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Hokrain Is A Light, Portable Music Player With Massive Hotkey & Format Support

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Listening to music during work or other activities is a common habit of regular PC users including myself. Windows Media Player that comes built-in with Windows takes up a lot of system resources, which can be overkill if all you want to do is play songs. Several third party alternatives such as iTunes and MediaMonkey also face the same memory-hogging problem. Other options such as the open-source Stealth Player offer a much more lightweight experience. However, while consuming lesser memory, most of the lightweight tools face the problem of not offering many useful options such as playlist creation, search, and navigation. Hokrain is a portable and lightweight audio player that allows you to play songs without interfering with your work, while providing you with several useful options related to playlist creation, navigation and hotkeys. Other than the usual MP3, WMA and WAV audio formats, it supports a large number of unusual ones allowing you to use one audio player for all your music needs. Keep reading to find out more about Hokrain. Read More

Securely Share Files With Specific Permissions & Recipients Using SmartRM

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There are a lot of file sharing application available on the internet, but many of them don't provide you with a lot of options when it comes to the amount of control you have over who can view the file. Using various services, you can share a file via email, social media, or a URL. Most of the times, anyone can view the files using their direct links, for instance, someone with access to an image URL can easily view it by pasting it in the browser. SmartRM is an file sharing service with an open-source application for Windows that allows you to overcome that problem and lets you share files only with people that you intend to. Other than directly sending the files using any online method (email, IM, social networks), you can also share it using a USB drive or even Dropbox. Once received, only people with proper permissions can access the file, that too only during a limited time frame specified by you. Read More

Have Your PC Auto Capture Screenshots At User-Defined Intervals

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AddictiveTips is all about finding newer tools to help you get more productive and get more things done in lesser time. We always emphasize the importance of screenshot capturing utilities and how they can help you explain system problems to your friends or an expert. Screenshots are used in several situations; from a creating a manual to getting help on a forum, screenshots act as a visual aid to the issue under discussion. If you are a blogger, you likely know the importance of screenshots in explaining things in your blog post already. Mostly screenshot tools provide you with three modes for capturing screenshots: region capture, window capture and full screen. Auto Screenshot Capture is a screenshot app with a difference - it lets you take screenshots in succession after a custom interval, allowing you to capture ongoing screen activity. Read More

MyClip Is A Lightweight, Powerful Clipboard Manager For Copied Text

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There’s an umpteen number of desktop tools that give your everyday computer tasks a productive boost. Clipboard managers proudly sit among the top of such tools that can get things done in less time and effort. They save you the hassle of retyping or recopying text items again and again while composing emails, essays, documents and so on. If you’re looking for a lightweight, simple and basic clipboard manager that doesn’t bog down your system performance with unusual memory leaks, try MyClip. It’s an open-source clipboard utility for Windows that boasts a plethora of features such as clipboard bookmarking, predefined text items such as date, time and IDs, integrated search, hotkeys support and more. Read More

Monitey Monitors A Website’s Status & Notifies You When It’s Down

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Have you ever wondered if your website is up and running as it should be, and everyone from around the world can access it perfectly? It’s a waste of time and effort if you put a lot of content on your site but it remains inaccessible to your visitors. Even though you can employ web services like DownForEveryOneOrJustMe (yeah, that’s a long name, I know) and other such tools for the purpose, they're only good for manually checking the status of a website. In case you want to constantly monitor a website and get instantly notified upon any outage, Monitey might be just what you're looking for. This free Windows application monitors any URL in the background, keeping a detailed log of its status and in addition, it notifies you whenever the URL goes offline. The application can be quite useful for all website owners who want to continuously monitor the online status of their web server. Let’s see how it works! Read More

Unblock Websites Or Accelerate Web Browsing On PC & Android With Hola

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Internet censorship is becoming more and more serious everyday. Many governments block access to certain websites or online services within their country. In other cases, many online services don't offer some or all of their content in certain regions; many of us have click a YouTube video link to land on a message saying the selected video is not available in our region. Same goes for many other services that are being provided in the US only. While finding out the reason why these services aren't accessible in your part of the world is probably something beyond your control, what you can still do is actually access the website using a VPN, though most free VPN services have a catch: low speed or advertisements. Hola is one of the newest entries in the free VPN services scene with clients for Windows and Android that accelerate internet browsing and allow you to access blocked content without compromising the speed. Moreover, it allows you to browse the internet while maintaining complete anonymity, and supports major internet browsers including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. Keep reading to find out more about Hola. Read More

Run-Command Is A Windows Run Utility Replacement With Favorites

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Run-Command is an extended take on the standard Run dialog in Windows. Where the native Run dialog only lets you execute apps or launch websites by inputting a shortcut or executable command, Run-Command does a lot more than that while maintaining a compact UI profile. In addition to the basic Run dialog features, this portable application lets you quickly access commonly used system tools like Command Prompt, Registry Editor and Computer Management using the integrated buttons. You can also set commands, websites, apps, and folders as favorites for instantaneous access. And best of all - it weighs in at only 44 KB for the 32-bit version and 112 KB for the 64-bit variant! More details after the jump. Read More

Batch Resize & Convert Images While Retaining Metadata With PIXresizer

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With all the high-resolution cameras out there these days, most of the images we capture are in resolutions much higher than our display devices. Having a 2560p image to view on a 720p or 1080p screen does not offer any benefit when it comes to the picture quality, and having a lot of such images on your disk can consume significantly high amounts of storage space. Image resizing is also very important if you need to frequently upload images online, because larger images take more time to upload and consume more space on the server. PIXresizer is a nifty application that lets you resize images as well as convert them into other formats, including PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF and TIFF. You can work with single images, or use the batch mode to resize and convert images in bulk with ease. Resized images are saved as copies in a location of choice and can be set to retain EXIF data. Read More

YoWindow 3S Is An Amazing Weather App & Virtual Landscape For Windows & Mac

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Whether you live in the dusty winds of Sahara or the sunny beaches of Miami, it’s always a good idea to stay up to date with information about the weather in your vicinity, or the world for that matter if you frequently travel around. Moreover, keeping an eye on the daily forecast isn’t like it was back in the 90s anymore; you have a myriad of weather apps at your disposal for every mobile and desktop platform for free. If you are on Windows or Mac OS X, turn to YoWindow 3S and you might enjoy looking more at your screen than outside the window. We reviewed this free app quite a while back and by now, it has been spiced up with some great new features in the latest version 3 to make it even better! Let's find out more after the jump. Read More

Sync Folders To SkyDrive Without Changing Directory Structure

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SkyDrive is Microsoft’s native file hosting service similar to Dropbox and Google Drive that allows to upload files to cloud storage and sync them across all your Windows devices. Compared to earlier cloud storage and sync services offered by Microsoft (Live Mesh et al) , SkyDrive has a deeper integration with the latest versions of both Windows and Office. Just like Dropbox, Google Drive, and other popular sync services SkyDrive creates a folder in your hard drive and anything that is copied into it gets automatically uploaded to the cloud. You can access your cloud data using your account information from any computer with an internet connection. While being very useful, there is still a limitation that you need to manually copy the files and folders to your SkyDrive folder in order to upload them. SkyShellEx is an application for Windows that integrates SkyDrive into your Windows shell, allowing you to sync any folder to SkyDrive without changing the existing folder structure. You can also share your SkyDrive files and folders via email and URL. More on SkyShellEx after the jump. Read More

Customize Date & Time Displayed On Windows 8 & RT Lock Screen

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If you frequently change the Lock Screen background on Windows 8 or RT, you'll probably love spending time customizing it further as well. Lock Screen is a new feature in Microsoft’s latest OS that shows off your favorite image when your Windows 8 PC or Windows RT tablet screen is locked. The Lock Screen does more than just displaying the wallpaper though, and is home to some miniscule widgets like Wi-Fi signal, battery, email notifications and a clock with date display, in addition to time. Windows doesn’t offer a way to customize the clock widget however, leaving you stuck with the stock date and time format. Thanks to Vishal at AskVG, you can now customize the clock widget’s time and date format and language by modifying a registry key. Read More

Get An Enhanced Windows ‘Open With’ Menu With Better App Suggestions

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When faced with a situation where the limitations of tools provided in Windows itself do not let us to perform something efficiently, a little bit of Googling can often help in finding a third-party solution. The right-click context menu of Windows Explorer offers the 'Open with...' option to let you open a file with a program of your choice. The 'Open with...' option is the default actions for files that don't have any association, but it can also be useful for files that can be opened with multiple apps that you have installed. Through the years, we haven’t seen a lot of improvement in the 'Open with...' feature, and if you are not satisfied with the current options, check out OpenWith Enhanced. It is an application for Windows that replaces the native 'Open with...' dialog box of Windows with an enhanced version that offers more options. Read More

Picture Information Extractor Is An All-In-One Image Metadata Editor

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Due to the widespread availability of high-resolution digital cameras, photography has become incredibly popular over the past few year, and people with all skills levels have started to take an interest in this field. Take the example of mobile apps like Instagram for instance, which has made photography an everyday thing for most us. Avid photographers would also realize the importance of a proper image viewer, because your photos are pretty useless if you cannot actually view them properly on your computer, along with all their associated metadata. If you’re looking for a feature-rich image browser & viewer, take Picture Information Extractor for a spin. It’s an incredibly powerful yet lightweight image viewer for Windows that can extract metadata information of photos with ease. The software supports EXIF, XMP and IPTC formats of metadata for many major image formats such as JPEG, TIF and RAW items. Read More

Forgot Your Passcode? Bypass iPhone Lock Screen On iOS 6, 6.1 With This Trick

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iOS 6.1 has been problematic for many iOS device users out there ever since its release a few days ago. iPhone 4S users are facing unexpected battery drainage, while all iOS devices appear to have issues with setting appropriate brightness when Automatic Brightness is enabled. Today, we’ve come across an all-new, very serious security issue: you can bypass the lock screen on any iPhone running iOS 6 by following a list of simple steps. We’re discussing the set of steps that allow you to bypass your lock screen with the hope that it will be put to good use like, say, when you forget your passcode in an emergency situation. Using this method allows you to access the Phone application which, as a result, means you can make calls, access contacts and even edit them. Read More

Media Companion Is An Extremely Feature-Laden Movie Manager App

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We have covered a truckload of movie and TV series managers for our readers, including DVD Chief, Movie Explorer, and the recently reviewed jMovieManager, just to name a few. The good thing about these offline media applications is that in addition to keeping your media collection neatly organized, they can fetch relevant data for your media from the internet and save it locally to make it available when you don’t have access to an active internet connection. Media Companion is another such application that doesn't just manage your movies and TV shows. but also allows you to organize your casually shot home videos that you captured from your camera. Read More

Firefox Nightly 21 Brings Modern UI App To Windows 8

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Mozilla promised a Windows 8 Modern UI Firefox app and it’s now available on the Firefox Nightly channel. The Nightly channel is Firefox’s experimental version for the very latest but potentially unstable releases, which means a stable version of the Firefox Modern UI app will not be available for a while till everything is completely sorted out. Developers and anyone just generally curious on what the app will look like can download the Nightly build now. The Modern UI app is low on features at the moment, thought the desktop version is fully functional. In its present state, it is much like Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8, which has both desktop and Modern UI versions working independently of each other. Read More

Split Text Files Based On A Custom Delimiter With Chopping List

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It can often be difficult to send very large files over the internet or copy them to a slow USB 2.0 flash drive. Almost all email, file sharing and cloud storage services have a maximum file size limit for their free accounts, which is usually in MBs rather than GBs. Another scenario is where you want to transfer a huge file using a couple of low capacity flash drives that you have handy, with none of them having enough free space for the complete file, but the total free space on all of them is adequate enough for the purpose. In such scenarios, splitting large files into smaller chunks can be a great option. The receiver can then merge the pieces together to get the complete file. That's where tools like Chopping List come handy. This free utility has been specially designed to split text files into smaller parts. Rather than using the normal file size method, it allows you to split text files based on custom delimiters. When you specify a delimiter, the file will be split at every instance of that delimiter in the text. Read More

Simple Watcher Monitors Local & Network Folders; Runs Apps Or Sends Emails When Changes Occur

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Whenever you are working on the computer, Windows is constantly creating, changing and deleting files in the background. Keeping track of all these file changes is impossible to do manually because of the sheer number of different files and their locations involved. Other than Windows' functions, our own activities in several applications also result in a lot of files getting created and modified. If you want to recall the files that were deleted or moved from a particular folder, having a log with details of all such activity can be a blessing. Previously, we have covered folder monitoring applications such as Folder Monitor that lets you monitor local folders and sends visual and vocal notifications whenever activity is detected inside them. Simple Watcher is an even better folder monitoring application that allows you to monitor local as well as network folders for file creation, changes, modifications and deletions. The app can display visual and vocal notifications, send out an email, copy files to another folder, execute a program or a batch file and a lot more whenever such an event occurs. Read More

How To Remove Multiple Windows Store Apps From Windows 8 In One Go

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Removing Modern UI apps in Windows 8 or RT doesn’t work like the traditional way of uninstalling them from Control Panel. Instead, you can remove a Windows Store app directly by right-clicking its tile on the Start Screen and selecting Uninstall from the app bar. This makes uninstallation process fairly simple and intuitive, as you can instantly remove the app without going through the conventional procedure for desktop apps. Though what if you want to remove multiple Modern UI apps at once? There is no default option to do that, since when you select multiple apps on the Start Screen, the Uninstall button simply vanishes from the app bar. Thankfully, there’s a user script named RemoveWindowsStoreApp available at TechNet’s Script Center that makes the whole multi-app removal procedure a breeze, letting you get rid of all unwanted Modern UI apps from the Windows PowerShell. Read on to find how it works. Read More

WaveShop Is An Advanced Audio Editor That Handles WAV Files

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Considering the countless options available out there, finding the right audio editor that exactly matches your needs can be a tough job. Most of the available tools can perform simple editing tasks such as converting audio files into different formats, splitting them, or just cutting a part out of the complete track. However, advanced audio editing that involves adding silence at different points, inverting and reversing the track, generating different types of sounds, amplifying the track, etc, requires you to have more sophisticated tools. We have previously covered several audio editing applications such as the cross-platform Ocenaudio for analyzing and edit audio files, as well as web apps like FileLab Audio Editor that let you to apply different effects to an audio track. WaveShop is an open-source audio editor for Windows that specializes in handling WAV files and modifies only specific parts of the track as per your requirement, rather than the whole track in one go. Read More