Techno Collections

How to add your favorite image to a folder

2008-11-17T06:37:00.000-08:00

SnapAct: stylish image viewer with free online synchronization

2008-10-30T02:07:00.000-07:00

Snapact is a free, stylish image viewing and management software that offers a good range of image manipulation and management functions, including tag and metadata editing, a drop basket, and the creation of virtual albums which can be uploaded and shared using the free online Snapact photo sharing service.What’s different about Snapact is that while these programs previously sited tend on average to be resource hungry or have high 3D requirements, Snapact does not (uses around 23 megs in memory when running). On the other hand what Snapact manages to do is to retain a pleasing “coolness factor” while offering a lot of nice features both for image manipulation and image management (but especially the latter).

What also needs to be said about Snapact is that it is very much a desktop front-end to the free Snapact image sharing service; which is to say that it is designed for seamless integration with your online Snapact account. Having said that, I also have to note that you can use this program as a local viewer and image management program without signing up or using the online component. I had been using this program as a local image viewer for a week, in fact, before I decided to review it and only then did I sign up for a Snapact online account for the purposes of writing about it.

features:

Carousel-style browsing: similar to the famous iTunes carousel, this is not only fashionable these days but rather cool, and the implementation here is a very good one (fast, efficient). When viewing an image all of the other images in the same folder are displayed as thumbnails in the bottom part of the screen and will enlarge in turn as you mouse over them. Or you can simply use the left/right arrow keys to browse back and forth, as you would with any image viewer.
Image editing functions: rotate, crop, blur, sharpen, brighten/contrast, redeye, adjust tint/color, and negative and black and white image filters.
Image managent functions: edit or add tags to your images, edit other metadata (including rating, title, description, etc), view metadata (simply hover over any image thumbnail), add to album (an album is a kind of virtual folder or category), synchronize album(s) to your Snapact online account (this is optional), add to mini-basket (a handy work area where you can drag images or other files you would like to work with).
Smart browsing: the “predefined” album in your list of albums offers browsing by smartlist (recently modified, image size, etc).
The search box: a fast way to find what you’re looking for. Will look at file and folder names as well as metadata (tags, description, EXIF data, etc).
Snapact online: once you create a free Snapact account you or any of your friends can log into your page which will have a URL that looks like (www.snapact.com/u/your-username). As far as image sharing sites go Snapact online actually offers a very pleasant user experience. You can surf “recent images”, “recent album”, by tag, etc. and the site offers thumbnail-style views and a page for each uploaded image offering photo and EXIF information. Images uploaded are reduced in terms of their file size and I am unsure as to whether or not there is a storage limit per account (please advise if you have more information).
Snapact online privacy settings: you can change your privacy settings such that your images are accessible to just you, to just your official Snapact “friends”, or publicly to everyone.
Panoramic images: I used Snapact to view a folder of panoramic images with some good results (click on the “Full Size” button first, then use the mouse to scroll across your panorama).

Wish list (or how this program can be even better):

Mouse-wheel control: for browsing images. Currently the mousewheel is not utilized, which I find a tad surprising.
Notification when unpublishing an album: stating that this will result in x number of uploaded images being removed from the online account on next sync. Is a good idea.
Slideshow function: this is conspicuously absent, and while I never cared much for my images being automatically displayed in succession I do think that many users will want and miss this.

The verdict: I will confess that at first I did not intend to review this software, but the main draw for me was the good user experience that it provides. If you are looking for a stylish image viewer with good features that does not hog your system you should check out Snapact; also, if you want a quick and very functional online image synching/sharing service certainly give Snapact online a try (if not, don’t sweat it, you can use Snapact 100% locally without using the online image sharing function).

Compatibility: Windows XP or Vista.

download: SnapAct

Free Video Capture Software Download - Debut Video Capture

2008-10-30T01:40:00.000-07:00

Debut Video Capture is a free video recording software that can capture video and audio from any USB device, and can also record anything that is displayed on-screen such as a video that is playing or a user’s visible on-screen activity. Supports a wide variety of output formats and encoders.

I was recently faced with the need to make videos of a user (me) interacting with a site that we’ve created at work. This presented me with the opportunity to do some research and find a good screen-recording program; the last time I’d posted something like this was the Krut Computer Recorder way back in April 2007, but since then there seems to have been a proliferation of good free options. I decided to post this program because it is simple and straightforward, extremely easy to use, and offers a good number of output encoders and formats.

Features:

# Input sources: you can record any input coming from a USB video input device (including a videocam with USB input). You can also record your visible screen or a sub-section of the screen.
# (Another) Debut ScreenshotDefining an area of the screen to record: is extremely easy; click on the "select a desktop rectangle tool" and draw a rectangle anywhere on screen. Debut will only record that area and any visible events that take place within it. Alternately you can click the "capture the whole desktop" button to record the entire screen.
# Output: can output in a variety of formats, including AVI, WMV, ASF, MPG, 3PG, MP4, MOV, and FLV). You can use a number of encoders which the program - I believe - installs (including DV video), as well as any encoders that you might have installed on your system (e.g. I installed an Xvid encoder and was easily able to use it to encode video screen captures with Debut).
# Editing output: you can resize the output video on the fly while recording and/or change the framerate to something that you set manually.
# Video effects: you can apply a number of filters on-the-fly (black and white, negative, sepia), and also have the option to change output color settings (brightness, contrast, gamma).
# Text annotation: also supported is adding an on-screen text message that is present across the entire video. You can choose it’s on screen placement, alignment, whether or not to use a background color, font, font-style, and font size, etc. The program also allows for variable date and/or time stamping.
# Hotkeys: you can define hotkeys for most program functions. This is useful when you do not want the program dialog to be visible on screen, and therefore can minimize it and control Debut using the keyboard.
# Other options: include pre-determining the recording time, sending a recorded video on completion as an email attachment, uploading to an FTP server, recording to multiple drives (including network drives), and running an external program, command based or otherwise, after recording to process the resulting file.
# Audio setup: the first time the program runs it will present an "audio setup wizard". There are two sources of audio: internal audio and an audio input device such as a microphone. If you are not interested in the latter you can dismiss this dialog and probably not need it again (if you need to re-run it later you can).

Download: Debut Video Capture

Image viewer with a high coolness factor: Pictomio

2008-07-13T00:35:00.000-07:00

Pictomio is a free image viewer which features a slick, modern interface and 3D accelerated browsing of image libraries. It brings together a host of functions for working with images such automatic grouping of images, tagging, image rating, EXIF and metadata editing, as well as image rotation and zooming. Pictomio can also view and manage video and media files and requires a fairly powerful graphics card to run.

In software as in anything, we ideally want to balance both form and function. And although Pictomio scores high marks on both, there exists a good number of more powerful and feature-rich freeware image viewers out there that nonetheless will not hold a candle to this one in terms of sheer coolness and the richness of the user experience. It does come at a cost (will require a powerful graphics card, and is somewhat higher on resource consumption than the average viewer) but if your machine has the resources you will probably love this. Here are more notes on this program:

The user interface: simply looks good and is definitely the program’s strong suite. Navigation is intuitive and everything is accessible through a combination of tabs (on top, on the side of the screen, etc) and right-click context menus.
Image browsing: offers thumbnail browsing, film-strip browsing, single image browsing and the iTunes-style carousel browsing, which is somewhat cool but not exactly mind-blowing (and which is presumably why the 3D acceleration is needed). Allows you to sort and/or filter images based on different criteria (see “organization” below).
Organization: if you are looking for a tool that can best organize a complicated image library this one is on steroids. Pictomio scans a user selected folder initially and immediately sets to work indexing your library and organizing it across different categories and elements. For example, it allows you to classify images into user-defined categories, rate them, flag them as favorites, tag them using multiple arbitrary tags, create albums, browse by medium or by “color mark”, browse by EXIF data, and maintain a shortlist (a basket, if you will) of images to work with. It even keeps a history of performed search queries. You can filter what you are looking at by everything (e.g. date criteria, landscape or portrait, etc.)
Slideshows: you can use the slideshow function just as you would any other image viewer (grab a bunch of images and run the slideshow), or you can choose to specify exactly the display duration for each image, the type of transition used (supports nine different transitions such as Cut, Dissolve, Flip, CrossFade, fade) and the duration of each transition. If you create the perfect slideshow you can save and re-use or re-view it later on.
Metadata: offers a comprehensive metadata editor. Aside from some of the elements mentioned above (rating, category, tags, albums) it allows you to enter annotations and to edit/view EXIF data.
Editing: this program is not geared towards editing. There is little on offer aside from the lossless rotation and zooming functions; no cropping, no applying of filters, color (or redeye) correction, no on-image text annotation, etc. It assumes that you already have all of these functions using an external image editor.
Keyboard shortcuts: for the keyboard-inclined, Pictomio supports a keyboard shortcut for most everything you can do with it.
Memory use: this seems to vary wildly depending on what I’m doing with the program. I’ve seen it go from as little as 3 megs when minimized to as high as 120 megs. Suffice it to say it is somewhat resource hungry.
Other functions: a color dropper and a ruler to measure image elements. Nice touches.
Other media support: in theory Pictomio supports video and audio files as well as well as images. However, this seems like an afterthought, as the program is so heavily geared towards images. It seems to be dependent on system codecs, which I try to limit as much as possible, and was not able to play many of my videos.
A pared-down version with lower 3D graphics card requirements: i.e. a version that takes away the carousel view and some of the bells and whistles but maintains the look-and-feel and everything else. Would be great
The option to switch off non-image media support (videos and music files) in the settings. Or otherwise remove it as a feature altogether if that might make the program less resource hungry.

Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, with 1 GB RAM and CPU > 1GHz. Requires a graphics card with Shader Model 2.0 and a minimum of 128 MB video RAM.

Download: Pictomio

Free Easy CD DVD Burner

2008-07-13T00:20:00.000-07:00

Free Easy Burner is a CD/DVD burning and authoring program that supports burning data and audio CD’s and DVD’s, copying CD’s and DVD’s (by ripping and burning ISO’s), and Ripping audio CD’s into MP3’s.

If you want a small CD/DVD burning program that performs all standard functions without many frills, then Free Easy Burner will cater for all of your burning needs (pun intended heheh).

since first reviewing this program on 2/3/2007 it has become adware, despite still being billed as freeware on the author’s site. This means that as of version 1.2.43 the program, while fully functional, nonetheless displays ads (albeit harmless ones) within its interface. However you can still download version 1.2.21 of this program, which is fully functional and ad-free, from the link at the bottom of this page.

Supports dual-layer DVD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW.
Burns Data CD’s and DVD’s: allows dragging and dropping of files and folders, will verify and/or finalize your CD/DVD.
Will copy CD’s and (unencrypted) DVD’s by ripping an ISO image on hard drive and burning it back.
Will write to ISO (i.e. can create ISOs from any collection of files and/or folder). Will also burn ISO files.
Burns Audio CD’s; will convert your audio files into a playable audio CD. Supported audio file formats are: WAV, WMA, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and M4A.
Rips audio CD’s to MP3 or WAV file formats. Supports automatic FreeCDDB tag information retrieval.

This is great, straightforward freeware that does the job very well and looks good to boot. Nice simply functional user interface; I recommend higly.

Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista.

Download: Easy CD DVD Burner

MWSnap - Screen capture tool

2008-07-11T07:09:00.000-07:00

MWSnap is a small yet powerful program for taking scren captures of a desktop, an active window,menu, or a specified part of the screen. The program supports BMP, JPG, TIFF,PNG and GIF formats, with user selected color depth and quality settings. It also includes a zooming tool, a screen ruler and a color picker as well as system wide hotkeys and preset selection sizes. A very nice program, one of the best - if not the best, you can currently find for free.

Download: MWSnap

Angry IP Scanner - Network ip scanner

2008-07-11T06:51:00.000-07:00

Angry IP scanner is a very fast and small IP scanner. It pings each IP address to check if it`s alive, then optionally it is resolving hostname and tries to connect at specified in Options dialog box TCP port. The program uses separate threads for each scanned address to reduce scanning speed. It can also display NetBIOS information: computer name, workgroup, currently logged user and MAC address.

Download: Angry IP Scanner

PstPassword - Recover forgotten Outlook passwords

2008-07-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

PstPassword enables you to recover a lost password from an Outlook PST (Personal Folders) file. Just launch the program and it will automatically detect available PST files and recover the associated passwords. PstPassword does not actually reveal the original password, but offers 3 variations of it, that may appear completely different from the original, but will still allow you to access the file. During our test, the original password was set as `snapfiles` and the recovered version was `U4n7m2`, which worked properly to open the locked file.

Compatibility: 98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista

Download: PstPassword

Paint.NET - Image editor with layer support

2008-07-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP or 2000. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software. The program offers a clean and easy to understand interface that includes all common editing tools, as well as clone stamp and various image effects. More advanced users will also appreciate the fact that Paint.NET supports layers with transparency and layer adjustments. Additional features include Red-Eye removal, image resizing, sharpening, multi-level Undo and more.

Download: Paint.NET

InterChat - LAN messenger and chat

2008-07-11T06:15:00.000-07:00

InterChat is a small but powerful chat program and network messenger, that allows you to chat over a Local Area Network (LAN). It automatically detects other users on the network that are using the InterChat client and allows you to chat with one or more users, or to send an alert message that will show as a small pop-up window on the users desktop. It includes many features like auto-reply text, file transfers, multi-user chat, online status, alert messages to all users and more. The interface is easy to use and supports chat emoticons, chat dialog export and logging, custom user names and other handy features. In addition, InterChat comes with a SpeedBar option, that can put auto-hide chat bar across the top or bottom of your screen, which can be very handy for frequent chatters.

Download: InterChat

Beneton Movie GIF - Create animation image

2008-07-11T06:05:00.000-07:00

Beneton Movie GIF is a complete GIF editing tool that supports all popular file formats, including BMP, GIF, JPG, and PNG. It allows you to create animations from scratch by importing the frames, dragging them into position, setting frame properties and more. You can also apply a variety of image effects (rotate, color blend, blur and more) as well as animation effects that enables you to generate animated moves, distortions, transition effects and more. The program can be used to create new animation or to load and edit existing GIF files. The results can be exported to animated GIF image or AVI movie. Other features include batch import of frames, a built-in image editor for frame editing, and more.

Download: Beneton Movie GIF

Extract audio and video files from FLVs with FLV Extract

2008-07-11T05:53:00.000-07:00

FLV Extract is a free program that can save video and audio files from FLV files in their original formats without decompressing or re-compressing.

If you weren’t aware of it, FLV files are containers that house audio and video files which may be encoded in any number of formats. FLV Extract gives you the ability to unpack the video and audio files without needing to re-encode or re-process.

This little program will be very useful if you (a) are downloading music from music-sharing sites in the FLV format, or (b) need to demux the audio or video from FLV files.

Features:

Nothing to install: just unzip and run.
The UI: a simple dialog with 3 options: extract video, timecodes, and audio. All you need to do is to drop files onto the app for processing.
Performance: you can drag multiple FLVs onto FLV Extract and they will be processed immediately within the space of a second (or a few seconds at most).

Compatibility: WinAll. Requires .NET Framework 2.0.

Download: FLV Extract

BitRipper: convert DVDs to AVI or Mpeg with a single click

2008-07-11T05:46:00.000-07:00

BitRipper is an integrated DVD ripping and conversion program that provides AVI or Mpeg creation from DVDs in a single step.

Cool Features:

Decrypts and converts: combines the DVD decryption and conversion processes, so that you no longer have to think of these as two distinct parts requiring different programs. More convenient but also will save you a lot of time and manual involvement with the process.
Handles any DVD: whether its a normal 4.7 Gig size or a double density 8 Gig+ DVD. “Decryption” mentioned above means that BitRipper will copy most commercial, copy-protected DVDs (includes “3rd party” CSS decryption module. (I am guessing that some very recent DVDs might have protections that it will not be able to decrypt).
Converts on the fly: i.e. does not save the DVD to your hard drive first and therefore does not require gigabytes of free space on your hard drive to run.
Installer includes codecs: installing BitRipper will also install a number of codecs that you need to perform a conversion, but the program will also use any codecs that you might have pre-installed on your system. I would advise downloading and using the LAME MP3 codec which provides better audio quality options than the included MP3 codec.
Simplicity: the program is designed to suggest a simple, 1-click conversion (see screenshot above), where you merely insert a disc and press a button. My experience, however, is that this is the case if you do not want/need to customize the conversion settings, at which point things can become both complex and confusing.
Ability to convert all parts of a track at once: by this I mean that BitRipper will allow you to select all tracks within a DVD at once. Can be very useful, especially when you want to convert all episodes of a TV series at once into a single AVI.
Customizable: to a good extent; in terms of quality, resolution, aspect ratio, and output file size. More on this in the “wish list” section below.
Audio normalization: you can easily raise (and lower, if you like) audio volume from the main conversion interface.
Performance: is quite fast, although this is somewhat subjective and variable.
Compression: use the Xvid video and Mp3 audio codecs for high compression.

Compatibility: tested on XP; no info on Vista.

Download: BitRipper

View3Dscene

2008-07-11T05:31:00.000-07:00

Description: View3Dscene can open and view VRML 1.0, VRML 2.0 (aka VRML 97), 3DS, OBJ (Wavefront) and MD3 scenesfiles created with 3D modeling programs without the need for having a 3D modeling program installed on your machine. This free program offers a number of features including flexible navigation/viewing of objects, playing animations, raytracing, collision detection, as well as a command line operations.

Navigation: the ability to move in and around the object using a variety of mouse and keyboard controls.
Viewing options: a rich variety here: the ability to change colors, including the color of the object and the background; also gives you the ability to switch a number of options on or off, including vector (vs. solid), smooth shading, fog, blending, texture, point size, etc.
Raytracing: if your file includes at least one source of light, you can perform raytracing on the object from View3Dscene (and I must say it seemed rather efficient at this in terms of performance).
Play animations: play, pause, and rewind (but no fast forward, apparently). Also provides the ability to make time pass slower or faster on display or loading. Note that I did not test this myself.
Command line operations: convert to/from the supported formats, as well as perform a number of custom rendering/viewing operations. (I did not test this).
Editing: allows you to inspect your objects (i.e. select an element and view its properties). Also supports limited editing capabilities.
Cross platform, unzip and run (no need for installation).

Compatibility: Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD.

Download: View3Dscene

Ipod Video Converter for Free

2008-07-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

Ipod Video Converter for Free converts a myriad of video formats into Ipod-compliant MP4 container videos, including WMV, MKV, ASF, FLV and VOB as well as the usual AVI (DivX, Xvid) and Mpeg formats. It will also download and convert Youtube Videos.

Note on Ipod video resolution . The maximum resolution for an Ipod compatible video depends on the Ipod’s firmware version. For Ipods with firmware 1.2 or later the max resolution is 640×480 or lower. Ipods with earlier firmware versions can handle video resolutions up to 320×240 (more info here). I would advise you to check your Ipod’s firmware version (from the Ipod main menu > settings > about) and update the firmware using the iTunes sofware if necessary. Maximum audio bitrate is 160bps.

The interface: very simple.. Allows batch encoding of files. Also includes a video preview option which I suggest you switch off as it will slow down the conversion process.

Custom settings: you can change these depending on the output resolution, quality, and file size you want. Unfortunately, there is no documentation to speak of for this program that I could find either with the installed program itself or on the developer’s website (or on third-party websites for that matter). It is possible to get a good, high quality converted video nonetheless.

If you want, you can pick the easy “Ipod Standard Format” setting from the main menu. I do not recommend this, as the quality of the standard 320×240 resolution is too low in my opinion.
Frame rate: Ipod Video Converter for Free doesn’t seem to force you to enter this and I have had good results without messing with it. If you must enter something why not use the same frame rate as the original (again from MediaInfo).
Bitrate control Mode: with no documentation whatsoever my guess is that (a) constant bitrate is the fastest; (b) 2-pass VBR provides the best quality but takes longer than (a) to convert; (c) manual VBR is probably better quality than (a) but faster than (b); and (d) Automatic VBR is probably best quality and longest time. Don’t quote me on any of this; pick one that seems like it suits your needs best and try it out.
Target bitrate / bitrate range / VBV buffer size, and Encode Mode: I didn’t touch any of these and got excellent results. Can’t give you more info, I’m afraid.
For Audio: my advice; set to 160bps (the max the Ipod can use), 48Khz, stereo. This way you get the best possible audio (believe me when I tell you that there’s nothing more annoying that low quality sound when you’re trying to watch a video over the din of a bus or other crowded public place).

YouTube: copy the URLs of the videos you want from YouTube and paste them into this program singly or in batches. It can then download them for you all at once and optionally convert them into Ipod MP4 files at 320×240 resolution. Alternately you could download the FLV and convert them later using custom settings if you want better quality.

Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista.

Download: Ipod Video Converter for Free

MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter

2008-07-11T05:20:00.000-07:00

Description: MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter will combine a number of MP3 files into a single .M4B audiobook file. Ipod M4B audiobooks support a number of features including remembering last listening position and the ability to adjust reading speed.

Having recently transferred an audiobook consisting of some 56 MP3 files into my new IPhone, I realized that it wasn’t possible to use ’song shuffle’ without getting these files played as well, interrupting the music, and requiring a human intervention. I had tagged these MP3s as "audiobook" genre but being as there is no "shuffle songs from all genres except" function I started searching for an MP3 to Audiobook converter and found this program. (Why use an app like this instead of an audio converter or transcoder? because it will both convert and combine in one action, as well as provide an interface for sorting chapters correctly and editing the tag info of the resulting audiobook).

Fitst, here’s a list of reasons why Apple’s audiobook M4B format is a good thing:

Combines all the different MP3s constituting the different chapters into an easy to manage single M4B file.
Will not get played when using song shuffle
Remembers the last listening position and allows you to get back right at the point where you left off.
Allows you to adjust the reading speed.

Here are some notes on this program:

Will combine as well as convert all MP3 files into a single M4B audiobook.
Very simple; load MP3s and convert. Supports drag and drop.
You have to make sure that the files are in the correct sort order; sort order for individual MP3 files corresponds to their sort order in explorer (i.e. in the directory where they reside).
The program allows for adjusting the sort order of files individually (move up/move down).
MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter will allow you to modify/set tag information for your file straight from the program interface.

Wish list (or how this program can be even better):

Support for other audio formats (esp. Ogg Vorbis) not just MP3
Allow for moving up/down of blocks of files or multiple file selections.

The verdict: I like it; hit me with those audiobooks, baby!.

Compatibility: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Mac and Linux versions promised soon.

Download: MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter

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2008-07-11T05:17:00.000-07:00

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2008-07-11T05:09:00.000-07:00

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