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"Picto" refers to pictograms, which are visual symbols that represent things, such as "table," "chair," and "men's room." Pictograms convey meaning quickly and intuitively, and they're used in many areas, including design, transportation, and education. Picto Selector is a free tool that makes it easy to choose and create pictograms for any purpose. You can choose from thousands of free "pictos" and combine them by theme, style, or usage into picto sheets, or create new pictos from your own images and text. It offers print overlays for speech … Read more

Bookmarking has come a long way since the early days of Web browsers, when saving a URL in a folder for future reference was about as exciting as it got. Now you can save not only URLs, but annotations and other information, and you can save them in the cloud for easy access wherever you go. Diigo Bookmark, Archive, Highlight and Sticky-Note is an extension for Google Chrome that makes it easy to save Web addresses, highlights, notes, and much more.

Like most Chrome extensions, Diigo installs with little fuss, appearing as an icon to the right of Chrome's … Read more

Most of us are used to opening PDF files with a special viewer, be it Acrobat Reader or something else. But what happens when you have other files that require special viewers? Are you supposed to just keep cluttering up your hard drive with new programs? STDU Viewer Portable is a document viewer that can handle not only PDF files, but a variety of other common and uncommon file types.

STDU Viewer Portable looks just like many other document viewers, with a set of menus across the top and a toolbar just below. We were impressed with the number of … Read more

Searching is one area where the one-size-fits-all approach has never served Windows very well. Maybe that's because there are so many excellent freeware search tools out there; some are much more complex than Windows, and others much simpler. TheSearchMan is a multithreaded search tool that is simple and extremely fast when searching your disk drives in real time. But it also creates indexes that make searching even faster. It's portable freeware that includes both 32-bit and 64-bit versions in the download. We tried both.

Since it's portable, TheSearchMan opens immediately when you click its extracted executable file. … Read more

Free Stocks Ticker places a scrolling stock price ticker at the bottom or top of your screen. It displays current stock prices and news feeds from Yahoo, CNN, FOX, and your own sources. You can configure the speed, opacity, and colors of the display, and it's one of the nicest programs of its type that we've tried.

Free Stocks Ticker displays stock prices in a semiopaque black bar. The text is also slightly transparent but still perfectly legible, giving a nice effect that doesn't hide pop-up messages in the notification area. Price changes are color-coded; for example, … Read more

The search tool built into Windows has gotten a lot better over the years, but many users still prefer a third-party search utility, especially a tool that doesn't use indexing. There are many standalone search tools to choose from, most of them freeware. UltraSearch from JAM Software is a free search tool optimized for NTFS drives. Instead of indexing, it searches your NTFS drive's Master File Table (MTF). It searches while you type, returning results almost instantaneously.

UltraSearch has a compact, efficient layout in a medium-size, draggable window. It's a very simple tool: you see a search … Read more

As your music collection grows, do you sometimes wish for a simpler media player, not a more complex one? Maybe you prefer to manage your music collection in your own file structure and need a small, fast, yet capable player that doesn't take over your system. Or maybe "simple is better" just makes sense sometimes. CrystalWolf Audio Player covers those bases. It's not a video player, slideshow maker, or media center: it's a free music player optimized for high-quality playback of most audio files, including MP3, WAV, WMA, ACC, OGG, FLAC, and APE. It has … Read more

Visually comparing PDFs to identify changes or differences is harder than it sounds, and it sounds hard enough, not to mention extremely boring. But it's all too easy to miss subtle differences with the Mark I Eyeball, and some changes might not be visible at all. Why put yourself through it when there's a free tool that can do the job for you, only much faster and more thoroughly? It's called DiffPDF, and it's from RubyPDF Technologies. With dual file selection tools and display panes, this efficient tool makes quick work of a tedious but necessary … Read more

There is no imminent shortage of sticky notes apps for Windows. They come as desktop apps, gadgets, and add-ons. Most are free; some are portable. Some merely provide a quick-and-easy way to pin reminders to the desktop. Others try to replicate the look of paper sticky notes but with enhanced features. That describes 7 Sticky Notes, a free sticky notes program that uses shading and highlighting to give its notes a realistic 3D look.

The program gave us two installation options, Normal or Portable. We chose the standard installation, but Sticky Notes would make a great portable tool, combining versatility … Read more