Articles about Free Software

Desktop image editors have been offering effects like "Oil Painting" and "Pencil Sketch" for years, without anyone paying much attention, but the rise of the smartphone has created a whole new market for these photo-transforming tricks.

Style is a Prisma-like tool for Windows and Mac which converts regular photos into works of art using various classic styles.

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Snipaste is an unusual developer and designer-oriented screen capture tool for Windows. Basic operations are simple and you’ll feel at home right away. Press a hotkey, left-click and drag to capture a rectangular area: easy.

The program also captures UI elements, like menus, panels, toolbars and buttons. Move your mouse cursor around the screen, Snipaste highlights the underlying UI area, and it can be captured with a left-click.

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Auto FX Free is a free collection of 10 free Photoshop plugins which can also be used stand-alone.

The effects include Focal Zoom, Light Brush, Lighten and Sharpen, Mood Lighting, Soften Details, Vitality, Dreamy Photo, Mosaic, Abstract Edges and Photo Border.

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Iperius Backup 4.7.0 has shipped with support for incremental and differential backups to Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, OneDrive and Azure.

That’s the commercial builds, anyway -- as with previous editions, Iperius Backup Free 4.7.0 doesn’t support cloud backups.

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Gaaiho Reader is a lightweight and feature-packed PDF reader for Windows. The program opens with a more cluttered interface than Adobe Reader -- menus, buttons, sidebars -- but basic viewing remains very straightforward.

Drag and drop a file, scroll through it as usual, and you can use page thumbnails or bookmarks to jump directly to whatever section you need.

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Identifying a file type is often very easy. A glance at the icon gives you a general idea -- VLC Media Player tells you it’s a media file, for instance -- and the extension tells you everything else.

Life isn’t always that simple, though. File extensions might be lost, changed, or maybe you’ve just found a mystery file in a folder somewhere and would like to know what it is.

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A busy Facebook feed could be crammed with all kinds of articles and news headlines, but are they genuine, or propaganda, or hoaxes, or something else entirely?

B.S. Detector is a free extension for Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari and Edge which claims it can help.

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Classic freeware Notepad replacement TED Notepad has just been updated to version 6.1.1, its first release since 2011. The new build brings you drag and drop editing with either mouse button. Select text, drag and drop with the left and it’s moved; drag and drop with the right and you’ve the option to copy or move it.

An extended Backup feature enables copying the previous version of the current document whenever it’s saved. The program can save multiple backups and rotate between them.

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You're working in your browser, testing some new web development project, but there's a problem. And you've no idea why. So you open some documentation in a separate browser tab, more in your development environment, maybe a separate PDF or two until you find whatever you need.

Alternatively, you could just install DevDocs, a free Chrome app which gives you speedy access to documentation for 190 technologies from one interface.

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SpeedCrunch is a keyboard-based scientific calculator which is easy to use, yet still has the power that advanced users need.

The program is both open-source and portable, which means no real setup hassles. Just unzip the download and run speedcrunch.exe to begin.

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Non-Plex Pass holders rejoice -- Plex has made its desktop-friendly media player app for Windows and Mac completely free with the release of Plex Media Player 1.2.

Version 1.2 also introduces a major new feature -- when the app is run in windowed mode, it defaults to the web interface, allowing users to manage their server(s) remotely.

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If you’re working on a document or design template then you’ll often need images of a specific resolution or aspect ratio, but finding matching pictures on your own system might take a little work.

One option is to add a few extra columns to Explorer. Go to the Pictures folder, right-click a column header, select More and add items like "Dimensions" (1920×1080) or Horizontal/ Vertical Resolution (xxx dpi). Click the Dimensions column header to group the images by width, and that should help you find whatever you need.

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Stretchly is an open-source tool which displays regular "take a break" reminders when you’re working on your PC, Linux system or Mac. There are plenty of similar tools around, but stretchly has some unusual touches which help it stand out from the crowd.

Application size isn’t a strong point: 134MB, really?! But that’s what you get with Electron apps, and at least there’s no need to install anything: just unzip and go.

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Set up your own home network and you can have Explorer automatically map any remote drives you like, whenever you log on. Connect to another network, though, and Explorer will still try to connect to the drives that aren’t there, along with drives for work, school, or whatever else you might have set up.

Network Drive Control can help by checking a network as you log on, and only mapping the drives you need for that environment.

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TeamViewer has just released TeamViewer 12, the latest edition of its popular remote control package. Major performance improvements include up to 20x faster file transfers, and frame rates of up to 60 fps.

Connection settings can automatically adapt to network connections, giving you the best possible quality at all times.

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