Software Spot

VirtualDub is an excellent free video processing application that can be used to convert video file formats and apply various processing options such as adjusting the frame size, reducing frame rates and changing the audio encoding. " VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images." I've been using VirtualDub to convert mpeg and avi files to a format I ca n use on my Palm Tungsten PDA so I can watch videos on the go. I've event come up with a way to of converting Windows M...

DENIM is a really innovative and very different type of application for web site design. This tool from from University of Washinton enable quick scetching of page layout and interactions to rapidly build out a functional prototype of a website. "DENIM is a system that helps web site designers in the early stages of design. DENIM supports sketching input, allows design at different refinement levels, and unifies the levels through zooming." DENIM is best used suited to pen based input using a tablet PC or an external graphics table. Trying to sketch deisgns with a mouse can be a bit challenging.

The latest useful utility I came across is "A Note" . I've tried out many Post-it note style applications in the past but this is one of the best free ones I've come across. "A Note is a program that lets you create post-it like notes on your Microsoft Windows desktop. The program sits in the system tray and with either one click or a double click a new note appears and you can write the message directly."

Freemind is a great open source mind mapping application that can be used orgainize your thoughts and ideas. I use Freemind both at home and at work to help orgainse thoughts and ideas. Freemind has a number of export options and the latest 0.8.0 release adds the ability to use XSLT transformations to perform custom exports. UPDATE: I've created some of my own custom transformations to various formats including Text, RTF and Open Workbench

I often have the need to edit text files in various formats and more often than note Windows Notepad just doesn't cut it. Notepad++ is an opensource project goes where Windows Notepad fears to tread. Notepad++ supports a wide variety of text files types and includes customizable syntax highlighting and multiple file support with tabbed windows.

I've been hunting around for a good free web authoring package for a few weeks and I finally came across Nvu, an open source HTML editor web site manager along simular lines to Frontpage and Dreamweaver " Nvu is the new Web editing environment based on the Mozilla platform and its Gecko layout engine. Primarily made for Linspire and other Linux flavors, its cross-platform architecture makes it available on a wide variety of other platforms."

Picasa is a great piece of software for orginizing photos and images, and is available as a free download from Google. This application has to be one of the most user friendly applications I've come across recently, and performance is amazing, even on my aging 500Mhz PIII system.

Desktop Sidebar is a cool desktop accessory that provides a collection of dockable information panels supporting a wide variety of data feeds including weather, news, email, stock quotes, etc. Desktop Sidebar comes with a number of useful panels, plus additional extensions available for download. My favorite panel extensions are the RSS new reader and the Virtual Desktop panel. The 'Newsroom' RSS reader panel was my initial reason for trying Desktop Sidebar in the first place and for me this is the way RSS should be, a frequently updating panel of headlines on the side of the screen (or wherever you want to place it). The Virtual Desktop Panel is an added bonus, I've tried a number of alternative free virtual desktop tools and this is the one I've stuck with using for the longest time.

Gaim is an excellent open source IM client that supports the main messaging platforms (MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ etc). Gaim does not support all of the fancy new features available in the main IM clients, but when it comes to plain and simple messaging Gaim is a winner for me. I largly use Gaim as my messaging client at work where I don't care for audio and video features and animated emoticons. There are also a number of Gaim plugin extenstions available. My personal favorite is the Guifications plugin in conjuction with the MSN Guifications theme which provides MSN messenger style popup notifications in the corner of the screen.

My favorite image editing application is The GIMP : "The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages." One limitation of GIMP is the lack of shape drawing tools, so I'm just taking a look at another promising drawing application called Inkscape : "Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In addition, Inkscape supports Creative Commons meta-data, node-editing, layers, complex path operations, text-on-path, and SVG XML editing. It also imports several formats like EPS, Postscript, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF and exports PNG as well as mul...