It'll let you play with appearance settings, security adjustments, tweak control panel settings, and even fix some common system errors. And it won't even leave greasy fingerprints on everything like the gas station attendant.

DiskHeal is a free Windows application. It will run under Windows NT/2000 and later.

Download DiskHeal

If you're like us, you can't sit down at your computer without firing-up your web browser. Whether it's online services you use regularly, like Gmail, or other resource sites you visit multiple times a day, you just can't get anything done without them. You can bookmark sites and pages, but maybe you're specifically interested in a particular paragraph, image, or maybe a snippet of code on a page, rather than the whole page. It'd be cool to be able to create your own online "knowledge base" to track just the things you want to keep track of.

NetNotes is a tool that can help you to do just that. Compatible with IE 7 and Firefox browsers, just pick the piece of information you want to capture, right click on it, and you can add it to your knowledgebase. Now you can categorize, organize, and search your info, and really get some work done.

NetNotes is a Windows application. You'll need WinXP and a browser (IE or Firefox) to take advantage of all its features.

Download Canaware NetNotes

Need to send somebody a list of links? Maybe you've found a bunch of great resources for a report you're working on. You can copy and paste them into an email, but that can get kind of tedious pretty quickly. And what if you're sharing with with somebody who's using a mobile browser, or just receiving SMS text messages on their cell phone? Now message size comes into play.

1link is an online service that lets you send a bunch of links all at once. Rather than a list of individual links, you simply enter your links into 1link, click the button, and get a URL you can easily send to anybody. Copy and paste it into your message, and when your recipient clicks on it, they'll get your whole list of links, each one opening in a separate tab or window in their default web browser.

1link is a free service. You'll need a web browser to use it, and of course an email application if you want to send your 1link links to somebody else.

Download 1link

We're always looking for a new way to try to organize the zillions of pieces of information that we come across in a given day. We've recently discovered The Guide, which seems to have a lot to offer here.

The Guide lets you create "guides"—documents that let you organize information in a hierarchical fashion, much like an outline. You're working with two panes, the left one to arrange and rearrange your categories, and the right one to enter your text.

The organizational pane comes with a set of icons that lets you flag nodes that require special attention. The editing pane has a full-featured RTF editor, so you can format your text. It supports Unicode characters, so there's probably not a language it can't work with. Guides are fully searchable, and they support hyperlinks within documents, between documents, and even to emails and web pages. It's small enough that you can carry it with you on a USB stick, so you'll never be without your information.

The Guide is a Windows application. It requires Win2k or better.

Download The Guide

Planning a big party? Hosting the social event of the season? That's all well and good, but if you don't have any guests, it doesn't really mean too much. If you want guests, you need to invite them. One of the easiest—and cheapest—ways to invite anybody to your important event is to grab a free Printable Invitation.

You can grab Printable Invitations for all different kinds of events, from birthday parties, to holiday events, to milestone celebrations, like weddings and graduations. With over a hundred different designs to choose from, you're sure to find just the right invitation. You just download them and print them on plain paper, fold them up, write your message, and you're good to go. They're available in two different sizes, so you can send a little invitation (maybe for a little event) or a larger one to really grab everybody's attention.

Printable Invitations are available for free download in PDF format, so you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to print them out. If you don't mind spending a few bucks, all of the invitation designs are also available in Microsoft Word DOC format, so you can edit the cards—add the recipient's name or include directions to your event.

Download Print Invitations

You've got a big file that you seed to send to somebody else. Many email programs and ISPs have issues with large attachments, so you can't always just attach your file to an email. There's always FTP, but then you have to know how to use it, and have server space out there for your file to land on, so that your recipient can grab it for download. It would sure be handy to have something a little bit friendlier to rely on for this important task.

YouSendIt might be what you're looking for here. You don't even have to sign up—although you'll get more flexibility if you do—to upload files. You'll get a URL you can share with your intended recipient—all you have to do it email it to them, and they'll be able to download your file with their web browser. It doesn't get much easier than that.

When you register for the free Lite version, you can upload files up to 100MB in size, and download them a hundred times. You also get options to PDF your files, so you don't have to worry whether your recipient has Microsoft Word, for example. You and also password protect your files and receive notification when they're downloaded.

YouSendIt is a free online service.

Download YouSendIt

Where would you be if all your email just went away? Whether it's important communications from others, or just notes and reminders you've sent yourself, you'd probably be in a world of hurt if, all of a sudden, they all just disappeared. Whether you use a POP email system and download messages to your local drive, or employ IMAP email or an online service like Gmail, you run the risk of having all these important messages just go away.

MailStore is a tool that can help protect you against the unimaginable. It's compatible with any of these configurations, as well as Exchange Server mailboxes. You can create backups to guard against data loss, but it also gives you the opportunity to save your messages offline. If you've got a bunch of email you don't access regularly, but can't stand to lose, save it with MailStore for access later when you need it. It's smart about how it stores your messages, saving only one copy of each attachment, for example, and it compresses your messages to boot. Now you're able to be much more efficient in how you save these oldies-but-goodies.

MailStore is a Windows application. It requires Windows 2000 or later.

Download MailStore