Tag Archives: opensource

IMGDissolver: Cross-Platform Slideshow Creation Tool With Transitions & Filters

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To avoid the complexity of hard to understand applications, most of the people avoid creating professional slideshows by themselves, and mostly hire others to do the job for them. However, contrary to the common belief that professional looking slideshows cannot be created easily, there are a ton of free and easy to use applications that allow you to make slideshows in just a few steps. Previously, we have covered some very useful tools for creating slideshows, such as, PhotoStage for creating professional slideshows with any media file and the default Windows application called Windows DVD Maker available in Windows Vista and Windows 7. All these applications are limited to Windows, but if you want a cross platform application for creating slideshows, try IMGDissolver. It is an easy to use open source application for Windows and Linux operating systems that can be used for creating slideshows, DIVX and DVD of your photos and videos. Read More

SmartCopyTool: Copy, Move & Delete Files By Name & File Type Filters

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Copying files from one location to another can be a tedious task if you have huge folder structures containing a lot different formats of files. If the files are scattered over multiple folders, you have to manually locate the required files and copy them from each folder to the new location one by one. It can be both time consuming and confusing, since you might forget which folders you have already skimmed through. SmartCopyTool is an open source application for Windows that allows you to copy files from a source location to a target location by specifying name and format filters. More on SmartCopyTool after the break. Read More

InstagramDownloader: Grab All Images From Any Instagram User In Windows

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Instagram is a famous photo sharing application, exclusive to the iOS, which enables users to share and explore pictures, apply filters, and share them via a number of social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter,  Flickr, etc. Instagram is famous among iOS users and has supported web service that allow viewing Instagram images. Previously, we reviewed Extragram web service that acts as a web interface for Instagram. This time, we have InstagramDownloader, which is a portable application for quickly downloading Instagrams. You can simply download images by entering an Instagram username. Read More

StreamDesk: Open Source Application To View & Manage Multiple Streams

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Videos streams are a great way for companies, as well as individuals, to get their message to people around the world. It can be anything from a news feed to the video of a live performance of a band playing in a concert hall. I, being a huge fan of the multiplayer game DOTA (Defense of the Ancients), follow a lot of video streams of international players showcasing their game play. If you follow, or want to follow, a lot of video streams, it can be a bit of a hassle to manage all of them from your browser. Instead of cluttering up your browser bookmarks, take a look at this stream manager. StreamDesk is an open source client that allows you to view and manage multiple video streams. Usually, to view multiple streams, you need to open each one in a separate tab in your browser, but StreamDesk allows you to watch multiple streams in a single interface without even opening your browser. Keep reading to find out more about StreamDesk. Read More

Mendeley: View/Sync PDF Files, Research & Collaborate With Friends

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Mendeley is an open source and cross-platform PDF organizer, which provides options for easy document management. It allows easy reference management to help you organize your work, collaborate with friends, and to obtain latest research (via its social network). It automatically generates bibliographies, makes it possible to collaborate with others, import data, sync and access your papers from anywhere (via the internet), and more. It requires users to store all basic data on Mendeley servers, which enables accessing copies of the data any time. Read More

cacheCopy: Copy Images From Temp Folder Based On Age, Size & Resolution

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When surfing through different websites on the internet, a lot of data is collected on our computer by the browsers, including web pages, images and videos. All this data is stored in temporary form and it gets deleted when the temp folder reaches the size limit. The browser keeps the data in its cache in order to avoid downloading everything again from a website on subsequent visits. If you want to copy something from the temporary folder, you will have to manually navigate to the folder, search for the required file, which is not an easy task considering the number of files that are usually present there, and then copy it to the required folder. For instance, if you are looking for a particular image that you saw earlier on a webpage, you will have to sift through hundreds, maybe even thousands, of stored files, before you can find the one image that you are looking for. Wouldn't it be easier if you could copy only the images from the temp folder and then look through them? cacheCopy is an open source application that allows you to automatically copy images from the temporary folder of browsers to a specified location. Moreover, the application provides you with filters for copying images according to time, size and pixel size. Read More

Convert Music Samples, Transpose & Shift Notes With Midi Sheet Music

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A lot of people like listening to music, but some of them also like to play an instrument, Leaning to play music not an easy task and it requires a lot of time and effort to even get your head around the basics of a musical instrument. Like any other skill, learning the theory of music, including how to read the language is very important.  Today we have a tool that converts songs into sheet music. Midi Sheet Music is an open source application that allows you to play MIDI files and convert them to sheet music. The application plays the music files in MIDI format, and automatically highlights the current music note being played. It allows you to set different custom colors for each note, and plays the track on a user-specified speed. You can choose which instrument to show & which to hide from the sheet, and view the staves according to a different Key Signature, Time Signature and Transpose, Shift Notes, Measure length etc of tracks. It lets you enable and disable note letters along with the staves, and show/hide Measure Numbers of notes. You can save the staves as images, and print them from within the application. More on Midi Sheet Music after the break. Read More

CloudBerry Explorer: Desktop Manager For OpenStack, Rackspace & Clodo Cloud Services

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Cloud computing has seen some mainstream usage for the past few years. Dropbox for instance, has become quite a popular phenomenon among file sharing aficionados. Cloud sharing allows an easy access to your files from anywhere, provided you have an internet access, even from your smartphone. If you have an OpenStack or Rackspace account and looking for an easier solution to manage your files, then CloudBerry Explorer might help you out. It is an open source cloud service account manager that lets you manage your OpenStack, Rackspace and Clodo storage accounts from your desktop. It provides you with a two-pane, tabbed interface, allowing enabling you to manage multiple accounts at a time. The interface is designed in a way that it works as if your managing the files in your local directory. The application allows you to connect to any number of accounts, create, rename, browse and delete files and folders, copy folders between your computer and cloud storage, synchronize data between different services, generate URL for files etc. CloudBerry Explorer has the capability to remember user settings, generate storage capacity reports and move & copy data in background without interfering with your work. Read on to find out more about CloudBerry Explorer. Read More

SelfRestraint: Block Websites For Up To 24 Hours, View Countdown Timer

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There is nothing worse than wasting your time during some important work. An interesting fact, its human nature that whenever we are doing something of great importance, something else continually tries to distract our mind, which can be a simple wish or something bothering us. Same holds true when your working on your computer. For instance, your boss has given you an important task but your mind is lurking on YouTube or 9gag. To combat such situation, FocalFilter is a website blocking application to avoid getting distracted with time wasting websites while working. When we reviewed it back in January, albeit it worked flawlessly, it had only a limited number of time presets to block websites. Today, we discovered an alternative solution simply labelled as SelfRestraint. It is an open source application developed by Parker Kuivila, which takes care of the problem by providing you with presets of 15 minute intervals for blocking websites, starting from 15 minutes, to up to 24 hours 45 minutes. Once you set the block, a countdown timer will be triggered and automatically pop up, allowing you to monitor how much time is left before the websites will be available again. More on the application after the jump. Read More

SyncWall: Sync & Auto-Change Wallpapers With Effects Between Multiple Computers

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I have covered various wallpaper applications in the past, the reason for which being my own fondness for new and attractive looking wallpapers. One of the awesome feature introduced in Windows Vista was its ability to automate the wallpapers, so you don't have to look to the same old boring background everyday. Third-party applications however, simply provide a lot more. Desktop wallpaper managers we have covered, such as, DisplayFusion, Mourao Wallpaper Changer and Kuvva, let you manage and automatically change desktop background after a certain period of time. These software were good for sure, but as we are always looking for something even more feature-rich, it looks like we found one.  SyncWall is an open source wallpaper manager that allows you to synchronize wallpapers between multiple computers. It lets you  changes wallpaper periodically and also has multi-display support. Coupled with a neat looking design, it enables you to set schedules for automatically changing wallpaper, define global hot key for changing the wallpaper, and add special effects to wallpapers, such as emboss, blur, sharpen, edge etc. Wallpapers can be synchronized, along with the basic display parameters, between multiple computers, by defining the server and clients. More on SyncWall after the break. Read More

Perform IP Address Calculations With Gip IP Address Calculator

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Gip is an open source Linux calculator for system and network administrators for performing IP address calculations, e.g., an administrator who may require finding out the IP prefix length, subnets, etc. To calculate IP address related information, simply type the IP, subnet mask and prefix length. Furthermore, Gip can split subnets using a given IP subnet mask, and perform other necessary calculations for converting IP address ranges. Read More

Stealth Player: A Hotkey Controlled Music Player Without An Interface

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Listening to music while working on the computer is pretty common among regular PC users, but with all the flashy interfaces that come with the latest audio players, getting distracted from your work is a major issue. Other than the interface, some audio players, such as the native Windows Media Player, hog too much memory, and might interfere with ongoing work. Stealth Player is an open source audio player that takes care of all these problems by providing users with ‘nothing’! That’s right, the music player doesn’t host an interface; instead, it just has a system tray icon, with playback being controlled through hot keys. More on Stealth Player after the jump. Read More

Elpis: Desktop Client To Manage & Listen To Pandora Radio

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With each passing day, more and more web based services are beginning to appear on the internet. A lot of simple functions, from opening and editing text files to listening to music and watching movies, can be performed directly in your browser without having to download anything to your computer. Pandora is an online radio service that allows you to listen to music by visiting its home page. You are not required to download anything to your computer, if the service is supported in your country and you have an account registered with it, you can listen to thousands of songs. Now, someone has been kind enough to develop an open source desktop client for Pandora, named Elpis, that allows you to easily manage your account, add stations to your account, and listen to your favorite bands and artists. It allows you to view, sort and select stations, as well as play, pause, skip, thumbs up, thumbs down and mark a song when you tired of it and want to stop it from appearing in the list again. Keep reading to find more about Elpis. Read More

Drag & Drop To Read Comics And View Plain Images With MComix

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Reading comics is a good way to take your mind off work and have fun. Everybody has a different hobby, some like to play games on their computer, some people watch movies and listen to music, while other read comics for fun. However, to enjoy whatever you want to do requires you to the right tools. For example, if you trying to watch a movie, you need to have the right video player with the correct codecs installed on your computer, otherwise the video file will not work correctly on your computer. In the same way, a good comic reader is a major requirement for enjoying reading your favorite comics. Previously, we have covered comic readers such as ComicRack, CBR and  WPF Comics Book Reader, which let you read comic books available in different formats. Today we bring to you MComix, an open source comic reader that lets you read and manage your comics. It provides you with all the basic options to control and customize your comic reading experience. Other than serving as a comic reader for archives compiled in ZIP, RAR, 7ZIP and TAR formats, it can also open plain images. Preferences can be changed for default settings of the application, such as background color, page numbers, scrolling options, display properties and language selection. The application allows you to maintain bookmarks to easily resume reading your favorite comics! Read More

myCollection: Manage All Your Media & Auto-Update Information From Web

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myCollections is an open source application to help you manage your Apps, Books, Games, Movies, Music, NDS, Series and other types of media under separate tabs. The application allows you to view all or just some of the tabs, depending on your preference, and shows detailed information about each selected media item. You can apply various filters to displayed content, such as View Files with Cover, Without Cover, Complete, Not Complete, Heard, Not Heard etc, and different views such as Card View, Covered View, CoverFlow View etc. It comes with a built-in duplicate checker and a tool to automatically download media information from the web. Moreover, myCollections has multi-language support, and offers different skins to choose from. More on the application after the jump. Read More

Sync Files Between Amazon S3 & Local Drive With Amazon S3 FileSync

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Amazon S3 FileSync is an open source application that synchronize files to and from your Amazon S3 account, as well as, between two local folders. This application aims to make two way synchronization between local and Amazon S3 folders easy by preventing you from following tedious backup methods like burning data to optical discs or saving them to external drives. The application is portable , and can be taken anywhere to sync data instantly with your Amazon S3 account without having to set up and configure the account settings. Read More

Volume 2 Updated, Adds OSD Notification Support For Volume Features

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Volume 2 is an open source volume controller that aims to replace Windows default Volume Control utility. Since our review, the application has seen quite a lot of improvements and features such as better display OSD features, added battery status display and default device highlight feature. Apart from these major improvements, the latest version has OSD (On Screen Display) for changing screen brightness with hotkeys, function set for original brightness hotkeys, OSD for changing volume, additional keyboard shortcuts to Pause, Scroll Lock, Home, Insert, Page Up, Page Down, Del, End, option to set device as default and a lot  more. Read More

Sigil: Now With Data Loss Fixes And Multiple Linux OS Packages

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Last year, we covered Sigil, which is a cross-platform e-book editor for editing books in ePub format. Since our review, this open source application has undergone major updates, and now has more dynamic features than its initial release. For instance, Sigil now supports a number of handy keyboard shortcuts, inline spell checking, and other useful features. Furthermore,  Sigil in now available for Linux as well, and provides a number of packages for various Linux distributions. Read More

view3dscene Is Cross-Platform Tool To View & Interact With 3D Models

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2D to 3D transition opened up a new gate in the graphics designing pipeline. Not only does 3D models save a lot of prototyping and designing costs, but also let graphics designers bring various imaginations to life. 3D models have become so mainstream now that they are used in quite every field. From designing a house to modelling a car. Back in December of 2011, we covered Sweet Home 3D, an open source interior design application that lets you design a complete home and place furniture on a 2D plane, with a real-time 3D preview. The application surely was quite feature-laden and one of the best of its kind. However, if you have already got a 3D model, and only want to view it, you can use view3dscene. It is an open source browser and viewer for VRML, X3D and other 3D model formats. Other than viewing 3D models in window mode, as well as full screen, it also allows you to play 3D sounds along with the models. The application has a built-in screenshot capturing feature to take screenshots of a loaded scene. Some of the supported file formats are VRML, X3D, Kanim, Collada, 3D Studio 3Ds, MD3, Wavefront OBJ, and Videoscape GEO. Read More