Free Download A Day

Pictures being worth a thousand words and all, sometimes it's just more economical, both time-wise and money-wise, to draw it than to say it. If you've ever read the legal description of a piece of property with irregular borders, you know that it's a lot more complicated than looking at a map of that same piece of land. While the written text may be more technically descriptive, that drawing makes it much easier to take a quick look and say "I get it".

Diagramly is a free service that lets you construct diagrams and charts with nothing more than your web browser. It's easy to drag objects into the drawing area from the well-populated onscreen palettes, and you can choose from general flowchart shapes as well as various pieces of clipart to help tell your story. And it supports all manner of connecting lines so you can show connections and process flow. Once you're done, you can save your handiwork in its native XML format, as well as PNG, JPG, or SVG images. Need to make changes? Just re-import your saved XML and you're ready to go.

Diagramly is available online. It should work with just about any modern browser with JavaScript.

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It's easy to write HTML code in any old text editor on your desktop. A little typing here, a little cut-and-paste there, and you're all set. But what is that page going to look like? Unless you've got a web server running on your local machine, you really don't know how that page is going to behave. You can upload your handiwork to a server somewhere, but then you have to give it some kind of memorable name and be sure to delete it when you're done playing around. Or maybe you can just publish it to a server that doesn't care.

PasteHTML is a free service that lets you publish anonymous web pages. You can do your editing directly in their online form, or you can write your code in your favorite text editor and then paste it into the form. Or if you're not so big on the whole markup thing, you can also use their online WYSIWYG editor, which lets you format your text without any of those pesky HTML tags. Either way, once you're done, you just click the button and your page is published. Now it's easy to see what your page will look like when you publish it for real, as well as making it easier to find that place where you forgot a closing bracket or quotation mark in your code.

PasteHTML is a free online service. You really shouldn't need anything more than a web browser to use it.

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You and your data are only as safe as your password. Whether it's desktop apps, or more likely online goodies, you've got to have a good, strong password if you're going to be able to sleep at night. But of course, the better the password, the harder it is to remember it. And that's where a tool like StickyPassword can come in handy.

With StickyPassword, you only have to remember one password to unlock your store of passwords. Now you can use appropriately complex passwords—upper- and lower-case alpha characters, numbers, and even symbols—that make it much harder for the bad guys to break into your stuff. StickyPassword remembers them all for you, as well as other important information for your online travels, such as name, phone, and even the ever-popular Mother's Maiden Name. And if you're particularly security-conscious, StickyPassword even comes with a virtual keyboard you can use while entering password information. That means that any keyloggers lurking in the background won't have access to your information as you type it in.

StickyPassword is available as a free download for Windows. This version supports up to fifteen passwords and one account. If you need more than that, they'd be happy for you to upgrade to the Pro version.

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At its best, music is a a collaborative creative effort. You play guitar, she plays bass, he plays horns, and it all goes together. Sometimes, though, schedules don't work out, and it's impossible to get everybody in one place at the same time. At that point, you can either give up and go watch TV, or you can look for some help. If the drummer is the one who's a no-show, maybe it's time to hire Pattern Sequencer.

Pattern Sequencer is an app that will lay down a percussion track for you when there's no real drummer. You can pick from all the pieces of its virtual drum kit, including kick, snare, and toms, as well as hi-hat and crash cymbals, and even a rimshot to keep you going. Pick the tempo and volume, decide which sounds to use where, and you're off to the races. You can lengthen or shorten your passage, and it loops when it hits the end, so you can put Pattern Sequencer on the case and get back to making a melody.

Pattern Sequencer is a free online service; all you need is a web browser with Flash and you're good. And while you're there, you might check out some of the other apps they've got as well, including a Guitar Tuner that guarantees you'll never be off again.

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Software comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes, with a lot of different business models behind it. There are the big corporations with names you recognize, like Microsoft and Adobe, but there are also the little Ma and Pa shops, the lone coder banging away in obscurity on some cul-de-sac out on the edge of the Information Superhighway. Some applications come with a hefty price tag, while others—like those featured on this site—are available for free. Shareware typically is free to use at first, but often is limited in functionality or has a time limit on it and ultimately requires payment. And then there's "donationware". Apps in this category are free to download and use, but you always have the option of making a donation to the publisher—kind of like the tip jar at your local caffeine dispensary: you don't have to pay to use it, but the folks behind the counter don't mind if you throw a couple bucks in the jar.

DonationCoder.com is an outfit that supports this business model. On their site, they've got software from many different programmers covering a wide array of applications. All of their listed apps are available for free, but you can always choose to make a donation if you're so inclined. Among their activities, they sponsor an annual NANY Challenge (New Apps for a New Year). We're highlighting several of this year's entries on Free Download A Day this week. Enjoy!

Visit DonationCoder.com

No matter how many pretty pictures you see and work with on your computer, behind it all is a bunch of text. Websites, desktop applications, data—it's all text. But what do you do with all this text? You can type it, edit it, move it around, but what if you're looking to do something more than that? What kinds of tools are there out there to manipulate your text?

Text Mechanic is a suite of web-based text manipulation tools. Using a web browser with JavaScript enabled, you can manipulate text in just about any way imaginable with the tools on this site. They run the gamut from the simple addition of text to the beginning or end of a line, changing the case of text, or sorting lines of text, up to random selection of a line (maybe to choose a contest winner?) and even encoding text in Base 64. It even has a tool that lets you reverse text, flip text upside down, and more.

A free online service, all you need to use Text Mechanic is a web browser and some text to work with.

Download Text Mechanic

Project management is not easy. Getting people to work together can be challenging. Keeping track of which tasks have been completed and which are yet to be done can be daunting. And that, boys and girls, is why they invented project management software.

Freedcamp is a web application that can give you a hand if you draw the short straw and end up leading your group's next big project. Keep track of your assets, monitor your to-do lists, manage discussions, share files, and more. You can monitor your project's overall progress, or you can drill down and look at individual contributions. Are you meeting all your milestones, or is there a bottleneck in a critical path? Freedcamp has built-in communications capabilities as well, with integrated email, instant messaging, and even an RSS feed. Everybody will know when they've received a new assignment and how things are progressing overall.

Freedcamp is free to use. Since it's a web app, there's nothing to download, and it should work on any system with a recent browser.

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We're all familiar with the notion of information overload. We've got contact lists, web bookmarks, and no end of sticky notes glued to our computer monitors just to try to keep track of the "who" and "what" of our complicated lives. If you're looking for a better system, you might check out Flexadex.

While Flexadex can be thought of as an online address book, it might be more properly called a text information organizer. What it really is is a freeform online database that allows you to write notes to yourself that include a title, the main body of your note, and also tags to help you better organize things. Each entry can contain up to 50,000 characters, so you're probably not going to run out of room. And if you do, just add another entry and keep on going. Its Web interface is intuitive and easy to use, and they've even got a minimalist mobile version for you to use on the go.

Flexadex is a free online service.

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Everybody's got a blog nowadays. Some are serious, some are silly, but they all have (at least) one thing in common: they have to live somewhere. For the quick and dirty setup, there is no end of blog hosts out there, where you get to make a few minor tweaks to look-and-feel, but the heavy lifting is left to someone else. Or for the adventurous, you can set up your own blog on a server that you (or your ISP) control. While there's a lot more work involved, getting the web server to talk to the database server and all that, you can take charge of a lot more of how the whole thing works. If you're in this latter group, and WordPress is your platform of choice, then once you're set up, you have to go look for a theme.

Sure, you could use WordPress straight out of the box, but part of the fun of running a blog is getting to decide just what it's going to look like. Generally this means searching the Web looking for a downloadable theme to use with your blog. Maybe you'll be successful, or maybe you won't. Even though you can customize WordPress manually, it's not a job for the faint-of-heart. That means you're at the mercy of the folks who build themes. Until now.

WordPress Theme Generator is an online service that lets you build your own custom WordPress Theme. Choose the colors and fonts you like, add a sidebar or two, even pick how you want your menus to display. You can preview your creation online, and if you decide you like it, download it and install on your server. And you don't need to know a lick of HTML or PHP, or anything about stylesheets.

Download WordPress Theme Generator

Some of the best ideas ever were first drawn out on a cocktail napkin or the back of an old envelope. While this design methodology may appeal to our sense of rugged individualism and the elusive search for that "ah-ha" moment of insight and genius, it's probably not the most efficient way to do things. For that you probably want to be a bit more deliberate, and for that, you'll want a better mockup and prototyping tool.

Mockingbird is a tool that lets you design websites, desktop apps, or just about anything else where the layout and look is important. Starting with a blank canvas, you drag widgets from a palette that includes controls (buttons, textboxes), forms, graphs, and more. Add your own text and take your site for a test drive, visually at least.

Mockingbird is an online service. The free version lets you work on one project with a total of ten pages.

Download Mockingbird