This Week’s Downloads
October 24, 2006
Clich� Generator – http://www.westegg.com/cliche/ Category: Web Toy Platform: All License: Free
The first one on our list isn’t technically a download, but it can be both fun and useful. It’s a clich� finder, that lets you search for well-known (and many not so well-known) sayings, colloquialisms, and aphorisms. These could spice up your writing, or (more commonly) simply be ironically amusing. Most of these clich�s aren’t recommended for formal writing, and if you were to fill an academic paper with statements like “hotter than a nanny goat in a pepper patch” or “never place anything bigger than your ear in your elbow”, a poorer grade might result. Use with caution.
Xee – http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/xee.html Category: Image Viewer/Browser Platform: Mac OS X License: Freeware/Open Source
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Xee is a wonderful little program that acts as a replacement for the “Preview” app included with all Mac OS X machines. It is a free program that allows you to view images in a folder or several folders as an easy-to-manipulate slide-show, instantly send them to an editor of your choice, and delete or move them with user-customizable keyboard commands. If you work with large batches of photos on a regular basis, this program can be extraordinarily helpful. For those of you who work on both Macs and PCs, this software also addresses a shortcoming in the Mac OS X finder, which is that there is no good image-file viewing built-in, like there is in Windows XP, a feature many find terribly helpful when managing lots of image files.
Tabledit – http://www.tabledit.com/ Category: Music Composition Platform: Windows/Mac OS X License: Shareware
Tabledit is a shareware tablature editor for players of fretted instruments, including guitar, electric bass, banjo, mandolin, and others. It features an easy to use interface for manipulating compositions, transposing passages, finding alternate fingerings for passages, and many other useful features.
One particularly useful feature is the ability to import MIDI files and convert them to tablature. For instance, if you ever wanted to know how to play the melody of any piece of video-game music (which often have not been written up by tablature website contributors), you can load the file into this program and see the tracks as guitar fingerings.
The shareware version has some limitations, but you can get the first several bars of any piece of MIDI music without registering. For those interested in other guitar tablature editing software, also check out Guitar Pro 5 at http://www.guitar-pro.com/.
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