Free Download A Day

It's a big world out there. If you want to share your work, whether ideas, images, or what-have-you, with everybody else, you've got to move it from your desktop onto the appropriate server. Whether it's a web page, a file archive, or some more exotic location, nobody will appreciate your brilliance until they see your stuff.

AnyClient is a platform-independent file transfer tool. Written in Java, you can use it for bare-bones FTP exchanges, encrypted SFTP transfers, or even for WebDAV sessions. You can choose to download it and install it on your local machine, or run it via a Java applet through your web browser, with no installation required. Either way, you can save your connection information in a site profile, allowing you to easily connect to your servers again and again.

AnyClient is a free application. You'll need to have an appropriate version of the Java runtime installed on your system.

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While a program with a name like Clavier+ sounds like it ought to do all things musical, the connection to the musical instrument is not the obvious one. Clavier+ is a keyboard (get it?) shortcut tool, letting you issue commands or type text with just a keystroke or two.

With Clavier+, you can designate a hotkey to run an application, another one to open a URL in your default web browser, or even use it to type text into a document. For the more rodentially-inclined, it will even simulate a mouse action for you. Your hotkeys can be used systemwide, or you can specify a particular app to apply them to. With the ability to add pauses, you can open an app, create a new window, and then type text into it all from one hotkey. Pretty slick.

Clavier+ is a Windows application.

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Freebie Notes is a quick and dirty electronic sticky note application. While it doesn't necessarily incorporate all the features of a more robust (and more pricey) tool, it just may take care of business for you.

You can create an unlimited number of notes, with a maximum recommended size of about 4000 characters each. That's a pretty sizeable note. You can adjust your notes' appearance: color, location on your desktop, transparency (Win2k and later) so that they don't get in your way onscreen. Set basic alarms to remind yourself of important tasks you need to take care of, or flag them with the "VIP" setting. Now your notes will jump up, flash, change color, and generally make a nuisance of themselves until you respond. If you've ever missed an important meeting or phone call because you hit Cancel instead of Snooze, you'll appreciate this.

Freebie Notes is a Windows application. It will run on systems with Win98 and later.

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There are all kinds of tools out there to help you organize information. They range from large-footprint database management systems down to little text file apps that let you scribble down notes to yourself. One thing that they all seem to have in common, though is that none of them remember where you got your information from.

When you jot a little note, you may want to keep track of just where it came from. If you're looking at a web page and see that little something you need, you may want to keep track of just which page it was that you were visiting. That's fine if you remember to capture that little bit of information, but if you don't, you may never get back to it. QuotePad can give you a hand with this.

When you grab a chunk of text from a web page, QuotePad not only copies the text you've selected; it also keeps track of the URL of that page. Now you don't have to get bogged down with the process—find the page, grab the text, remember to note the address—you can just keep looking, and QuotePad does the dirty work for you. And it's not limited to just snatching text from web pages: it also timestamps your notes, lets you set reminders, and more.

QuotePad is a free download. It's a Windows application, and runs under versions from Windows 2000 through Vista.

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Sometimes less is more. If you're trying to get something written and you're using the latest and greatest high-powered word processor from Microsoft or whoever, chances are it may take you a while to get to where you can start spitting out the words. There are so many bells and whistles that it's easy to get distracted, and you may end up spending more time tweaking the tool than actually using it to get something done. You need something less.

WriteMonkey is less. It's got a clear, bare-bones appearance that lets you concentrate more on the creative process than on the care-and-feeding of the tool. That doesn't mean that you can't make it bend to your will, however. Customize the look and feel of the editor with your choice of fonts and colors. You can set internal bookmarks in your documents, allowing you to easily navigate through your work. It uses a facility it calls "repository" that lets you store notes and meta-data in your document, and lets you toggle back and forth between your text and this extra data. And like any good writing tool, it's got built-in spell check.

WriteMonkey is a Windows app. It'll run under XP (.NET version 2 required), as well as Vista and Windows 7.

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As you wander around the Web, you're bound to find interesting things. You've got oodles of bookmarks or favorites on your browser, and you've a major contributor to del.icio.us. You'll always be able to get back to your little discovery now.

Sometimes, though, it's no so much about being able to return to the scene of the crime as it is of grabbing what you found interesting and taking it along with you. Maybe it's a little snippet of text, or an image you want to snap up. Now you want something that'll help you take that little bit of stuff and stick it in your pocket.

Snippy is a tool that lets you grab odd-shaped bits of this-and-that off of your screen. Unlike other screen capture tools, which are restricted to rectangular-shaped regions, Snippy lets you draw a freehand outline around the onscreen region you're interested in, and save that off to the clipboard. (You do have the option of grabbing a rectangular region as well.) With this snippet on your clipboard, you can now paste it into documents or email messages, saving for posterity that nifty little goodie you just ran across. It's important to note that everything you grab with Snippy is saved as an image, even if you're only looking at text. That means that any text you do grab isn't editable.

Snippy is a Windows application. It runs on XP out of the box, or on earlier versions with a little bit of extra attention.

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We're always excited about little tools that help make our lives easier. Anything that helps to make sense out of all the little bits-and-pieces of information that we need to keep track of is a good thing. We've recently added another of these to our list.

Jreepad is a Java reworking of the classic TreePad tool that we've looked at earlier. Whereas TreePad is strictly Windows, Jreepad will run on any system that supports a Java Virtual Machine, which includes OS X as well as various flavors of *NIX.

It uses a tree structure to organize your notes hierarchically. Individual notes are entered as "nodes" on that tree. Branches can be dragged around to reorganize your thoughts, so you're not stuck with your original organization scheme if it becomes clear to you that a different one might work better. Enter your notes in plain text, or format them as tabular data, or you can even mark them up with HTML. Jreepad has a powerful search capability, so it's easy to find just the info you're looking for. You can also create hyperlinks within your document, so it's easy to jump from place to place.

Jreepad is available as a .dmg file for OS X users, a .zip file for Windows installations, and as a platform-independent .jar file for everybody else.

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You're a busy guy (or gal). You're running a bunch of programs, and your toolbar is just packed full of application icons. If "cleanliness is next go Godliness," then you've got an ungodly mess here. Maybe it's time to tidy things up.

TrayEverything is a tool that lets you take your application icons and stick them in the System Tray. But what have you really gained if you just go from a crowded toolbar to a crowded tray? You can take it beyond that: make that icon go away completely. You can even password-protect your hidden icon—helps you keep that important, um, work-related application you were working on—or maybe it was MineSweeper—secure Or you can group icons together so now where you once had five icons, you've got only one.

Minimizing application windows is easy—just double-click them, or you can hit the minimize button, and away they go. You can even choose to have inactive windows minimize themselves. That seems pretty handy.

TrayEverything is a Windows application. There's an ANSI version for Win95/98/ME, and a Unicode version for Win2k and later.

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XML—Extensible Markup Language—is the latest and greatest way to share data between systems and platforms. It's an open standard, so there's no worries about getting stuck in some proprietary format that may go away, or be so tightly controlled by its publishers that you'll need to pay to get your data back. No thanks.

While XML is flexible, it's not always the easiest thing in the world to work with. With its combination of markup tags and text, you can get some files that are pretty big, and kind of nasty to work with—one false move, and you've broken your data. What you need is an editor that can help you make sense of all the potential that XML brings to the table.

XML Marker is one such tool. When you load your data into its editor, the Tree View gives you a hierarchical view of your information. It's easy to drill down into the specifics, and then the Tree Selection Browser lets you easily tweak your values, without your having to fear that you'll smash the structure of the file at the same time.

XML Marker is a free download for Windows systems.

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Have you ever used your email system as a database? When you want to remember to do something, you send yourself an email. When you want to capture a little piece of data, your send it off in an email to yourself. Since you've already got your head in that game, here's a way to make it work even better.

Postbox is a tool that helps you to organize the contents of your email messages. Not only that, it also looks at your attachments—images, documents, that whole deal—to help your keep track of it all. Now when you're trying to see everything about that new project, you'll really find everything. It's compatible with POP3 and IMAP mail protocols, so you're probably good to go with it right now. Search through everything, or filter your info so that you're only digging through a subset of your mail. You can even archive older stuff, so that you don't have to dig through it every day, while still allowing you to search through it when the need arises.

Postbox is available for Windows (XP and later) and Macintosh (OS X 10.4 and newer). It's currently beta-level software, so you might expect a bug or two. Their website says that this app is free, but suggests that they may change their pricing model somewhere down the road.

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