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AI Picture Explorer Is A Dual-Window Image Viewer, Editor & Manager

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The native image viewer of Windows allows you to view images, set them as desktop background, rotate them and delete them, but that is where its functionality pretty much ends. Personally, I feel that the default Windows 7 Photo Viewer is not up to the mark, as it does not provide any image editing options, and even lags a bit when quickly switching between images. This can be especially annoying when you are trying to locate a particular image by browsing through an album. Previously, we have covered some great image viewing and editing applications such as Zoner Photo Studio and Fast Stone ImageViewer that serve as great alternatives to Windows 7 Photo Viewer. AI Picture Explorer is another Windows app that provides you with a two-window interface to manage and view your images. It features batch image editing, fixing and conversion, while allowing you to extract images from archives without having to use another tool. Moreover, you can create file and folder lists, and view the images in a slideshow with up to 173 transition effects. The tool also supports playing some common audio and video formats, in addition to images of resolutions exceeding 80 megapixels. Read More

PassLook Is A Light, Portable Password Vault For Windows & Mac OS X

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Password managers first started to grab my attention when I began using LastPass – a staggeringly useful utility that keeps all my credentials securely in one place. I don’t have to remember my passwords anymore, as LastPass perfectly handles this job. However, LastPass isn’t the only app that offers this amazing service; you can find a plethora of other similar tools that provide a virtual vault for storing your login information pertaining to emails, applications and other confidential stuff. Meet PassLook – a very simple and minimalistic Windows and Mac OS X app that allows you to maintain a secure, encrypted database of all your passwords. While PassLook comes nowhere near LastPass in terms of design and features, it can prove useful for those looking for a lightweight and more importantly, portable password manager. Read More

Discover Music People Are Listening To Nearby With Soundtracker For Windows 8

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Listening to online radio is one of those activities that we enjoy the most during our work hours. For many of us, listening to music apparently keeps us coping all day with a hectic work routine. Spotify tends to cover all my music listening needs most of the time, but that doesn’t stop me from trying out new similar apps for myself as well as our readers. The latest such app to come across my way is Soundtracker for Windows 8 and RT - an online radio service that makes listening to music more engaging, thanks to its Foursquare-esque location-based concept. The app lets you discover music that’s being listened to and shared by folks in your vicinity. You can browse other Soundtracker users’ profiles and befriends those who share the same music taste as yours. Read More

Design & Apply Custom Folder Icons With Iconmancer For Windows

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Creating custom icons is not a new concept, and you can find a wide-array of icon creating apps for almost every computing platform out there. Though if you’re looking for something built specifically to create folder icons only, Iconmancer might be just what you're looking for. It is a feature-rich app for Windows that enables you to craft your own folder icons from scratch, embedded with images of your choice. It’s more than just an icon composer, actually; it also allows to share your creativity among other Icomancer users by uploading the icons to Icomancer marketplace. In addition, you can download a truckload of icons already uploaded by other users and apply them on the fly. More details after the jump! Read More

TurboSR Is A Text Search & Replace Tool With Extensive Format Support

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Replacing text in a single file is easy; you just open a file, find the text, and replace it with the required text. This works fine when you have just one or a few files to replace text in, but what if you have to do it in a whole bunch of files? Consider there are 500 files that need to be edited; opening each one of them one after the other, replacing text wherever required, and saving them one by one would be a huge waste of time and a major annoyance due to the monotony involved. Fortunately, you can simply use a software that allows you to find certain text in multiple files and replace it with text of your choice in one go. We have covered several find & replace utilities including a plugin for Notepad++. TurboSR Search and Replace is a portable utility that performs the same job but in addition to TXT files, it supports a wide variety of formats, including HTML, LOG, JS, PAS, CPP, XML, XSL and many more. Read More

Create GIF Animations From Multiple Videos & Images With KickMyGraphics

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GIF or Graphics Interchange Format image is the most popular file format for simple animated images. It supports a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame, and you can use GIF animation tools like the portable AnimateGIF to create flawless GIF animations with custom frame delay and option to run the animation once or in a loop, or even combine multiple GIF images into a single file. However, if you want to create GIFs from videos, you will need a different tool that can extract the frames of a video for you, and KickMyGraphics does just that. It is a basic tool that allows you to create animations from video frames, while giving you some simple editing options such as resizing the frame size, choosing the speed of the GIF animation, and cutting out unwanted frames. Other than supporting a lot of video formats, it also lets you work with images files as well as existing GIFs. More on KickMyGraphics after the jump. Read More

Personalized News Aggregator NewsMix Comes To Windows 8 And RT

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Windows 8 is the most versatile operating system to ever come out of Redmond’s doors. It gives you a mix of both Modern UI and desktop apps to meet all your app requirements. When the operating system was first unveiled, the availability of Windows Store apps was a huge factor in determining its success, but now that Windows Store has flourished with a decent collection of apps, it seems like Microsoft is now finally catching up with iOS and Android ecosystems. NewsMix is one of the latest of apps to join the club and looks amazing to say the least. It’s a news aggregator that lets you create custom news feeds that suit your taste, and allows you to discover various news channels from around the web by subscribing to more than 2000 news 'playlists'. Read More

6 Productive Tasks Your PC Can Perform When You Aren’t Using It

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So you bought a really powerful PC on Cyber Monday; it comes with a quad-core CPU, a dedicated graphics card and more RAM than you can handle. The question is: are you putting it to good use? Or is it a $999 Facebook / Reddit machine? If that’s the case, we’ve got 6 things your PC can do while it is idle that will help make the world a better place. Check them out after the jump. Read More

FileFilter Is The Ultimate Tool To Organize Raw Data From Text Files

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FileFilter is a portable Windows application that can be used to filter or extract specific data from text files in several formats including TXT, XML and CSV. The application offers a number of additional features that you would normally see in separate apps, such as file renaming, filtering, splitting and XML & CSV file conversion, among others. While these kind of applications tend to be used by a particular niche, FileFilter can come handy in a number of scenarios. The application can be used by web developers, data analysts, and software testers alike. FileFilter also houses an integrated FTP server to move files from local host to remote servers. Read More

Manage Multiple Cloud Storage Accounts On Windows 8 With RainbowDrive

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Back in January, we came across an interesting Windows Store app named Cumulo. The application basically lets you link and manage multiple cloud storage services under one roof. Although it was the first Modern UI app of its kind, Cumulo lacked intuitiveness due to a somewhat confusing design that showed all the connected cloud service(s) as a single drive, making things a bit difficult to manage for many. Today, we stumbled upon another such app called RainbowDrive that not only overcomes the shortcomings of Cumulo, but also feels simpler and easier to use compared to the latter. The application supports three cloud storage services as of this writing: SkyDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox. Read More

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