5.2

PDF software can be extremely sophisticated -- with a price to match. But sometimes you just want to create a simple PDF document that others can open and view. PDF ReDirect Freeware is a simple PDF creator from EXP Systems. It creates and merges universal PDF documents with no restrictions, watermarks, size limits, ad banners, pop-ups, nags, or similar limitations.

PDF ReDirect opens with its Help file displayed as well as a list comparing its features with its shareware version. Like many PDF creators, PDF ReDirect appears as an option on the Printer menu when you select the Print command … Read more

MailTab for Gmail provides a way to access your Gmail account without using a browser. Running as an app, MailTab for Gmail can notify you when you get new mail (both audibly and visually) and gives you faster access to your inbox than loading Gmail the traditional way. MailTab for Gmail installs easily and a simple click on the menu bar icon gives you near-instant access to your Gmail account.

MailTab for Gmail works with Gmail only, of course, but the interface is slick and friendly. Arriving mail appears as a small number over the MailTab for Gmail icon. When … Read more

Kik Messenger for iPhone is a free, easy-to-use tool that has all the characteristics of a messenger application, as well as the advantage of texting, in an all-in-one, well-designed app. Its clean, uncluttered user interface will make interactions smooth, and the app will soon become one of your favorite texting tools.

We love how the developers have opened access to all mobile platforms and provided some great features you may miss on a computer-based social networking app. It is compatible with both portrait and landscape layouts, and you can switch between these at anytime. You don't have the limitation … Read more

If your first idea is to diagram it (whatever it is), then Farshadoo's Diagram Ring may be for you. This versatile freeware helps you create and edit just about any kind of diagram you can think of: pie charts, flow charts, class diagrams, bar charts, ERDs, DRFs, and many more. Its predefined symbols and unique node-linking methods yield professional-quality diagrams that can be used anywhere a diagram is needed.

Diagram Ring's main interface opened with the program's Startup screen, which let us create a new diagram or open an existing one. A unique, graphic-intensive design gives the … Read more

Roboreader is a free sequential image viewer that is designed to replace the default Windows image viewer (typically Photo Viewer) with a faster, more capable tool. It displays animated GIFs as well as most image files, and it can let you view images directly in a wide range of archived files, too. It automatically continues on to the next image archive in a directory.

There are several options for fitting images to the desktop, which is one of Roboreader's chief advantages. As widescreen displays become common, more users will appreciate the ability to get the best fit for their … Read more

If you needed proof that the world will come to an end in 2012, just know that this will be the year that someone actually builds a stretch limo variant of the Audi R8 5.2 FSI Quattro.

Commissioned by Limo Broker and currently in production by Carbonyte UK, the formerly two-seater Audi R8 will be stretched to accommodate six more sport bucket seats, bringing the total passenger count to eight. When it is completed, the right-hand-drive vehicle will see service in Limo Broker's fleet, which also includes a stretch Ferrari 360 Modena, in the U.K. sometime later … Read more

Praat is Dutch for "talk." It's also the name of this lab-quality phonetics freeware that can record and analyze speech sounds in mono or stereo. While it's not difficult for lay users to pick up, it's designed for linguists and students of linguistics as well as other scientists and researchers who need to analyze human speech. It supports speech synthesis, including articulatory synthesis. It also creates high-quality images of data suitable for publication.

Praat's interface consists of two parts, Praat Objects and Praat Picture. We started by opening the Help file, which offers an … Read more

JPEGsnoop is a free image decoder that wrings every drop of data that can be extracted from JPEG images. It's compact and fully portable, so you can take it along with you on a USB drive or other memory device and run it from any compatible Windows machine without having to install it. It can open not just JPEGs but also AVI, DNG, PDF, and THM files, and it also extracts embedded JPEG files. As for the data it extracts, we didn't know that JPEGs contained so much information.

We extracted JPEGsnoop's compressed download and opened the … Read more

We just love portable applications, which let you carry a wide range of useful tools around with you and run them on virtually any Windows PC without having to install them or modify the registry. PortableApps creates portable freeware versions of open source programs designed to be easy to save and run. We recently tried their PhotoFiltre Portable. It's a compact but full-featured digital image-retouching suite. Among its many capabilities are an Image Explorer browser, automatic batch processing, and the ability to import TWAIN data from a scanner or other device.

After we'd selected our installation language and … Read more