Windows only Are you looking for a light-weight screenshot utility that does only what you need it to? LightShot is about as resource-friendly as you'll find considering it uses a mere 2MB of memory while running. With it you'll be able to select an area of the screen you want to snap for your screenshot, and then choose from a variety of actions:
The Reader addition in Safari made it easier to read articles on websites, but that feature isn't unique to Safari. Most other browsers offer a similar option through the use of extensions, and one of my favorites is iReader for Chrome and for Firefox.
Windows only Wouldn't it be nice if you could see a larger preview of an image without having to actually open the photo? That's exactly what FastPreview does, and it does a pretty awesome job of it. All you have to do is right-click on the image file and a larger preview will be shown right there in the context menu.
Windows only A couple months ago I wrote about an app that could be used to download songs from Grooveshark, but it was limited to songs you searched for one-by-one or songs that are on Grooveshark's "Most Popular" list. The free SciLor's Grooveshark Downloader can do all of that as well, but it also has a some other awesome features.
Windows; Mac; Linux When I've had to compare two files in the past I've always used the free WinMerge. There is no arguing that this is an awesome free app, but there is one feature it has always lacked that the developers say they won't add. That feature is a way to view only the lines that are different between two text files. Here is what the WinMerge FAQs say:
Windows; Linux Areca Backup is one of the few backup utilities that I've seen that runs on both Windows and Linux operating systems. Like most backup utilities you can choose what files you want to backup and where you want to send them to, which includes backing up the files to an FTP/SFTP server. You can also have the the backup zipped to help save some space.
Windows only Students these days have a lot of resources available at their disposal thanks to the Internet. In fact there is so much out there that most students will never even use a lot of the tools available, and a good example of that is Microsoft Mathematics.
Windows only There are some times where it would be nice to reset important registry values and services back to their default state. With RefreshPC you can do exactly that. They don't list out exactly what changes are made, but there are over 300 registry settings and services that will revert back to their original state.
Mac onlyI love the way Microsoft integrated the quick window resizing in Windows 7, and so I started looking around for something similar on the Mac since I frequently work with two windows side-by-side. Not only did I find an app, Moom, for my Mac that would let me resize my windows, but it also blew away any expectations I had for such a utility.
Windows only I use PDF printers quite a bit since I've grown accustomed to having the feature built-in on my Mac. In order to do this on a Windows machine you'll need a third-party application, and there are quite a few that you can choose from. Most of them all do the same thing, but we came across one recently that we liked.
Windows only There are a lot of apps out there that will calculate hashes for popular formats such as MD5, SHA1, and CR32. Some of them try to conveniently integrate into Windows Explorer so that you can just right-click on a file and view the hash, but very few apps have an option where they can recursively crawl through an entire folder and record the hash for each file it comes across.
Windows only I've seen a bunch of different apps that add buttons to the title bar of your windows, but I think Chameleon Window Manager may be the one that has all the right actions.
Windows only Have you ever been working on something only to have another app try and abruptly shutdown or restart your computer? If that sounds like something you've encountered before I recommend taking a look at ShutdownGuard.
Wikipedia is definitely one of the sites I access the most, and most of the time it is just to quickly look up something I know they'll have on there. If I'm reading an article on another site I hate having to open a new tab just to search for something on Wikipedia, and that is where the Wikipedia Companion for Google Chrome comes in.
Windows only The interface for managing the default "open with" programs in Windows isn't the best, and in the past we've recommended utilities that make managing the default apps a little easier.
One of the things Microsoft added to Windows 7 is Search Connectors, which gives users the ability to search sites and view the results directly in Windows Explorer. It probably isn't something that everyone will use, but I can see it being useful in certain scenarios.
Windows only It is a dream to think that there could be just one program that can view all of your different types of files, but Free Opener is getting darn close. It currently supports over 70 different files ranging from videos all the way to Office documents and compressed files (ZIP and 7Z).
Windows only Sometimes all it takes to make a great application is to develop a simple program that users clearly know whether it is something they will want to use. Taskbar Hider is that app.
Windows; Mac; Linux Many of you have likely heard of Amarok which is a popular cross-platform music player, and Clementine is a cross platform player that is benefiting from its open source nature. To me it has a clean interface the features people are looking for, such as iPhone syncing.
Windows; Mac There are a multitude of screenshot utilities out there, but the nice thing with Puush is that it really only focuses on one thing: sharing screenshots. This is your kind of app if you're the type of person that merely snaps a screenshot and immediately sends it to someone.
