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If you're like me, you can't sit down to think without a legal pad in front of you. Somehow it's always easier for me to grasp a situation when I can draw a picture of it. You get your keywords out there, maybe add a few arrows to indicate relationships between nodes, that sort of thing. The hard part of this paper-based thinking, though, is that it's not so easy to change and refine your thoughts without extensive use of a pencil eraser (with the attendant holes rubbed in the paper), or of having to go through several iterations of your plan, starting from scratch each time.

View Your Mind may be the tool to use for these types of situations. Not just a drawing tool, it actually helps you to organize your thoughts and reorder them as you work through the process. Along with being able to order and arrange nodes, the note editor allows you to annotate them, so your main drawing doesn't get cluttered with the details.

View Your Mind is available for free; grab it for OS X as an image (.dmg) or Linux as an .rpm package.

Download View Your Mind

MacOSaiX is an interesting application that allows you to create a mosaic image. Select your original picture, and then choose the shape and number of mosaic tiles you want to create, and finally grab a source for the images you want to use, and you'll create a new piece of art based on your original. Choose hexagonal, rectangular, or even puzzle-piece shaped tiles, and use either Google images or random glyphs to create your masterpiece. You can create very low (10×10) or very high (10,000×10,000) resolution images by choosing the number of tiles to use. Needless to say, the more details and colors you have, the higher you'll need to dial up the resolution.

As with any image manipulation program, the more RAM you have available, the faster things will be accomplished here.

MacOSaiX is a Mac application and requires OS X.

Download MacOSaiX

There it is–that elusive screen you've been looking for. Now to get that screenshot. What is that command again? Command + Shift + what? I can never remember what that is. Or you can use Grab, right? Except, who needs a screen shot saved as a .tiff? What to do, what to do….

Well for starters, maybe you can use a real tool for this job, an app like InstantShot. With InstantShot, you can grab the whole screen, choose a specific window, grab a rectangle that is less than a whole application window, or even select a region that takes real estate from multiple different windows–it's all up to you.

When you grab a screenshot, you can save it as a .tiff, .jpg, or .png image, or even save it to the clipboard, making it easy to paste directly into another app, rather than having to import from a file.

InstantShot is a Mac app and requires OS X ver. 10.4.

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Whether you're doing serious tech support, or just helping Mom with her email configuration, sometimes the words get in the way of real communication. By the time you walk somebody through three levels of menus and a couple of dialog boxes, it's no wonder why they get totally confused and decide that it may be easier to just give up.

The Jing Project has a handy tool that allows you to share what you see on your machine with other folks. Rather than explaining in text what you're looking at, or explaining a complicated series of steps to complete some task, Jing allows you to capture either a stationary image, like a screen shot, or record a quickie video, showing multi-stepped processes as you see them on your screen. Once you capture the on-screen images, you save them and get a URL that you can then email or IM to your contact. When they access that address, they can look at what you just saw on your screen. Images are saved as .png files and movies are Flash movies (.swf). Aphorisms about pictures and thousands of words come to mind–it's often easier and more direct to demonstrate a process than to describe it.

Jing is in beta, so there may be some glitches along the way. In order to have somewhere to host the images and videos you record, signing up nets you a free Screencast.com trial account with no expiration date (or at least until completion of the Jing Project).

Jing runs on Windows (XP and Vista) and Mac OS X (10.4+).

Download Jing

Project Draw is an online vector drawing service provided by the folks at Autodesk. Rather than needing some big horsepower high-end workstation like you might need for AutoCAD, this online application will run on just about any system with a modern browser.

When you fire it up, you get a drawing grid to work with and several palettes of pre-fab drawing objects, including basic shapes, as well as shapes for flowcharts, network layouts, Windows and Mac UI widgets, furniture and electronics layouts, and more. You can use it to design your next network, or to rearrange the furniture in your living room.

Just drag shapes from the palettes onto the drawing grid, and resize them as needed. You can add color, lines, shadows, and text to your drawings. Sign up for a free account, and you can save and retrieve your drawings.

Project Draw works best with IE 6 or Firefox 1.5 or higher.

Download Project Draw

Looking for something new and different? How about a picture that's not a picture.

ASCII Art Generator can take your .gif, .jpeg, or .png image and turn it into ASCII art. Enter the URL of your image, specify the quality and size you want, and decide whether to get black-and-white or color, and just click the button. The resulting "image"–which really isn't an image at all–is available as plain text (no colors), HTML, or as a PHP class.

What you do with your new "image" is up to you. Revisit the days of yore when there were no such thing as graphics cards or displays. Add it to your "I (heart) ASCII" website. Knock yourself out–the sky's the limit.

ASCII Art Generator is an online service, so it should be available to anyone with a modern web browser.

Check out ASCII Art Generator

So how would that couch look over against that wall? Does this rug really tie the room together? Moving furniture around the room to try a new look isn't always easy. Not only is it a pain to drag the couch from here to there, but there's the matter of the two full bookcases you had to empty before you even started the process. And what if you don't like the result?

Sweet Home 3D allows you try out your new design ideas without having to get out the liniment. Rather than moving furniture, you can drag scale images around on your screen to see how your new design looks before you fully commit to it. Once your furniture is placed, you can rotate the room around to examine your handiwork in 3D, to see how it will really look. The app comes with 50 pieces of furniture, or you can even create some of your own.

Sweet Home 3D is a Java app, and will run on Linux, Mac, or Windows, or presumably any other platform that supports the Java virtual machine.

Download Sweet Home 3D

A polar bear is a Cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.

Not too many graphing jokes out there, but we've always liked that one. And speaking of graphing, we've found a great place to download almost every graphing format imaginable. Free Online Graph Paper has a huge collection of customizable graph and grid paper downloads, all available in PDF format. Ranging from plain vanilla graph paper to paper with only dots instead of lines, five-line music staves to accountant's ledger paper, to calligraphy and Chinese character guides. Many of the grids are customizable, allowing you to select colors, and even decide whether the heavier index lines should be every five lines or ten lines and so on.

All you need to do is to find the type of grid you're interested in, enter your specific details, and download the resulting PDF file. The author even says that if you need a type of grid that isn't already featured on the site, send him an email and he may give it a try.

Since all these grids are in PDF format, they're compatible with any system that supports an app to read the files, meaning that just about anybody can take advantage of them.

Download Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs

Got a pile of pictures? Need to make them all the same size? Got all day? If the answer to the last question is "heck no!", then Resize! may be the tool you're looking for.

While there are lots of tools that will let you resize image files, you may have to spend all day converting those files one at a time. With Resize!, you can batch process an entire directory full. Choose your pictures, tweak the size/quality settings, and choose the resize parameters. You can select a proportional resize, box resizing where you can constrain maximum height and width, or resize with independent settings for width and height, if you need to fill a pre-defined rectangular space.

Resize! is a versatile as it is easy-to-use. It is available for Windows, OS X and if you want to go really old-school, you can get a version for Mac OS "classic", for the old OS 9 platform.

Download Resize!

freeCAD is a basic 3-D CAD application, that allows you to try your hand at computer aided design without having to pay a fortune for the privilege. If you're planning to take on General Motors or Boeing, this is probably not the tool for you, but if you want a basic introduction to the electronic version of the drafting board and T-square, you can't beat this price.

freeCAD allows you to execute mechanical drawings, as you would expect a CAD app to do. In addition, you can also animate your work. If you design a cam shaft, you can make it rotate, and actuate a cam follower or rocker arm. With a bunch of example assemblies included, you should be able to get started quickly in creating and animating your own inventions. The publisher's website has an extensive set of video tutorials that walk you through the process of creating, fine-tuning, and animating your drawings.

freeCAD is available for Linux, MacOS, OS X, Windows, and several flavors of UNIX.

Download freeCAD