Free Download A Day

Your computer should behave the way you want it to. You're going to be most efficient when things make sense and fit with the way you work, so why shouldn't you have it your way, as the burger place says.

FinderPop integrates with Finder to let you stand your Mac on its ear. You can easily add items to context menus, so that you can get where you need to go with minimal effort. Command-click the menu bar and you'll get a process menu that lets you see what your machine is up to, listing both user apps and even background processes. Want to quickly see what volumes you currently have mounted? Shift-click on the menu bar and you'll see which drives you're attached to. Life is a lot easier when you're calling the shots.

FinderPop is a Mac app and requires OS X 10.4 or later. It's distributed as a Universal Binary, so it's good for your PowerPC or Intel machine.

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How do you spend your time? By the end of the day, we've been so many places and done so many things, it's hard to reconstruct exactly what happened. And what about the little tasks that don't take any time themselves, but add up to several hours by the end of the day or week?

Sure, you can keep track of what tools you've used and which applications you've run, but pretty quickly it becomes clear that the overhead involved in breaking your time down can easily grow into a big task itself, which doesn't really benefit anybody.

With RescueTime, you install a "dohickey" on your system (their words, not ours). Data is store remotely, so you won't take up all of your hard drive space keeping track of how you use your hard drive space. Tell it which applications you want to keep track of, which websites you're interested in, or even which categories of work you want to track. It then keeps track of how much time you spend with a particular application active on your desktop, or how long you spend on those websites. You can track where you've been, or how how much time you've spent surfing the web. Want to spend less time on email? Set a goal—maybe an hour a day—and let RescueTime tell you whether you've achieved that goal.

RescueTime is still in Beta, so there may be a few rough edges. The up-side is that as an early adopter, your feedback can help make this an even better tool.

RescueTime is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux, and requires an active Internet connection.

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So just how productive are you? You're writing a blog post that has to be 150 words long. Maybe you're writing an AdWords ad and you need a 25-word title. Are we there yet?

Whether it's an online form that requires that you not be too long, or an essay that must be 5000 words in length, size matters. It's not always easy to know just how much you've written.

Word Counter can help with this. Whether it's characters or words that you're interested in, you'll know what you've accomplished. You can type text directly into this tool, copy and paste from other apps, or even drag documents into the window. Interested in a whole folder worth of documents? Just drag multiple files, or even whole directories in, and you're good to go. Along with counting words, you can also take a look at what words are there. Whether it's counting the number of times you use a particular word, or even generating a list of all the words you've used, it's all there.

As you'd expect, Word Counter can work with straight-up text files, but it also handles Word documents (both DOC and WORDML), RTF documents, and even HTML files.

Got a special rule you need to follow, like "ignore if, and, and but"? You can filter your results so you get the count you're looking for. Pretty slick.

Word Counter is a tool for your Macintosh. It's a Universal Binary, so it's equally at home on your PowerPC or x86 Mac. It requires OS X ver 10.4 or later.

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Work is a noble thing. It helps give meaning to our lives. It keeps us occupied and engaged. Oh, yeah, it pays the bills, too.

No matter what other benefits may accrue to us through work, that paycheck is a strong motivator, and a reward for a job well done. Some folks work on salary, or are paid by the project, so everybody agrees ahead of time what will be in the pay envelope. With hourly folks, that's not true.

Whether you work on an hourly basis, or simply want to track your time as it's split between multiple projects, it's important to keep track of how many hours you work, and when those hours are. Whether you track your hours with an electromechanical time clock, a pad of paper on your desk, or some other form, at some point those lists of hours have to be summarized, and the hours turned into dollars.

PrintableTimesheets.net offers more than 40 employee time sheet templates that you can download and print. Categories include weekly, bi-weekly, semimonthly, and timesheets with overtime calculation. These PDF files allow you to standardize your data collection, and make it easy for the payroll folks to do their job. Everybody likes it when payroll goes easier.

Customizable versions, which perform the actual calculations, are also available for a nominal charge. These are compatible with Excel, Google Docs, and most other spreadsheet apps.

PrintableTimesheets are compatible with most systems that support PDF files and spreadsheets.

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There are just too darn many things to do. When was the last time you saw your desktop, or the bezel of your monitor? Between the piles of to-do lists, and all the sticky notes hanging on the walls, it's a wonder we get anything done.

CheckOff is a slick little to-do list that sits on the menu bar of your Mac. You can enter individual items, each with an associated note. For related tasks, you can create groups, helping you to better organize your life. Colored labels make it easy to spot work-related items, or personal stuff.

CheckOff is a Mac application, and can be downloaded as a Universal Binary. It requires OS X 10.5 (Leopard), although there are reports that it may run on Panther or Tiger as well.

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There's always a need for more computer programmers out there, but unfortunately not everybody's thrilled at the prospect of keeping track of semicolons and curly-braces. With this in mind, the folks at Carnegie Mellon University created Alice.

Alice is a development environment that allows for error-proof programming. Using a drag-and-drop interface, users write code by dragging onscreen tiles that fit together into programs. As the result of fitting these pieces together, students actually create 3D animations. While interesting in their own right, these animations allow immediate feedback to the user, showing how re-ordering a series of tiles (instructions) impacts the behavior of the resulting program.

While users think they're creating animations and games, they are also seeing how languages like Java and C++ work, since the tiles correspond to statements in those types of high level programming languages. They claim that upwards of 10% of all computer science programs in American colleges use Alice in their curriculum.

Alice is a free download, and is available for Windows (Win2k or later), Mac (OS X 10.3+), and Linux.

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How can you possibly keep track of all the "stuff" you've got to do? There are lots of organizers and calendaring tools out there, to be sure. Even then, it's not always easy to stay on top of things. Sure, if you're at your computer, an Outlook-generated reminder is fine, but what if you're using a different machine? An emailed reminder may suffice. Need more flexibility than that?

Remember The Milk is a free online service that allows you to easily create reminders, but it comes with more. Along with pop-up and emailed reminders, you can have it send reminders to your favorite IM client. Or even send SMS text messages to your phone. Now you'll be on top of your schedule no mater where you are or what you're doing.

Along with the basic functionality, Remember The Milk supports a bunch of plug-ins. Use the iGoogle Gadget to manage your life from your homepage, use the mobile version on your iPhone, or even do it all offline with the Google Gears browser plug-in.

Remember The Milk is an online service. You should be able to use it with most any modern web browser.

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Are you responsible for the care and feeding of a large website or an online application? Given the speed with which everything on the Web changes, it can be a constant headache to plan, implement, and then test changes and updates to your site. We've found a tool that may help you to at least get through the testing phase easier.

Watir (pronounced like water) is a Ruby library that helps to build test suites for your online applications. Watir (Web App Testing in Ruby) is designed to interact with browsers the same ways that human users do: click on buttons, fill-in forms, follow links, and all the other types of interactions that you need to use to really test the stability and performance of your complex online apps.

Not a keystroke recorder, Watir allows you to really get in there and test the logic and results from working through your complex site or complicated online app. You're programming in Ruby here, so it's going to be helpful if you have experience in the language, or at least a couple of good references to work with.

Watir is available for Windows and Internet Explorer. There are also ports for Firefox (on Windows, Mac, Linux) and Safari running under OS X.

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MetaWrite is a text editor probably best suited to folks who know their way around a page full of HTML and CSS markup. Rather than leaning on the ease-of-use of a WYSIWYG editor, MetaWrite focuses more on folks who are comfortable around a tag or two, helping them to speed through their coding tasks.

For the experienced coder, MetaWrite makes available "metatext", a shorthand for encoding markup quickly in your pages. Typing [p] at the beginning of a paragraph, for example, will result in automatic generation of appropriate beginning- and closing paragraph tags. There are many other quickie shorthand techniques like this for other block elements, and even inline markup. After getting the hang of these shortcuts, it looks like you may speed up your coding considerably.

Creation of a new site is made easy. With its wizard-like interface, MetaWrite helps you to quickly compile all the information you need to get that site up and running.

MetaWrite is a Mac application and runs under OS X.

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Sometimes thinking is just too hard. When you look at any task or project, there can be so darn many considerations to keep track of: little pieces, big picture, dates and deadlines. It's a wonder you can ever get anything done.

Mind mapping is a technique where you dump all that "stuff" in your head onto a piece of paper. By grouping related thoughts and concepts, drawing arrows and boxes to show relationships and timing, eventually you can bring some sort of order to all those bits and pieces.

WiseMaps allows you to do all this paperwork on your computer. Not only does that make it easier to arrange and rearrange your thoughts as you clarify what's going on, but you can also share your mind map with others. WiseMaps uses SVG and VML to allow you to embed your mind map in web pages, either for your own review, or so that you can show others what you are really talking about.

WiseMaps is a free online service. It requires that users be using IE 6 (Windows), Firefox 1.5 (Win, Mac, Linux), or Safari ver. 3 (Windows, Mac).

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