Free Download A Day

PHP is a handy scripting language for putting websites together. While the sites you build can be pretty spectacular, it's not so easy to just bang out a few pages and make sure they behave as expected.

For PHP pages to really do their thing, they need to live on a web server. If you're creating a big, elaborate site, no doubt you've already got a server set up to use. If you're just putting together a couple of pages in a one-off project, or for a site you're not going to host, it's not so easy to test and debug your code, short of installing a copy of Apache or IIS on your local machine. If you really don't want to go through all that, QuickPHP may be the tool for you.

QuickPHP is a very lightweight PHP web server that you can install locally without worrying about using up all your hard drive space or creating an administrative nightmare on your system. It has a small 500KB footprint and doesn't hog all your system RAM either. It can handle GET, POST, and HEAD requests, so you can really see what your scripts are doing, and can feel confident that they are going to be well behaved when you upload them to your production server.

QuickPHP is a free Windows application. It runs under Windows 2000 or later. A word of caution: QuickPHP is not designed as a production server. Since it runs under your user credentials, if you're running as Administrator, then it is as well—and you don't want the world hitting a server with those kinds of rights!

Download QuickPHP

CSV (comma separated values) files are one of our favorite little tricks. If you're keeping track of a few little pieces of data and don't need to do anything very fancy with it, they're the perfect solution. Unfortunately, they aren't always the easiest thing to work with.

Because records in a CSV file are often not of a fixed length, when you open the file up in a text editor, you may have one row that's 50 characters long, right next to another one that has 500 characters in it. That makes it pretty tough to compare one record with the next. Sure, you can open CSV files in Excel or another spreadsheet app to look at them in a tabular layout, but that may be overkill. What you need is a tool that's designed specifically to view and edit these files.

CSVed is one such tool. It doesn't care what you use a a field delimiter—you don't need to have comma-delimited CSV files, you can use TABs, pipes ("|"), or any other character. Open your file, and you're now looking at your data in a spreadsheet-like table. Not only is it easy to see what's in your file, but you can now easily make changes to it as well. Add a record, edit, insert, or reorder columns (fields), and more. Now you have all the power of a high-end GUI for your lowly CSV text file.

CSVed is a Windows application, and runs under Win2k or later. Free to download, technically it's "cardware", so if you find it useful, send the authors a postcard, and tell 'em "thanks."

Download CSVed

Computers want to be helpful. They're designed to help us get things done, both by what they let us do, and by what they keep us from doing. Want to run an app? Great, open your word processor and get to work. Want to unplug that USB drive? Hey, you've still go open files there, and if you eject it, you're going to be in a world of pain.

Usually that's all good. We get in a hurry and forget that we're accessing a file on removable media, and we don't want to trash that report or spreadsheet just because we've gotten a little distracted. Sometimes, though, we are smarter than the machine.

As we all know, sometimes Windows gets confused. It slips a cog and thinks that there are still open files when there are none, or that an app that we launched from our USB drive is still running, when it isn't. The only way to help Windows come back to reality is to reboot the machine, and that's not always a desirable state of affairs.

EjectUSB is a tool that lets you force-eject your thumb drive. Yes, if you're not careful, you can now break that file and lose hours of work, but you're smarter than that, right? Once you're sure you know what you're up to, you can force eject the drive, as well as clean up all the leftovers, like flushing caches, closing windows, and cleaning up Registry entries and Recent Document shortcuts that point to your removable volume.

EjectUSB is a free Windows application.

Download EjectUSB

Search engines drive our online lives. If Google isn't your browser's home page, you probably spend as much time on it as if it were. We often can't get through a web page or a blog post without needing to run a search on something—a new term we've run across, a new site to go visit, that sort of thing. The biggest problem there is how disruptive that is. Whether you have to open a whole new browser window or just a new tab, you have to leave what you're involved in to go do your search.

KallOut is a tool that lets you do your search from the very page you're looking at right now. Rather than having to open a browser window, you just select text, a word or a phrase, hover over the KallOut target, and click on the menu item you want.

Not just a browser-based tool, KallOut can also be used while you're editing Word DOCs, reading through PDFs, and more, all without leaving the page you're working on. That helps you to stay focused and get more work done more quickly.

KallOut is a free Windows application. It runs under WinXP and Vista.

Download KallOut

As much as we'd like to see more and more of our correspondence reduced to electronic form, there are some situations where nothing replaces a piece of paper. Whether it's a well-worded letter convincing a prospect to buy your goods or services, or a reminder note asking them to pay that invoice you've sent them three times, sometimes that simple piece of paper can make more impact than all the email in the world.

Having settled on that printed correspondence, you've carefully chosen the font and spacing to make just the right statement. Now to mail it off.

Nothing screams "unprofessional" like hand written addresses on the envelopes of your business correspondence. Sure, you can run envelopes through many printers, but often it's a tedious one-at-a-time process that takes up way too much time and trouble. The solution? Address labels.

autofillPDF-labels is a free service that allows you to create mailing labels and print them on industry-standard label stock. We've reviewed their service before, but they've made it even better. They don't require any software on your machine except for a current copy of Adobe Reader—no Microsoft Word or OpenOffice software is needed. Visit their website and browse through their impressive array of label formats. You can choose formats to print a whole page of the same label (so you can send your favorite client a dozen different bills), or you can put a different address on each label (to send a newsy letter to your Christmas mailing list). You can choose to include images on your labels as well (your company logo may be just the thing to convince them of how serious an operation you are).

They've got templates for nearly three dozen different labels, ranging from rectangular mailing labels to round labels to labels for CDs, DVDs, and VHS tapes, as well as file folder labels and labels for name badges, and even business cards. They're all cross referenced to Avery part numbers, so you can pick up the label stock at your local office supply store.

autofillPDF-labels is compatible with Linux, Macintosh, and Windows systems, as long as you've got a recent version of Adobe Reader.

Download autofillPDF-labels

Repetition: something that computers do well, and people don't. Give your system a task, tell it to repeat a hundred—or a thousand—times, and you can just walk away. If you had to do that same thing that many times, you'd surely go nuts.

It's easy to work within applications to get them to repeat actions like updating records in a database or mail-merging a letter to your Christmas list. What about other actions that aren't so easily defined? In those situations, keyboard macros are often the way to go.

Windows Macro Recorder by Freelabs is one such tool. To create your macros, it records keystrokes and mouse events from any application. Once you've recorded these actions, it's easy to play them back. Use them to insert little passages of text into your documents ("Dear Mom….") or use the repeat function to have them carry out complicated procedures. You can run it from their GUI, or you can use its command line interface. Either way, you'll be automating your workflow in no time.

Windows Macro Recorder is (obviously) a Windows application.

Download Windows Macro Recorder

Back in the day, you could run a business—or your life—on the back of an envelope. A couple of notes here, a little sketch there, and you were good. Nothing all that complicated.

Update to today. There's no such thing as simple any more. What you used to be able to do on a legal pad requires computers and more. There's a lot you can accomplish with a word processor and a spreadsheet, but if you really want to take care of everything, you need specialized software that deals with your particular issues and concerns. Who knows what those are better than you?

Now you can take your knowledge and expertise and leverage it into applications that you build yourself. LyteRAD is a lightweight rapid application development framework that lets you build complex database applications without writing a line of code. They supply the tools, including an embedded database, and you put it together. Sound good?

LyteRAD is available as a free download (the "CE" edition), and also has paid upgrades. It's a Windows application.

Download LyteRAD

If getting things done were easy, there wouldn't be so many productivity tools available out there. Writing a letter or putting together a budget, while they can take some time and effort, are generally pretty straightforward. You can use a word processing application or spreadsheet, or even just a yellow legal pad. Dial the complexity up, however, and all of a sudden the paper-and-pencil approach probably isn't your best bet.

Planning, scheduling, and project management fall into this category. Even a moderately complex project involves all kinds of resources, schedules, deadlines, and more. Trying to sketch this out on the back of an envelope is just looking for trouble. Microsoft Project is one tool you can use to try to manage this type of thing. Unfortunately it can also be a way to severely deplete your bank account.

Open Workbench is a free open source project management tool. It includes all the capabilities you need to successfully plan your next big project, including scheduling, allocation of resources, tracking progress, and more. You can even schedule across projects, so your planning can stretch across the enterprise.

Open Workbench is a Windows application.

Download Open Workbench

Back in the day, a photocopier was a big investment. You had to be a big deal company, and in some cases, they were so expensive that you couldn't even buy them—you had to lease them instead.

Fast forward to today. You can now buy all-in-one machines that scan, print, fax, and just about anything else. What if you're stuck somewhere in the middle? You've got a scanner and you've got a printer, but you aren't interested in chucking them both for a new piece of hardware. Sure, you can scan documents into a paint program, and then turn around and print them out, but wouldn't it be more convenient to just push a button to copy a document?

iCopy can give you a hand with this. It's a small little application—so small you can carry it around on a USB drive—that lets you do exactly that. With your scanner and printer fired up, just push the button in iCopy and before you know it, you'll be printing a copy of whatever you put on the scanner. You can adjust brightness, contrast, and even choose the number of copies you want.

iCopy is a Windows application.

Download iCopy

Does it ever feel like your brain is going to explode? You can reach a point where you couldn't possibly cram another idea or piece of information in there. Or maybe even worse: you've got it all in there, but now you can't retrieve that important fact that you need right now.

Evernote is a tool that will help to keep your head from blowing up. Whether it's typed notes, images you've grabbed, web pages you've seen, you can save it all, and in a way that allows you to get it back when you need it. Their technology helps to organize it all, so you can retrieve your data. And maybe best of all, it's available to you across all your devices, so you're not stuck with not being able to get to your Windows bright ideas while you're on your Mac.

Evernote is available for Mac (OS X - Leopard), Windows (XP/Vista), Windows Mobile, and as a Web Clipper.

Download Evernote