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Mom 'n' pop point-of-sale

We've all stood and waited while an inexperienced cashier calls in a supervisor to void a charge or enter a discount in a point-of-sale system that would be more at home in Mission Control than Corner Drugs. The Corner Store application has Mom and Pop in mind. It's a POS system specifically for small retailers, so it's designed to be as easy to use as possible. It supports bar code scanning, cash register hot keys, and customer tracking. Most importantly, it supports secure credit card transactions via major national services.

Corner Store POS uses Microsoft .NET Framework … Read more

Bank statement file converter

Online banking has been one of the Internet's greatest conveniences, eliminating not just tons of paper but also delays, lag time, and errors. What could be better, you say? Well, electronic bank and credit card statements could be more useful. ProperSoft's Bank2CSV is a free utility that converts your electronic bank and credit card statements from the OFX, QFX, QIF, QBO, and OFC formats used by programs such as QuickBooks, Quicken, and Microsoft Money into spreadsheet-compatible Comma Separated Value (CSV) files that are compatible with Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice.org, and other spreadsheets.

Bank2CSV's simple, dialog-based interface is … Read more

Wiki quickie

Wikitup is a free desktop reference tool with extensions for Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Wikitup uses open-source data from sites like Wikipedia, Wikitionary, and Wikiquote to deliver search results quickly to your desktop via a system tray icon. It can translate selections in more than 700 languages as well as find photos and videos and present them in a Cooliris 3D Wall display.

To access Wikitup, we clicked the W icon in our Windows notification area, also known as the system tray. We right-clicked the icon and selected Settings, which let us select languages, data sources, hot keys, … Read more

Instant hash

Hash functions have a variety of cryptographic uses, such as providing digital signatures, checking the contents of downloaded files and programs for corrupted or changed files, and time-stamping secure documents without revealing their content. Easy Hash is a freeware hash value calculator from odzysk.info. It supports more than 130 file and text hash functions, and it can crack CRC-32 passwords. It can also reset passwords in a variety of dynamic content management and e-commerce platforms, including Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress, Magento, Drupal, and Prestashop.

Easy Hash's compact interface is easy to manage, with a plain window that displays the … Read more

Pleasantly puzzling

We love jigsaw puzzles, but we can't say we'd ever tried playing them on our computer before. It seemed like a good idea--no chances for our cat to abscond with our puzzles pieces--but we weren't sure how well an electronic version would really replicate the experience of completing a puzzle in real life. As it turns out, Everyday Jigsaw replicates that experience just fine.

The program's interface is attractive and easy to navigate. The program comes with seven free puzzles, and we quickly found ourselves sucked in once we started on one. Everyday Jigsaw does a … Read more

Password provider

We can't say that we don't have a few ethical issues with FacebookPasswordDecryptor. Sure, you might need such a program because you've forgotten your own password, or maybe because you suspect that your teenager is up to no good and you want to see what secrets Facebook can reveal. You could just as easily, however, use this program to nose around in your spouse's--or even your employee's--Facebook account. We'll leave that up to you and your conscience. What we can tell you is that FacebookPasswordDecryptor does indeed work as advertised.

FacebookPasswordDecryptor works by detecting … Read more

Magazine mart

MART is a file format for electronic books, and we have to admit that we had never heard of it before. The paucity of Google results about this format made us wonder about its popularity, but it turns out that there is no shortage of people using the format to upload e-books for viewing with MartView. Not only does this e-reader let you view electronic documents, it also makes it easy to create and share books of your own.

MartView features a sleek and attractive design. The program comes with a user guide within its library of e-books, which is … Read more

Stylish to-do list

Download.com is jam-packed with to-do list programs, and most of them are more or less the same. To-Do DeskList surprised us by delivering a fresh, unusual design and just the right number of features. If you're in the market for an unobtrusive but flexible task manager, this just might be the one.

To-Do DeskList's interface is sleek and attractive. The program appears as an icon in the system tray, and when you're ready to create a new task, you simply right-click on the icon and select Add To-Do from the menu. The program lets you set … Read more

Better ASCII art viewer

ASCII art is the ancient variety of computer graphics and images created by typing ASCII text characters. Most users encounter ASCII art in the form of NFO files, literally, "info" files; they're text files that Windows can open and display, albeit via a cumbersome process that uses Notepad. CubicDesign's Compact NFO Viewer is a great choice for folks who just need to open and view NFO files now and again as well as those who regularly handle NFO files, too. It's not often that a new ASCII art viewer comes along!

Compact NFO Viewer certainly … Read more

Chromed downloads

Chrome users who also use JDownloader with Rapidshare and similar sites have been a step behind Firefox fans, who enjoy browser integration via FlashGot for Firefox. JDChrome is a free extension that integrates the open-source download manager with Chrome. It lets you initiate downloads, singly or in blocks, in JDownloader from the Chrome interface.

To use JDChrome, you need to have JDownloader installed, open, and running with FlashGot enabled to access downloads in Chrome. We downloaded and installed JDChrome and opened its options page in the Chrome extensions manager. The extension offers few options beyond choosing a file extension. We … Read more