viewer

Foxit rivals Adobe for reading PDF files

Foxit PDF Reader, the program that many consider to be a faster, lighter, more able Windows alternative to Adobe Reader, has recently jumped to version 5.0. This newest release comes with many of the same solid features, a few new ones, and an upgraded interface.

As with the previous version, the setup process is a bit cumbersome. First, watch out for the two check boxes that make Ask your browser default search provider and Ask.com your home page. Opt out as necessary. Then, toward the end of the installation process, be sure to read carefully and opt out … Read more

Access Access files without Access

It's hard to access Access files without access to Access, Microsoft's popular relational database management system. If you need to open Access database files, try Alex Nolan's MDB Viewer Plus. It's a free tool that not only displays Microsoft Access MDB files and the newer Accdb files via the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) in Windows but also lets users open, view, edit, search, sort, import, and export Access files without an Access license or an installed copy of Access.

MDB Viewer Plus is portable freeware that runs as soon as you click the program file, … Read more

Pieceable puts working iOS apps in your browser

You're itching to test drive an iOS application, but the lack of a free trial, the limited screenshots, and no demo videos are holding you back from pulling the trigger on a purchase. Such hurdles could soon be toppled with a new service called the Pieceable Viewer.

Parent company Pieceable, which is working on a tool to let people create mobile applications with a visual editor as opposed to writing lines of code, has come up with a viewer that can demo iOS applications on the Web, sans iOS device. Developers send their finished .app file to Pieceable, where … Read more

Portable image package

FastStone Image Viewer Portable is a full-featured image-handling application that happens to be totally portable and totally free. It's an image file browser, editor, and converter that bundles the most useful editing tools, such as red-eye removal, lossless rotation, resizing, and color adjustment, as well as various effects, text, captions, and frames. It creates self-running slideshows, photo contact sheets, wallpaper, and other displays; downloads digital photos; converts, renames, and changes the attributes of batches of files; changes time stamps; compares images; splits and combines files; captures screen images; e-mails images; and a lot more.

FastStone Image Viewer's fully … Read more

Password viewer

Have you ever forgotten your password when you tried to log on to a Web site? We thought so. Like many Web browsers, Mozilla's Firefox saves your password, username, and other log-in details for every applicable Web site and stores the data in its sign-on database. FirePasswordViewer is a free tool that can decrypt, recover, and display this data. It will show a site's password on the same line as the username in Firefox's built-in Password Manager when you click Show Passwords. However, it can also display your passwords in its own interface, even when Firefox isn'… Read more

File viewer plus

Universal Viewer Portable is a free application that can open and display a wide range of files, including text, hex, binary, and Unicode files of unlimited size. It opens nearly all image and graphics formats as well as multimedia files, plug-ins, Internet-compatible files, various encoded files, and even Office files via the associated Navigation Panel shareware. It can also be integrated with Windows' context menus and some popular file managers such as Total Commander.

Universal Viewer has a small, efficient interface with toolbar icons clearly depicting their functions. We quickly browsed to and opened a wide range of files, including … Read more

Instant info

The Windows Control Panel gives access to some of the operating system's nuts and bolts, but it doesn't always provide as much information as it could. ReSysInfo is a basic program that presents information about a variety of your computer's components all in one spot.

ReSysInfo looks very much like the Windows Control panel, with a collection of icons representing information about drives, networks, keyboards, and other hardware and software. Unlike the Control Panel, ReSysInfo doesn't actually let you change any settings, but it does allow you to quickly view the settings and other information. There … Read more

Better ASCII art viewer

ASCII art is the ancient variety of computer graphics and images created by typing ASCII text characters. Most users encounter ASCII art in the form of NFO files, literally, "info" files; they're text files that Windows can open and display, albeit via a cumbersome process that uses Notepad. CubicDesign's Compact NFO Viewer is a great choice for folks who just need to open and view NFO files now and again as well as those who regularly handle NFO files, too. It's not often that a new ASCII art viewer comes along!

Compact NFO Viewer certainly … Read more

Help Viewer issues solved in Mac OS X 10.6.5

Several issues can arise when attempting to access the Help Viewer in Mac OS X 10.6.5. Changed language, no information showing, or access errors are some of the problems that can be fixed by resetting a few files or simply waiting it out.

Apple Support Discussions user Pilif Nudd writes about an issue where documented knowledge base articles are not appearing in Help Viewer:

"Have recently installed 10.6.5 (Combo) and am now getting strange behaviour with Help Viewer. Entering a search term lists standard help items and support articles, as normal. However, clicking on any … Read more

Google's Ngram Viewer: A time machine for wordplay

The word "spiderman" appeared in books in the 1920s, long before the famed Marvel superhero debuted in the early '60s. And the term "smartphone" was in use during the first decade of the 20th century, a century before anyone picked up their first iPhone.

How do I know all this? By using a new tool from Google called the Ngram Viewer. Launched by the search giant yesterday, this tool lets you trace the usage of a word or phrase during the past five centuries--five centuries!--by seeing how often it's appeared in books over that … Read more