Quitter: Who says quitters never prosper?

Quitter is a "quiet little Twitter client".  It's extremely interesting, because you can read tweets, send tweets, and pretty much have the entire functionality of Twitter.....right in your command line. Yes, it's a command line program.


READ:
-Read all: Read an aggregate of  tweets from every user that you're following.
-Read groups: Read tweets only from users in a certain group. (Read on to find what a group is.)
-Read from user: You can scroll through the users you are subscribed to and pick one to read their tweets.
-Read mentioned: Read tweets where you are mentioned, ie, @Freewarewire.

DIRECT MESSAGES:
-Read: Yesh.
-Send: You can also send a direct message to any user (even one you're not following). Just be sure you type the username correctly.


ACTIONS:
-Post a tweet: Self explanatory. Type in a tweet, and it will get posted to your profile.
-Reply: You can also reply to a tweet, or reply to a direct message.
-Retweet: You also have the ability to retweet someone else's tweet, but it's a little more difficult, since you just scroll through the tweets using the arrow keys
-Open link: If a tweet contains a link, you can choose to open it your web browser. But again, it requires the arrow keys, so it can be a bit difficult to find the tweet you're looking for.


Quite a bit of functionality, for such a "quiet" program. Plus, there's even more.

Color changing.
Unfortunately, you can't change the background color (within Quitter. However, I believe Quitter follows the Windows command line protocol, so you can make a batch file, but that gets a little complicated.) But you can change the text color, and the highlight color. What's highlighting? Glad you asked...

Filtering/Highlighting.
On top of being a "normal" Twitter client, Quitter also lets you sort incoming messages. Filtering allows you to block certain messages, and Highlighting highlights certain messages. You can use the following three types for either:
-hashtags (ex: #hashtag)
-usernames (ex: @username)
-word (ex: "shareware")
If you filter any of the above, they will not be shown in Twitter. If you Highlight them, they will be changed to the "Highlight color", making them stand out.

Grouping.
On top of everything else, you can also divide who you follow into groups. The reasoning? Because you can also get tweets from one specific group.

Number of tweets.
You can also change how many tweets are displayed on the screen. The default is 20 (which currently fills my screen from top to bottom) but the max is 200 (which would be massive!)

URL shortening service.
Quitter also lets you set what service you want to use when you post a tweet.

Over-post in red.
Twitter limits it to 140 characters per tweet, and Quitter knows that. When posting a tweet, anything beyond 140 characters will be in red text. You can still tweet it, but the red will get cut off.

Download updates.
Not only can Quitter check for updates every time it starts, it can also download the update straight to the Quitter folder. It won't install it for you, but all you have to do is open the ZIP file and extract the new version of Quitter over the old one.

Really, it's great little app, even for someone who doesn't use Twitter that much (ie, me). There are a few things you should know about it though.
1. Can't read own tweets (in version 1.2).
I'm not vain, I just wish this was an option. It really would be nice. Especially if you think you misspelled something or whatnot.
2. No need to Enter.
If you've ever used command line files, you know that you type something, then press "Enter", and it submits the data to the program. In Quitter, it submits the data as soon as you press a key, meaning you don't have to press "Enter" after. It's actually very nice because it lets you browse the menus much faster, but it does take some getting used to.
3. Needs .NET framework (2.0).
Yes, it does need the Microsoft .NET framework, so that makes me consider it not portable. Don't get me wrong, it can be put on a flash drive and taken anywhere, it just might not work on all computers.

One more thing that I need to add about  Quitter is that it's development has been abandoned, meaning the author has decided to move on to other programs. That doesn't mean that Quitter is not awesome or will not work, it just means that it's going to stay where it is.

If you don't mind the command line, it's a wonderful little app. It's only ~300kb in size, but it does require a hefty amount of RAM for what it does (15MB on my current machine). It is open source, and is promised to stay that way. If you like simplicity with functionality, Quitter is for you.

Visit Quitter (Disintegrator Software) website for download

Folding@home: Ask not what freeware can do for you....

Freeware can be really handy. Just browsing the freeware on this little site can show you that. It's just downright helpful. Checking e-mails, browsing the web, chatting with friends, writing work documents, listening to music, organizing wedding photos, you name it. Freeware helps in many areas of life. But who helps freeware?

Folding@home is a very interesting idea created by Pande Lab at Stanford University as a way to help us understand the "art" of protein folding. Proteins do what is called "folding," essentially changing form and purpose in the time span of a microsecond, and understanding how and why they do this could help us find the cures to many diseases, and help us better understand our own psychological structure. (That's just my understanding of it.)

You might think that a supercomputer is the best way to get this done, but that's actually not the case. The best way to virtually fold the maximum amount of proteins is to actually have it spread out on a ton of computers, all over the world. What better way than to do it in our households? "Folding@home" is a computer program that simulates how a protein will fold, and does so "at home" on all types of computers. It uses the host computer's processor to fold a specific protein, then sends that data back to "headquarters" (Stanford).

You may be a little skeptical, but Folding@home really does produce results. All you have to do is install it, set it up (just a little configuration), and add it to run on startup, and you'll forget it's running. I've run it on multiple computers over the years, and I've never seen a decrease in performance when it's running. You can set the priority and even make it stop if you switch to battery (for laptops) so it doesn't eat up your battery life. Overall, it doesn't require anything of the user, and helps so much. Why not start folding?

Also, as a bit of an incentive, you can also keep track of how much you've folded. You can register a username and even join a team, and you can compare your "work load" with others in your team, or even compare your team with other teams. In fact, there's actually a FreewareWire Folding@home team, in case anyone wants to join. To join a team, just type the team number, (for example, 174576 for the FreewareWire team) into the "Configuration" window of your F@h client, right below your username, and bam, you are linked in to that team. But don't feel pressure to join the FW team. There are plenty of teams out there, from a Google team to Duncan's (mobilephone2003 of Youtube) team (whom I must mention, since he's the one who first introduced me to F@h). Just pick whatever team you want, and fold away. Or don't even choose a team, if you don't want. Just start folding, somehow.

With so little cost and so much gain, why not start folding? Freeware gives a ton to us. Let's give a little back to freeware.

Visit Folding@home website for download

Advanced Diary (v1.3): Dear Journal, I love this freeware!

A while ago, I decided I wanted to pick up journaling again for the first time in who knows how many years, since it really helps unwind at the end of the day and think about what's happened, plus there's the added bonus of looking back at the entries years later. And me, being a freeware freak, decided to find a freeware to make journaling easier (plus, my handwriting is atrocious).

I came across Advanced Diary, and I was extremely surprised at just how much it was exactly what I was looking for. Here's some of the key features that I really like, in terms of a diary.

"Wordpad"-like:  I was expecting something like notepad: write down text, but not much formatting. I was wrong. Advanced Diary has it's own little "Wordpad" built in, filled with formatting like font type, font size, font color, bold, italics, underline, highlighting, alignment, "find in text", tables, hyperlinks, bullets, numberings, spellcheck, and more *GASP FOR AIR*. That's alot of features for just a diary! Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's actually more than Wordpad! It might not be as much as Microsoft Word, but it definitely has enough for a good diary.

Password protected: This is a must, in my opinion. Journals are often very personal, and you don't want people snooping around, so having a password is a necessity for a good diary program. But then, it's also an optional feature, for maybe if you are just journaling about something non-private, like your favorite sports team.

Calendar: It has a wonderful little calendar in month form, which you can browse through. What's even extra cool is that the day is bold if it has an entry, meaning you can tell at a glance what days have entries and what days don't.

"Find": This actually surprised me about how good it was. Say you remember journaling about a certain word, like "freeware", but couldn't remember what month, much less what day, you had mentioned it in. Advanced Diary has a wonderful search that will pull up every entry that has the search terms in it.

Link to other entries: This is really kewl. Say you refer to something you said last week, and you want to provide an easy way to find where you said it in your Advanced Diary journal. You can actually create a hotlink, just like to a URL, except it will take you to that Advanced Diary entry. (Keep in mind, Advanced Diary is not tabbed, so you can't multitask, but it's still a useful tool.)

Autosave: If you've ever used Google's Blogger service, you know how useful this is. You'll be typing along, your browser/internet/computer will crash, but you don't worry about typing that long post, because Blogger auto-saves the draft as you go along. Advanced Diary has the same functionality, only better. You can actually specify how often you want it to auto-save, meaning it can save every 1 minute, assuring you that no entry will ever be lost.

Images: Maybe you want to illustrate your journal with doodles or pictures. Advanced Diary can do that too. One of the nice things about it is that (I believe) it actually copies the picture data into the Advanced Diary file, not just the link to the image file. That means that if you delete the image on your hard drive, it won't dissapear out of your diary, like in some other word processors *coughOpenOfficecough*. On the downside, there aren't as many formatting features for images as there are in processors like MS Word or OpenOffice. You can't choose the wrap (how the text moves around the image) or really any other formatting, but you can adjust the alignment (just like with text) and resize.

Thesaurus: This is kind of a bonus, but you can select a word and use the built in thesaurus, which you can then use to replace the word with a synonym.

Multiple Diaries: This is an interesting feature. Suppose you want to journal, but want to keep it "separated", like maybe journal about school in one place, and then about your latest gaming venture in another, and so on and so forth. Advanced Diary actually lets you create multiple diary's in hierarchical form. For example, your diary list might look something like below:

-School

-Diet

-Private

--Friends

---Geoffrey

--Girlfriend

Overall, it's a fascinating concept. It's really a good way to further organize your entries.

Print, Backup/Restore, Import/Export:  Need I explain? I shall. You can print the current entry, all entries in the current diary, or all entries from a specified date range. You can backup for safety, and then restore if something goes awry. You can import (which is actually really picky and depends on what the files are named), and you can export in RTF, TXT, or HTML (images will actually be exported along with the HTML file!). Overall, it's a great way to get entries in and out of Advanced Diary.

It really is a wonderful utility. Some might say "It's just a glorified, organized notepad, with password protection!" And I would respond ".....so?" What more could you ask of in a Diary?

There is one catch though. Unfortunately, the makers of Advanced Diary decided that it's so good, it should be worth $30. However, the last free version available (version 1.3) is available through the ever-amazing and wonderful A+ Freeware, and can be downloaded from thus. This entire blog post was about the free v1.3, so don't think you are being cheated of any features.

Visit Advanced Diary (host site A+ Freeware) for download

PDFCreator: Printing without the printer

Sometimes you want to print something, but you don't want to use the paper. That's why there are programs called virtual printers which allows you to print whatever you want, only saving it to a file instead of actually putting ink onto paper. PDFCreator is one such program, and (as you can tell by the name) it excels in the creation of PDFs.

If you've never heard of a program like PDFCreator before, you might find it a tad odd, but trust me, virtual printer software is DEFINITELY something you want to have on your computer. Why? Well, for starters, if you've ever wanted to save something without having to use paper (say, a receipt while online shopping), you can just print it to a PDF instead. Also, PDFCreator is great if you want to "convert" anything that can be printed into the PDF format.

When you go to print something, all you have to do is select "PDF Creator" from the list instead of your hardware printer. Then, after whatever program is printing is done, it will hand the file over to PDFCreator, and you'll be prompted for a filename. Name it, click save, and you're done. It's that easy. It also has a ton of options like the ability to integrate into the shell, or make it auto-save with the date and time as a filename.

One surprising thing about PDFCreator is that it is not limited only to PDF files. Although that is the default, it can also "print" to PNG, JPG, BMP, PSD, TIFF, and several more. Another surprising thing is that PDFCreator does not just take a "snapshot" of the thing being printed. If you use a PDF reader, you probably know that on some PDFs, you have the ability to search for text, because the text is actually in the PDF. When PDFCreator prints a file, it doesn't just "flatten" it to a picture, it includes the text. So if you print a word document, you can then search through the text in the PDF you've printed. I don't use PDFs that much, but I thought that was pretty nifty.

Virtual Printers are one type of software I can't live without. The uses are endless. You can use it for anything from just creating a PDF of a letter to your cousin to taking a section of a multipage PDF by "printing" that section with PDFCreator. The only downsides are (1) it's like installing hardware so there are drivers, (2) it's not portable, since it's like installing a real printer, and (3) it's not a lite install. PDFCreator takes at least 21mb, probably a bit more including drivers. But if you can spare the space, it's totally worth it. Plus, it's even open source.

Visit PDFCreator (pdfforge) website for download

Music Animation Machine: MAM your MIDIs!

MIDI files are pretty nifty, if you think about it. Really, they are just directions that tell what to play, like sheet music for the concert pianist. You might not find that fascinating at first glance, but after seeing what MAM can do with that sheet music, you'll do a double take.

Music Animation Machien (shortened to "MAM") is a MIDI player, but it's more than that. MIDI's might be considered to be sound files, but MAM definitely makes them something more. In addition to being able to play MIDI files, it also has a visualizer, and a pretty sweet one at that. It has 12 different views you can choose, differing from the regular piano roll-esque dancing lines to views that really have music theory behind them. Either way, no matter what you choose, you can most certainly say "Pretty colors" to any of them. MAM takes a midi file and turns it into a musical screensaver.

You can change colors, show the note start lines, and choose whether the notes are colored due to pitch or by what track it is. If you choose pitch, you can set the tonic, thus changing the colors of the notes. You can also view the track by right clicking in certain views.

MAM also has a limited ability to accept MIDI input as well. For example, it has the ability for "Live play", meaning that it will create the visualization as you play on your MIDI controller. Let me be clear, though, in saying that MAM is not a MIDI editor. You can save files, but all it does is save the color preferences for later usages of MAM.

It's the niftiest MIDI player I've yet seen. The only thing that I'm kind of said about is that it doesn't have a fullscreen option. If it did, you could rig it to be your screensaver, opening a random MIDI and taking up the full screen. But alas. Anyway, one of the other things about MAM that is great is that it is very tiny, weighing in less than 1MB, and is portable.

It's really nifty. There are a ton of videos of neat works that are just played through MAM. It's fun to search around and find works you like and then toy with the color and view settings until you get a really great lightshow.

Visit Music Animation Machine website for download