Freely Ten

Ten Things You Can Have for Free

Amibook is a "Free Personal Information Manager . You get a personal information manager to make your life easier, not harder. So why use a day planner that takes a course in school to learn to use? Most of us want to be able to keep our address book, keep track of the appointments and tasks we have scheduled, and send an email without worrying about spreading a virus. Amibook lets you do all that. Features: Remember what you have planned for today; Don’t miss appointments. Amibook lets you schedule appointments for any day, any week, any year. You can set alarms, so you are reminded if you do forget; Keep the contact information for friends and colleagues at the tip of your fingers; Don’t let email viruses use your computer to spread themselves. Amibook isn’t vulnerable to them. You can use Amibook’s address book to automatically start an email to send to someone at the touch of a button, or to everyone in an address book. You can access the websites in your address book or dial phone calls with a single click; Print envelopes for anyone to everyone in your address book; Have full printing capabilities. You can print out address books for the people you select, so you can put them in your paper planner. You can also print daily, weekly, or monthly calendars of your tasks and appointments. Amibook supports full print preview so you know exactly what you’ll be printing, and by using custom page sizes you can print on paper sized to your planner; Are you using another personal organizer now? Amibook will both import and export from delimited text files, which most other programs support. It also imports other Amibook databases and the Window? Address Book; Get updates when you want them. You can access our updates page from within the program at any time to see if there is an update available. If there is, just download it and install it where you currently have Amibook installed. All your settings and data are saved; Protect your privacy. With Amibook, you have the option of encrypting your database, so only those with the password can see the contents of your sensitive personal information" (OS: Windows 2000 or higher.)

The free trial version of Budget uses an interesting envelope system for money management: "Use Budget to manage your real world checking, savings, or even credit card accounts at the same time as you're managing your expense envelopes. You Balance your account, print checks, and view your checkbook register. When you get paid you will manually distribute the income to your envelopes" [PBW notes: the free trial for this program has no expiration -- certain features are disabled and documents print with watermarks until you purchase the full version, so you can use it as long as you like to see if it will work for you] (OS: Mac OS X, Windows)

DesktopModify is a "program that cheers up your desktop making it cute and unique by arranging your icons into different shapes and styles. With it you can arrange your desktop icons into 77 different shapes and styles like circles, stars, hearts and other cool shapes which truly makes your desktop original and funny to work with" (OS: Windows)

DSpeech is a "TTS (Text To Speech) program with functionality of ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) integrated. It is able to to read aloud the written text and choose the sentences to be pronounced based upon the vocal answers of the user. It is specifically designed to quickly and directly provide the functions and improved practical usefulness that are requested by this kind of program. In the meantime, the invasiveness and resource consumption is minimal" (OS: Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7)

Lightened Dream is "a journal designed for dreamers in search of lucidity. Follow its directions and you will be bending the laws of reality while getting a good night´s rest" [PBW notes that while I seriously doubt this program could even ding the laws of reality, dream journalists might find it an interesting resource/experiment] (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)

Task Coach is a "simple open source todo manager to keep track of personal tasks and todo lists. It is designed for composite tasks, and also offers effort tracking, categories, notes and more" [PBW notes: This program is free for desktop, but there's a small charge for iOS versions] (OS: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch)

Todo Plus is "a free to-do list program for Windows. Features: Easy to use — TodoPlus is designed with productivity and simplicity in mind. It is both fast and easy to manage many tasks;; Sub-tasks — You can have many levels of sub-tasks, that can be opened and closed like folders. This is a great way to break down large projects into smaller projects; Filters — Focus on your most important tasks using filters. Hide the unimportant tasks and finished tasks; Password protection — You can add a password to each file. Files are encrypted and backed up; Accessibility — Keyboard shortcuts for anything! Fast access to tools. Resizable fonts. You can use your mouse, but you don´t have to; Multiple lines per task — Tasks titles can have multiple lines of text, so you can keep everything within the task list. If you need more space, just add sub-tasks; Search for keywords — Search through large files for text/TAG´s, like : ´buy´, ´email´, ´call´, ´urgent´ or just ´*´. This way you are able to finish a group of related tasks faster; Continue your where you left off — TodoPlus remembers all your settings including window size and position, font type and size, filter settings, file history, the last opened file and edit positions; Import/Export tasks — You can import text files. You can also import/insert many tasks at the same time in TodoPlus if you want to copy a checklist from a website, a text edition or an email etc. Use HTML-Previews to be able to transferred your to-do list to other software like text editors, email software, calendars and website editors" (OS: Designer notes: "Cross-platform — TodoPlus is released for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, and you can share the same files between the two")

Ultimate Calendar is a "free, easy to use calendar with rich features and settings. Features: Calendar for any year from 1 to 9999-th in table and list; Common and personal dates differing by sets and groups; Movable, cyclical, periodical, particular dates; Internal editor for easy work with dates sets; Two view modes: Whole year and Monthly; Popup window which contains the list of nearest events and displayed when the mouse hovers over the tray icon; Tracking change of day; Options «Autostart on system startup», «Hide to tray on minimize», *new* «Run only one copy», *new* «Always on top»; Plugins support. Distribution includes the following plugins: ◦Sun and Moon. Displays, in accordance with the selected geographic location, the time of rise and set of Sun and Moon, the duration of the solar and lunar day, the current phase of the Moon ◦Julian dates. Displays the date on the Julian calendar (old style), Julian Day and Modified Julian Day; Displaying schemes support; Export to Microsoft Excel and formats BMP, RTF, TXT; Multilingual interface and Unicode support; Contains predefined dates sets with holidays and events for Armenia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, USA" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)

Viva Start Menu's designer notes: "In Windows 8, Microsoft has replaced the Start Menu with a new Start Screen filled with flashy "Live Tiles." The new interface is cool and has a wow-factor, but not everyone is ready to get rid of the start menu. Viva Start Menu gives you the power to restore the start menu on Windows 8. We also include a shortcut to the Live Tiles modern desktop and lots of options to customize your start menu experience" (OS: Windows 8)

X Sticky Notes is a "simple, effective, useful and user-friendly sticky notes & reminder for windows. It expands the meaning of sticky note with many features: You can let notes stay on top always, or pin notes to desktop, notes always show even pressed Win+D; You can hide your note by dragging it to any edge of your screen, When the cursor touches the hiding note´s border, it will show again; You can stick note to window or program, for e.g. document or web page; You can copy & paste anything into note; You can drag & drop files(documents, programs, pictures), folders as note´s attachments. The attachment can place anywhere in your texts, double-click to open it; You can set reminder by day, week, month, etc.; and you can save and backup all your important notes" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7/8 [32-Bit/64-Bit])