Miscellaneous Software

This page contains links to office applications and other non-development software that I found useful. It is divided in two sections:

• Free Software
• Commercial Software

All programs run on any recent version of Microsoft Windows, unless otherwise noted.

Free Software

• Analog is a free web log analyzer that creates exhaustive graphical reports from web server access logs. Input formats and report generation are highly customizable. Sadly, the program has not been updated in a long time and won’t recognize the identification strings of current operating systems and web browsers.
• DITA and the older DocBook are two OASIS standards for structured documents of usually (but not necessarily) technical nature. Essentially, DITA and DocBook are complex schemas that define a hierarchy of content tags for XML documents. The system resembles LaTeX but does not include a typesetting engine. You can transform documents into printable or viewable format using free converters (e.g. XSLT style sheets) from the DITA Open Toolkit or The DocBook Project, or you can purchase an integrated solution like Adobe FrameMaker (see Commercial Software).

  Ironically, getting good documentation on these document standards is quite difficult. I have managed to get only two printed books on DITA, and both were useless. FrameMaker comes with some documentation, but naturally focuses on the integration of the standards with FrameMaker. So you will have to rely on the official reference documentation. For DITA, download the DITA Architectural Specification and DITA Language Reference at the OASIS Standards repository. For DocBook, download DocBook: The Definitive Guide.

• Eraser is a flexible utility that overwrites files or unallocated disk space with user-defined byte values. Unlike most other tools for secure data deletion, Eraser can be configured to zero all free disk space – an extremely helpful feature for Microsoft Virtual PC users because it reduces the physical size of virtual disks!
• FeedDemon reads and displays XML feeds in the popular RSS and Atom formats, commonly provided by bloggers. This excellent application used to be commercial but is now available as a free download. NewsGator also offers a subscription service to synchronize RSS readers on different machines.
• IrfanView by Irfan Skiljan is a freeware viewer for graphics files, with some limited editing capabilities. Plug-ins for virtually all known graphics file formats exist, plus several animation and audio file formats. The internal file viewer of Total Commander can use IrfanView to show graphics files. – Should you ever come across an image file not recognized by IrfanView, you might want to try XnView which is also free and supports another slew of obscure formats.
• ISO Recorder by Alex Feinman writes the contents of an ISO file to a blank CD/DVD, a feature that Windows did not support natively prior to Windows 7. The utility can create bootable disks and supports all recent 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.
• OpenOffice.org is the successor to StarOffice, originally a commercial office suite developed by Star Division in Hamburg/Germany, later bought by Sun Microsystems and released as freeware to undermine Microsoft’s dominance, and now placed under the care of a team of volunteers. StarOffice was rather unimpressive but OpenOffice has come a long way – for a download no bigger than a single MS Office XP service pack, you receive a complete suite of applications that nearly match the functionality of their Microsoft counterparts and (more importantly) read MS documents with few problems.
• Paint.NET is a free image editing program that started out as a student project and has now matured into a viable alternative to Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. While lacking the more esoteric features of these commercial applications, Paint.NET is more than adequate for my modest bitmap editing needs. The entire program is written in C#, including its elegant and responsive user interface, disproving the popular claim that such tasks require C++.
• Piriform offers several free utilities, including CCleaner for deleting unnecessary files and obsolete registry entries, and Recuva to recover deleted files that are not (or no longer) in the Windows recycle bin. Just make sure to uncheck the Yahoo toolbar option during installation…
• PrintFile is a small utility for printing text files with some formatting. Options include headers and footers, line numbers, font selection, n-up printing, user-definable pretty printing of source code, and piping output text through user-defined filter programs. Some options also work with DSC-compliant PostScript files. I found that PrintFile supports all the features of GNU a2ps that I really need while being significantly easier to use.
• Sysinternals (now owned and hosted by Microsoft) is the first place to go if you need any tool for Microsoft Windows. Mark Russinovich and his colleagues have created an incredible wealth of extremely useful programs, ranging from command-line process manipulation to system activity monitors of every kind. Programmers should also check out DebugView, a stand-alone debug output viewer.
• TextScan by AnalogX is a free utility that scans arbitrary files, such as executables or libraries, for embedded text strings. The program detects both 8-bit ASCII/ANSI and 16-bit Unicode characters.
• Thunderbird by Mozilla is a powerful and elegant e-mail client that has replaced Qualcomm’s discontinued Eudora on my system. Thunderbird can automatically import Eudora folders and messages, making the migration as painless as possible. Existing attachments must be archived manually, however.
• TrueCrypt provides strong encryption (AES-256 and others) for an entire partition or an arbitrary collection of files, accessible as a virtual disk. I haven’t tried partition encryption but file encryption works very well and is extremely easy to use. Great solution for keeping sensitive files hidden, even from users with administrator privileges or low-level disk monitors. That’s not just paranoia – consider who might gain access to your hard disk when you throw it away, or exchange it under warranty.
• Virtual CloneDrive by SlySoft is an essential utility that mounts ISO files as virtual CD/DVD-ROM drives. The company also provides a number of commercial tools to deal with copy-protected disks.
• XML Marker by SymbolClick is a free XML editor with a syntax-highlighting text view, a structural tree view, and even a table view that’s extremely convenient for browsing large data sets. Unfortunately, the program does not support Unicode.

Commercial Software

• Agent by Forte is a reliable and powerful newsreader for Usenet and private NNTP servers that is particularly suited for offline reading. Agent handles e-mail accounts as well, although I prefer dedicated e-mail clients. You can use the program without a registration fee, although its functionality will be reduced. Forte also offers full Usenet access for a monthly subscription fee.
• ClipMate by Thornsoft is the last clipboard manager you’ll ever need. Every new Windows clipboard entry is automatically copied to a huge searchable repository for future reuse, and you can type your own notes into locked folders that are not subject to periodic deletion of aging content. – If you’re only interested in note-taking, you might also want to check out TurboNote.
• FrameMaker is a comprehensive solution for editing and publishing technical documents. The application was created by Frame but later bought by Adobe. Their main contribution was an elegant integration of Acrobat Distiller for extremely fast and easy PDF creation. Adobe has otherwise updated FrameMaker at a fairly glacial pace, but that seems to be improving. Version 8.0 finally added full Unicode support, and 9.0 revamped the ancient user interface.

  Meanwhile, FrameMaker is still the only affordable integrated solution for authoring DITA and DocBook documents (see Free Software). The program supports “structured editing” of SGML and XML documents, and provides a customizable style matching mechanism that turns structured content into formatted pages. Using DocBook requires a lot of customization work, but DITA is very well integrated and lacks only equation support out of the box. You can also define your own document structure and forgo DTD/XSD schemas entirely if you don’t need SGML/XML roundtripping.

  FrameMaker’s structured mode has one significant GUI defect: you cannot automatically open the structure tree view to the current text position. DataHansa’s Tree Help Plugin adds this much-needed function, and also allows collapsing or expanding the entire tree view. The price is rather steep for such a small utility, however.

• GetRight by Headlight Software is a comfortable download manager that allows you to queue and schedule, pause and resume Internet downloads – an essential tool for anyone on a slow dial-up connection, and still very useful to manage large amounts of downloads on faster connections.

  Note: The so-called “spyware” which has caused a lot of bad press for GetRight and similar tools has been completely removed from all editions starting with version 4.5a.

• HyperSnap-DX by Hyperionics is the standard solution for taking screen snapshots under no matter which display mode. Widely used by game reviewers, this exemplary shareware utility enjoys frequent updates and a great customer support. The company also offers tools for bitmap vectorisation and video recording/editing.
• Macrium Reflect is a hard disk imaging utility that does everything Acronis True Image does, except faster and without the UI bloat. There’s even a perfectly usable free edition.
• Mybase by WJJ Software and the sadly moribund Knowledge Base by OzmoSys are “free-form outlining databases” which manage a tree-like hierarchy of RTF text notes, HTML web pages, links to external files or web pages, and even arbitrary file data stored as embedded “attachments.” Knowledge Base additionally offers syntax highlighting for source code. Both programs are inexpensive, easy to use, and perfect repositories for odds and ends such as notes, articles, code snippets, addresses, images, and so on.
• Speed Commander by SpeedProject is a powerful Windows file manager in the Norton Commander mold. Unlike other popular NC clones, such as Total Commander and Free Commander, Speed Commander offers a native 64-bit implementation. This is an absolute necessity on 64-bit versions of Windows because 32-bit programs cannot access certain system directories and do not support 64-bit Explorer plugins.
• SpinRite by Steve Gibson is a justly famous utility for hard disk maintenance, far more thorough and useful than the various free utilities provided by HD manufacturers and others. SpinRite fully supports SMART but more importantly does its own surface analysis to find defective blocks and recover their data. SpinRite doesn’t rely on a drive’s built-in error recovery mechanism which is usually pathetically inadequate and merely leads to “clicks of death”. The whole program is tiny and easily fits on a diskette or USB stick for emergencies.
• WebLog Expert by Alentum Software is a powerful web log analyzer that’s extremely easy to use and relatively inexpensive compared to other commercial options. There are free alternatives, but they have various drawbacks: Analog hasn’t been updated in a very long time, and AWStats lacks the essential 12-month “rolling view”.