Free Download A Day

Keeping a journal has always been a way to track of your deepest thoughts and feelings. It's also been a way to keep an eye on what you've been up to, as well as great ideas that have sprung from your mind to resounding success or utter failure.

Digital Diary is a tool that can help you to keep track of the comings and goings of your day. While you can tie entries together by topic, it's really set up for free-form text entry. It includes a robust search function, which means that if you can remember a keyword, you can find your notes for a given topic. Within your entries, you've got a WYSIWYG editor that lets you format your notes, adding a bit of color here and a bit of bold there. If you're keeping track of super-secret stuff you can add a password that will keep prying eyes out of your business.

Digital Diary is an application for your Mac. It's a Universal Binary, so you'll be able to use it on your PowerPC or x86 machine.

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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.

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Do you drink tea? Whether you make it a pot at a time, or a just a single cup, you know that timing can be critical. If you let it steep as little as a minute or two extra you can turn a fine cup into a nasty, bitter mess. A timer is pretty critical here.

Messmer, a European tea company, has a timer you can download to your desktop to make sure you avoid that problem. Pick the type of tea from the dropdown list (in German–you remember that from high school, right?), click Start, and it will count down just the right amount of time for you and your selection, and then alert you with a little musical snippet when you tea is done to perfection.

The Tea Timer is available for both Mac and PC, so everybody can enjoy the perfect cup of tea. Unfortunately, you can't download any tea to go with it.

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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.

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If you use a Mac, then you know all about Finder, the program manager you love to hate. Sure, it gets the job done, but why are some things just so darn hard? The cavalry has just arrived.

TotalFinder gives you a bunch of features that Apple probably should have already put in Finder but didn't. Like tabs. Everybody's got tabs, but not Finder. Instead of having half-a-dozen Finder windows open on your desktop, open just one and fill it with tabs. A hot key brings up the Finder window from wherever you are; no more hunting for an icon to click on. And it deals with the dreaded .DS_Store files in a way that makes more sense. It'll even show you hidden files if you want.

TotalFinder is a free (for now) Mac application. They're threatening to start charging at some point down the road, so you may want to grab it while you can. It requires OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to run.

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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.

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Using a computer to give a presentation can be a real mixed bag. The classic approach is to build a PowerPoint presentation, and hope that you've covered everybody's questions before they ask them. That's fine until the first time you have to deviate from the script. Then you have to switch over to pointing and hoping that everybody can follow along.

Highlight is a tool that can help you out with this. Basically it lets you overlay whatever is on your screen with a clear layer to write and draw on. By default when you fire it up, you get a free form pencil that lets you circle and point at items on your screen. Through the use of modifier keys (Shift, Control, Option) singly and in combination, you can also draw rectangles, ellipses, straight lines, arrows, and more. A hotkey lets you toggle the app on and off, since you can't click on any underlying buttons when the app receives focus.

Highlight is a Mac application. It runs under OS X (10.4 and later) and is distributed as a Universal Binary, so it's equally at home on PowerPC and Intel-powered Macs.

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There's no doubt that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the wave of the future for web page layout and formatting. Gone are the days when everything was a table and <FONT> tags ruled the day. Stylesheets give you much greater flexibility and accuracy in your text formatting and page layout. Unfortunately it's not always easy to figure out just which commands to use to get the job done.

Simple CSS tries to help make the whole stylesheet thing easier. A desktop app, you can use a series of dropdown lists to build your style rules. It's almost always easier to pick stuff from a list that to pull them up from memory, and this seems to be no exception. Text formatting, page layout, borders, and more are available to you. Use it to create new stylesheets, or import existing ones and use it to tweak them and get them just right.

Available in both Windows and Mac versions, Simple CSS is a free download. The Windows version runs under Win98 and later; for Mac it's a Universal Binary and runs under OS X and should do fine with Tiger (10.4).

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No doubt you use your computer under different lighting conditions; certainly indoors; maybe outdoors; probably day and night. So how can you make it so that you can always see the display? After all, if you can't see what you're doing, you probably aren't going to get much done.

Nocturne is a tool that makes it easy to switch your computer into night vision mode. Along with simply turning it on and off, it also lets you tweak your settings to make things even easier to see. Color correction and window shadow effects help clear things up, and the ability to black-out your desktop wallpaper makes you screen less cluttered. It's a thoughtful little app, too: after you've installed Nocturne and fired it up, it sits unobtrusively in your menubar, waiting on you to call on it to do its thing.

You'll need to be running a Mac under OS X to use Nocturne.

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One of the cool things about Intel-powered Macs is the fact that they can also boot non-Mac operating systems as well. Instead of needing to have a Windows machine to do Windows-y things along with your Mac, you can get away with just one box. For that matter, even your older PowerPC Mac can run PPC versions of Linux along with official Apple stuff. This convenience, of course, doesn't come without complications.

You can avid some of these problems with QuickBoot, This tool lets you easily jump back and forth between OS X and Windows. Just install it, pick the OS you want to boot, and away you go. For Intel installs, you can choose "next boot only" to boot Windows just once, with subsequent restarts loading OS X instead.

QuickBoot is a Mac application. You'll need to be running OS X and have multiple bootable volumes on your machine to use it.

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