Space Combat is a fun TIE FIGHTER-style space game
Hobbyist programmers have been producing their own games since the very first computers appeared, but the professional products are now so hugely impressive that it’s almost impossible for a single developer to compete.
Still, if you can live without photo-realistic graphics and a soundtrack by Hans Zimmer then there are still plenty of smaller projects worth exploring, and Space Combat is a great place to start.
Emsisoft Anti-Malware and Internet Security 10 betas now available
Emsisoft has announced that beta versions of Emsisoft Anti-Malware and Emsisoft Internet Security 10 are now available for testing.
The headline improvement is in scan speed, with Emsisoft claiming a typical malware scan fell from 5 minutes 42 seconds to 57 seconds, an 83 percent drop.
Swoosh: deliver presentations with a wave of the hand
Great presentations aren’t just about the content -- how they’re delivered matters, too. Android app Swoosh helps you stand out by stepping through your slides with just a wave of the hand.
The $2 app needs a server component on your Windows, Mac or Linux system. There’s no installation or configuration required, just run the download, launch Swoosh, and as long as they’re both on the same Wi-Fi, they should find each other automatically.
Easily set windows as always on top with PinMe!
If a Windows application needs to be accessible at any time -- a desktop calculator, perhaps -- then it’ll sometimes be possible to set it as always on top, ensuring its window stays on top of any others.
Not every application has that feature, unfortunately, but there’s another way. PinMe! can set any window as always on top in a couple of clicks.
Spelr is a spell checker for any Windows program
There’s a common view online which says that spelling doesn’t really matter, mistakes are no big deal, and anyone who says otherwise is An Evil Grammar Nazi Who Can Safely Be Ignored.
There’s a fragment of truth in that, at least in some situations, but if you want to get your point across effectively in an email, a forum post or anywhere else, it’s still best to avoid distractions like spelling mistakes.
Save Text To File is a handy research tool for Firefox
If you find something interesting while researching online, your first instinct will probably be to bookmark the page for reference later. And that’s just fine, as long as you can find the bookmark later. And remember why you saved it. And don’t mind re-reading the entire page to locate the fragment you need.
Save Text To File is a Firefox add-on which could make this much easier. If you’re only interested in a paragraph or two of text, forget bookmarks, just select what you need with the mouse, then right-click, Save Text To File > Save, and your chosen words are saved directly to a local file.
Mac recovery tool Disk Drill comes to Windows
It's been undeleting Mac files since 2010, but CleverFiles’ Disk Drill is now also available -- for free -- on Windows XP and later.
The Mac heritage brings some immediate benefits. The program can recover data from HFS+ drives, as well as FAT, exFAT, NTFS or Linux EXT2/3/4 drives. And it's able to back up drives to a DMG image, handy if you're worried about files being overwritten before they can be restored.
FileSeek is a fast and flexible search tool
FileSeek is a portable free-for-personal-use search tool for Windows XP-10, a fast and flexible way to locate the files you need.
The program's familiar interface means you’ll be using it right away. Select a path to search and an "Include" pattern – like *.txt – to find files of a particular type, say, and optionally enter text to locate within those files.
Copy the contents of image and text files to the clipboard with Copy Contents
You’re browsing Explorer and find an image you’d like to paste into another program. You could right-click it, select Copy, but that won’t work: Explorer copies the location of the file to the clipboard, not its contents.
One workaround is to double-click the image, open it in your default viewer, and copy it to the clipboard from there. That gets the job done, but it’s hardly convenient.
Quick Review: OW Shredder
OW Shredder is a free Windows tool which securely wipes files, folders, free space or entire drives, ensuring any confidential data can’t be recovered.
The program is a compact 600KB download. There’s no installation involved, no adware or other hassles -- just unzip the program to a USB key and you can run it anywhere.
NewRetroArcade has classic 80s games -- in a VR arcade
If you’re interested in 80s arcade games then you’ve probably played clones of Space Invaders, Pac-Man and other classics. If you’re a real fan then you might have set up an emulator to run the original game ROMs.
NewRetroArcade goes further. Not only does it give you MAME emulated playable arcade games, but it actually presents them in a Virtual Reality arcade for Oculus (although you can also run it on your Windows desktop to get a basic idea of what it can do).
Tune your Windows Services with Easy Service Optimizer
Popular utilities developer Sordum has released Easy Service Optimizer 1.0, a free tool for optimizing system services on Windows XP and later.
The program works much like an automated version of Black Viper’s classic tuneup site. It has four profiles ("Default", "Safe", "Tweaked", "Extreme"), each of which disables progressively more services, and you can apply the profile you need in a couple of clicks.
Backup, clone or reformat USB keys with ImageUSB
ImageUSB is a free Windows application for creating and writing images of USB drives. It sounds much like many other free tools, but wait -- this one is much better than you might expect.
The program comes from a trustworthy developer, PassMark Software, so you can download it with confidence. That won’t exactly take long -- it’s a very compact 463KB -- and there’s no installation required, just unzip and go.
Caliber: instant messaging for your LinkedIn contacts
Most instant messaging apps market themselves on just how much fun they are, with group chats, location services, media sharing, and of course way more stickers and emojis than everyone else.
Free Android and iOS app Caliber bypasses all this and goes for a different audience entirely: it’s instant messaging for your business contacts.
Office Image Extraction Wizard goes open source
RL Vision has announced that its Office Image Extraction Wizard is now open source.
The Windows application is a simple but effective tool for extracting images from Office and many other document types. Although, notably, not PDF (the company has a shareware application for that).
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