Cool Apps & Tools

Few freeware apps which make life better

SnagIt Screen Capture Utility – While Microsoft Windows does offer a Prt Sc (Print Screen) key it is fairly complicated and painful to capture the screens with the ‘Prt Sc’ key. A solution to this problem is offered by Windows Vista through a nice screen-capture utility SnagIt. SnagIt enables users to capture selections, full screens, active window. Not only that you can also capture videos and record desktop movements and save them as .avi file. SnagIt also allows you to take timed screen captures meaning you can configure SnagIt to take screen-shots at pre-defined time intervals like every 5 seconds, 10 seconds or so on.

Cayra.net & Bubbl.us – Mindmapping software is a great utility to share your thoughts in a professional environment. Mindmapping tools ensure faster and smoother collaboration 🙂 There is the famous old saying having your thoughts in mind is one thing and putting them on paper is another. MindMaps allow you to do just that in a cool way 🙂

MindJet’s MindManager software is the best tool around but it comes at a cost.

However, there are two popular freeware alternatives:

• Cayra.net which is desktop app that runs on Windows XP or Vista
• Bubbl.us an online mapping service

GreatNews RSS Reader – With the evolution of RSS and Atom plenty of feed readers have been developed. There has always been a big debate over which feed reading method is the best? (desktop, web-based, mobile,email.. )

For desktop users GreatNews is an intelligent option as it offers its users multiple views to read feeds.. there is the Newspaper view, Firefox Sage view and several other options. Bloglines users can sync their feeds with GreatNews and you can always export your feeds as an OPML file 🙂 Pretty smart utility to have.