Featured Freeware

Lightning makes Thunderbird soar above Outlook for home use, and places it on nearly equal ground in the office. It includes an overhauled interface with easy-to-use buttons for jumping between e-mail and your calendar, LDAP directory support for event invites, and Sun Java Calendar Server support.

Work on the plug-in is now handled by Mozilla as it prepares to integrate its code into Thunderbird for the big Version 3 update coming later this year, but that doesn't mean Lightning isn't ready to be used now. A menu bar for switching between mail and calendar views can live either … Read more

Doing for Gmail what the MailTo link does for Outlook, the wonderfully simple gAttach is a small utility that reassigns Gmail as the default mail account from Windows documents. With gAttach installed, selecting Send from Windows Explorer, Firefox, and Microsoft Office automatically attaches the files to a Gmail composition instead of opening a new e-mail in your mail client.

Though effortless, we wish we could associate some file types with gAttach and let others default to the e-mail client. Also missing is a way for gAttach to automatically divide, where possible, e-mail compositions that breach the 20MB upload limit.

GreenPrint World is a free Windows utility that helps eliminate wasted pages while printing. Installation takes some time since it requires Visual C++ 2005, which is included if necessary. GreenPrint will also put four new programs into your Windows start-up menu, add a browser helper object for Internet Explorer, and add three printers (GreenPrint PDF, GreenPrint MailPDF, and GreenPrint). During installation, GreenPrint will ask you to select a default printer, but the printer can be easily changed later from the GreenPrint interface.

After installation, you can print from any application to GreenPrint, which will automatically remove pages from your printout … Read more

Web Photo Album is a simple free album creator offering a wide range of nice--if sometimes cheesy--templates.

A clean interface layout makes it easy to find the pictures you want and quickly create a simple album. A row of big, easy-to-read buttons from which to navigate cap off the user interface, with a convenient left-side tree for folder selection and gallery creation. Web Photo Album offers basic editing functions like red-eye removal and picture rotation, and you can add captions to each picture. The finished product comes out as a page of thumbnails, and once you click on a picture, … Read more

Once upon a time, Mac users got the short end of the stick when it came to BitTorrent clients. Those days are gone, thankfully--and Transmission is a perfect example of that. This excellent open-source client is one of the very best choices for a BT client on the Mac, being both extremely lightweight (some users even manage to run the Ubuntu version on their cell phones) and fairly feature-packed.

Transmission's interface is easy to use--and easy on the eyes. The layout should be familiar, even to PC users, with torrent controls like stop and pause on the top, and … Read more

For a piece of freeware in a category that's rife with scams and junk, FLVPlayer4Free stands out as a solid, reasonable program that does what it says, offers a bunch of options in the deal, and does it all without any annoying predatory advertising.

The program starts off with eight skins, most of which provide significantly different looks beyond just a new coat of paint. The options menu, which is only right-click accessible, provides hot-key and menu access to several useful choices. These include fixed resizing to double the original size or full-screen viewing, maintaining the aspect ration, smoothing, … Read more

This top-notch feed reader will devour your RSS and Atom feeds, though some users might find it too basic. Snarfer keenly follows the "keep it simple" adage in every function. An uncomplicated, uncluttered interface follows a generic layout of left-side listed entries and a central preview pane. Set your browser to recognize Snarfer as your feed catcher and you'll find the program has already entered the link from the clipboard into your add-feed dialog.

To save an entry, simply drag it to a Save folder. E-mailing an entry and other basic functions are available in the context … Read more

The team behind the screen-recording utility Camtasia have released a simplified, experimental version of the technology, packaged into a nice downloadable application for Windows and Mac called the Jing Project.

Jing makes it very easy to grab screenshots and videos straight from your PC, and then save them or share them on the Web. The coolest part of this experiment--in theory--is Jing's integration with Screencast.com, a hosting service for videos recorded off your computer. Once you've recorded a video, you can save it to your Screencast account, and from there you can get an embed code to … Read more

When you're working on your Mac, sometimes things happen in the background that you would like to keep track of while working in another application. Growl works with hundreds of popular Mac apps to notify you of specific tasks like when a download is complete or when your CD-burning project is finished.

For example, it will tell you in Adium when a friend comes online while you're working on something entirely different, and it can notify you when your EOD backup is done.

We like having control over what gets a Growl notification, and the ability to choose … Read more