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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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Pencil is a free open-source animation program. Not aimed at professionals, it allows just about anybody to create old-school 2-dimensional animation. Working with layers, it supports both bitmapped and vector drawings. Using virtual "onion skins", you create one image, and then use that to create your next one by displaying a semi-transparent rendering of your first image, just the way the great classic animators used to painstakingly create all the old pre-computer cartoons. You can draw your images within Pencil, or you can import drawings from other apps, or even scan them in from your real-world drawings.

The camera layer lets you move the viewer's point-of-view around your drawings. There's also some support for a sound layer, so you can add voices or music to your creation.

When you're all done with your masterpiece, you can save your animation to the default XML format, or as a series of PNG images. You can also save it as a Flash movie, or as a QuickTime file (Mac only).

Pencil is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows users.

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How many email accounts do you have? Home, work, clubs. POP accounts, webmail accounts like Yahoo and Gmail. The list goes on and on. How can you possibly keep track of all this?

POP Peeper is a tool that sits in your Windows System Tray and helps you keep track of all your comings and goings in the land of email. Sitting unobtrusively in your task bar, it'll let you know when new messages come in for your accounts. It's compatible with POP3, IMAP, and most webmail services.

An account creation wizard makes it easy to configure POP Peeper for your accounts. You can enter account information manually, or import it from your current email client.

You can configure it to play a sound for new arrivals with your choice of either one sound for all new messages, or select a different sound for each account. Once new email has arrived, you can choose to read it and respond through POP Peeper, or it can open your regular email client for you.

POP Peeper is a Windows application and should run on most systems.

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Has this ever happened to you? You've got your desktop icons all laid out just the way you want them. Maybe it's applications over here, and documents over there, or work and personal, or whatever arrangement makes you feel like you're really gonna' get some work done. And then you change the resolution on your screen.

Whether you're coding a new app or looking at a web page, sometimes you need to see what it looks like at a different screen resolution. Now you've done it. Your carefully arranged desktop icons are totally trashed. Windows has been very helpful and rearranged them all for you. Only, now you can't find anything. What makes perfect sense to the O/S makes no sense to you. Despair sets in.

DeskSave is a tool that keeps you from being the victim of Windows' helpfulness. Once you get your desktop configured the way you want, you can save that layout. Now when you have to change your screen, when you restore the original resolution, you get your layout back. If you regularly jump from one size to another, you can save multiple arrangements, so that things always look the way you want them to. No more despair!

DeskSave is a Windows tool. It runs on systems using Win98 or later.

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RapidoWrite is a cross-application text replacement tool. If you're constantly typing the same text into letters, forms, and so on, why not automate the process? Now instead of typing your whole address, just type "addr" or any other string of characters, and it will expand out to the text you've assigned to it. Use it for signatures, addresses, or even whole documents—it's up to you. It's easier and quicker for accessing regularly visited web pages than digging through lists of bookmarks.

To use the power of RapidoWrite, you just type your abbreviation and hit [Return], and that's it. It will automatically replace the abbreviation with your selected text, and you're on your way. It works with any application, so you don't have to use one tool with your word processor and another one with your web browser.

RapidoWrite is a tool for Macintosh users. It requires OS X version 10.4 or later. It will run on both PowerPC and Intel machines.

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PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files were designed to be the best of both worlds: they don't require the licensing of the technology behind GIF images, and they are a lossless format so that you aren't losing data from your image files. They can suffer, however, from being rather large in size.

PngOptimizer is a free tool that can help you to optimize your PNG files. You can clean-up your existing files, making them smaller in size, or convert them into other lossless formats, such as BMPs and GIFs. It also allows you to make PNG screenshots, which are handy to insert into documents or post to the Web.

PngOptimizer is a Windows app, and requires Win2k or WinXP. It's available in both a GUI version, and also a command line version, suitable for scripting and batch files.

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The good folks at Stickergiant.com have created some dandy laptop stickers for FreeDownloadADay.com. (A laptop sticker is a sticker to, uh, stick on your laptop… but is easily removable or relocatable.) Want one for free? Just tell us your snail-mail address in the form here. U.S. addresses only (sorry, rest of the world.) Available while supplies last.

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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