Free Download A Day

Shortcuts are a Godsend in the world of software. No matter what the configuration of your system is, it's not always easy to dig through piles and piles of directories to find that tool you want to use at a particular moment. But when you've got a bunch of shortcuts, you can save some serious time, whether it's writing a term paper, visiting a web site, composing an email, or any of the zillions of things we do with our computers each day. Whether you call it a shortcut, a link, or an alias, they help you get through your day much more easily.

Windows makes it pretty easy to create shortcuts. Advanced Shortcuts Composer makes it even easier, and adds extra functionality to your shortcuts.

When you create a shortcut with this tool, not only do you get the quick-and-easy "double-click on this to run the application" that you're used to, but you can also direct where that shortcut will be created (desktop, folder full of personal shortcuts, etc.). You can assign a priority to the underlying application, so that it will play nice with other software on your system. You can even create hotkeys to run your shortcuts from the keyboard, giving you even faster response times. The only real question left is "what will you do with all the free time?"

Probably go download more apps, right?

Advanced Shortcuts Composer is a free Windows application. It's compatible with systems running Windows 2000 or later.

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Everything's got a password. Online bank accounts. Online mail accounts. Editing your blog. Logging in to your network at work. That's a lot of accounts, and that means a lot of passwords.

Now you can avoid having to remember a bunch of login information if you always use the same short passwords that are based on dictionary words or easily knowable personal facts about yourself, or if you always write them down on sticky notes and hang them on your monitor. Of course, with that approach, you can also forget about keeping your money, identity, work product, and everything else that those passwords are supposed to protect. If you really want to keep things safe, you should use long, complicated, impossible-to-remember passwords, and change them regularly. Good luck keeping track of all that.

Password Gorilla may be the tool you've been looking for. A cross platform app for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and more, it helps you to use passwords the way they were intended. Now instead of having to remember a whole brain-full of passwords, you can store account names, passwords, URLs, notes, and more in Password Gorilla's encrypted database. Now you only have to remember one password, and everything else is safe and sound behind it. If you're feeling particularly uninspired, it will help you generate serious passwords that nobody is likely to crack in this (or several more) lifetimes.

Password Gorilla is a free download.

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In the beginning was the Terminal. It wasn't necessarily pretty, but it got the job done. Remember, we sent people to the Moon without a GUI anywhere in sight. Sometimes the bells-and-whistles just get in the way. In times like that, maybe JDarkRoom is the tool you need.

A basic text editor, JDarkRoom doesn't do anything fancy; it's a no-nonsense text editor that's not going to get you bogged down with a bunch of flashy stuff. If you need to write, and you're easily distracted by shiny things, you're bound to get a lot more done here. Just because it's not flashy doesn't mean that it comes without features.

You can choose a color scheme and default font and size. Specify a default file to open on start. Text search, word count, adjustable margins, and more make sure that low overhead doesn't mean low functionality as well. Who knows—it may just become your favorite editor.

JDarkRoom is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's a Java app, so you'll need to have Java 1.4 or better on your machine.

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Where would we be without clock radios? Still in bed and asleep? Well, I suppose so, but that misses my point. Whether it's the dulcet tones of the latest Top 40 hit to fly up the charts, or the rantings of the talk show flavor-of-the-month, it's all so much better than the insistent clang! clang! clang! of the old wind-up alarm clock sitting on your night stand.

Online Clock Radio is, as the name might suggest, an online clock, alarm, and radio, all rolled into one. Choose from several different sizes and color schemes to see the current time of day displayed on your computer in faux LED characters. Set an alarm for any time in the next 24 hours. Listen to Internet radio stations chosen from an extensive list. But don't expect to wake up to music.

Because of the unreliability of Internet radio, the decision was made not to depend on a radio station's operation to get you out of bed in the morning. "The Internet didn't wake me up" isn't going to get you out of that test you missed, or the meeting your showed up late for. Think of this as more of a radio to listen to as you nod off in the evening, which will then wake you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with the dawn's early light.

Online Clock Radio is a free online service. To take advantage of all its functionality, you need to have the RealPlayer plugin installed on your system. Unfortunately, the service is not compatible with Safari or Opera browsers.

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Where's that memo? I'm sure I had it here just a minute ago. It must have gotten up and walked away on its own.

I'm sure I'll find the memo, since we know it didn't really sprout legs and walk away. But what about other things on your desktop? Like your computer?

No, your trusty Mac isn't likely to walk away on its own either, but if it had some help—the dreaded "five-finger discount," for example—it might well part ways with you. And that's bad, right?

This may be a job for Lockdown. An anti-theft application that runs on your system, once it's up and running, anything from the slightest tap on your computer will set off audible alarms, which can't be shut off or muted. It'll even snap a picture of the perpetrator with your built-in iSight camera. It can even email a copy of that photo to you. Once it's back in your hands, it's easy to turn off the racket, using your Apple Remote or by typing your password back into your computer.

Lockdown is an OS X application. It requires Leopard (10.5) or later.

Download Lockdown

So what's the real difference between a GUI and a terminal or command prompt interface on your computer? Ease of use? Drag-and-drop file maintenance? Point-and-click convenience? Those are all good. I like the pretty pictures.

We've come to think of our applications and data as the icons that represent them. Whether it's the big blue "W" of Microsoft Word, or the globe-and-critter icon for Firefox, they've changed the way we relate to our computers. But maybe you'd like a little input on this topic. Maybe you have a better idea about how things ought to look.

IcoFX is a free icon editing tool that lets you create and edit icons for your Windows or Mac system. You can create original icons, or extract them from other files; you can even change the icons embedded inside of your Windows executables. Make icons out of images. Further personalize your blog or website with favicons. It supports all different sizes and has over three dozen effects you can apply.

IcoFX is a Windows application. It runs under XP or Vista.

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What won't those Google guys (and gals) think of next? Not content to be the biggest search engine on the block, they further enmeshed themselves into our lives with Gmail, the ubiquitous email service. Google Docs makes it easy to get done what needs to be done without involving Microsoft in the process. Now they've rolled-out a new web browser, called Google Chrome.

While technically still a "beta" level release, it looks like they've got big plans for this new tool. Like the Google site itself, it's built around the theme that less is more, with a fairly minimalist user interface. Like the old Mozilla browser (Sea Monkey now), there's an all-in-one address bar, where you can enter URLs for pages you want to visit, and search terms for looking around online (no doubt using your favorite search engine by default). It can import all your bookmarks and passwords from your current browser, making for a painless transition. Application shortcuts let you use your favorite online apps without opening a browser window, making them more like desktop tools. Incognito mode lets you browse without having to worry about leaving bits and pieces of your trek in various history and cache files.

One important thing to bear in mind here is that all these features come with a price. While there is no suggestion that Google is up to anything nefarious here, they will know everything about where you go and what you look at with this browser. No doubt this will help them to personalize the content you view, but for the paranoid, or even just the careful, you may want to keep in mind that there may be somebody looking over your shoulder while you surf.

Google's Chrome browser is a Windows application, and requires WinXP or Vista. They plan versions for OS X and Linux, but they aren't available yet.

Download Google "Chrome" Browser

They say that what goes up must come down. I suppose that works with Sir Isaac Newton and falling apples, but I'm not so sure about it when it comes to data on our computers. We spend a lot of time uploading images to web sites and blogs, but we probably spend a lot more time downloading data–web pages we visit, email we receive, music files we acquire (whether by purchase or other means). No matter how you slice it, there's a lot of bits and bytes flying around us constantly. But how much data do you send and receive?

BitMeter is a tool that lets you see what's really going on. Install this tool, fire it up. and take a look at the data coming in and out of your system. Its default configuration is as a scrolling graph, showing speeds up and down, and data up and down over time. You can also grab the data numerically to load into a spreadsheet. Your data is available with several different time horizons–look at information regarding the last few hours, days, or even months.

While this may all seem like just an interesting parlor game, consider for a minute that some folks have limits place on their bandwidth usage. If there's a limit on your downloads, for example, then it's vital to really know just how much data you're grabbing, lest you run out of month before you run out of downloads.

BitMeter 2 is a Windows app. You need to be running Win2k or better. It also requires version 1.1 (or later) of the .NET framework.

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Tazti (pronounced "tasty") is speech recognition software for your PC. Basically, it allows you to do just about anything on your system without touching it, just by the power of your voice.

It has many built-in commands that hook into commonly-used applications and websites, but you can also add your own, so that you can use it with virtually any program you have on your computer. Along with specific commands to play a track in iTunes or to log into your Facebook account, you can also tell it to run your mouse, with commands like "click," "double-click," and "context menu."

Each user creates a "recognition profile", so that Tazti will recognize their unique speech patterns. That way, no matter what kind of accent you have, Tazti will understand what you want it to do.

Tazti is a Windows app. It requires Win XP or Vista, with separate downloads for each flavor of Windows.

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It used to be, back in the day, that when you bought Windows, you owned Windows. Not so much any more. Now there's the home edition, the super-duper home edition, the professional version (as opposed to the amateur version?), and so on. Each has a different price, and a different set of features, with a direct correlation between price and functionality. One of the features that they decided, in their wisdom, was an "extra" was that of a local web server. There's no such thing any more as the Personal Web Server that used to ship with Win98; now you have to buy the super-duper version of Windows to get a copy of IIS, the big-deal Windows web server. What if you want to create an intranet to use locally, or even a low-volume web site for the real world to access? Time for third-party applications.

Abyss Web Server is a powerful web server that doesn't require a high-priced version of Windows to run–it'll even run on Win95. In fact, it doesn't require Windows at all, since it's also available for OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD.

It's easy to set up and configure, with a browser-based front end. It supports server-side includes, custom error pages, URL rewriting, and many more features. The Windows version even handles ASP.NET pages. With add-ons, it supports PHP, Perl, Python, and a bunch of database backends.

Abyss Web Server is free for personal use. If you want to add extra functionality or deploy it in a production environment, you'll want to upgrade to the paid version.

Download Abyss Web Server