Miscellaneous Software

This page contains links to various non-development software that I found useful.

• Media & Social
• Free Software
• Commercial Software

Several of the media & social entries target Apple iOS devices. All programs in the other sections run on any recent version of Microsoft Windows, unless otherwise noted.

Media & Social

• Calibre is a free e-book manager that can display and convert between all common formats, including Amazon’s proprietary Kindle format. An indispensable tool for non-Kindle readers, and quite useful for anyone with lots of e-books.
• FeedDemon by Nick Bradbury, formerly with NewsGator, is my preferred Windows newsreader. It’s available in a commercial and a free ad-supported edition, both of which can synchronize with a Google Reader account.
• GoodNotes for iPad records hand-written notes and diagrams, and lets you annotate images and PDF documents. Writing with your fingers is surprisingly accurate, but you can also use a stylus designed for capacitive touchscreens. Check out the stylus reviews on iMedicalApps (first set, second set) and The Verge for suggestions.
• GoodReader by Good.iWare is a feature-packed iOS reader for PDF and text files, as well as other media formats. Its PDF renderer is not the fastest, and its somewhat obtuse UI is decidedly un-Apple-like, but its sheer amount of functionality is unmatched on the platform. Features include a versatile file manager, two-page display on iPads, PDF watermark removal, etc.
• Google+ data mining: All my + shows statistics for specific accounts, and CircleCount also shows global statistics for all accounts.
• iShare+ by Ryan Peggs is a native iPad client for Google+, far superior to Google’s own iPhone-optimized client and primitive mobile web interface. There may be some rough edges, but the developer is very responsive – just leave a note on any improvements you’d like to see.
• Keyboards are a popular iPad accessory, but from a Windows user’s perspective they have one problem: Apple’s key combinations for special characters are undocumented and often differ from Microsoft’s. Thankfully, Christoph Koeberlin has assembled a complete list of special characters on the English and German keyboard layouts for Mac and Windows.
• More Fun With Siri Dictation by Jim Rhoades lists numerous voice commands for punctuation and text formatting that are recognized by Siri on iPhone and dictation on iPad. Any application with a text edit box should accept these commands.
• Reading PDF Documents details my recommendations for PDF reader applications on Windows.
• Reeder by Silvio Rizzi is a Google Reader client available on iPhone, iPad, and Macs. I’m using the iPad version which goes perhaps a bit too far in its Apple-style elegant minimalism, but it’s nevertheless a very slick and highly usable newsreader.
• Twitter’s mobile web interface is terrible, and there is no obvious option to turn it off. Visit this hidden URL to permanently disable redirection from www.twitter.com until you explicitly revisit mobile.twitter.com.
• Twitter Viewer by Aaron Swartz lets you easily follow entire Twitter conversations with multiple participants.
• Tweetbot by Tapbots is miles better than Twitter’s own mobile app, let alone its primitive mobile web interface. Tweetbot is also available for iPad and a must-have for Twitter users on iOS.

Free Software

• Analog is a free web log analyzer that creates exhaustive graphical reports from web server access logs. Input formats and report generation are highly customizable. Sadly, the program has not been updated in a long time and won’t recognize the identification strings of current operating systems and web browsers.
• Eraser is a flexible utility that overwrites files or unallocated disk space with user-defined byte values. Unlike most other tools for secure data deletion, Eraser can be configured to zero all free disk space – an extremely helpful feature for Microsoft Virtual PC users because it reduces the physical size of virtual disks!
• FontForge by George Williams is a powerful font editor that lets you create, analyze, and convert fonts in every known format. There is no official Windows version of this gnarly X11-based program, but Matthew Petroff was kind enough to create an unofficial port.
• dp4 Font Viewer by digital performance shows the full glyph set (or any desired text) of any OpenType or TrueType font. This is much more useful for previewing a font file than the tiny sample text shown by the built-in Windows font viewer.
• IrfanView by Irfan Skiljan is a freeware viewer for graphics files, with some limited editing capabilities. Plug-ins for virtually all known graphics file formats exist, plus several animation and audio file formats. – Should you ever come across an image file not recognized by IrfanView, you might want to try XnView which is also free and supports another slew of obscure formats.
• ISO Recorder by Alex Feinman writes the contents of an ISO file to a blank CD/DVD, a feature that Windows did not support natively prior to Windows 7. The utility can create bootable disks and supports all recent 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.
• Mozilla makes the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client, but you probably already knew that. So instead I’ll tell you about my favorite add-ons for these fine products.

  For Firefox, NoSquint by Jason Tackaberry manages site-specific zoom levels and text colors; and Stylish by Jason Tarnabe adds custom overrides to any website’s CSS style sheet. For Thunderbird, Toggle Word Wrap by Kaspar Brand toggles word wrapping in the message composition and HTML display windows.

  As a basic example for Stylish, my Ars Technica Georgia style changes article text and forum posts from Arial to Georgia. (Simply copy the text into a new blank style.) Also note that Stylish features a custom sidebar – which is only accessible through “View: Sidebar: Stylish” in the main menu, which is disabled by default in recent Firefox versions!

• Paint.NET is a free image editing program that started out as a student project and has now matured into a viable alternative to Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. While lacking the more esoteric features of these commercial applications, Paint.NET is more than adequate for my modest bitmap and photo editing needs.

  If you want to create Windows icon or cursor files (.ico/.cur), you should download Evan Olds’s excellent Icon/Cursor Format Support plugin. Evan’s website also offers many other utilities for image editing and other purposes.

• Piriform offers several free utilities, including CCleaner for deleting unnecessary files and obsolete registry entries, Speccy for comprehensive system information, and Recuva to recover deleted files that are not (or no longer) in the Windows recycle bin. Just make sure to uncheck the Yahoo toolbar option during installation…
• PrintFile is a small utility for printing text files with some formatting. Options include headers and footers, line numbers, font selection, n-up printing, user-definable pretty printing of source code, and piping output text through user-defined filter programs. Some options also work with DSC-compliant PostScript files. I found that PrintFile supports all the features of GNU a2ps that I really need while being significantly easier to use.
• Sysinternals (now owned and hosted by Microsoft) is the first place to go if you need any tool for Microsoft Windows. Mark Russinovich and his colleagues have created an incredible wealth of extremely useful programs, ranging from command-line process manipulation to system activity monitors of every kind. Programmers should also check out DebugView, a stand-alone debug output viewer.
• TextScan by AnalogX is a free utility that scans arbitrary files, such as executables or libraries, for embedded text strings. The program detects both 8-bit ASCII/ANSI and 16-bit Unicode characters.
• TrueCrypt provides strong encryption (AES-256 and others) for an entire partition or an arbitrary collection of files, accessible as a virtual disk. I haven’t tried partition encryption but file encryption works very well and is extremely easy to use. Great solution for keeping sensitive files hidden, even from users with administrator privileges or low-level disk monitors – or when storing data in a cloud service.
• Virtual CloneDrive by SlySoft is an essential utility that mounts ISO files as virtual CD/DVD-ROM drives. The company also provides a number of commercial tools to deal with copy-protected disks.
• XML Marker by SymbolClick is a free XML editor with a syntax-highlighting text view, a structural tree view, and even a table view that’s extremely convenient for browsing large data sets. A newer commercial version also supports JSON and Unicode – but currently only Unicode, i.e. no 8-bit code pages such as ISO-8859-1 or Windows 1252!

Commercial Software

• GetRight by Headlight Software is a comfortable download manager that allows you to queue and schedule, pause and resume Internet downloads – an essential tool for anyone on a slow dial-up connection, and still very useful to manage large amounts of downloads on faster connections. Rather importantly, GetRight also tells you which connections cannot resume a paused download.

  Note: The so-called “spyware” which has caused a lot of bad press for GetRight and similar tools has been completely removed from all editions starting with version 4.5a.

• HyperSnap-DX by Hyperionics is the standard solution for taking screen snapshots under no matter which display mode. Widely used by game reviewers, this exemplary shareware utility enjoys frequent updates and a great customer support. The company also offers tools for bitmap vectorisation and video recording/editing.
• Macrium Reflect is a hard disk imaging and file backup utility that does everything Acronis True Image does, except faster and without the UI bloat. There’s even a perfectly usable free edition.
• myBase by WJJ Software is a “free-form database” that stores hierarchical trees of RTF text notes, syntax-highlighted source code, HTML web pages, links to external files or web pages, and even arbitrary embedded binary data. myBase is inexpensive, easy to use, and the perfect repository for odds and ends such as notes, articles, code snippets, addresses, images, and so on.
• Speed Commander by SpeedProject is a powerful two-pane Windows file manager in the Norton Commander mold. Unlike other popular NC clones, such as Total Commander and Free Commander, Speed Commander offers a native 64-bit implementation. This is an absolute necessity on 64-bit versions of Windows because 32-bit programs cannot access certain system directories and do not support 64-bit Explorer plugins.
• SpinRite by Steve Gibson is a justly famous utility for hard disk maintenance, far more thorough and useful than the various free utilities provided by HD manufacturers and others. SpinRite fully supports SMART but more importantly does its own surface analysis to find defective blocks and recover their data. SpinRite doesn’t rely on a drive’s built-in error recovery mechanism which is usually pathetically inadequate and merely leads to “clicks of death”. The whole program is tiny and easily fits on a diskette or USB stick for emergencies.
• WebLog Expert by Alentum Software is a powerful web log analyzer that’s extremely easy to use and relatively inexpensive compared to other commercial options. There are free alternatives, but they have various drawbacks: Analog hasn’t been updated in a very long time, and AWStats lacks the essential 12-month “rolling view”.