analyzer

YSlow is a question with an answer: "Why slow?" This free Firefox extension can tell you why, and in great detail, when the question happens to be about Web page performance. YSlow tests and grades Web sites based on high-performance criteria established by Yahoo, and issues a report card describing areas for improvement. It also comes with a bag of tools for fixing some of the problems it uncovers.

YSlow is designed to integrate with Firebug, a suite of development tools bundled into a free Firefox extension, and YSlow's developer recommends installing Firebug first. YSlow placed a … Read more

A new nanomedicine device designed to monitor signaling gas in exhaled breath could help people monitor their own known diseases, as well as instantly detect new ones, according to research out of Stony Brook University.

"This is a single breath analysis diagnostic tool for monitoring disease or metabolic functions that can be used to check cholesterol levels, diabetes, and even lung cancer," says lead researcher Perena Gouma, whose work appears in the October 2010 issue of Sensor Letters. "Lung cancer is a silent killer that can only be detected when it's progressed vastly--but in the breath, … Read more

Just like your car, it's important to keep your computer tuned up to ensure that it runs at its best. Regularly removing old and unnecessary files is crucial, and RidNacs aims to help you with this task by analyzing your PC's disk space usage. Unfortunately, its lack of viable help and vague results left a lot to be desired.

We appreciate the program's clean user interface. It consists of a small window with commands at the top for choosing directories to analyze and a blank panel for displaying results. But upon closer inspection, we found its menu … Read more

We possess some basic knowledge about photography and photo editing, but occasionally we encounter a photography-related program that we don't fully understand. Fortunately, one of us is married to a photographer, and he comes in pretty handy when we have questions. So it went with ExposurePlot. We understood that the program displayed EXIF info for groups of images in a bar graph format, but we didn't understand why.

"I don't understand why, either," said our photographer-husband as we looked at ExposurePlot together. The Overview tab of the program was displaying four bar graphs depicting the … Read more

There are plenty of free tools available for making budgets and tracking spending habits that are intuitive and attractive. Simple Home Budget Lite is neither. Despite its free price tag, we're not sure why anyone would want to use it.

The program's interface is simple in appearance yet gives little direction on how to get started. The main window contains a calendar and input fields for entering each transaction's date, category, and related notes. Four tabs for managing transactions reside on the right-hand side. We quickly noticed that something was a little off with the interface, though. … Read more

YUV video uses one carrier for luminance and two for chrominance to yield a better picture than other types of "component video," which are often mistaken for YUV. It's common in high-end video equipment as well as the MPEG-2 format used in DVDs. Sunray Images' YUVTools is a set of powerful utilities for playing, converting, analyzing, and editing YUV or RGB videos in their raw formats. It bundles the developer's YUVPlayer, YUVConverter, YUVAnalyzer, and YUVEditor, as well as other utilities such as two-way AVI-YUV conversion. The full-featured player accepts many different YUV/RGB file formats, including … Read more

Managing hard disk clutter mostly means figuring out which files eat up all the space. Utilities like SizeExplorer Free help by pinpointing the folders and files holding you back from downloading season three of "West Wing." It's an easy-to-use disk analyzer with some valuable features.

The interface is pleasant and mostly intuitive, and there's a Help file if needed. SizeExplorer is fast: it ran through more than 170,000 files in around two minutes. The resulting Windows Explorer-like view lists each item's overall disk usage with colored bars and percentages. You can sort the list … Read more

Keyword Expert is a versatile research tool that allows users to choose and implement the right keywords for search engine optimization. The program's intuitive interface and multiple features make it both easy to use and effective.

The program's interface is sleek and well-organized, with its major features organized in five separate, intuitive screens. The built-in Help file is not going to explain the SEO process to a complete beginner, but it does give a good overview of how the program works and is illustrated with helpful screenshots. The program brings together five different SEO utilities, all of which … Read more

Absence Management System is a complex program that allows users to track employee absences and many other workplace events. Although it's not the most intuitive program we've ever seen, we really like the way it automates a lot of workplace functions that have traditionally be handled with paper, verbal, or e-mail requests.

The program's interface takes some getting used to. We spent a fair amount of time in the built-in Help file, and just messing around with it, it gradually started to make more sense. The program's main functions are organized in a tree-style format down … Read more