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So what's the real difference between a GUI and a terminal or command prompt interface on your computer? Ease of use? Drag-and-drop file maintenance? Point-and-click convenience? Those are all good. I like the pretty pictures.

We've come to think of our applications and data as the icons that represent them. Whether it's the big blue "W" of Microsoft Word, or the globe-and-critter icon for Firefox, they've changed the way we relate to our computers. But maybe you'd like a little input on this topic. Maybe you have a better idea about how things ought to look.

IcoFX is a free icon editing tool that lets you create and edit icons for your Windows or Mac system. You can create original icons, or extract them from other files; you can even change the icons embedded inside of your Windows executables. Make icons out of images. Further personalize your blog or website with favicons. It supports all different sizes and has over three dozen effects you can apply.

IcoFX is a Windows application. It runs under XP or Vista.

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If you take a lot of digital photos, you know that sometimes you need to tweak them to get them "just right". Whether it's issues with lighting and color, poorly framed subject, or the dreaded red-eye, you know that you need a tool to help you clean up your images. You also know that if you want to buy a copy of Photoshop you may have to refinance your house.

If your graphical editing needs are primarily in dealing with photos like this, then you might want to take a look at LightBox Free.

It's a professional-level image editor that doesn't cost like a professional tool. You can resize your images, crop them (maybe cut your irritating brother-in-law out of the family photo), print them, and get rid of those dreaded red eyes.

LightBox Free is a Windows app, and runs under Windows 2000 or later. If you really like it, they also have a paid version with even more features.

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Back in the old days, nobody cared about what things looked like on computer screens—you had your choice of green text on a black background, or if you were really adventurous, you might have amber on a black background. Nowadays, everything's graphical: desktop applications, web pages, and more. Graphics are everything.

With text, you could describe what you saw on your screen in terms of characters and lines—maybe an area ten characters wide and three lines tall. Now, it's all pixels. Images, icons, on-screen widgets, web pages—everything has a size, and those sizes are important. Will this control fit on the screen? Will this picture fit on the page? There are a zillion things to consider.

Meazure is a cool tool that helps you wrap your head around all these graphic elements. You get on-screen rulers that allow you to measure all of the stuff you see on your display. In addition, you can grab screen captures for any piece of the screen you want. You can even measure to see whether what you've got on your screen will fit into common screen or video sizes.

How much would you expect to spend for all this functionality? You're right: it's free. Meazure is a Windows application. It runs under Windows 98 or later.

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How many image files do you have on your computer? Zillions? With various pieces of clipart, digital photos, and more, you've got a huge pile of GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and more all over your hard drive. They've probably all got just plain old generic file icons, making it a little challenging to figure out which file is which. It'd be nice if you could assign custom icons to your images.

Xentient Thumbnails is a tool that lets you do just that. Instead of every file looking just the same, it helps you to make thumbnail images of your graphics files. Now instead of a generic JPEG icon, the photo of your vacation in Yosemite has a thumbnail image of Half Dome, so you don't have to scratch your head, trying to figure out what in the world HPIM0418.JPG could be a picture of.

A free download, Xentient Thumbnails is a Windows application. It's at home on anything from Windows 98 up through Vista.

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How big a geek are you? While some folks strive for the latest and greatest, others are driven in the quest for the more obscure. (We once new a guy who balanced his checkbook in hex.) If you fall into this latter group, or you just like flashing LEDs, then you might want to take Binary Clock out for a spin.

Binary Clock is a fun little app that tells you what time it is via (simulated) little green flashing lights. Not only that, but it's all in binary. It takes the current time, 11:45:15, for example, and breaks out the binary equivalent of the hours, minutes, and seconds, giving you a result like :1011:101101:1111. With all the flashing lights and 1s and 0s, it's a veritable geek-fest.

While it's fun to amaze your friends, it also gives you a chance to bone-up on your binary numbers. After a bit of practice, you may find that it's as easy as 01-10-11!

Binary Clock is a free download for your Windows system.

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When you're trying to describe something that's happening on your computer screen, there's nothing like a screenshot to show what's really going on. Regardless of what platform you're running on, it's generally pretty easy to take that screenshot, but it's not always easy to make sure that you're getting your message across with that pretty picture.

Bug Shooting is a screen capture tool with a difference. Created for use in the software testing biz, not only does it grab what's onscreen at a given time, but it also lets you annotate that image. Now you can draw circles around what you're trying to highlight, and write messages like "what's up with that radio button?" directly on the picture. It's much easier than telling somebody to take a close look at the third option button down in the fourth groupbox on the fifth tab of a form. You get the idea.

Along with adding text and shapes, you can crop and resize images, add arrows, combine images, and more. It includes a built-in screen magnifier, so you can really see what you're talking about.

Bug Shooting runs under Windows and requires XP or Vista, along with ver. 2 of the .NET Framework.

Download Bug Shooting

Where would we be without icons? No, we're not talking religious imagery here, we're talking about those ubiquitous little pictures that we double-click on to launch applications in a modern GUI-based computer environment.

One of the biggest drawbacks with icons is their lack of flexibility. There's a fixed set to deal with system needs, like folders and such. Applications usually come with their own. But what if you want to organize things a different way, or your design sense doesn't match that of the people who crated these stock icons? You need to be able to create your own!

Icon Sushi can give you a hand with that task. With this tool, you can convert your favorite image files into icon files to use on your system. Start with BMP or PNG files, or even Photoshop PSDs and convert them into fully useable Windows ICO icon files. You can also grab icon images out of other EXE or DLL files, so that you've got just the images you need. Or if the need should arise, you can take icon files and convert them into image files as well.

Icon Sushi is a free Windows app. It's been tested under WinXP, but it may run under Win2k as well.

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Have you ever needed to convert some media file to another format? It might be images, audio files, or some video thing. There are just so many different formats, and most applications are limited in the formats that they support. Having an all-in-one solution might come in handy.

SUPER, the Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer, claims to be just such a solution. With a huge number of different formats supported, it shouldn't require Herculean effort any more to convert between any of the supported formats. All the necessary codecs are built in, so you can spend your time converting files, instead of looking around for more plug-ins and add-ons to really make the software work for you. You can even rip video files to audio, grabbing the sound for your MP3 player.

SUPER, the Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer, is a Windows app, and it's compatible with most systems.

Download SUPER, the Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer

Do you have a short attention span? Or maybe you just have a lot of pictures. Either way, it might be nice to change your desktop wallpaper to take advantage of your cool collection of images. John’s Background Switcher may be the solution for you.

Sure, you can choose an individual picture or two to use on your screen. Set an interval and it'll change for you. Good enough. Or you can choose a directory full of images–"My Pictures" or "Burning Man '07″–and display those pictures. Not varied enough? How about Flickr or Picasa? Still not enough? You can even use Yahoo! image search to feed your habit. Now you've got virtually unlimited pictures to use for your wallpaper. Boredom shouldn't be an issue now!

John’s Background Switcher is a Windows app. It runs on anything from Win98 up through Vista, including both 32- and 64-bit versions. It also requires version 2.0 of the .NET Framework.

Download John’s Background Switcher

So you've got a huge picture that you want to make into a poster, but don't have a huge piece of paper to print it on? How about a smaller image that you want to blow up into a larger-format piece? Not so easy if your printer only handles 8 1/2 x 11 paper.

PosteRazor can help you solve this problem. It takes your picture and chops it up into page-sized pieces and outputs it all as a PDF file. Take your favorite picture and make a wall-sized image from it. In fact, you can blow it up to over 15 feet if you want to. Choose your method: absolute image size to specify the end result, size in pages (to specify how many pieces of paper you want involved with your project), or image size percent to scale your image by some specific factor.

It supports most of the usual suspects in terms of image formats (BMP, GIF, PNG, PSD, TIFF, etc.) and colors from monochrome to 48-bit RGB and 32-bit CMYK. You can set how much each tile page overlaps with its neighbors, to allow you to get cleaner edges when you paste pages together.

PosteRazor is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows systems, or you can geek-out and grab the source code and build it yourself.

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