Free Download A Day

How many different ways are there to skin a cat? More than one, if the conventional wisdom is to be believed (sorry, kitty). In much the same way, there may be a lot of different ways to do a lot of things. A meter, for example, might also be expressed as 100 centimeters, 1000 millimeters, 1/1000 of a kilometer, 39.37+ inches, and so forth; temperatures expressed in degrees Celsius track to expressions in degrees Fahrenheit as well; we talk back and forth about bits and bytes. So how do you do all those conversions?

One way is with NumericalChameleon. This app can handle thousands of different units in dozens of different categories. If you can measure it–length, volume, mass, duration, value, and more–then you can probably express it in a different set of units with this tool.

NumericalChameleon is a Java application. That means that it will run on any machine that has the appropriate Java runtime installed on it, including Linux, Mac, Windows, and just about anything else you can think of that supports this technology. It's free download, too, so you won't have to worry about converting dollars-in to dollars-out.

Download NumericalChameleon

When you write in Word, OpenOffice Writer, or any other high-powered word processor, you've got built-in spell checking, grammar checking, and more. But any more, lots of your writing doesn't take place in one of these desktop apps. Writing blog posts, creating Tweets in Twitter, and lots of other places have you composing directly in your web browser, where these types of tools aren't necessarily available to you.

You can add the ability to check spelling, grammar, and usage with After The Deadline. This tool is available as an Add-on for Firefox. Click in a text field on your online form, hit the After The Deadline hotkey, and it'll take a look a things and let you know what it thinks might need attention, highlighting spelling errors in red, problems with grammar in green, and even style suggestions in blue.

And if you don't happen to have Firefox, they've made the core functionality of this tool available as a bookmarklet that you can use with Safari and Internet Explorer.

After The Deadline is free for personal use. All you'll need to use it is a recent copy of Firefox and a dedication to making (and fixing) spelling errors.

Download After The Deadline

Data can be messy. It doesn't always come to you in an organized form—kind of like a pile of Post-Its on your desktop, everything's on the same level. But that's not how people always think. Lots of times it's easier to understand and remember important things if we can impose some kind of organization to them. A stack of business cards has much of the same stuff that you might find in an address book, but the book makes it easier to find information on a particular contact, and may make it easier to keep track of which of those phone numbers is an office number, as opposed to a fax line, cell phone, or something else.

TreeLine is a tool you can use to help organize these little bits and pieces. As its name might imply, you can create tree-based hierarchies, allowing you to drill-down to get to more and more granular pieces of information. You can store just about anything in here, including plain text, HTML, and more. Keep things free form, or impose some order on the chaos by defining data fields to help you better organize your info. TreeLine stores its data in XML files, so you can access your stuff without using the program, and can import it into other tools as well.

TreeLine is available for both Windows and Linux.

Download TreeLine

If you've ever had a roommate—or a partner, spouse, kids—who came into your bedroom at oh-dark-thirty in the morning and turned the overhead light on, you know what a pain in the neck—and the eyes—that can be. Your eyes are all used to the dark and all of a sudden, blam!, they've got to deal with regular light. You can run into the same problem with your computer as well.

When you use your computer during the day, you may have the brightness on the display turned up so that you can see the screen with all the ambient light around you. At night, though, the room lights may not be so bright, so you don't need your screen to be lit up like noonday either. And first thing in the morning when you're all squinty-eyed, you definitely don't need to be jolted like in the turn-the-light-on scenario outlined above.

F.lux is a tool that may come in handy here. Based on your location, it does a little calculation and makes its best guess as to when sunrise and sunset ought to hit for you, and dims your display appropriately after dark. You can choose from several different settings, with nighttime color temperatures ranging from 2700K up through 5000K, as opposed to normal daylight operation at 6500K. While it dims the lights automatically, you can disable it for an hour at a time, just in case you need things to stay extra bright.

F.lux is a free download. It's available for Windows (XP and Vista), Mac (OS X 10.4), and Linux.

Download F.lux

Run here, go there, and don't forget anything. Now that's a pretty tall order. How in the world do you keep track of it all? Slips of paper aren't too efficient, and store-bought organizers cost a small fortune. Thank goodness for free software that can help you keep track of it all.

PhiTodo is one one such tool. You can keep track of appointments, meetings, and more. Organize individual tasks, or group them together to create projects. Sort them, arrange them, and keep track of the time you've spent on each piece. Now nothing's going to fall through the cracks, and you'll always know how long everything took to complete. Not only can you now answer the question "where did all the time go," but you'll also be able to plan better next time based on how things went this time.

PhiTodo is a free download. It runs on the Adobe AIR platform, so it's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

Download PhiTodo

If you've written computer code for any length of time, you know that you can end up with screen after screen and page after page of complicated text. Whether it's writing desktop apps in a language like C++ or Java, scripting in Perl or Python, or writing web pages in HTML or PHP, one of the tricks you've no doubt learned, is that it makes the most sense to use a monospace font while you're coding. Proportional fonts like Times New Roman or Arial can mess-up the spacing in your code, especially if you jump back and forth between using TABs and individual spaces to indent lines of text. With a monospace font, that's not a problem, since the character in Column #4 will always line up precisely with all the other characters in Column #4 of every other line in the file.

Courier and its variants come as standard equipment on most systems. Using that trusty old typewriter-looking font accomplishes the "everything lines up" objective, but it's not too much fun to look at. There aren't lots of other monospace fonts to choose from.

Anonymous Pro is a monospace font that you should be able to use on just about any system that supports True Type fonts. It's specially designed so that characters that look alike—the letter "O" and the digit "0", for example—are deliberately made to look different, so there's no more guessing what a given character really is.

A free download, Anonymous Pro can be used with systems running Windows, OS X (but not old Macs still running System 9, etc.), as well as most flavors of Linux.

Download Anonymous Pro

Are you writing the next Great American Novel? How about the next award winning play or movie? You've got so many ideas in your mind about character, location, plot, and more, that your head is about to explode. You know you've got to write it all down, but how will you ever find it all once you've created a stack of paper or a hard drive full of word processing docs?

Character Keeper is a tool that lets you keep track of all these important bits and pieces in one location. Keep your notes in here, and you'll always be able to find them. There's no limit to the number of characters you can keep track of, or the amount of information you track for each one. Add all your other ideas as well, including timelines, family history, titles, and more. With Character Keeper tracking the minutiae, you can spend your time writing and being creative, instead of serving as an unpaid file clerk.

Character Keeper is a free application. It's available for Windows (XP and Vista), as well as a couple flavors of Linux.

Download Character Keeper

Once upon a time, Google was a search engine. You used it to find stuff online, and it was good. After a while, they decided that they wanted to do more. They started creating applications that you could use to do more than just search. We're all familiar with GMail, Google Maps, their calendar, Google Docs, and all the other good stuff that they're got. Unfortunately, since all these apps are run as online services, it's been necessary to run a web browser to use them. After all, how do you get at the online stuff if not with a browser?

GMDesk is an alternative to that approach. Built on the Adobe Air platform, this tool lets you run Google's tools without running a browser. With Gmail or Google Docs running in GMDesk, they're literally just another app running on your desktop. You can easily task-switch between these and your other applications, and you don't have to bog your system down with all the overhead of your web browser.

GMDesk runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms—in fact, anywhere that you can install Adobe Air.

Download GMDesk

No matter what you do in life, everything always goes easier if you've got the right tools. If you're a carpenter, you need a hammer and a saw. An auto mechanic? You need your wrenches and screwdrivers. Sure, you could drive a nail with a rock or use a pair of pliers to loosen a bolt, but that makes your life harder than it needs to be. The same can be said for those who write computer code for a living.

While you could use a plain-vanilla text editor like Notepad, TextEdit, or emacs, in some ways that's like driving a nail with a rock—it gets the job done, but you may bang your fingers up in the process. A programmers text editor like jEdit has many of the features you'll need on your next project.

In addition to letting you enter plain-old text, it supports doing the things that programmers need to do: syntax highlighting (over 130 file types), unlimited clipboards, folding (to hide and reveal chunks of code), search and replace for literals and regular expressions, and more.

jEdit is written in Java, so it should run on just about any system that supports that technology, including Windows, Mac, and various flavors of *NIX. It's available for free under the GPL.

Download jEdit

Whether you're taking a beating in the current financial situation, or you're on top of things and positioned to lead us all back out of recession, everybody can agree on one thing: you won't know how you're doing if you don't keep an eye on things. If you've got a portfolio of more than one or two investments, you probably already get some help from a high-powered tool like Quicken or Microsoft Money, but sometimes you just want to take a quick look at what's going on today, without having to wade through layers and layers of complicated stuff.

Portfolio Viewer is a tool that lets you keep an eye on your investments. It can handle multiple portfolios. Track your positions, with automatic updates of share prices, so you'll always know the value of your investments. Use charts and reports to help you tweak your asset allocations. And since all your data is stored locally, you're not going to have problems with your information being compromised, as well as the fact that you can take advantage of much of this tool's functionality while you're offline.

Portfolio Viewer is built on the Adobe Air framework. It should run on any system that supports that technology.

Download Portfolio Viewer