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Back in the old days, nobody cared about what things looked like on computer screens—you had your choice of green text on a black background, or if you were really adventurous, you might have amber on a black background. Nowadays, everything's graphical: desktop applications, web pages, and more. Graphics are everything.

With text, you could describe what you saw on your screen in terms of characters and lines—maybe an area ten characters wide and three lines tall. Now, it's all pixels. Images, icons, on-screen widgets, web pages—everything has a size, and those sizes are important. Will this control fit on the screen? Will this picture fit on the page? There are a zillion things to consider.

Meazure is a cool tool that helps you wrap your head around all these graphic elements. You get on-screen rulers that allow you to measure all of the stuff you see on your display. In addition, you can grab screen captures for any piece of the screen you want. You can even measure to see whether what you've got on your screen will fit into common screen or video sizes.

How much would you expect to spend for all this functionality? You're right: it's free. Meazure is a Windows application. It runs under Windows 98 or later.

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Everybody's collaborating online these days. It's not that uncommon for a programmer on one continent to work with an analyst on a different continent, and for both of them to update a tech writer located on the other side of the world. Sure, through the miracle of the Internet, it's possible to communicate and share work product between you all, but do you really want your hard work and trade secrets mixed with all the junk email and other foolishness flying around out there on the 'Net? You really want a network you can use that separates you from all that other stuff, but to do it without having to string cable all around the globe.

Remobo is one possible solution here. You can set up a network between all your machines, which allows you to share files privately, or even to run applications remotely. Now you can look over each other's shoulders, or even drive programs on other user's systems. Instead of telling them what you're talking about, you can show them.

Another way to use Remobo is to access your home or work computer when you're not at home or work. On a business trip? Log on back at the office to check your email. Took work home last night, but forgot to bring it back to the office? Log on to your home computer and grab your stuff.

Remobo is a Windows app, and runs on Windows 2000 or later. Their website says that Mac and Linux versions are coming soon.

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Genealogy is one of the most popular hobbies in the country. Where else can you collect things–in this case, ancestors–without filling up boxes, bookcases, and curio cabinets? (No, you can't stick Uncle Joe in a box!) Once you have your lists of the "who" and "when" of your family, what do you do with them? An affordable answer to that question is to grab some free family tree templates at FamilyTreeTemplates.net.

Family Tree Templates are available in a wide variety of styles. There are "formal" templates that take a bare-bones "just the facts" approach, with room for names and vital statistics. Others include graphics to dress them up. Some even have places to add photos of your family members, making your project much more personal.

With over 20 family tree templates and ancestor charts to choose from, they're perfect for genealogy research and class projects. Best of all, they're all available for free.

Family Tree Templates are available for free download. You'll need a recent version of Adobe Reader or compatible program that can read PDF files to print them out. Also available are Templates in Microsoft Word (DOC) format, that you can edit with your computer. They run $4 each.

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The Dock is a great innovation in desktop application management. You get to keep a pile of shortcuts to the tools you use most often; add to that new entries for each app that's currently running. Now you're cooking with gas!

The thing is, even though the Dock may be the second greatest thing since sliced bread (you can choose for yourself what the best thing is), it's always got one shortcoming: it is where you aren't. You live most of your computing life out in the middle of your screen—applications, documents, everything interesting is out at the center of the display, but your Dock sits along the edge, a virtual wallflower. If you could move your Dock into the center and away from the side or bottom of the screen, you just might be a little more efficient.

Circle Dock does just that. Rather than Dock-as-straight-line, you can now use a Dock that is circular or even spiral in shape. Drag it around the screen; put it where it makes sense to you—maybe some place where you don't have to move your mouse halfway across the screen just to click on an application icon. Who knows, maybe doing away with all those extra mouse movements will make you so much more efficient, you'll get your work done in half the time—or at least be the talk of the office.

Circle Dock is a free download. It's a Windows app and runs under Windows XP and later, and requires version 2 of the .NET Framework.

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Whether you're a small business, or a not-so-small business, if you're going to last very long, you need an income. You provide goods or services (or both) for your clients and customers, and it would be nice if they paid you for your hard work—after all, you can't run your business on good intentions alone. For that matter, if you're a non-profit who mostly does run on good intentions, you probably have expenses that you incur that need to be reimbursed. No matter how you slice it, you need that income. That means you need to send out bills.

There are several different approaches you can take to generate invoices to send to your customers. You can buy an expensive computerized system to generate bills, but you know that's going to cost you a pretty penny. Or you can run down to the local office supply store and grab a pad of invoice forms and fill them in by hand, although that torn-from-a-book look doesn't seem very professional. Another approach to take is to visit the folks at PrintableInvoiceTemplates.net.

PrintableInvoiceTemplates.net offers over 60 downloadable templates for invoices, statements, purchase orders, and more. Download the free PDF versions and print them out. Now you'll can be taken seriously, the money will come rolling in, and you'll be on the path to success. They've also got customizable (Microsoft Word DOC) versions of these financial documents that you can grab for a couple of bucks.

Printable Invoice Templates require the free Adobe Reader program. They should be compatible with most modern systems.

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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!

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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