Evan Sims

14 free or open source Windows applications I love

“What do you use to do this?” or “What application do you recommend for that?” I get asked these kinds of questions a lot, as do most folks in my line of work. What surprises a lot of people is that much of the time, I respond with a free or open source solution. I’m not against commercial applications by any means… I use Photoshop over Gimp and TextPad over Notepad++. But sometimes you discover applications that are so robust, and so well done that they blow the socks off anything you can buy… these are a few of those apps.

1. WinSCP — An open source FTP/SFTP/SCP client. This tool is indispensable in my web development work, and I use it pretty much everyday. It’s rock solid and feature packed. I switched to WinSCP earlier this year from SmartFTP.
2. 7zip — A powerful archiving tool. Fully supports 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR, and can extract ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z. The 7zip archive format for which it’s named is also very robust, and supports a better compression ratio than ZIP. Excellent alternative to shareware tools like WinRar and WinZip.
3. VirtuaWin — An open source virtual desktop manager, allowing you to define an arbitrary number of desktops and hot swap between them. Think Spaces on Mac OS X, or similar functionality under Linux. I’m kind of an organization freak, so it’s great to be able to have a workspace devoted to IM/Twitter, another just for code, and another with Warcraft running on it. =)
4. Privoxy — A web filtering proxy that filters advertising, removes pop ups because they hit your browser, manages cookies and much more. It’s an advanced tool with a lot of options, but the default configuration is enough for most folks who are just looking to protect their privacy a little bit more. As a Google Chrome user, this is a great way to get rid of ads without missing AdBlock for Firefox. bFilter is a similiar filtering tool, but uses heuristics (like your virus scanner) instead of blacklists to filter content. It’s also a bit easier to configure for less advanced users. Both work very well.
5. Google Chrome — Google’s innovative web browser, based on WebKit (the same rendering engine that powers Safari.) It’s not for everyone, but I love it. It’s the first mainstream browser to take advantage of threaded processing, in which each browser tab resides in it’s own CPU process; if a page crashes a tab, it doesn’t take down the whole browser. It also features a very fast Javascript engine, putting script-intensive sites like Gmail much faster. The only downside right now is the lack of an extension API, but the developers are planning on adding one.
6. ImgBurn — A freeware disc burning and backup application. Not much to say here, aside from the fact that I’ve never lost a disc from a bad burn using it.
7. AVG Free — You don’t have to spend a bunch of cash on antivirus protection… in fact, you don’t have to spend any. AVG is a great antivirus tool, frequently updated and easy on system resources. It comes highly regarded from editors and users alike. Avira AntiVir Personal and Avast Home Edition are both great, free antivirus tools too.
8. CCleaner — Windows has a built in system cleanup utility called “Disk Cleanup”, but it doesn’t hold a candle to this tool. Aside from cleaning up Windows itself, it supports a slew of other applications, including Firefox, Google Chrome, Acrobat, Microsoft Office, Java and many, many more. It also includes a very thorough registry cleaner. I recommend running both functions of the tool several times a month
9. Foobar2000 — I’m a loyal iTunes user, but if I’m running a lot of memory intensive programs, or if I’m on battery power and I’m looking to get every drop of time I can out of it, Foobar2000 is a very capable music manager and player. I just set it to monitor my iTunes Music folder, and Foobar will add everything to it’s own manager. The two programs can coexist very comfortably.
10. Last.fm — Although it began it’s life as Audioscrobbler, a simple habit tracking and statistics generating website for music lovers, Last.fm has blossomed into a very robust and useful site, with a number of desktop and mobile applications that extend it even further. In particular, I love the Last.fm desktop and iPhone clients, which provide a Pandora-like customizable Internet-radio feature. On a side note, Pandora does offer an iPhone app, and has a Adobe AIR-based desktop application, but I don’t think they’re really taking advantage of the desktop space as well as Last.fm is… yet.
11. VideoLAN — An open source media player that runs on just about any desktop operating system out there. It will support just about any video format on the planet out of the box, without requiring you to work through the tedious process of installing codecs. I use it for video playback only, but it does support audio too. Other honorable mentions are Media Player Classic and ZoomPlayer. An excellent codec package for Windows XP is XP Codec Pack, which I believe will also work on Vista.
12. Windows Live FolderShare — I’ve been using FolderShare for about 3 years now, and it’s a tool I don’t think I could live without. Basically, FolderShare allows you to easily set folders on your PCs to sync between each other. Unlike most tools these days, FolderShare doesn’t back anything up to the Internet, it’s strictly PC-to-PC, and that’s why I like it. I use it to keep my iTunes library, source code, web development projects and invoices in sync between my desktop and laptop, so I’ve always got the latest versions of everything ready to go when I need to head out the door, and my desktop is up to date with any revisions as soon as I get home. It works over local networks and the Internet alike, and will function nicely behind most firewalls. Microsoft announced they’ll be renaming and upgrading the service at some point this month, doubling the amount of files you can keep in sync. If you’re looking to store things in the cloud, I highly recommend Dropbox.
13. Picasa — I’ve used Picasa to manage my photo library for years, and it’s never let me down. I recently toyed with Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is also an excellent library management tool, but not as mature and polished as Picasa. You can use the open source Picasa2Flickr tool to ease the uploading of your Picasa photos to the popular photo hosting service.
14. Evernote — Potentially my most recent addition to my favorites list, Evernote is a free note taking application for Windows, OS X and a variety of mobile devices, including iPhone. This app is packed with so many features I’m not even going to try to cover them all, but trust me: you need to try it. You can publish and share your notes on the web if you chose to, and optionally store them in the cloud so they can be kept in sync between multiple machines. The commercial version offers more bandwidth for note sync, and HTTPS support for better security while you’re on the road.

There are more, of course, but these are the favorites that come to mind. If you have any recommendations or alternatives, please share!

Getting your extensions to work in the Firefox 3.1 Beta

If you’ve been running the Firefox 3.1 beta for the last few days like I have, you’re probably beginning to miss all those fun extensions you took for granted in 3.0. Sure, you could install nightly tool addons to disable version checking for you, but I feel dirty having a hack like that running all the time in the browser. Instead, I discovered a far more elegant solution: just edit the XPI.

First, grab 7zip. It’s a free archive manager like WinZIP or WinRAR, but it plays nice with the XPI format. Now, go to the Mozilla Addons site and find the extension you’re looking to install. The “Install” option will be disabled, but no worries, just scroll down and hit the “All Versions” link. Now you’ll have one or more versions listed with enabled Install buttons, but using those won’t work: they’re marked internally as working with Firefox versions up to 3.0.*. This is what we’ll need to change.

Right click the Install link for the most recent plugin version, and save the XPI file to your desktop. Now, load 7zip and open that XPI file in it. Find the “install.rdf” file, right click and pick Edit. There’s a lot of nonsense in these files, but all we’re worried about is one string:

em:maxVersion="3.0.*"

Once you locate this line, change it to read:

em:maxVersion="3.1.*"

Save the file, allow 7zip to update the archive, then close 7zip. Now, in Firefox, go to the Addons window from the Tool menu and switch to the extensions tab. Drag the XPI from your desktop into your addons list. Firefox will install the addon for you without complaint. Restart Firefox and you’re done!

This hack will work for most extensions as there has been very few changes to the core functionality of Firefox in 3.1; most of the changes are to the Gecko rendering and JavaScript engines. I’ve successfully installed all my essentials in 3.1 without any problems, but if you do end up running into an addon incompatibility issue you can always start Firefox in Safe Mode from the Mozilla Firefox group in the Start menu.

Hope this helps!

Encrypting Your Drive with TrueCrypt

Today I thought I’d try my hand at a video tip, a screencast walkthrough of encrypting your hard disk using TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt whole-disk encryption is a fantastic option to further secure your data against prying eyes, and the software is free and open source. Whole-disk encryption is precisely what you might think it is, encrypting your whole hard disk and locking it down with a password. After your encrypt your disk, you’ll need to enter a password every time you boot up or resume from hibernation to unlock the data on your drive.

Whole-disk encryption is a far superior method of securing your data than BIOS passwords or user accounts; user account passwords are easily bypassed or cracked, and BIOS passwords are locked inside the motherboard rather than the hard drive, so anyone could just yank your drive out of your machine, hook it up to theirs and access your data as if you’d never set a password at all. Whole-disk encryption is per-disk or per-partition, and uses a variety of very high level encryption algorithms, so you can’t get much more secure than this.

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This video is also available on Vimeo, Viddler and YouTube. Please favorite it on your service of choice if you find it useful!

You can download TrueCrypt from it’s website, http://www.truecrypt.org, and if you’d like to use the image burning software I use it’s available for free from http://www.imgburn.com/.

Any questions? Don’t hesitate to ask!

Take advantage of Firefox 3’s color profile support

One of the big complaints I’ve heard from the more photographically inclined about Firefox 2 was the lack of color profile support in the browser. The simplest way to explain color profiles (or embedded ICC) is to look at some examples of images rendered in browsers that don’t support color profiles (in the left frames) and those that do (in the right frame.)

Images provided by SmugBlog.

What do you immediately notice? For me, it was the depth of shadowing. What you being to realize as you look at the difference between the images, however, is how much more “real” the image feels to you; the expanded range of colors really makes the images pop out.

When you’re seeing an image on the web with a color profile in a browser that supports color profiles you’re seeing it in a closer representation to what the author intended. At this time, Firefox 3 and Omniweb are the only browsers to fully and properly support color profiles. Safari has a buggy implementation of it, and Internet Explorer… well, it’s Internet Explorer. They’re still scratching their heads over how to CSS working.

How do I enable color management support in Firefox?

Shockingly, Firefox 3 doesn’t come with color profile support enabled by default. This feature was one of the most praised and eagerly awaited aspects of the new version, so I have no idea why they would chose to not enable it from the get-go. Apparently Mozilla chose not to enable the feature by default over performance concerns. On a page with lots of color profile-enabled images this feature can slow down rendering time.

None the less, enabling color profiles is very simple, you can either:

• Install the Color Management extension; keep in mind that the extension is still in the experimental/review phase as of this writing, so you’ll need an account with the Mozilla Addons site to get it.
• Alternatively, you can enable profile support by hand, which is actually very simple and the method I recommend. In Firefox 3, type about:config. If you get a warning, just say OK and continue on. In the filter bar, type: gfx.color_management.enabled. It should have a state of “false”. Double click it to turn it bold and toggle it to “true”. Restart Firefox.

You can test if your color profile support was successfully enabled at this site. Another great demo page is over at SmugMug- try loading it in Firefox 3 with color profiles, then Internet Explorer or Safari. Big difference, no?

How do I export my images from Photoshop with ICC profiles?

By default Photoshop does not embed color profiles in images exported using the Save to Web & Devices interface. To enable this, choose the JPEG format and checkmark “ICC Profile”. Simple as that.

Getting FolderShare for Mac to Play Nice

I’ve been using Microsoft’s FolderShare (now Windows Live FolderShare blah blah blah) service for years now, and I’ve got to admit that as much as I hate most of Microsoft’s Live apps, FolderShare is one utility that I couldn’t live without. Well, OK- I could, but I wouldn’t want to.

My recent addition of a shiny new MacBook Air to the household introduced an odd problem; while my Mac Pro has never had issues syncing files to the PCs in the house using FolderShare, the Air refused to do so. After some cursing, I did a bit of Googling and came across the solution.

Disable FolderShare encryption across all the Macs and PCs you want to sync. Yep.

Now, don’t ask me why my Mac Pro didn’t have the problem with encryption; both machines run Leopard, and neither have their Firewalls enabled. In any case, disabling encryption solves the problem, though I’m not at all a fan of the fact that my data is getting tossed around in plain text now. I suppose I could funnel everything through my Hamachi network to encrypt it, but… bleh.

Anyway, there’s the solution, Mr. Googler with a Mac. Hopefully Microsoft will fix the problem sooner rather than later, but if their track record with FolderShare updates is any indication I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m hoping to get a Dropbox invite to see if it’s a worthy replacement. Stay tuned on that.