Useful win apps

[remus]

as per mike lucey's suggestion, heres a thread to post your favorite windows applications in.

I'll start with objectdock, an app that basically imitates the apple dock, i use it instead of my start bar, much neater way of organising things.

[Alan Fraser]

Active Desktop Calendar

[remus]

Belarc advisor

a very useful little app that scans your computer and tels you what hardware your running. Also tells you aobut major bits of software your runing (OS and big applications.)

Very useful when you go hunting for new drivers or a bios upgrade.

[Mike Lucey]

VMN Toolbox is a lightweight application that provides you with handy utilities designed to make your life easier in the Web. The user interface is unobtrusive, neat and intuitive.

http://toolbox.vmn.net/

[remus]

in a similar vein google desktop lets you search your computer, its an indexing type search so it'l take a bit of time for it to start working properly, but when it gets going its very good.

[solo]

Deep Exploration, probably the best app after the standard SU, Podium and PSP.

Here is the feature list of what this extremely powerful app can do.
http://www.righthemisphere.com/products ... 20v1.1.pdf

[Frederik]

Deep Exploration is undoubtedly a very powerful product...
But the price...

[Ken]

PDF 2 DXF 2.0, converts PDF documents to DXF files.

Ken

[remus]

PDF 2 DXF

[Alan Fraser]

I've got Deep Exploration too. Fantastic program. For those of you on a budget, I posted a simple, free file converter on this thread.

[Jackson]

3 Freebies:

Autostitch(free for jpg version).- brilliant automatic photo stitcher.
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

JPGVideo (free)- converts any series of jpgs to an avi animation, simply and very well. Note that although this link leads to a faulty page, the download button on the right still works.
http://www.ndrw.co.uk/free/jpgvideo/ind ... ideo/index

CCleaner (free)- formerly "Crap Cleaner" it does what is says on the tin, does a great job of cleaning out all unnecessary Windows files (temp, etc) and redundant registry entries and keys.
http://www.ccleaner.com/

[remus]

winrar, its got to be one of the best archiver type programs out there. Will compress/decompress nearly any format (every format i've ever come across at least.) Loads of features, easy to use and free. Not a lot more you could ask for really.

[remus]

As torrent clients go utorrent is my favourite, its very lightweight (216kb last time i checked) and doesnt need instalation. I've also found it to be very easy on sysem resources.

[Goyoes]

Hi, people.

I must recommend Revo uninstaller http://www.revouninstaller.com.
It´s the best uninstalling software I've tested. An it's freeware.

It has a portable version, due to not having to intall it.

Cheers form Spain.

[Ampa]

FARR (Find and Run Robot) is a superb launcher (and much more). [Donationware though free registration is also available]

Fast, non-intrusive, infinitely extendable via aliases and plugins (which can be written in almost any language), with many useful addons already available.

Plus it is supported by the DonationCoder community, who are the kindest, most reliably helpful crowd on the interweb (present company excepted).

[linea]

I've mentioned this before but Perspective Pilot is a nice little app for correcting perspective distortion in photos. It does a better job than photoshops distort and perspective transforms because it resamples the image.

http://www.colorpilot.com/perspective.html

[Mike Lucey]

Painter Essentials 4 has just been launched. A 60 day demo can be had here,
http://www.download.com/3120-20_4.html? ... 4&tag=srch

Mike

[remus]

google picasa. A well known piece of software (relative to most of the other stuff in here, but i just downloaded it, and its wicked, much better than the standard microsoft nonsense.

[Mike Lucey]

Hi Guys,

I've downloaded the Jing Project (free) for the Mac also registered with ScreenCast, free for 60 days. There is also a Win version of Jing. I can highly recommend this set up for communication.

http://www.jingproject.com/

Mike

[Jorgensen]

VSO Image Resizer

Free supersmart imageresizer
http://www.vso-software.fr/products/image_resizer/

[remus]

Crazy bump

A very nice little program that dos normal maps, specularity maps, displacement maps and occlusion maps. Pretty pricey at 300 dollars for a commercial license but a really nice program to use.

Almost forgot to mention it does a real time preview of the map and how it affects the mesh.

[remus]

cpuz

If you want to know something about your CPU this is the app for you. It tells you pretty much everything you need to know plus quite a lot of other stuff.

I believe theres also a gpuz, if your so inclined.

[Pixero]

Tree[d] from the maker of Gile[s] is the best tree generator I've found and... it's free.
You can also use images as "crosses" for even more low poly branches/leaves (see pic 2).
Can export animated trees in .x format.

Download: [url]http://www.frecle.net/treed/tree[d]-setup300.exe[/url]
Edit: cant get this link to look right. You'll have to copy paste whats between the [url] tags.

[remus]

Hmmm, i couldnt get it (tree [d]) to work on my comp, might be vista?

[Pixero]

Hmmm, i couldnt get it (tree [d]) to work on my comp, might be vista?

Did you mean that you have Vista?
It runs fine on XP and even better if you have a fast graphics card.

[Burkhard]

@Pixero, what is the .x format ?

[Pixero]

Microsofts directx file format, for game engines and such.
(I think there is a .x importer exporter for SketchUp.)
The great thing with three[d] is that it exports animated trees that looks like the wind is blowing.
I've done some tests with it and DX Studio and exported buildings from SketchUp.
Nothing to show yet though.

While I'm at it DX Studio http://www.dxstudio.com is a program for making realtime visualisations and such. Also comes in a free version with some limitations but great for trying/learning it. (New version to be out in september.)

[remus]

I did indeed mean that ive got vista, can anyone else confirm wether or not it works on vista? (might just be by machine spazzing out.)

[Chris Fullmer]

I got it to run just fine on vista 64bit last night. Cool Program, I'm interested in playing with it more.

Chris

[remus]

Cute PDF

Surprised noone has mentioned this yet.

Basically it installs itself as a printer on your computer, and if you send a document to it to be printed it is converted to a PDF. Pretty nifty