Introducing Paint.NET: Quality meets affordability

Many a time I have come across an app, and said to myself: “That sounds like a great app! If only it didn’t cost so much money.” Of course, that sends me out looking for free alternatives, which lack in quality.

That’s why I was so glad when I came across Paint.NET. It was free, so I was initially a bit skeptical about it. As with all things though, I gave it a try. My first reaction: Looks like Photoshop, with all its sub-windows and endless menus and miles upon miles of configuration controls. To be honest, it seemed complicated.

I was willing to give myself some time to monkey around with all the buttons. Paint.NET turned out to be a really fun image editor to use! Although there were so many buttons and functions, the controls are actually quite intuitive. Everything is neatly organized, and after a while, I was no longer overwhelmed by all the features.

Some of its best features, in my opinion, include:

• The History box which records every single one of your actions, allowing you greater control over undoing/redoing your edits
• The countless number of cool effects in the Effects menu, such as Gaussian Blur, Oil Sketch, and … well, I’ll leave it up to YOU to explore
• Layers
• The ability to add new effects with plugins

There’s so much functionality built in to Paint.NET, that I give it a solid recommendation for anyone looking for a Photoshop alternative. Try it yourself, you’ll love it!

Website: http://www.paint.net/

Price: $0

Why you shouldn’t trust your Recycle Bin

If you want to get rid of a file, I’ll bet that you subconsciously drag it to the Recycle Bin and right click -> Empty Recycle Bin, thinking that the file has vanished into a black hole forever. Well, I have some bad news for you.

Recycle Bin doesn’t work like that.

Need a countdown timer? Try this gadget

Uniquewg.com has a unique collection of widgets (who would’ve guessed?), including this very easy-to-use countdown timer. It’s a Windows gadget that does only one thing: count down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until a particular date. How you use it is up to you, so what are you waiting for, grab yours today!

Link: http://www.uniquewg.com/gadget_countdown.php

Want to visualize your music? Try Synthesia!

A long time ago, I covered MuseScore, an application that can typeset your music as well as play it back.

And now, for something completely similar…

Originally developed as a game to train people how to play piano, Synthesia is equally adept at playing back your music. Instead of a bunch of notes on five-line staves, Synthesia uses a Guitar-Hero-esque approach, by translating notes in a MIDI file into colorful falling bars that strike a keyboard. The advantage of this visualization is that everyone, including non-musicians, can understand what’s going on in the music.

Take a look at the videos below:

Never forget your flash drive again

Flash Drive Reminder is another simple program that only does one thing — remind you to remove that flash drive before logging off! Over the past few years, I think I’ve broken the world record for most flash drives lost: six. That’s why I don’t carry a flash drive around anymore; I opt for cloud storage systems like Dropbox, or I just use the crude method of emailing documents to myself.

For those of you who are fortunate enough to not have lost your flash drive, I recommend this program. Get it before you lose it!

Website: http://www.bgreco.net/reminder.php.

Need a good screen dimmer? Try PangoBright

I’ve found myself stuck in many situations where my laptop screen is too bright for my eyes, and yet the brightness is as low as it can go. Up until recently I’ve tried to work around it, including wearing sunglasses at the computer (tip: that doesn’t really help.)

Then, I discovered a utility called PangoBright. While it cannot call your neighbor or help you hack into the FBI’s private files, it does one thing very well, and that is making your screen darker than its lowest setting. It’s a cinch to install, starts up in less than a second, and takes up very little space on your hard drive.

There are some annoying visual artifacts though: portions of your screen will become undimmed when you perform certain tasks, such as switching windows. And since the dimmer directly affects the display and not the backlight, your screen will start losing color intensity at the lower settings. Other than that, the program is simple to use and I recommend it for anyone who suffers from SOBS (Screen Over-Brightness Syndrome.)

Grab it

Link: http://www.pangobright.com/

Platforms: Windows only

Reblog: How to name a web browser

This post was originally written by thebeebs on blogs.msdn.net, on 9 January 2012. You can read the original post here.

How to name a web browser (by those who have)

I don’t know about you, but my web browser is the second app I launch every day (just after email). In fact, overall, I probably spend more time using it than pretty much anything else (not surprising considering what I do). But it got me wondering, where do the different browser names come from? So I did some digging.

Meet graph.tk, a great utility if you forgot your graphing calculator

Website: graph.tk.

It does nothing more and nothing less than you’d expect it to. Simply put, it graphs functions of all different kinds!

The interface is beautiful not because it has a thousand buttons, but because it is so simple and straight to the point. Here’s what you see when you load up the website:

In case you're wondering what that function in the right hand top corner is, it's a derivative.

You can add almost an infinite number of functions, and toggle their display via the colored checkboxes. And this isn’t your ordinary Cartesian coordinate grapher; it can even handle polar functions and inequalities! The controls are very intuitive: use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out, and left-click + drag to pan around. There’s even a screenshot option built-in to the page so that you can take a picture of your beautiful graph! The equations are displayed as you would expect to find them in a mathematics textbook (with LaTeX), and for you tech geeks, it’s built with HTML5 and it’s open source.

The only caveats to this otherwise awesome web app are that you can’t find points of intersection or roots of a function so easily… but that’s where your high school/college algebra skills come in!

I would give this app an overall rating of 9/10 (10/10 if only it had tools to find intersections/roots), and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs a quick graphing calculator because they’re too lazy to go downstairs and get their backpack.

For more information, visit their about page.

This is a really awesome drawing tool

The above image was produced with a lot of random mouse strokes and messing around on a program called Flame.

The program was designed by Peter Blaskovic, an artist and graphic designer from Slovakia. Here’s how he describes it:

Flame is a painting program, it belongs to my ‘I am Artist’ experimental project. I think with tools which inspires you, everyone can be an artist. more>>

It’s true, anyone can be an artist. Any random mouse gestures will make awesome light-painting on this web application. It’s a program with a very easy learning curve. Its interface is simple, yet very functional and customizable. If you want to save your image as a JPEG, there’s a button for that.

You can see some of the trippy things you can do with this and Flame Painter, the desktop equivalent here.

And that’s not all. Explore the website, and you’ll find a lot more cool things like interactive animations and other painting tools. Have fun!

Screenr (a.k.a. magical screencasting)

Screenr is a web-based screencasting application. Here’s what they say on their homepage:

Instant screencasts for Twitter

Now you can create screencasts for your followers as easily as you tweet. Just click the record button and you’ll have your ready-to-tweet screencast in seconds.

I first heard of Screenr from a forwarded email and decided to try it out. I had been looking for screen recording software for ages, so when I saw Screenr, I was interested.

Features

Screenr was not a disappointment like other screen recorders I’ve seen. It doesn’t:

• Plague you with advertisements
• Add an annoying watermark on to your screen recording
• Require forty programs to download and install just to make one program work
• Have a million buttons that leave you thinking “which button do I press?”
• Expire because it’s a free trial

What it does is simply amazing:

• Nothing to install (provided that you have Java and a web browser)
• Simple to use
• Records everywhere, not just on the web browser
• Allows voice-over narration
• Pause and continue
• Choose the size and location where you want to record
• Publish online automatically in full resolution
• Screencast plays back on almost all operating systems, even iPhone OS
• Download screencasts in a movie format

There’s only one downside to this program: The maximum length that you can record is 5 minutes.

Final rating

9.5/10. I highly recommend this software for those of you who have been digging for screen recording software with no success. This program really made my day, and I’m sure it will make your day too.