When you take a look at all of the different software pieces out there, what you often see is that there are a number that seem to created for some weird purpose that you wouldn’t really use on any regular basis. The Free Uninstaller is the exact opposite of that; it is a software program that is created with a very common use in mind.  When you consider the add/remove program that comes with the Windows software, you can come to the conclusion that there are a lot of faults in it. It doesn’t work all the time and the permissions issues can sometimes really derail any plans you might have had for that annoying piece of software that you just can’t seem to uninstall.

There is actually a dual purpose to this program. First, it replaces the add/remove program that comes with Windows with a far more effective uninstaller; one that can remove any application that was installed with the Windows operating system. In addition to that, it also has the ability to remove entries from the uninstall list; fixing the other big problem with Windows add/remove software. Have you ever noticed a piece of software on the list that you just removed and tried to remove it again only to be told it wasn’t a real file? That’s a very frustrating situation and the Free Uninstaller 1.1 can be used to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

More info can be found at http://www.freeuninstalleren.glt.pl/

One of the coolest things ever developed for the use of online music files is the concept of Ogg Vorbis tags.  These are tags attached to audio files that allow you to give information to other people that might be using the same file later on to listen.  For example, if you’ve ever seen a file pop up in your Windows Media Player with information regarding the name of the artist, the title of the song, the year of publishing, the CD cover or anything else, what you were looking at was very likely a Vorbis tag!

Well, now you can create and maintain your Vorbis tags through the use of the WinVorbis 1.60 editor.  It is a multi-file editor that really makes the process of encoding and entering tags for a whole CD’s worth of songs as easy as possible.   Not only does it allow you easy editing of the typical artist and title tags, but it also allows you define up to a maximum of six other tags specifically for use with your CD files.   It is about as user friendly as can be and the reason that so many people like it is specifically because it tags music tagging and makes it extremely easy.

Oh and by the way it’s free as well; more information on it can be found at http://winvorbis.stationplaylist.com/

When you take a look at all of the different coding languages used in internet development today, you can see that there are quite a few indeed.   If you ever want to be good at web development, it goes beyond learning HTML nowadays.  You need to know XML, XHTML, CSS, SQL, PHP, ASP and a number of other programming languages.   With new languages emerging all the time you are going to find it becoming harder and harder to keep knowledge of all of the tags from all of the languages in your head at once.

Therefore, software is necessary.  Even if you don’t want to work in a web development program like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, you should still use software to check your code.   Programming different parts of code for hours on end is going to make anyone make the odd mistake here and there, so you want to be absolutely sure that anything you take a look at also gets looked at by an impartial set of eyes.   The CSE HTML Validator Lite 8.0130 is something that you definitely something you want to look at because it is exactly that; an impartial pair of eyes.   It will tell you how good your code is and whether or not there are any mistakes present.  It will also show you the line numbers of those mistakes and that information alone is priceless in allowing you to design your dream website.

More information can be found at http://www.htmlvalidator.com/

When you think about it, part of making software for the computer should be in making tasks that people almost don’t even think about when they do them easier.   In other words, if you can take an everyday task that a person has to do and find a way for them to make that task easier, then you have really accomplished a great feat in your software design career.

Take the example of file browsing.  If you’re like most computer savvy users, what you are going to find is that you have a number of different CDs with a lot of data on each CD. Every CD that you’ve made that contains files from Microsoft office, programs, software and games are all going to be CDs that you might need to browse at some point to find a specific file. If you’ve got hundreds of CDs to look at, this can become a real problem in terms of loading and unloading a CD each time you want to look at its contents.

If you have the Offline CD Browser however, what you can do is make copies of your CDs and save images of their file contents within the program itself. Then, when you need to find a file, you can look through all of your CDs in moments because of the file structures having been saved on the hard drive. You can’t activate any of the files, but searching through them is a breeze.

More information can be found at http://www.anderssoftware.com/ocdb/

Tiny Hexer has been one of the most popular free hex editors because of all of the functionality that it has.  When you are using Tiny Hexer, you can do almost anything you’d like to a binary file. You can edit multiple files in .mdi format to your heart’s content with the software as well as use it to take a look at sectors of any data medium that you can think of (hard drive, disk drives and many others). You can even use the Tiny Hexer to change information regarding the virtual memory of processes activated on your system.
 
In addition to all of that great functionality, Tiny Hexer as a piece of software was also something that was scriptable as well as something that could be used to view plugin data structures in browsers. However, there are a number of people that use the Tiny Hexer software that don’t need any of the functionality provided by either the scripting or the plugin options and therefore these people can benefit from the use of the Tiny Hexer Medium Edition software.   It has all of the editing abilities that users of the original Tiny Hexer will expect, but without any of the scripting or plugin support for a leaner piece of software.
 
More information available at http://www.mirkes.de/en/freeware/tinyhex.php

If you’ve been using any version of Windows, then you will probably be familiar with the mechanism that Microsoft uses to distinguish true icon pieces from icon pieces that have been placed where they are as shortcuts to other icon pieces located elsewhere throughout the user’s hard drive. The mechanism for signifying the difference between a true icon and a shortcut is a small arrow that is put on overlay to the icon itself. This arrow is easily distinguishable and is used by Windows users to figure out which of their icons are shortcuts and which are not.

Of course, some users might want to remove this arrow for aesthetic purposes, simply because some people don’t like the look of it. While that’s been fine up until now, one of the vexing things about Windows Vista (one among many) is that there is no mechanism in place to actually remove that arrow. And because of the design scheme of Windows Vista, the arrow can actually be more annoying than in previous versions; especially to people that want it gone.

Well, if you want your arrows gone with minimal fuss, then take a look at the Vista Shortcut Overlay Remover 1.3. It is a program that allows you to either leave the shortcut arrows as they are, dull their effect and lighten their colour, or alternatively remove them altogether. It is a nifty little program to add to your hard drive and of course it is completely free to use.

More information available at http://www.frameworkx.com/frameworkx/content.aspx?ch=60&id=531

CSS is an acronym that stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It is one of the newer methods of coding available to web developers, but at the same time one that can save a lot of hassle in the sense of allowing you to make changes in one document that serve to affect the rest of your website. CSS has been a revolution because of its time saving properties and now that the use of it is widespread, what you are going to find is that the people interested in CSS are also the people that have come up with ways to make CSS integration and development even faster.

Meet the CSS Spy; an editor that allows you to take a look at and edit any CSS code you might already have. The innovative aspect to this handy little program is that you can actually view the changes that you make and their effects in real time in both internet explorer and firefox should you wish to do so. You can edit any sample you want with the CSS in this manner and of course it is compliant with all of the standards set out by the world wide web consortium; also known as the W3C. This can save you a lot of time because it means that you don’t have to continually save your file, upload it and then refresh your browser to view changes you might have made.

More information can be found at http://www.puntoequis.com.ar/aktive/default.aspx?SC=SOFT&ID=CSSSPY

Like most people, your computer probably has various programs you’ve installed on it over time. In my case, that’s quite a few indeed! If you are anything like how I am, You’ll know that it can become quite a time consuming task in itself just keeping all of these updated to the latest versions.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a program to instantly scan your computer and come back with a list of all your installed programs..and drivers!… listing the version you have on your computer and the current version available? Now wouldnt it be even greater if it had a link to download the latest versions in just a couple of clicks?

Well in short, thats exactly what VersionTracker Pro does. This seems to work pretty good for programs, but be wary with drivers as it doesn’t always show correct recommendations, at least not on my system anyway. You can download the one use trial at the website.

Check out the site for more details and prepare to save yourself a lot of time when updating your stuff in future!

If you’ve had issues with duplicate files in the past, taking up precious hard disk space, then Duplicate File Detector should come in handy in putting a stop to that. Duplicate File Detector is a powerful tool to search for file duplicates on your computer. The good thing about it is that it can find duplicates of any file: text, binary, music, video or images.

Criteria like filename, file size, or file content. For multimedia files (MP3, OGG/Vorbis, WMA), can be used to search for duplicates. The only problem I have with this software is that it is shareware, coughing up $29 for something would have been a great success as a freeware is something I can’t shake off.

But you check it out yourself, who knows it may be just what you need.  The trial version is free, go to http://www.al-soft.com/dfd/duplicate-file-finder.shtml to get it.

kruptos 2 is a powerful freeware application that enables you to encrypt your sensitive data. It uses 128 bit blowfish encryption to encrypt your files or folders which then can only be accessed with the correct password, so that only you can have access to them. You can even select to disguise the newly encrypted files name for further privacy.

One thing it could be used for is USB flash drives and portable storage devices, ensuring that no one can access your private or sensitive data if the drive is lost or stolen. It can also create self decrypting files and includes a file shredding utility.

Check it out at the website here.