Articles about Free Software

Earlier this year, Dropbox open-sourced Lepton, a lossless image compression algorithm which can reduce the size of JPEG images by an average of 22 percent. The technology converts your target JPEGs into the compacted LEP format, and restores the original version on demand.

Dropbox is using Lepton right now to save bandwidth and storage space, and if you grab a copy of the Windows build then you can try it, too.

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VideoLAN has released a technical preview of VLC Media Player 3.0 with 360-degree video support. The new build handles videos following the Spatial Video format, and photos and panoramas following the Spherical spec (the official test page has sample files).

The files play back just like any other video, but you can now left-click and drag within the screen or use the numeric keypad arrows to look around.

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It’s easy for me to poke holes in other people’s software, at least some of the time: oddball interfaces, missing functions, horrible performance, whatever it might be. But does that mean I have enough understanding of software to do any better myself?

That was an interesting question, I realized, and there was only one way to find out: I had to develop something of my own.

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Bitsum Technologies has released a beta of CPUBalance, its intelligent tool for optimizing PC responsiveness. The program uses the same ProBalance technology as Process Lasso to monitor running processes, detect CPU hogs, and instantly adjust priorities to keep your system running smoothly.

CPUBalance runs stand-alone, and you don’t need Process Lasso to try it out. Just install and launch the program and it works immediately.

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Apple’s Touch Bar is a major new selling point for its latest generation of MacBooks, but that doesn’t mean you have to purchase one to find out what it’s all about. Touché 1.0 is a new freeware tool that places a virtual Touch Bar on the desktop of any Mac running the very latest version of MacOS Sierra (10.12.1 v2 or later).

This isn’t an emulator, but a virtual copy of the Touch Bar itself, identical in every way to the hardware-based bar found on the latest MacBooks.

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NirSoft has released GUIPropView, a developer-oriented tool which displays extensive details on your system’s open windows.

The program lists all top-level windows, along with their handle, title, state (normal/ maximized/ minimized), visibility, position, size, class name, style, process ID, thread ID, parent handle, process name, instance name, class module filename, and more.

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Vivaldi Technologies -- led by Opera co-founder Jon S von Tetzchner -- has released Vivaldi 1.5, the latest version of its customizable web browser for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The big talking point in version 1.5 is Vivaldi’s integration into the Philips Hue IoT ecosystem, but the new release also adds a number of more universal features, such as support for tab drag and drop, which makes tab stacking much simpler than before.

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Freeware developer SoftwareOK has released MultiClipBoardSlots, a lightweight clipboard extension for Windows.

The program extends Windows with up to ten clipboards. You’re able to copy to any slot with Ctrl+<slot number> without overwriting anything else, and paste from it with Alt+<slot number>.

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Microsoft Sysinternals has released updates for some of its best tools, including Sysmon 5.0 and Process Explorer 16.20.

Sysmon gets a major update, with new support for recording file creations, Registry create and delete options, value sets and key and value renames.

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Shutdownblocker is a simple tool which intercepts and blocks shutdown, restart, logoff and related commands.

The program offers some protection from user mistakes or poorly designed software which forces a restart, as well as preventing forced Windows 10 Update restarts.

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If you’re researching online, or maybe browsing a collection of local documents, you might sometimes want to copy chunks of text elsewhere for later reference.

Sounds simple, but most solutions are either bulky (use a web clipping service or clipboard manager) or tedious in the extreme (copy text to the clipboard, Alt+Tab to Notepad, paste and Alt+Tab back).

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Malwarebytes has unveiled a beta of its next-generation, do-everything product, Malwarebytes 3.0.

The package combines anti-malware, anti-exploit, anti-ransomware and web blocking technologies for the maximum all-round protection.

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If you like some background noise while working on your PC then it can be tempting to play music, stream video, maybe just turn on the TV. But that can be distracting, and you might not get as much work done as you’d hoped.

Halotea Free generates ambient soundscapes instead -- birdsong, rain, white noise -- which help you tune out distractions and concentrate on whatever you’re doing.

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Building presentations often involves mastering a heavy-duty GUI: layouts here, color panels there, transition previews, animation and more.

Marp strips all that away, and enables creating presentations with just a little GitHub-flavored Markdown. This makes for a very plain, distraction-free interface: just a left-hand pane where you type your code, and a right-hand pane with a preview.

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Multi-core CPUs have been around for a very long time, but unfortunately most software is still single-threaded and has no idea how to utilize all that power.

MParallel is an open-source tool which offers one simple workaround, launching multiple processes in separate threads so that you can run them all simultaneously.

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