Free Download A Day

Did you ever want—or need—to be in two places at once? Hey, you could get twice as much work done, or at least only be half as far behind. But seriously, multitasking is rapidly becoming a way of life: so much to do, so little time.

We can't promise to give you the secret behind bi-location, but we can suggest the next best thing: LogMeIn Free. A "remote control" tool, LogMeIn Free allows you to run one computer from another one. Need to check email at work, but you're at home? No problem. Need grandma's email address from your home system, but you're at work? It's done.

Installation is simple; you just install the software on the machine you want to control from afar, and leave that box running. Now you can access it from anywhere in the world. On a business trip and need that file you left at the office? Just go grab it.

LogMeIn Free is available for both Windows and Mac systems.

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How would you like a free website with a free domain name? What if it was hosted for free? It's yours with Microsoft Office Live Basics.

Microsoft Office Live Basics is a free service that helps you to get up and running with your own business website, with an unbeatable price. Along with your own domain name, you get design tools to create your site, web hosting to make it available to the world, and up to 500MB of storage space (that's a lot of pages). Add to that website statistics tracking, so you can see who is visiting you, and up to 25 email addresses (each with 5GB of storage—that's a whole lot of email messages), and you'll be a presence online in no time. You also get a $50 credit toward online search advertising, so you can make sure the world knows about you.

Of course, Microsoft would be more than happy to help you upgrade to one of their paid services, but for a start, it's not too bad.

Microsoft Office Live Basics is for Windows users, and requires Windows XP or better and Internet Explorer version 6.

Download Microsoft Office Live Basics

Sometimes you want all the bells and whistles. Email clients are famous for doing everything—formatted text, images, and on and on. That's great when appearance is everything, but sometimes you need substance over form. Back in the day, email was all about text. It was easy to get your words out there, and everybody understood.

As a rule, those fancy email programs are pretty complicated beasts. They don't often provide you with an application programming interface (API), so there's really way to get them to talk to other programs. Suppose you've written several batch files to take care of some housekeeping activity in the background on your system, or more likely on some remote server you're interested in. When that script runs, you may be interested in the results—did it run? was it successful? were any errors encountered?

In the land of UNIX, you've got the mail command to send these script-created messages; Windows doesn't have that flexibility. With Bmail, you can grab output from scripts, batch files, and other programs and create and send email messages based on those results. Website down? Send an email. Backup complete? Send an email. You get the idea.

Bmail is a free command line SMTP mail sender. With a generous number of command line arguments, you can create and send the message you need, automatically. Pipes, redirection, and files can all be used in generating and sending your messages. By adding the mpack utility, you can even include MIME encoded attachments. How cool is that?

Bmail runs on most Win32 systems.

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KompoZer is a high-end WYSIWYG web authoring system that just happens to be free. With power like Dreamweaver and a price of $0, how can you go wrong?

Built on the Gecko rendering engine, the same one used by the Firefox web browser, KompoZer is fast and reliable. It doesn't require that you know any HTML in order to create killer web pages. It builds good HTML, not like some word processors, so you don't have to go in and fix what the tool created. With built-in validation, you can verify that you're putting clean code out there. Making extensive use of stylesheets, your code will be rendered more accurately by most web browsers. With tabbed documents, you can have multiple files open at once, and each one can be viewed in normal WYSIWYG mode, as well as HTML Tags mode, to see where the important tags are located, and even in source mode, so can see the underlying code, though you don't have to. And finally, with built in FTP support, you can use the same tool to create your pages and then publish them.

KompoZer is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

Download KompoZer

Glide is pretty close to an entire operating system's worth of applications and tools, available online. With nothing to download or install, just about anybody with a modern web browser can take advantage of its capabilities.

Along with email, instant messaging, and a calendar app, Glide also has tools for website creation, a presentation tool (like PowerPoint), a text editor, photo editor tool, and a bunch more. There are applications that support sharing media, whether it be photos, music, videos, or documents. There is also a spreadsheet app that runs in conjunction with the Glide Sync tool.

You can also use Glide's Sync tool synchronize files living on multiple machines. This tool must be downloaded and installed and requires Windows 2000 or later, or Mac OS X 10.4+, or Linux (kernel 2.6).

With Glide Mobile, you can harness the power of Glide through your web-enabled phone or PDA. The publishers recommend it as the perfect accompaniment for the iPhone.

Download Glide

Over the past several years, there has been a rapid increase in the amount of online course material available. Many colleges have dramatically increased the number of classes provided online as a way to stretch resources, as well as allowing more independently paced study. Re-entry students who have full-time jobs, for example, can "attend" class during evenings and weekends, whereas they might not be able to come to a physical classroom during the day in the middle of a work week.

There are many challenges that come up in making online classes informative and relevant for the needs of their students. One way to try to make the online learning experience better for students is through tools like Moodle.

Moodle calls itself a "course management system." It provides a framework for creating Internet-based courses of instruction and the supporting web sites. Based on a philosophy called "social constructionist pedagogy", which takes advantage of interactions among the community as well as content provided by the instructor, Moodle allows instructors to create opportunity for rich interaction, including elements such as wikis, forums, and blogs, as well as quizzes, surveys, and other activities.

There is extensive documentation available on the Moodle website. If you are responsible for the design or execution of online instruction, it may be worth your while to take a look and examine in depth the types of resources that Moodle can make available for you.

Moodle is available both for Windows and Mac systems running OS X, as well as systems running various flavors of Linux–basically any system that can support PHP, and requires a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Download Moodle

Is peer-to-peer file sharing not for you? It's too complicated to set up, and how about all those security issues. Does FTP scare you? What do all those arcane command line arguments mean anyway? You've got a file that needs to get from Point A to Point B. How do you do it?

Enter PipeBytes, a slick file-exchange service that only requires two users–the sender and the receiver–with a web browser each. Rather than sitting on somebody's server out there on the Internet, your file is actually copied directly from your machine to the target system.

To use the service, the users at each end simply go to the PipeBytes website.
The sender clicks on the Send File button, browses to and selects the file to be sent, optionally adds a text message, and clicks on the Start Upload button. The service returns a Pickup Code and a Pickup URL. The recipient then either clicks the Pickup File button on the PipeBytes website, or enters the Pickup URL into their browser, sees your message and a description of the file (filename, size, and MIME type), and clicks on the Start Download button.

Only at this point is the file actually uploaded from the senders machine. It never sits on a server anywhere, since it's immediately transmitted from the source to the destination machine. That means it's more secure, because it never sits anywhere waiting to be broken into. Encrypt your file, and you're using what has to be one of the safer file transfer methods out there.

PipeBytes is an online service, so it will work with just about any system out there that supports a web browser.

Download PipeBytes

Who can live without email? We all use it multiple times a day. If you're looking for something beyond what you're currently using, you may want to give i.Scribe a spin.

i.Scribe is a lightweight email client that combines email functionality with an integrated contact database, as well as a calendar. It doesn't require an installer (one is included for user convenience), so it can be dropped wherever you want it to live, including USB drives, making it super easy to bring along with you.

It starts up fast, requiring only a second or two to get up to speed. It may be one of the safer email clients out there, since it supports HTML email but not embedded scripts, so you won't have to dread opening emails like in Outlook. It features a Bayesean spam filter, so it will learn what you consider spam and react accordingly, getting smarter and more efficient over time.

i.Scribe supports only a single account (they have a paid version that supports multiple accounts), so it may not be the most flexible tool you own, but you can't beat the price.

i.Scribe is available as a free download. It runs under Windows (most features run under 98/ME, more under 2k/XP), Linux, and a beta-level version for Mac OS X.

Download i.Scribe

Whether we perform them regularly or not, we pretty much all agree that backups are a good thing. Why would you want to lose data if a simple backup would save your bacon? There are plenty of answers to that one too. It's too complicated. It takes too long. The list goes on.

What about the data you really care about? Your web browser and email client may be the two tools you use most often, and whose content you would most miss if it went away. If you use tools from the Mozilla family, MozBackup may be what you're looking for.

MozBackup is a specialized tool that backs up and restores the information that held in your profile under Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Suite, and even Netscape ver.. 7. You can grab your bookmarks, email, contacts, extensions, and all that good stuff. It's taken you a long time to gather all that information, so it would be a shame to have to go find it all again.

MozBackup is a Windows app (sorry, no Linux or Mac version is available).

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When you think about the major players in the current health care crisis in this country, one of the names that doesn't generally come tripping of the tongue is Microsoft. Their new HealthVault service, currently in beta, may help you bring some sanity back to healthcare for you and your family.

HealthVault is a free service that combines an enhanced healthcare search engine with online storage of your medical records, as well as an interface for certain enabled medical devices, such as blood glucose monitors, blood pressure monitors, and peakflow meters.

The search functionality is available to anyone without creating an account. It can be helpful in digging deeper into topics that interest you than working through your usual all-purpose search engine.

The information storage and retrieval functionality allows you to collect and store your personal or family medical information, prescription records, and health insurance info, and to share it with medical professionals as appropriate.

The third piece is the HealthVault Connection Center, which can interface with various health and fitness devices. This enables you to save these values directly into your account.

Privacy of your health information is always a big concern, so you'll want to read and be comfortable with HealthVault's privacy statement before you create an account and begin adding your information.

HealthVault won't fix our healthcare crisis, but it may help add some sanity to your own healthcare management. The search and account functionality are online, so they should support most modern web browsers. The Connection Center requires loading device drivers to a accommodate your various medical devices, so you should expect that Windows XP or later will be required.

Download HealthVault