nifty tools

I love little productivity tools that take the drudgery out of every day work.  I have a number of little tips and tricks that I use, and I’ve posted them in this little corner of the blog to make them easy to share with friends and colleagues (you know which you are).  Many of them have free versions that I use often.  Enjoy!

PC:

Address Grabber Basic – I never type in a contact.  Use this free piece of software to copy any contact’s coordinates and automatically transfer them to your Outlook Contacts.

CutePDF – This little piece of code adds a printer to your PC that allows you to print to a PDF file.

VLC Media Player – Play any type of media simply and easily – audio, video, you name it.  Can even capture clips from DVDs for presentations.

Debut Video Capture – Capture screen recordings, or an area of the screen for a very simple small video capture.

Evernote – Capture web pages, notes, photos and even audio onto online notebooks accessible from your iPhone and the web, wherever you are.

GIMP – Simple, quick and free photo/image editor.

PureText – Small applet that allows you to copy text only so that you don’t mess up the formatting in a document.

FreeMind – Great Mind Mapping Software to draw hypertext like documents that are useful for sharing processes, information and more.

Delicious – Online bookmark manager.  I keep my bookmarks online and save links from my iPhone, Macbook, PC and anywhere else I might be.

Audacity – Free audio editor and converter.   You can use this LAME plugin to export to mp3.

iPhone Apps:

For those that ask about my most used iPhone and Ipad Apps here is a sampling.

Remote – Use your iPhone / iPad to control iTunes and AppleTV

Flashlight – Best Flashlight App that uses iPhone 4 LED

Find iPhone – Find iPhone or iPad with App

Weathereye – More detailed weather app then comes with iPhone

Evernote – Incredible tool for tracking notes of all sorts

Stitcher – Stream podcasts directly to iPod. Find new podcasts

Labelbox – Simply adds labels to photos directly on your iPhone

Artstudio Lite – Draw images and diagrams directly on iPhone

Scanlife – 2d Barcode Scanner and more

Hunchable – App for hunch.com – a wonderful recommendation engine

Google Translate – Type or talk into the phone to have it translate from many languages to many other languages

OpenTable – App for opentable.com reservations to place reservations while on the go

Wikipanion – Wikipedia app for iPhone

Dragon Dictation – If you don’t want to type, this app is for you.  Speak and it converts to text which can be copied to e-mail, sms, or whatever app you like.

iPad Apps:

Flipboard – Incredible App that turns your Social Media into a Magazine.

Instapaper – Save online articles for later reading.

Zinio – Subscribe to Magazines electronically and read them on iPad.

Miscellany:

Screen Captures in Windows - If you don’t have Windows 7 and the Snipit tool, in other versions of windows, use Ctrl-Printscreen to capture everything that shows on your screen.  To capture the active window only, use Ctrl-Alt-PrintScreen.

Screen Captures on iPhone – With the image you want to capture on your screen, press the home button on the front bottom of screen and the power button on top of the unit at the same time.

Screen Captures on Mac – To capture a portion of the desktop, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear.  Click and drag to select the area to capture. When the mouse button is released, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.