Tag Archives: opensource

Copy & ZIP File Structure Of Directories Without Including Actual Data

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DirStructureCopy is a small Windows application that allows you to copy the complete file structure of a directory including dummy files without the actual file data, and store it all as a ZIP archive. This feature can prove to be very useful if you need to store just a specific file structure on a small storage medium such as a compact disk, without storing the actual data in the files. Likewise, it can come handy if you require to diagnose an ongoing computer related issue, for example, to rectify a damaged file structure by seeking expert advice. You can do this via simply sending them the dummy file structure. Another use case is preserving the directory structure of your media collection in order to remember everything that you had in them, when you temporarily want to delete the actual files from there to free up space, with intentions on restoring them later. The application is able to store the complete directory structure, with an option to include sub-directories and ZIP archives as well, without storing the actual data in them. Read More

Convert MS Word Documents To Audio Files With AudioDocs

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With the pace at which technology in advancing, it wouldn't be more than a decade or two before we will have robots educating our children and telling them bedtime stories. Although we still have to wait for a while for that, we do have various text-to-speech software available today that can turn our literature into audiobooks, and a little Windows app called AudioDocs performs flawlessly well in this regard. This open-source program available at SourceForge is designed to convert documents in DOC/DOCX format into WAV audio files. It can prove to be quite useful if you want to convert stories, novels, essays, reports etc. into playable audio files. Details after the jump. Read More

Easily Create Time-Lapse Videos From Images In A Folder

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Time lapse photography purportedly dates back to as early as the 19th century – a period when the camera equipment itself was quite expensive. The technique helps users playback a group of photos of the same subject taken at different times during a day, hour week or even month, as a single video sequence. When you playback these photos at an adequately high frequency (usually 24 frames per second or higher), it creates an effect of fast-forwarding time at the same spot, thus creating a time lapse. A quick peek at Wikipedia reveals that the technique has been in use for a while now and has been employed in various subjects of research such as plants growth, evolution of construction sites, celestial motion and so on. Today, I stumbled upon a unique Windows application called Motion Timer Lapser and couldn't wait to give it a try. The open-source application is designed to let you customize and create various time lapse sequences out of a group of similar photos. Read More

NeechPad Is A Simple Rich Text Editor For Windows With Tab Support

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Microsoft usually rotates the generation wheel of its Windows operating system every 3 years. Not only does the company bring core enhancements to the OS related to its security and performance, but at times, it revamps a few native utilities as well. Take Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer for instance; both these apps are more feature-rich now than they ever used to be. One application that has remained quite static in terms of development is Notepad. Even though it's quite handy considering what it does, the app has barely changed since Windows 95. It’s still a basic notes taking utility with a limited feature-set. While Windows also offers WordPad for editing rich text files, its interface isn't as minimal as that of Notepad. This is where third-party note-taking applications like NeechPad come to the rescue. Read More

Saladin: Open-Source, Dual-Pane File Manager With Focus On Convenience

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File Managers come in all shapes and sizes, and we’ve already covered quite a lot of them for our readers, including Double Commander, Bru File Manager, and Multi Commander, just to name a few. Saladin is another file manager with a dual-pane interface to let you easily manage your files and transfer them between different directories without having to open two Explorer windows. Saladin also has a host of other features such as Windows Shell integration, built-in file viewer, file archiving, FTP etc. Read on for details. Read More

Koush’s ClockworkMod Superuser Offers PIN Protection, Multi-User Support & More

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ChainsDD's Superuser and Chainfire's SuperSU finally have some serious competition, as Koushisk Dutta (aka Koush) – the developer of the famous ClockworkMod recovery and several Android apps like Tether, Carbon, and DeskSMS – has come up with a root access management app of his own. Currently in beta, ClockworkMod Superuser by Koush aims to add more features and transparency to the process of managing root access requests by third-party apps. Besides being free and completely open-source, this Holo themed tool brings with it several nifty features such as multiuser support on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean tablets, support for x86 & ARM devices, PIN protection for approval of Superuser requests, user-specified timeout for denying Superuser requests to apps, ability to handle concurrent Superuser requests effectively and full support for Android's permissions model. 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

Move Mouse Cursor Past Windows 8 Hot Corners In Multiple Monitor Setup

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If you have already taken a look at our previous post regarding how Windows 8 handles multi-display setups, you would know that the new taskbar features are quite handy. Not only does Microsoft’s Tiled OS expands the taskbar across multiple monitors, applications management is also far more lucid. There is however, one feature -  which is quite an annoyance, perhaps - that plagues overall user experience. This feature is sticky hot corners at the upper and lower right side of the desktop. On dual or triple displays setups, when you move the mouse pointer from one screen to the other from upper or lower right-ends of the screen, Windows 8 automatically sticks the mouse to the corners to display Charms Bar. This can make cursor transition quite cumbersome. If you want to get rid of this issue, then you may try giving Windows 8 Mouse Unsticky a spin. It’s an open source, light-weight application that frees up the hot corners for smoother transition. You may toggle the feature On and Off with a click of a button. Another interesting feature of the application is, it allows you to tap the right Ctrl key to instantly skip cursor among the screens. Read More

FileBot Automatically Renames TV Show Episodes Using Correct Titles

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A massive collection of songs, TV series and movies may give you bragging rights, but as collections grow, it gets harder and harder to keep them organized. You may move your files around to make room for new ones and store older ones unorganized for ages. FileBot is a Windows application that helps you organize your movies and TV series. It allows you to search for episode names for any series and rename the corresponding files using the downloaded list. Alternatively, it will also let you specify the pattern for renaming the files, though the syntax is limited to just appending serial numbers to the end of the file name. FileBot even lets you analyze entire media folders and view which subfolders and what file types have been saved to it. Lastly, you have the option to search for and download subtitles for movies. Read More

Read And Manage News Feeds With RSS Bandit For Windows

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Just a few day back, I reviewed a doozy-looking RSS feeds aggregator called Modern Reader. Even though the application looked extremely dandy, it carried that Windows 8-only exclusivity tag, and moreover, would only allow you manage Google Reader feeds. RSS Bandit is another feed reader that you can try, which is free from any aforementioned limitations. It’s a powerful open source feed aggregator that lets you manage and read feeds without opening your web browser. Another noticeable feature is, you can manage feeds even without any user account; however, synchronization option with your Google Reader is also available, along with Facebook, NewsGator Online and Windows Common Feedlist integration. Coupled with a decent looking interface, the application provides a two pane view of the subscribed items and the list of feeds within your subscriptions. Read More

ImageUP Lets You Drag & Drop To Quickly Upload Images To Imgur

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If you want to use images on your webpage, or an article you are posting on the web, you may need to host it somewhere. If you have your own website, you can upload the image there, but images consume a lot more storage space than text. High storage consumption means that all the hosting space that you have bought for your website can be consumed very fast. Although you can conserve storage space by the uploading images to image sharing platforms, it becomes quite a tedious process when hundreds of images are to be uploaded and shared. Hosting websites, such as Imgur.com, Minus, and ImageShack.us allow users to upload images for free. Imgur, in particular, is an image hosting website that offers account-based, and anonymous image uploading services, but you are required to open the website before you can upload the images. Today, we have a miniscule open source tool for you called ImageUP that allows you to quickly upload images to Imgur directly from your desktop. It remembers the images you have uploaded in the past, and shows all the images in a list, so that you can easily view them and copy their public links for sharing. Read More

Able Opus Extracts Colors From Range Spectrum, Images & Your Desktop

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Using the right set of colors for a project is very important if order to make it pleasing to the eyes and appealing to the target audience. Everywhere you go, you can see colors being used to capture the attention of people; for instance, when you visit a website, the colors of different objects found on the page in front of you can instantly decide if you want to stay on the website, or move on to a new one. When colors were first introduced in the computer, 256 colors was considered a huge amount, but nowadays, 32 millions colors have become the standard. To use the required colors for your project, first you need to know what that exactly is. If you find a particular color while looking at an image that you like, you cannot just tell with accuracy which one it actually is. With so many colors available in pictures of extremely high resolution, it is impossible for the human eye to distinguish one color from another. Today, we have an open source application for you called Able Opus Color Extractor that helps you in finding the RGB, Hex and HSB value of a color. You can pick the color from a spectrum, an image available on your hard drive, or anything placed on your desktop. Read More

WebPALTT: Powerful Web Performance & Load Testing Tool

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It is essential to develop and maintain easy-to-use websites and web applications to achieve the aims and objectives behind the outcome. There are various on-demand load testing tools available out there that analyze your application’s strengths through real-time measurements, session recording, scripting and advanced reporting capabilities to achieve effective web solutions. WebPALTT is an open source web performance and load testing tool meant for web applications. It is equipped with a user friendly scenario builder and customizable scripting feature. The overall working of the program is based on test scenarios that run on a web server with simulated loads. The scenario builder ensures a user-friendly environment coupled with the powerful scripting functionality. Read More

Espera: Windows 8 Metro Inspired Music Player With Party Mode

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Windows 8 launch is just around the corner and various Metro ‘Windows 8 UI’ inspired apps are already making their way into our PCs. Even though the Redmond giant has promised to launch a full blown Windows Store with the new OS, akin to what Apple has been doing for quite long via Mac App Store, open source community is one of the most convenient places to download applications without paying a dime. Today’s Windows 8 UI-esque recipe is a music player called Espera. It’s an open source app that seems to be carved directly out of Microsoft’s next major operating system release. Along with being a decent music player, the application is designed to stream YouTube videos (provided you have VLC media player installed on your computer). The keystone feature of the application is its Party Mode, which allows you to lock various user interactions with the player itself, a feature that can be used amidst dance parties so no one can alter your music library and/or delete your playlists. The user-interface is very minimalistic, and admittedly, the application as a whole still seems to be a work in progress. More to read after the jump. Read More

Stoffi: Minimalist Music Player With A Windows Explorer-Like Interface

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Music players come and go, but only a few ones actually grab users' (and our) attention. One such that crossed my way is Stoffi Music Player. At first glance, it would seem just another music application boasting features that are already found on other popular media players, but oh boy, was I wrong! Three things define Stoffi’s persona; minimalistic interface, instant access to everything and ease-of-use. The application’s GUI itself is a perfect example of the developer’s fondness to Windows 7. Although open source, the application is perfectly integrated with Windows 7, where its interface is not the only thing that seems to be carved out of Windows itself, but the application makes full use of Jumplist and Taskbar for instant navigation. Stoffi not only lets you define custom hotkeys, but also, you may use hotkey profile presets from other music players, such as iTunes, MusicBee, VLC, Banshee, Foobar2000 etc, should you make a switch. There’s an iTunes like Genius feature, too, called Random playlist, which instantly generates a playlist by randomly selecting soundtracks. What’s more, the application has a system tray icon to Play, Pause and jump to Next, Previous tracks, along with visual notifications. Read More

Aciqra Is A Virtual Planetarium For Students & Fans Of Astronomy

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Ever gazed at the sky and wondered why and where stars lie? Ever wanted to get to know of the night sky personally? If you’re an aspiring astronomer, the accurate sky mapping must be an integral part of your analysis. Aciqra is a simple yet powerful desktop utility that displays millions of stars for your calculations, mapping and deductions. You can easily zoom in or out depending on the body of interest. The application has over 2.5 million stars in its database and other celestial bodies such as planets, deep sky objects and the like; coupled with tools like angle indicator, night vision, atmospheric refraction correction to accurately interpret the layout of our universe. Read More

4k Stogram Lets You Follow & Save Images Of Multiple Instagram Users

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If you’re fond of photography then you must've heard the name Instagram, a photo sharing app for iOS and Andriod that changed photography as we knew it. Instagram was originally launched as an iOS app, for Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod touch devices, and earned instant acclaim. Such a triumphant success led the developers to push the service to Android as well. This much popularity has now made Instagram a popular internet phenomenon and folks, either using the service itself or not, are always looking different ways to grab Instagram images shared by other people. To make the job easier for you, we have covered a multitude of web services and desktop applications to easily download Instagram images, for instance, Farshad reviewed InstagramDownloader, a portable Windows application, then you can also try an Extragram web service or Instagrille For Pokki. Although these services do the job perfectly, some users seek a minimalistic solution that allows viewing and downloading Instagram photos. 4k Stogram is an open source application that provides you with a simple way for accessing and saving Instagram photo archive. Read More

How To Stretch And Enhance Sounds Without Losing Quality

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Ever wanted to stretch your favorite soundtracks beyond imagination? From studios to garage bands, sound stretching has profound applications due to spectral smoothness, special effects and features like binaural beats. Now, you can stretch a 4 minute audio to a unique 4 hours high quality listening experience using Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch. Supporting popular audio formats including WAV, OGG, MP3, it enables ease of operation with advanced post processing effects to give ambient epics. The stretching amount is unlimited and the complexity can be increased according to the requirements. Unlike other audio manipulation tools, it loads onto your system smoothly and has negligible effect on the overall system performance. After adding the required audio file, you have the liberty to select the stretch parameter as well as the audio output size. Read More

TileMill: Powerful, Cross-Platform GIS Mapping & Cartography Software

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Many cartographers use a combination of Maptitude, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, or CorelDraw to make those gorgeous looking maps. Although these tools are very feature-rich, they do come with a hefty price-tag. However, graphic artists or cartographers will be delighted to know that we have an alternative solution for you. Labelled TileMill, this open source application for Windows, Mac OS X & Linux aims to let you create beautiful looking interactive maps with a multitude of options. It’s built on Mapnik’s map rendering library (another open source tool), and is designed to help folks who work on cartography and GIS (Geographic Information System) in map creation. Every map you create can be either uploaded to Mapbox, or be exported as PNG, PDF, SVG, MBtiles and Mapnik XML. Axiomatically, if you haven’t worked with GIS or cartography before, you might need some serious learning before taking the step and using this application, but a usage manual has also been included to make you quickly learn a few basic things. What’s more, it also supports a number of additional plugins for increased functionality. Read More

Spell-Checker: Notepad++ Plugin For Adding Spell Check Functionality

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Notepad++ is an open-source text editor that offers a slew of basic and advanced text & source code editing features that are not found in integrated notepad utility. It is very comprehensive and probably the best of its kind. Apart from supporting a number of programming languages, it includes a syntax highlighting feature, a great feature which simply enables application developers to easily detect and correct syntax errors in their source code files. It also supports an umpteen number of third-party plugins that help users extend native source code editing functions. The application is mostly favored by developers as it greatly helps then in programming and coding various scripts, however, there are lots of plugins available for people who are not coders and still find quite handy. Earlier, we have covered quite a lot of Notepad++ plugins, including details on how to install them. Today, we have another one at your disposal called Spell-Checker. Spell Checker, as its name implies, allows you to quickly correct spelling mistakes in plain text documents. The plugin supports multiple languages, including English, French, Spanish, Danish, German and more. Not only does it mark spelling errors, it also helps you fix spelling mistakes and even lets you ignore selected or all errors. Moreover, you can add new custom words to its dictionary after reviewing all the suggested words for the misspelled word. Don't stop reading for more details Spell Checker just after the break. Read More