Your Favorite Utility Programs

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 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.

Video tools:

For video conversion (something I'm betting is similar to FormatFactory) I use Any Video Converter (Free, Windows). If you deal with Windows LiveMeeting files (which uses a strange fussy but highly compact codec), I have found it particularly useful in converting these meeting videos to other formats (I would convert them to XVID format, which is then editable in Camtasia).

Another useful transcoding trick is to upload a video to YouTube, mark it as private so it isn't viewable to anyone but you, and then download the transcoded version (MP4) for use in Articulate or other locations. You can then simply delete the file from YouTube. This gives you the power and reliability of YouTube's transcoding software, but the video is never made public.

A good tool for video is the free Windows utility Codec Information Appliance (I'm using the alternate title) which is a gem for finding out how a video was encoded and all the details about the video's file format.

web tools:

I love FancyBox (not platform dependent) for making those Web 2.0 "Lightbox" windows that allow you to pop-up a video or image on a web page without making someone navigate to a new page.

FoxReplace: Useful FireFox Extension if you are editing content within a web browser (in wiki for example) and you need to do search-and-replace.

Web Developer: Another great FireFox extension that helps in web design. Especially useful for troubleshooting layout problems or figuring out how someone did something on a page.

Audio:

foobar2000: With this free Windows sound (and other media) player you can designate "global hotkeys" to control the playback of audio. If you create screencasts and you record the audio separately from the video this can be handy because it allows you to start/stop/rewind the audio while the audio player is minimized.

Windows Utilities:

PathCopy: Allows you to right click on any file and copy the path to that file. In my opinion this should be built into Windows. Useful when you need to send the path of a file on your network via e-mail (which helps avoid sending big attachments).

I love software tools.

I had lost Pixie thanks Gerry!

Artweaver - Graphic Editor - Free for basic program. Can buy full version.

TinEye - A reverse Image Search - Free to a max search amount daily (donations accepted)

Xtranormal - Text to Video - Not as free as they used to be but still pretty cool.

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. 

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...