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Are you writing the next Great American Novel? How about the next award winning play or movie? You've got so many ideas in your mind about character, location, plot, and more, that your head is about to explode. You know you've got to write it all down, but how will you ever find it all once you've created a stack of paper or a hard drive full of word processing docs?

Character Keeper is a tool that lets you keep track of all these important bits and pieces in one location. Keep your notes in here, and you'll always be able to find them. There's no limit to the number of characters you can keep track of, or the amount of information you track for each one. Add all your other ideas as well, including timelines, family history, titles, and more. With Character Keeper tracking the minutiae, you can spend your time writing and being creative, instead of serving as an unpaid file clerk.

Character Keeper is a free application. It's available for Windows (XP and Vista), as well as a couple flavors of Linux.

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It's all about the information. Every day we've got tons and tons of it that comes our way. Trying to survive the deluge is no small task. If you're taking lots of notes on what's going on around you, then you need a good way to organize it—after all, data's not information until you can find it and use it.

eNoteFile is an integrated note taking system. Rather than having a bunch of separate text files littering your desktop, enter everything into this free tool. Now you can organize your thoughts and observations in such a way that you can keep track of them all, and most importantly, get them back out when you need them. As well as textual information, this tool lets you keep track of images as well—just try that in Notepad. The tool was originally built by- and for physical therapists, and you can well imagine the types of information they might need to keep track of, as well as the importance of being able to call up information from a patient's last visit.

eNoteFile is a free download. It runs on Windows XP and Vista using .NET Framework 3.5.

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Think about your computer's desktop. Mostly it just sits there. Sure, you can add some wallpaper to it, but now you've got a wallpaper-enhanced desktop that mostly just sits there. It might be nice to make it do something useful.

One way to put your desktop to work is with a tool like Rainmeter. This app lets you add a bunch of useful tools to your desktop and finally make it work for a living. As you might expect, Rainmeter does include a—wait for it—rain meter, so you can check on last night's precipitation. In addition to that, though, it's got a bunch of other tools you can use, including note taking apps, application launchers, various newsfeeds, system status info, and more. It's fully skinnable, so you can make it look pretty, and there are oodles of apps you can choose to use with it.

Rainmeter is a Windows app. It runs under XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

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If you live anything but the most simple of lives, you've got more stuff to keep track of than anybody really should have to. Whether it's projects at work, stuff at home, kids' schedules, volunteer work, or any of a zillion other things, there's just no way you can hold all that stuff in your head. All those little scraps of paper just don't cut it any more. You know that some day, it's ll just going to blow up and you're going to miss that important deadline, or the kids will be at soccer but you'll be looking for them at ice skating, or worse. Now what are you gonna' do?

ToDoList is aimed at helping you keep track of projects you're working on. Defining what a "project" is is up to you. There's no limit to the number of items or sub-items (or sub-sub-items) you can enter here, so you can probably get just as granular as you need to. Keep track of your estimates of how long each piece is going to take, and compare them with the actual amount of time you've invested in your work. You can expand and contract items, so you can expose or hide lower-level items while still looking at the big picture. And it automatically saves your work when you shut down, and remembers where you were when you start up again.

ToDoList is a free Windows application.

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How many little bits and pieces of information do you come across over the course of a day or week? Whether it's little reminders to return a phone call, a note to grab a quart of milk on the way home, a web address to visit, a pithy little quote to add to your blog, you've got tons of little things to keep track of. Sticky notes might be your current solution, but you know how quickly the walls around your cubicle gets filled with those, and sticking them to the bezel of your monitor isn't a real answer either. There are electronic sticky note-like tools you can use too, but those virtual notes can take up a lot of screen real estate before long.

CintaNotes is the electronic sticky note done one better. Instead of a bunch of separate little rectangles on your screen, these notes all live together as a list in the CintaNotes interface. It's got a super fast search system built in, so as you type your words or phrase, the notes that don't match go away (just hidden, not deleted), so that you're left with the information you want and not what you don't. You can add text directly to the app, or with it running in the background (minimized to the System Tray), just highlight the text you're interested in on a web page or in a document, hit the hotkeys, and that text is automatically inserted into CintaNotes. It doesn't get much easier than that.

CintaNotes is a free Windows application. It runs under Windows 2000 and later.

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There are just some things you need to memorize. Sure, you've got notepads and stickies and all manner of electronic tools to remember stuff for you, but there's always that stray something that you need when you're not around your memory aids—maybe it's an address, an important phone number, your ATM PIN (you didn't write it on the back of the card, did you?) or (shudder) the name of your supervisor's spouse or kids. Nothing can substitute for having that all-important piece of intel just when you need it.

There's nothing like repetition to memorize something. Back in the Third Grade, you used flash cards to memorize the multiplication tables, running through them again and again and again until you lived and breathed those numbers. Today you don't need to rummage though the junk drawer looking for index cards; just check out Memoriser.

Memoriser (the British spelling, with an "s") is a tool you can use on your computer. You define the questions and answers, and tell it how often to quiz you. It figures out which things you've learning and which you need more work on, and tweaks its schedule accordingly. After all, why spend tons of time on questions you're good on, rather than on the stuff that you need to work on more?

Memoriser run under Windows.

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When you're writing code, sometimes your (computer's) desktop looks like an explosion. Maybe you're working with several files in an IDE, you've got a dozen text files open, a couple of specification documents, along with all the normal email, IM tools, and everything else you need to really be productive. You're moving text back and forth between all these different windows, and frankly losing your mind in the process. Your clipboard is getting a real workout, but you just know there's got to be an easier way to carry all this stuff back and forth.

TenClips bills itself as the "ultimate multiple clipboards for developers." It incorporates features of a multiple-clipboard application with format-stripping capabilities as well. With ten individual clipboards, you'll probably find a cubbyhole for all the "stuff" you need to move from here to there. Imagine grabbing all the individual pieces you need from the spec doc at one time and then pasting them into your code individually—no back-and-forth to get the job done. And you can choose a plain-old paste, bringing formatting information along, or alternatively you can paste "purified text"—just the text, with no formatting.

TenClips is a free Windows tool. It runs under XP, Vista, and Windows 7

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Working with your computer, you can accomplish great things. Clever and insightful documents. Exciting and useful code. Financial calculations sure to make you the next zillionaire. Unfortunately, while we're doing all these great things, it's often easy to get bogged-down in the minutiae of the process. Running apps, moving files around, all that sort of thing.

Blaze is a clever little tool that helps to take some of the drudgery out of the mundane stuff that holds the brilliance together. Install it on your machine and it watches over your shoulder. When it sees you doing some repetitive task—renaming a bunch of files one after another—it pops-up its head (or at least its dialog box) and helps you finish what you're doing. If there's a pattern to it, it recognizes the pattern and can continue it for you, saving you from the banal and letting you soar to greatness.

A free Windows application, Blaze runs under XP, Vista, and Windows 7, in both 32- and 64-bit flavors.

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Once upon a time, Google was a search engine. You used it to find stuff online, and it was good. After a while, they decided that they wanted to do more. They started creating applications that you could use to do more than just search. We're all familiar with GMail, Google Maps, their calendar, Google Docs, and all the other good stuff that they're got. Unfortunately, since all these apps are run as online services, it's been necessary to run a web browser to use them. After all, how do you get at the online stuff if not with a browser?

GMDesk is an alternative to that approach. Built on the Adobe Air platform, this tool lets you run Google's tools without running a browser. With Gmail or Google Docs running in GMDesk, they're literally just another app running on your desktop. You can easily task-switch between these and your other applications, and you don't have to bog your system down with all the overhead of your web browser.

GMDesk runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms—in fact, anywhere that you can install Adobe Air.

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Copying and pasting text is a quick and easy way to make your computing life more efficient. Rather than having to re-type text from one application to the next, it's easy to just bring it with you via the clipboard. Sometimes, though, you get more than you wanted.

As computers and the operating systems that make them run get more sophisticated, they do more and more of the heavy lifting for you. Usually that's a good thing, but sometimes what the computer wants to do can be at cross-purposes with what you, the human, really want to accomplish. The system clipboard can be one culprit in this.

When you copy text to the clipboard, you typically grab the text itself, but along with it comes all the formatting that appears with the text. There may be a bold word, some of the text is in red, that sort of thing. Often what you really want is just the text, without all the fancy stuff that the clipboard brings along. The old-fashioned way to work around this problem is to copy text, paste it into Notepad, and then copy that same text from Notepad and drop it into its final destination. Notepad doesn't support formatting, so all the formatting stuff goes away. What a pain to have to take that extra step.

PureText is a tool that lets you strip out the formatting and paste text into your destination in just one step. Now it's not going to spell-check the text, strip out newline characters, get rid of HTML tags, or anything like that, but it is going to get rid of all the formatting that may be getting in your way.

A free download, PureText is a Windows application. It should be at home on any Win32 system from Windows 95 up through Vista.

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