You usually have to open the document or program window on the computer before you can start adding new log entries or editing old ones. And that’s one of the things that Anuran changes. The program has been designed to display the log window automatically on the screen. The default interval is set to 30 minutes with options to change the value to a different one in the program options.

Two manual options are available to bring the log window to the front. You can first double-click on the program icon in the system tray or configure a shortcut in the program options for that purpose.

The log remains on top until you submit your entry with a tap on the return key on the keyboard. The Ctrl-Enter shortcut adds a new line to the log, with the option to reverse the behavior in the program settings (so that enter moves the cursor to a new line, and Ctrl-Enter submits it).

While we are at it, the program is highly customizable. From setting up hotkeys for all important features to defining the log entry timestamp format or popup behavior.

The main program window displays all log files available along with the entries that they contain. Logs can be exported into csv or text files, opened in Notepad and searched using the built-in search form.

Take a look at this screencast for a visual program walkthrough.

Keep in mind that the data that you enter into the log is saved in plain text format. This means that anyone with access to the user account or hard drive the data is stored on can access it. One way to overcome this limitation is to save the logs in an encrypted container, for instance with the help of True Crypt.

Interested users can download the portable software from the Donation Coder website. The program is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

A total of 34 applications have been released this year, of which the majority has been released for the Windows operating system, and some for Android smartphones.

Here is a selection of applications and a short description about each. We have already reviewed some of the applications in December, if that is the case links pointing to the reviews have been added.

You can download all applications from the official announcement over at the Donation Coder website.

• Ethervane Echo – A clipboard alternative for the Windows operating system that improves the functionality of the clipboard feature significantly.
• Web Link Captor – Create link collections based on words or links that you enter into the program and customization options It is an easy way to create link lists.
• Tell When Done – Monitors application load and displays notifications when the load drops. This is taken as a sign that a process has been completed.
• Image Grid – Join multiple images into a single image.
• Qatapult – This is a lightweight shortcut driven keyboard launcher for the Windows operating system.
• RecursiView – Image Viewer that lets you view all images in folders and subfolders at the same time.
• PinPics – Checks a folder for geotagged photos and displays them all on a map.
• Paste Like Text – Adds multiple text pasting options to the operating system.
• MPH (Media Player Hotkeys) – Enables global hotkeys for many media players that would not support them otherwise.
• Stick a Note – Attach notes to program windows, useful to add notifications or important information that way.
• GotSpace – Portable program that displays storage information for every connected hard drive and storage device.
• Portable Extension Warlock – Lets you assign file extensions to portable applications or applications that are the default handler for that particular file extension.
• MPQ Screensaver Builder – This one can be used to create photo screensavers that can easily be distributed to other PCs.

Those are just a few of the programs and applications that have been released for the event. I suggest you head over to the Donation Coder website to check out all the applications that have been released.

Some media players support global hotkeys either by mapping global hotkeys or by supporting media keyboards that ship with keys to play, pause or skip media.

Media Player Hotkeys (MPH) is a free portable software by Donation Coder member Skwire that adds hotkey support for a variety of media players.

The program supports more than 20 different media players, including Winamp, Windows Media Player, Foobar, AIMP or Media Player Classic.

The supported players page lists all player names, process names and compatibility information. The information indicates if certain commands are not supported by the selected player.

New hotkeys are created in the Hotkeys tab. Start by selecting an action from the pulldown menu at the top. Available actions that can be mapped are play, pause, stop, previous, next, volume up, volume down, mute, show / hide player, and show popup menu.

The Add hotkey button opens a configuration menu where the selected action can be mapped to a global hotkey. Available for selection are modifiers, standard keyboard keys but also special keys only found on some keyboards.

The new hotkey is displayed in the program window afterwards. Please note that hotkeys control all supported applications. The order there determines the application the hotkey is submitted to.

Hotkeys are functional right after they have been created, and for as long as the program is running in the background. Please note that configuration information are saved in the same folder the program is started from.

Media Player Hotkeys is a great lightweight program for Windows users who’d like to use global hotkeys when playing media on their system.

The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

SFV Ninja is a portable software for Windows that can be used to calculate and display checksums of files that are accessible on the system. When you first start the program you have options to load individual files or files of a folder into the application. Users who have already worked with the program before can alternatively load a single checksum file or make the application crawl a folder for multiple checksum files to re-verify the data.

You can verify all files right away with a click on the Verify all files button. You may alternatively switch from the default CRC32 mode to MD5 or Sha-1 mode if those are preferred.

It may take some time to verify all files. The program managed to test 10 to 20 files per second on my test system. Each checksum is then displayed next to the program’s name and size in the interface. The information can be saved in sfv files which can be loaded again into the software to verify that the files have not been modified in the meantime.

Information that get saved include the file name and path, size and the checksum that has been calculated. When you load the sfv file into the application, you can re-verify all files again and compare the old and new checksum of each file with each other.

This can be handy to make sure that files in a specific directory have not been modified in the meantime, or to get a list of modified files in a directory. You can for instance use it to verify all files on a USB key, in a development directory or a shared network drive.

SFV Ninja is a portable software that is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Yo can download the latest version from the developer’s website.

Clipboard Help+Spell is a Donation Coder application. This means that it is free for personal use and well designed. The program might intimidate inexperienced users as it offers a wealth of features and options.

The basics however remain the same. Windows users can still use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v, or the right-click menu items, to copy and paste items to the clipboard. Clipboard Help+Spell remembers all items that get copied to the Clipboard, unlike the Windows Clipboard which flushes out the old entry once a new is stored.

The new shortcut Ctrl-Alt-q displays a selection menu to paste a previous clipboard entry into the current application.

The last items saved to the clipboard are displayed on top. But Clipboard Help+Spell does not stop there. Lets take a look at the other options of the menu.

• Favorite Clips – It is possible to create permanent entries, like contact information, signature or a sentence that are often used.
• Time / Date TextClips – Paste various time and date formats into the active application
• Stack Operations – The stack system can be used to copy multiple items to one stack, to paste them at once after the copy operation into another application.
• Formatting Presets – Change the text formatting, for instance dashes to tabs or trim line break.
• All Clips – Displays all clipboard entries.

The main program window is customizable. It displays a tree structure on the left side, the selected contents on the right and a log at the bottom.

Here it is possible to modify specific clipboard entries. The entries can be modified manually which works the same way as in a plain text editor like Notepad. There are also options to spell check or change the format or case of the selected text.

New entries can be created in all available groups, for instance in the favorites which become then permanently available in the selection menu.

A search filter at the bottom can be used to find specific entries quickly. Other options include deleting clips or sending them to the printer.

Clipboard Help and Spell supports Virtual Folders. Two are configured by default with options to add custom ones to the mix. The program will automatically put all web addresses and images into those two virtual folders, completely independent from the actual clipboard entry.

This is great if you want to look-up an url quickly without going through all clipboard items to find it. Virtual folders tap right into the program database. The help file offers some configuration instructions.

The program ships with loads of options. From configuring different hotkeys to trigger the clipboard functionality over backup and maintenance to the layout and design of the Quick Paste menu.

Clipboard Help+Spell is a well designed clipboard manager for the Windows operating system. Interested users can download it from the program page over at the Donation Coder website. The software supports 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the operating system.

There is a video tutorial available which explains the basics and advanced features.

Video 2 MP3 is a free software program by Skwire that comes without an interface. Well, that’s not entirely correct, but it comes without an interface that you can use to convert videos to mp3 format. You can however execute the program to see instructions on how to use it.

Here is how it works. You can convert video files by dragging and dropping them onto the Video 2 Mp3 executable. The program is a portable program which means you can unpack it to any location and use it from there without installation.

When you drag and drop a video file onto the program executable, you will notice that an mp3 file of the same name is created automatically in the program directory.

The cursor highlights the conversion and will return to the standard cursor once the conversion has been completed. The length of the video has a direct impact on the time it takes to convert the mp3 file. The mp3 file will always use a quality setting of 160 Kbps with no option to change it in a configuration file.

The program supports several video formats including mpg, avi and wmv. It is said to be compatible with flv files as well but I could not get the program to convert these into mp3 formats on a 64-bit Windows 7 system. It tried several from different sources and all failed to convert.

It is possible to convert multiple video files at once to mp3 by dragging and dropping them all on the program executable. Video 2 Mp3 will process them one after the other until the conversion queue is empty.

Options to change the audio quality settings are missing from the program, which could convince some users to use other video to mp3 converters instead that offer audio quality settings. Conversions with Video 2 Mp3 are fast and the process itself is comfortable and uncomplicated.

Interested Windows users can download the latest version of Video 2 Mp3 from Skwire’s Empire at DCmembers.

They have recently switched servers to keep up with the growing demands, not only because their software has become popular in recent years, but also because of the growing community and project hosting opportunities.

Jesse just mailed be that they are holding a fundraiser throughout March to raise enough money to keep the website and services going. The goal is to get at least $6000 for the year to come to cover server costs and other expenses that are website or Donationcoder related.

Donations have almost crossed the $3000 mark which means that the team has almost the full month to get the other half of the money. Jesse let me know that it is not just money that users can donate, they accept all kind of things, from gold bars to oil paintings, knitted cat socks to postcards with words of support.

Even better, every donator is included in a drawing at the end of the month with the chance to win some very interesting, and unique, prices. This includes software, hardware and a unique opportunity to get free coding time from Jesse, and maybe some other Donationcoder programmers. The winner could ask the guys to create a custom software (for which he will receive all rights), or improve an existing Donation Coder application.

I suggest you take a look at the fundraising site over at Donation Coder. Even if you do not or can’t donate you can give the guys support that they need and deserve.

It’s mouser from DonationCoder.com speaking to you here. Martin has graciously invited me to make a guest post on ghacks about the latest event on the DonationCoder site, and I’m thrilled to be able to speak directly to the vast ghacks empire :)

Today we posted the results of our annual freeware celebration called NANY 2011 (that stands for “New Apps for the New Year”).

It’s an event where we invite all the coders who hang out on the DonationCoder.com forum and website to try to release a new freeware application at the beginning of the new year. Some of the coders even discovered us from ghacks(!). Over 34 new applications and web services have now been released, and we’ve posted a video screencast of each one.

Some of the entries include:

• JottiQ – Batch queuing utility for Jotti.org’s multi-engine malware scan website.
• AskApic – Web community service for posting images and asking questions about them.
• Webcam Video Diary – For recording and annotating videos/snapshots throughout the day.
• Quick Cliq – Windows productivity tool with multiple clipboards, hotkeys and gestures.
• Cautomaton – Commandline invocation of Windows right-click shell context menus items on files.
• UserQuotes – Web service for collaborative management of quotes/reviews about your products.
• SnapDb – Portable minimalist flat-file database application that can be distributed with data.

But there are many more. The page for all the even is here:

I hope you will stop by and check out the videos and new applications — and maybe see if one of them is useful to you. If you have a feature request, post it on our forum. And if you are a coder, think about joining us in next year’s NANY event!

Thank you!
-jesse (mouser from donationcoder.com)

The free application can download the first bytes of a selected file from the Internet so that the local user can preview the file without downloading all of it.

That’s obviously only going to work if the file can be previewed if it is not fully on the computer. That works for videos very well, but not at all for archives or files that require all data to be present before they can be displayed or loaded.

Lets get back to the 100 Megabyte video that someone posted that you want to take a sneak peak at. With Partial Download you would use the command

"partial download" target url

to do that. To download the video example.avi from Ghacks’ root directory you would use the command “partial download” http://www.ghacks.net/example.avi

Partial Download downloads 1.5 Megabytes of the selected file by default. This value can be changed to another size by adding the new size in bytes at the end of the command, for instance 150000 for 150 Kilobytes.

Users do need a program that can play or display incomplete files on the system. Many video players can play incomplete videos, VLC or MPlayer variants can do that for instance.

Partial Download is a handy portable tool for users who want to download part of a file to preview it on their computer. The program could do with a gui or browser and email client integration to make that process more comfortable.

The software has been released as part of Donation Coder’s Nany 2011 challenge. Download and additional information are provided at the project website at Google Sites.

Most laptops come with programs that offer to change the display screen brightness, but many of those programs are everything but lightweight, and some seem to have been developed a long time ago.

DimScreen is a portable alternative by Donation Coder’s busiest member Skrommel.

The application, like all of Skrommel’s apps, has been created with Autohotkey, which sometimes is recognized as malware by antivirus software.

The program provides screen dimming options via hotkey and the system tray. The hotkeys Ctrl+ and Ctrl- on the main keyboard decrease or increase the screen brightness respectively.

Main keyboard in this regard means that the keys do not work on the numpad, which is understandable since most notebooks come without it.

Users who prefer to use the mouse to change the display screen brightness can instead locate the icon in the Windows system tray to adjust it.

A right-click on the icon and the selection of a screen brightness percentage from 0% to 100% adjusts the brightness of the screen immediately.

display screen brightness

A value of 0% means a screen brightness level of 100%, a value of 60% a brightness of 40% and so on.

DimScreen is an unobtrusive program for the Windows operating system, that is especially helpful for mobile users who want a lightweight program for changing the display screen brightness.

Dad’s Around is a portable boss key solution for the Windows operating system. It has been created as part of Donation Coder’s NANY 2009 challenge, a year end’s coding challenge.

The name implies that it has been designed for children or young adults who do not want their parents to see what they are doing on the computer. The application however can also be used by parents, or in work related environments, to quickly hide programs and windows.

Dad’s Around offers four main features that can be enabled or disabled individually in the program’s options.

dads around

The application can minimize all windows, kill the foreground process, show a black screen, and silence wave audio.

A right-click on the program icon in the Windows system tray and the selection of Options reveals those preferences.

All features that are enabled can be triggered by pressing the hotkey. The standard hotkey is set to Windows-z, the options contain a preference to change the hotkey to another key combination.

If the black screen is selected, pressing the boss key will blacken the screen. The ESC key will return to the normal system state that displays all open windows, programs, icons and background image.

This aids the user in keeping an eye on files that grow over time. Examples are log files, mailboxes or caches.

Users can add files in several ways. It is possible to pick individual files using the file browser or by selecting a folder instead. All files of the selected folder are added to the list of monitored files then automatically.

size matters

All files are listed with their file name, path, size in Bytes, Kilobytes, Megabytes and Gigabytes. The list view can be sorted by clicking on the header of each column, that way it is possible to display the biggest culprits directly.

Size Matters can be configured to automatically refresh the listing every x minutes. Selected rows can be exported into a csv file to work with the information in another program or store them as backup.

The application currently has a few shortcomings. It for instance does not have an option to react on file size changes. This could be something as simple as playing an alarm sound to advanced features like running external programs.

Size Matters does not update the list with new files that are added in folders that have been previously added to the program. This makes it impossible to monitor a download folder for instance, as the program fails to add the new files to the list.

This option could be combined with the ability to set rules for folders, like setting a maximum size limit for a folder, again with alarms that go off if the limit is reached.

Size Matters has been created by a Donation Coder member, you can visit the initial forum thread here or visit the developer’s website directly to download the software.

The results of this year’s New Apps for a New Year are with 23 coders having created 26 different applications. The contributions include online and offline applications and even some games which means that it is likely that people who visit the results page will find some applications they like.

A special treat in this year is the introduction of short video screencasts that review the application. The screencasts give a better overview of each application than text or images can.

Here are our favorites out of the 26 applications:

Anuran a simple but effective personal text log that supports hotkeys, reminders, filtered searches and archiving functionality.

Subdiv is a portable software program that can sort files in a directory structure into folders based on their creation date. This is for instance useful to better organize download folders or other folders that are filled with lots of files.

Page Countster was already featured at Ghacks a while ago. It is a printer management and inventory software which provides a quick overview of the printers in a computer network.

Those are just three of the applications that have been released. Screencasts have been created for all major releases of the coding challenge and they are usually a good way of getting to know an application after reading the short introduction and before opening the application’s profile page at the Donation Coder website.

The highly configurable software will create a report that contains printer IP addresses, mac addresses, host names, printer models, serial numbers, the total page count and color count as well as printer ink levels.

Each scan begins with the selection of the starting and ending network IP address and subnet mask as well as the SNMP community name.

Results can be saved in csv files or emailed to a specific email address. One of the interesting options of the printer management software is the ability to edit various printer information including a printer’s serial number (HP printers only), total page count, color page count and host name. Another great feature is the ability to send a test page to any network printer without needing a driver.

Page Countster is a portable software program for the Windows operating system that can come in very handy to create a printer inventory report with several additional printer management features.

It can be downloaded directly from the Donation Coder website.

The basic guidelines are as following:

• Pledge that you are participating on our forum well before the New Year — post a teaser about what you plan to create.
• Release the application on or before 31st December 2009 (we’ll be posting a roundup article about all the entries on Dec 31st).
• Any type of application is acceptable: Windows, Linux, Mac, Web, iPhone, Android, Script, Plugin, etc.
• It must be free (or donationware) for personal use.
• It needs to be something that hasn’t been released publicly before November 2009 (updates to existing programs don’t qualify).
• You keep all the rights to and control of your software, this is just an event to encourage coders to release new free tools.

Last year’s event saw over 30 applications submitted for the event and the Donation Coder’s want to top it this year by reaching out to some technology blogs.

If you are a coder you might want to consider taking part in the NANY challenge. You can read the thorough introduction over at the Donation Coder website which contains information and links to everything that needs to be known about the challenge. It would be nice to see a regular Ghacks visitor take the challenge by storm this year. So, if you have some time and a nice idea you might want to consider heading over right now. There is even a program idea suggestions thread in case you want to participate but are out of coding ideas at the moment.

We will be monitoring the event closely and review the most interesting applications that are produced by the participating coders.

There are however a few problems related to cover art compatibility. Some media players, like Apple’s iTunes for instance, have the ability to add covert art. This is however done in a way that makes it impossible for other music players to access that cover art.

And then there are different locations where cover art can be saved, namely in tags or as separate images in the music folder.

CovArt Ops is a portable software from our friends over at Donation Coder. The software can be used to check an entire folder (and subfolders) of music for cover art.

The scan does not take long and CovArt Ops will display various information about each album that was discovered during the scan including if cover art is included in the album, the type of cover art (folder image or tag), the resolution of that image and the path on the local computer system. The program can also display the cover art if available.

The program can be used to sort a music collection so that all albums without cover art become visible in the interface. The information (all or selected rows) that have been gathered during the scan can be exported in a csv file which makes the processing easier.

CovArt Ops does not have an option to download cover art. Is is therefor only possible to use the information that it presents to find the missing cover art. It can be a very helpful program for users who want to update their music collection manually instead of using a software program to automatically download cover art like the previously reviewed Album Art Downloader.

Covart Ops is available at the Donation Coder forum. It should be compatible with most versions of Microsoft Windows. Worked fine on our Windows 7 Pro test system.

Groups can consist of radioboxes or checkboxes. Only one paragraph can be selected per group if radioboxes are selected while checkboxes allow the selection of multiple paragraphs.

The example above consists of three groups with two of the groups using radioboxes and one checkboxes. Here is what Mouser has to say about his program:

The Form Letter Machine is a program that will help you to write letters and emails by mixing and matching from pre-written paragraphs.

It’s useful for people who regularly need to send out emails which include different components in different circumstances. For example if you field technical support requests, or if you need to reply to various inquiries, etc.

It enables you to assemble text from multiple paragraphs, each one customized for a specific type of inquiry or response. You can build your own configurations using checkboxes and radioboxes and nested groups, and then easily write new letters or respond to inquiries by checking off the components you want to include. A real-time preview allows you to view the message as it is composed. The program also supports user defined variables, which allows you to quickly personalize the template with a name or other data that is specific to the task. The text is then copied to the clipboard and can be used in your e-mail program or word processor.

One interesting option is the use of variables in texts (for names and other parameters that might change). Variables can be easily defined in the interface and filled with values which appear instantly in the text.

Mouser has created a website for the program which is a repository for user generated form letters that can be used in the software program. The Form Letter Machine is available for download at the Donation Coder website.

Multi Monitor Manager is a lightweight portable solution to control multiple monitors that are connected to a computer system from the main system. The software program will immediately display the screens of all connected computer monitors with the option to interact with each of them using the computer mouse and keyboard.

A click on a computer monitor window makes it possible to interact with the elements that are displayed on the computer screen. It is possible to resize the screen for better access. This is recommended as the default window size is rather smallish. Everything that can be done directly on a computer system with the mouse and computer keyboard can also be done using the Multi Monitor software. This includes opening and closing programs, typing text, launching commands or taking screenshots.

The multi monitor manager uses mostly cpu resources while running but barely any computer memory. Users who operate computer systems with multiple monitors might want to check out the portable software program. It was developed by Skrommel who is a member of Donation Coder. It can be downloaded directly using this link.

Trout can be downloaded as a portable version or installer. It supports a wide variety of audio formats including mp3, ogg, wma, flac and others. Music can be loaded by dragging and dropping files or folders into the interface or by using the menu toolbar at the top. All audio files that have been loaded into the player are displayed in the playlist area in the lower half. This area contains not only information about the names of the songs but also information about bitrates, sizes, artist and album tags and more.

Songs can be sorted by clicking on one of the columns. It is for example possible to sort by album, artist, playing time or filename. Trout offers a set of features that many expect from today’s music players. This includes support for Internet radio streams, freeDB support for audio CDs, compatibility with most tag formats and tag editing, hotkeys, lyrics, album covers or various play modes. Track announcements are another interesting feature that are great when listening to audiobooks.

The minimized music player needs less than 3 Megabytes of computer memory while playing and therefor ideal for low end computer systems. The free music player Trout is compatible with all Microsoft operating systems from Windows 9x on including Windows XP and Windows Vista. It can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website.

Active Hotkeys is a lightweight computer software program for the Windows operating system that can display all active hotkeys of a computer system. It does so by testing all possible combinations. The main interface offers two selectors on the left side. The first is called modifiers and is a selection of Alt, Windows, Ctrl and Shift combinations that can be selected. It is possible to test all combinations or only selected ones. Selecting only the Windows modifier will only check the selected keys in combination with the Windows key but not Alt, Ctrl or Shift.

The second group are key groups. This ranges from alphabetical over numbers to functional keys and punctuation. It is again possible to select some or all of these key groups. A user selecting all modifiers and all key groups would test all possible Windows hotkey combinations on his computer system. A right click on one of the two selection groups displays quick selection possibilities, e.g. checking all items, or only two-key modifiers.

The program will then test the selected combinations and display all results in the main window.

The results list can be sorted by various parameters including modifier, key, active state and others. The program cannot tell which application registered the key as Windows does not provide these information. Active Hotkeys is a portable software for the Windows operating system that has been published at the Donation Coder forum.