It’s not too late to do something a little special for your Valentine, thanks to these three free tools:
Many people are using wonderful free tools such as Jing (my favorite tool ever!) to create online presentations. Cueprompter is a quick and easy way to script your presentation so your “ums” and “wells” go away.
Free teleprompter/autocue service. Cueprompter – The online prompter..
Oh, I love free stuff, and I love people who make it easier to download free stuff.
Visit the Ninite site, and check off the free applications you want on your computer, such as Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, Audacity, Skype, AVG, Adobe Reader, Gimp… The list is fantastic! (And it reminds me of all the great tools I still need to cover here on Cheapskate Freelancer.)
Once you choose your programs, click to install, and Ninite will manage your installation. This is great when you are doing a full upgrade to Windows 7.
Ninite Easy PC Setup and Multiple App Installer – Great For Win7 Upgrades.
No list of free and low-cost tools is complete without mentioning Gimp. Gimp is like a free version of Adobe Photoshop, complete with the whole gamut of tools I can’t figure out how to use.
It’s downloadable and works in a whole bunch of platforms. I just read they now have a cool animation package as well. Again — all free.
GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program.
Although I appreciate the coolness of Gimp, it’s really too advanced for my meager photo editing needs. Instead, I rely on Picnik.
This post comes straight from a longtime reader. Thanks for the list, Mark!
A colleague just shared this list with me, and I thought this might be something to include on your list of free and low-cost tools. With so many ways to search the Internet now, you shouldn’t necessarily stop just because you don’t find what you’re looking for with the first search engine you first try!
www.goodsearch.com – when you use this one, they will donate money to a charity/cause of your choosing, or to the one they have chosen for the day – makes you feel good!
www.cuil.com (pronounced “cool”) – searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine.
www.gapminder.org – you can view statistics in kind-of a 3-D bubble graph the moves as the data/facts/dates/ increase.
www.waybackmachine.com – you can find the original link for anything that has been online…the archived version.
www.bing.com – very similar to yahoo.com and google.com
www.searchme.com – Multimedia searches
www.blinkx.com – you can enter a word/phrase and any video that has this word/phrase in the text should appear – this one is fun!
Sigh. I guess it was bound to happen. I found a low-cost screen capture tool that competes with Jing, which is one of my all-time favorites.
FastStone Screen Capture comes in as an unobtrusive toolbar. You can capture windows, the full screen, a scrolling screen and a video with audio (see my sample below — I don’t think the audio recording is as good as Jing). In addition, when you capture something, you get a whole host of editing options to add a little more flair and details — Jing simply lets you annotate and draw arrows. And FastStone has a couple of extra handy tools like a screen magnifier plus a color picker (similar to another Beth Favorite, Pixie).
FastStone has a number of ways to export your capture, but I still prefer Jing’s integration with Screencast.com, which allows you to simply toss your capture online into your library without having to actually upload it.
Overall, I give FastStone an A- and still give Jing an A. But they’re both pretty darn cool and are infinitely better than your “Print Screen” Button.
FastStone Screen Capture – The Best Screen Capture Software.
Now this is handy! Download iSpring Free, a little PowerPoint add-in to convert your PowerPoint presentation into Flash with a push of a button. Here’s a sample with my last presentation…. Warning… as a stand-alone without audio, it’s insanely boring. But the cool thing is it became a Flash movie in about a minute.
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