TopStyle Lite – Free Style Sheet Software

When I first started getting my feet wet with web design and support, I had trouble understanding style sheets and how they worked. TopStyle Lite — the free, downsized version of TopStyle — was recommended to me as a good visualizing tool. And so it is. The nature of style sheets is evolving, but I still use TopStyle Lite pretty regularly for sites using standard style sheets.

Download a style sheet (css file) and open in it TopStyle Lite, and both seeing what you have and seeing where you’re going become really simple. Change the attribute on the right side of the screen, and TopStyle will change the related item in the style sheet.  It’s nice until one gets comfortable with style sheets…and even beyond.

The Gimp – Free Image Manipulation Software

This is some pretty hefty software.  It does everything but tap dance. There is a learning curve, but if you’ve worked before with image manipulation software, you already have a leg up. Read more

Treepad Lite – Personal Information Manager

There are more and more reasons to save data digitally with every day that passes.  A belt-and-suspenders approach to traditional note-taking is a good idea.  A solid option for saving items traditionally relegated to a notebook is Treepad.   There is a more sophisticated paid version and there is a free pared down plain-text version called Treepad Lite.  While not necessarily the best place to store passwords (no security), it is a great place to store phone numbers, url’s, emails, etc.

Treepad Lite takes no space at all; it can be run from a thumb drive.  All versions run on several releases of Windows and on Linux/Wine.

doPDF – Free PDF Converter

Anyone who uses a computer as a part of his or her day-to-day life — business or personal — will eventually need to send a printed document to someone via email.  The options are to attach the original document (not advised, usually), a scan of the document (acceptable, but tedious to the sender), or a pdf (portable document format) of the document.  Whenever possible and practicle, the latter is the way to go.

PDF converters are listed as printer.  There are many, many options for software to create a pdf.  My personal choice is doPDF.  It’s free, installs easily, and creates the pdf quickly and accurately from your Windows word processor of choice.

X-Sheet Invoicing – Good starter business finance software

X-Sheet Invoicing is a wonderful little financial management application for business developed by the folks at Development-X to show the flexibility and ease of use of their X-Sheet technology.  I use X-Sheet to manage my own consulting finances.  I’m a small enterprise and find this app takes care of everything I need easily and cleanly.

It offers invoicing and credit processing, customer management (including accommodation for notes and reminders), extensive reporting,  payments and deposit management.  When it comes time to compile data for tax reporting, I’m truly happy I use this software.  That data collection couldn’t be easier.

Oh, and this app is free.  That’s right.  It’s been free since it’s inception.  I’ve been using it for almost 10 years.  Thank you folks at Development-X!

Color Cop – A free color picker

This is a tool that is meant for Windows web designers and programmers, but these days, bloggers who support their own blogs in WordPress, for example, are doing a lot of their own site modifications.  Color Cop stays on top and includes an eyedropper to grab a color of interest off any web page.  It lists the colors in RGB and hexadecimal. Another cool thing Color Cop includes is a complimentary color palette for any chosen option.  Nice for experienced users and rookies, as well.

Also, a quick demo and user forums offer a little more than meets the eye regarding use of this program.

Photo Credit: Color Cop

Zip Genius – a file compression option

ZipGenius is a file compression tool that is a perfect companion to anyone’s PC tool box.  Sending 10 full sized images and your email client is grousing?  Compress the images into one file that’s smaller than the sum of it’s parts, and email will be better able to handle those images.   Need to offload some old scanned paperwork?  Compress with ZipGenius and get more bang for your buck with off-pc storage.

And ZipGenius handles more than traditional .zip files! In fact, ZipGenius can compress and decompress 20+ file types. It’s easy to use, it’s been around for awhile, and it’s free.

FileZilla – Simple, Secure, Free FTP Protocol

This open source, file transfer protocol (FTP) is my preferred software for this function.  It is available in client and server versions, and it is free.  It runs on several platforms (including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and is available in many languages.

One of my favorite things, beyond ease of use, is the Site Manager tool.  For those of us who access many servers via FTP, FileZilla allows the saving of domain name/login/password for easy communication to those servers. . . a BIG time saver.

FileZilla displays a folder/file view on both the client and the server, making navigation more intuitive. File transfer is a snap with drag-and-drop.  You bloggers out there will love this tool for picking up or dropping off images from the blog host!

Cool Ruler – A handy measuring tool

You’re looking at a web page and see the size of the image on the page is what you want.  What is that size?  How do you calculate it?  Hold a ruler up to the screen?  Cut and paste into a graphics tool like IrfanView?  Nope.  Get yourself a copy of the very handy Cool Ruler.

Cool Ruler stays on top; measures vertically or horizontally; in CM, IN, or PX with an option to customize measurement; and includes a calculator.  It takes up virtually no memory or hard drive space, and is a handy tool to have in your digital tool box.

IrfanView – A Quick and Clean Graphic Tool

Like any computer tool, IrfanView is one of many available of its type.  I own Photoshop, but for basic image manipulation, the following are the primary reasons I use this tool.

1. Irfanview is Freeware. It’s not a trial software and there are no nags for licensing or registration or anything.

2. It supports many, many graphic formats. A  jpg image can be opened and saved as a gif, a tif, or any other of 22 formats. Different extensions for different applications. And the result is seamless…

2. The whole install takes up only 9.23 mb and requires very little memory to run.  There is just one exe and no additional dll’s.

3. Image rotation results in no loss of image integrity.

4. The most common tools for any user are cutting, cropping, and resizing.  With Irfanview, these operations are a snap.

5. Plugins can be all installed at once, or in bits.  A multi-media player option, OCR, and send by email right from IrfanView are examples of available plugins.  You can use them, or not!

6. Batch conversion or renaming is a breeze in IrfanView.

7.  I use IrfanView a lot to manage screen prints. ALT-PrtSc and CTRL-V to paste into IrfanView and you’ve got an easy way to save a copy of whatever from your PC screen and cut out whatever you don’t want or need.  That’s how I got the IrfanView home page banner for the top of this post.

This is just a fine product, in my opinion, with a dynamic user base. The forums are a great place to learn the ins and outs of the more advanced functions.  I have nothing bad to say about IrfanView and recommend it often when asked my opinion.