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Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door. Who said that—Walt Disney? Probably not.

There are lots of tools out there you can use for building web pages. Everything from Notepad to TextEdit to specialized tools has something to offer.

Araneae is a no-nonsense text editor for building and tweaking web pages. As a text editor, it doesn't add a bunch of extra junk to your code. Since it's built for editing web pages, it knows all about HTML, CSS, PHP, and uses appropriate syntax highlighting. That can be invaluable while you're plumbing the depths of tables nested four deep in your page.

Its tabbed interface allows you to open multiple documents at once, making it easier to jump back and forth and keep everything in sync. Quick Clips let you insert tags into your code instantly. Its built-in search capability allows you to easily find strings of text.

Araneae is free for personal use. It's a Windows application, and should run under Win98 or later.

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How much of your hard drive space is taken up with duplicate files? Sure, they were all important when you created them, but now you've got three identical copies of that report you created, and you don't even know where they all are. Is that really the kind of clutter you need?

There are several tools out there that will help you to discover duplicates on your system, but Duplicate Files Searcher goes one better. Not only does it work on your local hard drive, but you can also use it to check for duplicates on removable media like CDs, DVDs, and even USB drives. In addition, you can also search mounted network drives, which can help you find stuff you've left on your network share as well.

Duplicate Files Searcher does a byte-by-byte compare of your files, so you know that you're identifying actual duplicates, and not just documents with the same name and different content. You don't want to clobber all your incremental backups, after all.

Duplicate Files Searcher is a Java app, so it'll run on just about anything.

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The world's a complicated place. Things happening, people moving around, all that. It would be nice if Mom were always there to keep an eye on us and help tell us what to do, but she's not always available. Sometimes the next best thing can be a good sign. This house is for rent. You can't park there. There's wet paint on that bench. All the helpfulness of Mom, but without the funny hair style.

Printable Signs features over 75 signs that you can download and print for free. Formatted as PDF files, all you need is a copy of Adobe Reader or any other tool that can read those files, and you're in business. Put a "keep out" sign on the refrigerator; put a "biohazard" sign on your kid's room; hang a "beware of cat" sign on the fence. Knock yourself out—the sky's the limit here.

You can also grab editable versions of the signs for only $1.99 each. Available as Microsoft Word-compatible DOC files, you can post your business hours or fill-in a yard sale sign with all the particulars on the great bargains you're offering this weekend.

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Everybody has their own way they want to work. You've got your favorite apps, and you want them laid-out just so. When things are set up right, you just blast through your work and get things done. Change just one of those, though, maybe a window in the wrong location, and you're a fish out of water. Drag them all back where they belong, and you're on your way.

Not so easy, though, is when the icons in the Windows Taskbar get shuffled around. Those guys have a mind of their own, and no amount of coaxing will get them to move to where you want them.

Taskbar Shuffle is a slick little tool that lets you re-order the icons in your Windows taskbar. Click on an icon, and drag it to the left, or drag it to the right, and pretty soon you're back in business. It also lets you rearrange icons in the System Tray. Now you can finally make you machine look the way it needs to for you to get your work done.

Taskbar Shuffle is a Windows application. It runs on just about any 32-bit version, from lowly Win95 on up to Vista.

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Databases are valuable repositories of information. You can store data in plain old text files, or even in spreadsheets, but the results may be less than satisfying. Unfortunately, creating real databases can require a lot of heavy lifting to get them up and running. The biggest ones even have their own database administrators (DBAs).

FileAmigo LE tries to lower the bar for creating and maintaining databases. When you start it up, you can choose to create a new database by using a template, importing data, or starting from scratch. You can easily add fields and populate your database. Once the data's in there, you can manipulate it to get done what needs doing. Print directly from the data grid or create reports that grab the relevant information for you. You can even store other files in your database, by either embedding them in your database, or linking directly to them.

FileAmigo LE is a free Windows application. It runs under Windows 9x or later.

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Every time you type a letter, it's the same old thing. Get to the end and you've got to type the closing and signature, complete with all the tabs, returns, and all. It's the same thing every time, but here you go , typing it all out again. There's got to be an easier way, right?

Texter is a text snippet macro tool that takes the tedium out of having to type the same stuff over and over again. Instead of typing "Sincerely, [Enter][Enter][Enter]Mr. Joe Blow", create the hotstring "sinc", for example, and whenever you type that string, Texter will automatically expand it out for you. You can how your replacement is triggered—type your hotstring followed by [Enter], [Tab], or [Space], or even have it triggered automatically as an "instant replacement". Texter can also function as an AutoCorrect tool, so that the stuff you always type wrong will always be corrected for you on the fly. It even supports its own scripting language, so you can send keystrokes, like [Enter] to your applications.

Texter is a free Windows application.

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You're reading along in a document or web page and come across some numbers. You want to do a quickie calculation, but now you're stuck—do you start-up the ten-key sitting on your desk—you do still have a desktop calculator, right—or do you fire-up Excel? Neither of those is a particularly satisfying option. Wouldn't it be nice to have an on-screen calculator that would let you do that quick calculation without making a major production of it?

Calq is just such a tool. You can start Calq up when you need it, or add it to your start up items and call it up with a hotkey combination. Either way, you get a calculator that overlays the windows on your screen and lets you do calculations through the keyboard. It's so unobtrusive that once you're done using it, it even puts itself away—after several seconds of inactivity, it hides itself, just waiting for you to call it up again.

Calq is available for both Mac and Windows. The Macintosh version requires OS X version 10.4 or later. The Windows version wants XP or Vista.

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Outlook does everything. It's email, it's collaboration, it's scheduling; heck, it's even a development platform. The bad part? It does all that stuff.

I've got a bunch of stuff I need to do. What I don't need is a tool that takes more attention than the tasks I'm trying to get done. Like going after a pesky fly with a thermonuclear device, sometimes Outlook and its ilk are just too much for the job at hand. All I want to do is to make a list of what I've got to do, remind me to do it, and let me cross it off the list when I'm done. Nothing more.

Doomi may be just the ticket here. It's just a simple "to-do" list manager. Not a lot of bells and whistles, you can create and edit tasks, set reminders, and archive the stuff that you've done. No learning curve. No layers of stuff to have to dig through. It's a tool that lets you get your work done while it stays out of the way. 'Nuff said.

Doomi runs on both Mac and Windows machines. It uses the Adobe AIR platform, which requires either OS X 10.4 or later, or Windows 2000 or better.

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You're having a super productive day. You're coding like a demon, or you're banging out the blog posts, or letters to Santa or whatever. You're almost done. "Just this one little tweak," you say. Two hours later not only doesn't your tweak work but you can't get back to your original, because it went away several Saves ago. Oops!

AutoVer is a real time backup system. Never again will you have to worry about clobbering your only copy of some important document because of a bad edit. You can use it to make a full backup copy of any document each time you save it, or you can just grab changes, making it act more like a version control system.

AutoVer runs in the System Tray, so it's always there and you never have to remember to turn it on. You can configure it to watch or ignore certain files—temp files, the Windows directory tree, etc.—that change often, so you don't have a zillion copies of all the .TMP files that you really don't care about anyway.

AutoVer is a Windows tool. It requires Windows 2000 or later, and .NET Framework version 2.

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How much stuff do you collect? No, not the dust bunnies under the couch—we're talking real collections here. Stamps. Coins. Baseball cards. How about CDs? Movies? I'll bet you can come up with a sizable list…or lists, if you have to manage a separate list of each collection.

Data Crow lets you manage everything through one tool. Designed to help you manage your stuff, it lets you enter a closet full of goodies. To help make things easier on you, it's smart about the data you're entering. Keeping track of a list of books? It can use Amazon to help flesh-out that list—give it the title, and you'll get back the publication date, author, cover art, all that good stuff. You'll get similar help with music and movies, as well as software. Data Crow will also look a the meta data that your music files and image files carry with them, so you won't have to re-enter all that. Tweak the UI so that you can enter things the way that makes sense to you.

Features include auto-numbering, automated backup, and reporting. A quick and easy loan management system helps you remember why you can't find your favorite Starland Vocal Band album: you loaned it to your brother-in-law.

Data Crow is a Java app, so it should run on most any machine that has a current Java runtime. For Windows users, there is a regular installer.

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