Your Favorite Utility Programs

This is a great idea for a thread, Gerry.

Something I have on my "list" of things to do when I get time is create a Screenr of iPad apps I use as part of my work as an ID. Even though we can't output Articulate things to iOS devices (a whole other discussion), it is a great tool with lots of possibilities.

Two apps I use together are Adobe Ideas (free unless you want the layer capability) and Corkulous. Corkulous is currently $4.99. I use Adobe Ideas to do rough sketches of screens for a kind of pre-storyboard or what I've heard referred to as a low fidelity prototype. Then, I send those rough sketches to my photo album which Corkulous can import. Then, in Corkulous, I can create the pre-storyboard which I can email as a PDF to a SME to review my thinking about how a learning object I'm proposing might flow.

The other thing I like about Adobe Ideas is that it does smoothing of whatever you draw so I've used it to draw arrows or other things to bring into PPT for creation of Articulate learning objects.

So, maybe in the next couple weeks, I'll squeeze in the time to do a demo of these things. Currently, there is also the challenge of not being able to do a screen recording of iPad activity so will have to use another approach.

Wow. I've never seen the TinEye before, will have to give it a spin. The Adobe Ideas and Corkulous will give me another practical use for my iPad. Thanks for the links!

Two little utilities that I find I can't live without:

• http://www.dropbox.com (lots of peeps use this and I recommend it for anyone doing solution development - version control and offsite backup are priceless! Especially when they're free)
• http://www.evernote.com (I track my task lists and data collection in notes - nice for a quick reference anywhere whether I'm in the office or not)

And another I find pretty handy:

• http://www.ivona.com (text to speech for ear tests that don't destroy your brain) There's a neat program called SpeakIt for Mac / iPhone / iPad that will perform a similar task at similar quality.

For getting color values on the screen: ColorPix (Windows, FREE)

For resizing any window to an exact, predefined size: Sizer (Windows, FREE)

For converting your digital photos into art, automatically: Fotosketcher (Windows, FREE)

For creating easily Polaroid-like pictures from your digital photos: Poladroid (Windows & Mac, FREE)

Thanks, Everyone!  I've updated the first post.

Keep 'em coming. 

A great resource for these kinds of lists is here:

http://c4lpt.co.uk/Directory/index.html

Jane Hart is the Wonder Woman of free tools collections and general resources and info here:

http://c4lpt.co.uk/handbook/openresources.html

For those old-school clients who have yet to embrace the awesomesauce of Dropbox and still want FTP, I find that Filezilla is the best free FTP program.

I also don't see VLC listed anywhere. Dump Quicktime, dump windows media player. All you need is VLC. Plays more audio and video formats and codecs than anything else. Seriously, get it.

Don't know if SnagIt can be considered a "little app", but I can't count how many times a day I use it and how much time it saves me.

Works with Windows or Mac and costs about $50, unless you catch it on sale...

For creating very cool text art, Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

This is a FREE web service.  You can either take a screen grab or print to .pdf to save what you have created.

Man, I love that site!

 The key to get the highest quality resolution image, is to set-up "print to adobe pdf" in your custom print settings.

I love Delicious for bookmarking.  It's free, and you can access your favorites from any device.  It's also great for sharing resources with others and being able to quickly locate all of your favorite Articulate tips and screenrs.

Hi, my first day in Articulate world.

is there anyone that suggest me a recording tool that I can use into my LO and make my students record and listen their own voice, after they listened a correct pronunciation of a phrase/word in a language course exercise.

p.s. sorry for my "rusty" english...maybe need some more practice in writing

Wordle is cool! Thank you, I am so using that for the project I'm working on right now.

I'll share some free ones I use daily:

I find PureText indispensable as a tool for  pasting without formatting across all Windows applications.

Another great clipboard utility is Ditto, which keeps a history of your clipboard items. (Especially useful when copying quiz items/responses from a Word document to Quizmaker)

I couldn't live without Notepad++ for making quick HTML edits. I pair this with FireFTP for a minimal but fast web editing environment.

FireFTP is very useful for managing our web content right within Firefox. I especially like how it has a "View on the Web" right-click menu option.

Another awesome tool is iMacros for Firefox which allows me to automate a lot of LMS tasks.

Google Analytics is handy for figuring out what content is getting watched most and what browsers people are using to watch it.

I've got more, but I also have a meeting to go to...

Gerry, what a great idea - I love some of the replies in this thread.  I'm going to steal some that would be appropriate to use in the world I support and create a similar resource internally.

Thanks, Brian!  Hope it helps a few folks.

I need to find some time and update the first thread with the master list of everyone's great contributions.  I'm falling behind. 

You got an informative thread here! Nice one

Most of my favouites are here, but may I add Polardroid (just spotted it in the list above....) and also PDF to Word Converters such as this one. People often think I must be VERY quick at re-typing their "secure" .pdf file content

Bruce

First thread updated with additional contributions to date.  Also added HTTP Analyzer, Fiddler, OpenOffice, Screenpresso, FreeMind, GIMP, Effective File Search, etc.

Keep 'em coming . . . 

Here are a few more I use:

Another good free Windows screenshot alternative (although I still prefer Snagit for the way it keeps a library of your screenshots) is Greenshot.

When someone comes to you with a DVD (which they own the rights to distribute of course) and they want the video available online, Handbrake comes in handy. (For example, converting an orientation video from DVD to online).

A couple of Windows utilities for making  Windows a better experience (not all of us get to use Macs) are Fences (a desktop organizer utility) and Soluto (a utility that gives you easier control over what programs start up with Windows).

Thanks for the Polardroid recommendation -- I just used it today for a project and it worked out really well.

Ah, that reminds me. One of the utilities I use that I take for granted is Grepwin. I love it. It allows you to search and replace or search and find within files using text or regular expressions from the context menu. This is really powerful. Similar to Dreamweaver's Search and Replace within a folder but better since you don't need to crack open Dreamweaver to use it. 

Hi all.  One of my favorites that I use with screenr is zoomit.  It is great for highlighting parts of the screen.

http://zoomit.en.softonic.com/