Most people use Alt + Tab for navigating between open windows; however, it can get a bit confusing if there are a lot of applications open on your desktop. Managing all the open applications and being able to navigate through them is very important for efficiently using your time. Microsoft has also changed the way we switch between currently running applications by replacing the Alt + Tab hotkey menu with Switch List in Windows 8. Previously, we have covered some very useful desktop management tools, such as Plumb, an application that arranges the desktop windows automatically as you open them based on a user-specified criteria. Today, we have a simpler application for Windows called WinPicker that lets you quickly navigate between open windows and applications. Keep reading to find out more about WinPicker.
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By Fawad on April 18, 2012
In order to keep your data in order, it’s important to know where each file is saved on your hard disk. Windows Explorer shows you basic folder and file structure, but it does not provide you with a complete overview of folders’ and sub-folders’ sizes. We have previously covered TreeSizeNet and TDP x-Ray Lite, where the former shows files and directories in a tree format along with each folder’s size, while the latter displays file and folder sizes on a color-coded pie-chart. Treeviz is another application that allows you to analyze disk space usage. It lets you view the data structure, including files and folders, in a tree form. You can analyze how your entire data is being distributed on the storage medium. The application also reads the sizes of files and folders, letting you quickly identify all the heavy-on-storage folders, effectively helping you clean junk files and folders from the disk.
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By Fawad on April 17, 2012
Making backups of important files and folders always helps when the computer suddenly crashes, or when the original data gets corrupted. Although data recovery utilities are capable of recovering lost files, they often fail to restore the compete structure of files, leaving users with no other option than to manually repair recovered files. Last year, we covered Backup Folder Sync, an application for Windows that mirrors selected folders and allows creating backups on any local location, external drive, USB stick, and network mapped drive, and recently, we featured AngryFile, a Dropbox-like file sharing and backup utility that lets you store important files on the cloud. Today, we came across another data backup application called Bamboo, which not only lets you synchronize files & folders, backup data at specified target locations, but also clean, merge and consolidate data from two folders of your choice.
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By Fawad on April 17, 2012
If your internet subscription package allows you to use unlimited bandwidth, then you probably don’t need any bandwidth usage monitoring tool, however, in case your internet connection has a data bandwidth cap, you should keep a track of how much data is being uploaded and downloaded in order to avoid extra usage. Although I own a package with unlimited bandwidth, I still like to keep an eye on how much data I upload and download, and for this purpose, I use NetSpeedMonitor, a network monitoring application that displays the current upload and download rate and maintains a record of the total data transferred during a day. EmproNetUsgAlert is designed to monitor bandwidth usage and alert you when a specified limit is crossed.
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By Fawad on April 17, 2012
A few days back, we reviewed SuperGeek’s free JPG to PDF converter that allows you to not only convert various image file to PDF format, but also transform images into PS (post script) format. Today, we will take a look at another tool from SuperGeek, named SuperGeek Free Document OCR. If your aren’t familiar with the term OCR (Optical Character Recognition), it is a technique to convert scanned images or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is quite useful if you occasionally need to rewrite scanned text documents and use them in emails, drafts, reports etc. The application recognizes images with great accuracy, and supports all the major image formats, including JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, EMF, PCX and so on. Moreover, it has the ability to import images from any local location, and fetch scanned images directly from the scanner.
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By Waqas on April 17, 2012
A GIF or Graphics Interchange Format image is one of the graphics image formats that can be used to create animations. It supports a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame, and you can use a GIF animation tool, like AnimateGIF, to combine multiple GIF images into a single file for creating a low-end animation. The previously featured GiftedMotion is another easy-to-use animator for GIF images that allows creating animation from a series of digital images, but what if you want to create GIF animation out of video clips? Today, we came across GIF animator called Free Video to GIF Converter that enables you to create GIFs by extracting frames from videos. It supports a wide range of popular video formats including AVI, WMV, MPEG, MOV, FLV, MP4, 3GP etc. Details to follow after the jump.
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By Fawad on April 17, 2012
Acala Screen Recorder is a free screen capture utility that can record any on-screen activity and lets you save the video in AVI format or as a self-playback EXE file. It provides a flexible way of recording screencasts that you may want to share with your colleagues or friends on video sharing websites such as Youtube. The application packs a host of features to configure the screencast recording settings, audio capture options, allowing users to customize the screencasts according to their requirements. Additionally, it lets you set the number of frames you want to record every second, and specify custom a video compressor to adjust the screencast quality. Like any other screencast recorder, it supports hotkey combinations to quickly start and stop recordings. Read past the jump for more.
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By Waqas on April 17, 2012
It often happens that when we download a video (in AVI format) from video sharing platforms, it shows frame skipping, frozen images or pixel distortion. Although powerful media players like VLC and KMplayer come with the ability to handle frame skipping issues, and attempt to play the video without any lag, they can not render videos with multiple frame skips. The only way to watch such videos is to grab them from other sources. However, there is one more way that you can try before you re-download the video. DivXRepair is a lightweight open-source application that can repair corrupt AVI files and get rid of frame freezing. It does so by automatically detecting and eliminating un-decodable/freezing frames, re-encodes a new copy and saves it to the same directory that contains the original one. Read on for more details.
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By Waqas on April 17, 2012
There are certainly a host of desktop applications and online services available out there that let you tune in to your favorite radio stations within a few clicks. If you’re a fan of music, then you might have heard about Grooveshark, Pandora and Spotify, but when it comes to top online radio services, Screamer Radio also needs no introduction. X-Screamer Radio, is a portable desktop application that lets you listen to the massive library of radio stations available on the Scream Radio website. There are almost 400,000 different radio stations that you can listen to from within a unified interface. Apart from streaming online music tracks, it also lets you record any tune from a selected radio station. The application keeps a log of all the radio stations that you stream, so that you can instantly jump to these stations without having to look for them every time.
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By Waqas on April 17, 2012
SPlayer is an open source media player that claims to be (in a lot of ways) better than other popular free media players such as Storm player, QQ Player, Realplayer and KMPlayer. The application supports many file formats and also calls itself to be the lightest of all. Some of the key features of this player include auto-matching subtitles, GPU usage optimization, startup speed, optimized CPU utilization, ease of use and a simple yet elegant interface. The player uses various optimization engines to present fascinating picture and sound quality, such as ShaderEngine, LiveColor and SmartAmplify technologies. The application is available as both installable amd portable versions for on-the-go usability. Does it live up to all the hoopla its creating? Let’s find out.
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By Waqas on April 16, 2012
With the ever increasing evolution in technology, we have almost come to the point where we have completely started relying on our computers to store all our information. However, nothing can be worse than losing this information by accident. It can cause severe adverse effects, leading to the likes of even losing your job. So, to avoid any headaches, its better to backup your files from time to time. Exiland Backup is a free utility that lets you create backup tasks to store your important files to a safe location, such as local storage, network drives, FTP servers or other removable media. You can create as many tasks as you want, and schedule them to run automatically at selected times. You can also password protect your files to keep them safe from others. Read on for more details.
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By Waqas on April 16, 2012
Windows Media Player is widely used to not only manage huge music collection, but also to create and share music playlists across the Homegroup users. Although Windows Media Player provides an easy way to organize music playlists, share media files with network users and automatically manage music files in pre-defined categories, it doesn’t come with an option to automatically download and display lyrics of songs. If you’ve been looking for a lyrics plugin for Windows 8 Media Player, give Lyrics Plugin a try. It’s lightweight lyrics plugin for Windows Media Player that also supports the latest version – Windows Media Player 12. Unlike other media player lyrics plugins, it doesn’t require following a lengthy process to integrate the plugin; just run the installer and it will automatically add the plugin to Windows Media Player.
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By Usman on April 16, 2012
We have been reviewing quite a lot of financial management applications lately, because we fully appreciate how important a role money, and its management, for that matter, plays in one’s daily life, and requires some of the most judicial decisions in spending it. Money may provide all the luxurious fascinations in life; however, despite this, it can cause mental unrest if you don’t properly manage it, especially if you possess multiple bank accounts. If you have been a victim of such prospects and require an easy and simple way to look after your financials, then AceMoney might come in handy. Developed by MechCAD Software, this free personal financial application let you handle multiple number of accounts to manage budgets, track multi-currency finances, analyze your spending habits, manage bills and much more. The tool is aesthetically pleasing and might seem highly elucidative, even to an accounting layman. Read on to find about some of the salient features of this app.
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By Waqas on April 16, 2012
Encoding video files from one container to another can be a sophisticated and complex task, especially when you don’t know much about its related technical jargon. Moreover, you need different codecs and switches to perform the encoding process before making your final copy. X264GUI is an open source x264 video encoder that provides graphical user interface (as the name implies) by integrating different codecs. It can mainly be used for encoding high definition video files to MKV, AVI, x264 and MP4 containers, as these are the most popular ones among high-def freaks. The application contains many advanced features, and lets you encode a video from an avisynth script (you can read more about avisynth here). There are various preset codec profiles integrated within this tool, or you may create your own according to your preferences.
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By Waqas on April 16, 2012
There are tons of different tools available that let you capture screenshots of your computer screen, and we have covered quite a lot of them from time to time. The most popular ones contain plethora of features (even a few unnecessary ones, yup!) such as Greenshot, Shotty and LiveCapture etc., but they still lack one major option, i.e. sharing captured screens directly on Facebook. Well, CapShare is a lightweight screen capturing tool that aims to fill that gap. It not only lets you to capture any part of your screen and share it on Facebook, but you can also upload any image file which is stored on your computer, instantly. It makes it quite easy to share images with your Facebook friends. Read past the jump for more details.
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By Waqas on April 14, 2012
