Top 10 Freeware - April 2006

Top 10 Freeware
(April 2006)

Programs listed alphabetically

Copernic Desktop Search
Version 1.7, release date: April 10, 2006
Copernic Desktop Search brings the power of a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use search engine right to your PC and allows you instantly to search files, e-mails, and email attachments stored anywhere on your PC hard drive. It executes sub-second searching of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Acrobat PDFs, and all popular music, picture and video formats. CDS also searches your browser history, favorites, and contacts.
Screenshot | Download (3141 kB)

EnvVarEditor
release date: April 20, 2006
If you do any kind of development or admin work on Windows, you must at least once have had the need to edit or create (or maybe delete) a Windows environment variable. There are many ways of bringing up the Windows utility to do this, but the one way that I used to do is from the Start menu, I selected
My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Environment Variables.
A dialog box will pop up, but guess what, it's so user-unfriendly. The dialog box has fixed size, so if you have a variable such as "PATH" whose value is a long string, made up by many directory paths (concat by semi-colons), you can't tell what the value of the environment variable is. The pain continues when you try to create or edit.
I wrote EnvVarEditor to help make editing environment variables a little more pleasant.
Similarly to the Windows out-of-the-box utility, it has two sections: user and system. But that's where the similarity ends. The dialog box in EnvVarEditor is totally resizable. When it's resized, all child controls are resized accordingly and proportionally. Drilling down on a variable for editing, its concatinated value is tokenized and displayed in a list control. Inline editing is available, which makes your job a little easier. You can also choose to move up/down, delete, append, insert from the context menu (right click on the mouse). A helper button to browse for folders and files are also available, to help users from making typo mistakes. Again, this dialog box is also totally resizable.
Download (490 kB)

Ethereal
Version 0.99.0, release date: April 24, 2006
Ethereal is used by network professionals around the world for troubleshooting, analysis, software and protocol development, and education. It has all of the standard features you would expect in a protocol analyzer, and several features not seen in any other product. Its open source license allows talented experts in the networking community to add enhancements. It runs on all popular computing platforms, including Unix, Linux, and Windows.
Download (12.4 MB)

FastStone Image Viewer
Version 2.5, release date: April 21, 2006
FastStone Image Viewer is an image browser, viewer, converter and editor with an easy to use interface and a nice array of features that include resizing, renaming, cropping, color adjustments, watermarks and more. It also includes an intuitive full-screen mode that provides quick access to EXIF information and thumbnail browser via hidden toolbars that emerge when you touch the edge of your screen with the mouse. Other features include a high quality magnifier and built-in slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image frames, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA.
Screenshot | Download (2.9 MB)

Free Download Manager
Version 2.0, release date: April 5, 2006
Using the power of this free download manager and accelerator you can retrieve files and complete websites up to 600% faster than before. It utilizes the entire bandwidth of your internet connection even if you download from slow web sites. Features of the download manager include: easy integration with Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape and FireFox, simultaneous downloading from several mirrors, adjusting traffic usage, ZIP file and audio/video preview, powerful scheduler, antivirus integration, adjusting traffic usage, resuming downloads, browsing web and ftp folders and more...
Screenshots | Download (1583 kB)

FuturixImager
Version 5.7.1, release date: April 18, 2006
FuturixImager (formerly Futuris Imager) is compact and customizable image viewer. It is capable of opening more then 50 graphical formats, including all popular ones (GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, JPEG2000).
Imager can also print, scan, perform basic editing, make screenshots, show camera metadata, import raw camera photos, generate histograms, and much more!

Paessler Site Inspector
Version 4.1, release date: April 6, 2006
Paessler Site Inspector is a web browser that combines the two most frequently used browser engines (Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Gecko) into one program. Its advanced analysis features make it the perfect companion for webmasters and web developers. With Paessler Site Inspector's Analyzing Browser, users can switch between the two browser engines with just one mouse click, for example to compare the rendering of a page in both browsers.
Download (11.4 MB)

TheSage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus
Version 1.1.2, release date: April 3, 2006
TheSage English Dictionary and Thesaurus is a complete dictionary and a multifaceted thesaurus of the English language. It runs locally, and does not use your Internet connection. The Dictionary comprises more than 145,000 references with multiple detailed definitions (over 200,000); A large collection of examples of usage (approx. 35,000); Encyclopedic information (geographical, historical, political,...); Academic knowledge (medicine, biology,... ). The Thesaurus encompasses synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, holonyms,...; Nearly 1,200,000 relationships between definitions. The essential functionality includes the following: Tabbed interface allowing multiple definitions and searches to be readily available; Quick cross-referencing (any and all displayed words are clickable, triggering a lookup); Standard and advanced wildcard search functionality; Anagram search; History and session record keeping; Options that allow customization of the appearance of TheSage; Copy to clipboard of all or part of the information displayed.
Screenshot | Download (7384 kB)

Treepad Lite
Version 3.00, release date: April 15, 2006
TreePad Lite is a very intuitive, small yet powerful personal database program, only 465 Kb in size. They allow you to store all your notes, emails, texts, hyperlinks, etc. into one or multiple databases. With the look and feel of the familiar Windows explorer, editing, storing, browsing, searching and retrieving your data can not be easier! TreePad can be run directly from a floppy, if necessary, including data. To find any article you previously created or imported, you can browse the tree, in the same way as you browse directories/folders in the Windows explorer. You can also use the internal search engine to find any piece of information swiftly.
Screenshot | Download (885 kB)

Wink
Version 2.0, release date: April 12, 2006
Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
Download (2833 kB)

March 2006