PHOTO EDITORS – SCREEN CAPTURE – COLOR CHARTS – FILE CONVERTERS
Citrify - Online photo editor, lots of cool effects, touch-up and more. Works wherever Flash is supported, includes Mac OS X, Windows XP/Vista/7 and Linux.
Screenr – Screencasts made easy on Mac or PC. Nothing to install or download. Just click the “Record” button on the top of the page. Share your screencasts with everyone, including those using iPads, iPhones or other smart phones.
Capture View – CNET editors write, “Capture View is the most versatile and capable screen capture tool we’ve ever used. The fact that it’s free makes it a no-brainer; it blows the competition off the screen.”
Quick Thumbnail – Choose an image file, select some resize options, and hit Resize it. Your image will be uploaded to the server, resized and then your resized image(s) will be provided in a single convenient view. The power comes from the simultaneous generation of different sizes and the ability to enlarge your images too.
Aviary – Online creation tools: photo editing, logos, web templates, filters, color palettes, screen capture & more.
Photoscape – Fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos, create slideshows, make animated photos and more.
Pantone RGB Chart – Great for picking out colors for websites and other projects.
Design Seeds: For All Who Love Color – This is a great site, be prepared to stay a long time.
Graphics Wizard – Create headline, buy now/cart buttons, special offer and guarantee graphics. No html or graphic skills required. Our way of paying it forward and helping small business. (You may need to use (ugh) Internet Explorer if it doesn’t work for you).
PicMarkr – Add custom watermark (image or text) to your images online and free. It is useful when you need to protect your copyrights or if you want to add comments to your photos. Upload files from computer or grab them from your Flickr, Facebook or Picasa account.
Dynamic Drive Online Optimizer – Generates ten compressed images to choose from.
Web Resizer – Optimize photos for web or email. Easy to use. Crop, rotate, resize, adjust contrast, brightness, saturation, add border, convert photo to black and white.
PunyPNG – Website optimization tool that dramatically reduces the file size of your .png, .jpg and .gif images without any loss of quality (uploaded image size limit of 150kb).
Convert Files – Convert any document, archive file, spreadsheet, audio and video file from one format to another (up to 200 MB currently). Service is offered at absolutely no charge and without the need to download additional software.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Hyper Alerts – Get email reports of posts and comments on a Facebook Page. You don’t have to be an administrator of the page to get email alerts and you can have as many subscriptions as you want. You can get the alerts within minutes, or a digest every hour, day, week or month.
dlvr.it – Automatically distribute your blog to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. dlvr.it is Bit.ly friendly, offers real-time engagement stats, hooks up with any analytics system, including Google Analytics and Omniture, add hash tags automatically. Target content to your social networks based on keywords, author, tags and more.
TrueTwit Basic – Validation service for Twitter. All of your new followers are sent a validation request via direct message. If your follower successfully completes the CAPTCHA (or is already a TrueTwit user), you are sent an email indicating they are a TrueTwit-validated human!
uQR.me – Free social utility designed to share web content with the real world, letting you turn just about anything into a link: a wall, a tree, a shop window, a t-shirt, a pin, a concert poster, a wine bottle, a business card, your own body, the sky’s the limit.
Pagemodo – Facebook page designs. Add your own photos, embed video, change the fonts and text and show your products in a whole new light.
Tinychat – No installation needed. Simple video chat rooms that just work! Video chat rooms for groups! Share up to 12 broadcasts simultaneously! With text, video, and audio chat, you and your friends can connect and talk from anywhere in the world.
OFFICE – PRODUCTIVITY – MARKETING/BRAND IDENTITY
DigiSigner is a tiny tool to digitally sign PDFs and verify signatures. Use it to secure your PDF documents like invoices, contracts, etc. With DigiSigner you can design your signature appearance. You can sign PDFs on Windows and Mac.
sideCLOUDload - Send files from a url directly to “the cloud” (currently Dropbox and Email) without downloading to your computer or mobile device.
WiseSamp Email Signatures – Works with AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo. WiseStamp Email Apps enable users to bring functionality in every email they send. Check out their Apps gallery where you’ll find 14 social, fun and serious apps. This list will continue to grow, so keep checking back.
Sigwich Email Signature – Sigwich works with Outlook, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome. If you use Google Apps Gmail for business, then you are in luck, they support that also.
QRMobilize - FREE way of creating a QR code mobile landing page that links to all your social media accounts.
TAGGINN- 2D codes like QR (Quick Response) codes and Microsoft TAGs connect the world with digital marketing. They can be easily scanned by an application on a mobile phone, instantly connecting offline customers or prospects to your online contact details, website, social media profiles and so much more. You can create a campaign for your Facebook page. You need to be the page admin to create this type of campaign on this application. You can create a campaign for your Smartphone App. The phones will be detected and the users forwarded to the correct stores for their phones. For these type of campaigns, you get to see the number of views each app recieved as a result of sending users to the store via a QR Code. You can create a campaign for ordinary mobile websites. With the tracking code provided, you can learn what the user did after they viewed the intitial landing page.
GO.QR.ME - One of the best free QR code generators.
DropBox – Terrific tool for collaborating with clients! Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically. Shared folders allow several people to collaborate on the same files. Control who has access to your shared folders. Dropbox uses military-grade encryption methods to both transfer and store your data. The free Dropbox account comes with 2GB of space that you can use for as long as you like.
Foxit Reader – Free PDF document viewer and printer with incredible small size, breezing-fast launch speed and rich feature set. Foxit Reader supports Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7.
MailChimp – Get a free account for up to 2,000 subscribers (no auto-responders with free account). Though, we hope you like it so much you purchase a plan. MailChimp makes it easy to design exceptional email campaigns, share them on social networks, integrate with web services you already use, manage subscribers and track your results.
PrimoPDF Converter – Convert 300+ file types to PDF. Convert any file that prints to PDF, including Microsoft Word (DOC, DOCX), Excel (XLS, XLSX), PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX), Visio (VSD), Publisher (PUB), WordPerfect (WPD), OpenOffice, HTML, TXT, BMP, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and many more. 100% industry-standard PDF files. Easily create PDF files that can be opened in any PDF viewer, including Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and Nitro PDF Professional. Profiles include Screen, eBook, Print, Prepress, and Custom. Append PDF files. Combine each newly created PDF file into the one PDF.
OpenOffice – Leading open-source office software suite (similar to Microsoft Office) for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more.
Trello – All your projects, all your tasks, all of your team–organized, accounted for, and easily visible at a glance. You have control over board permissions. You can make a board that your company and team can see, or you can restrict it to specific people. Everything in Trello is secure. All traffic runs over SSL which encrypts all of your traffic. Trello is backed up hourly, so you’re in no danger of losing important lists or tasks.
Freecamp – Alternative to Basecamp and you can import Basecamp projects by using the API key. As always when working with web-based apps, keep a current copy of docs, etc., on your computer and backups.
emailSTRIPPER – Free program for cleaning the “>” and other formatting characters out of your emails. It will restore “forwarded” or “replied” emails back to their original state so they’re easier to read.
Inbound Writer – This is free up to 8 documents per month. Provide InboundWriter with a few words and websites that relate to the topic you are writing about. InboundWriter then scours major search engines, popular social media sites and specified competitive websites to determine words and phrases directly relevant to your topic of choice. InboundWriter then recommends the best words that will increase your content popularity and competitiveness for each specified topic. The current popularity of the recommended keywords, as determined by search or share volume, is presented in real-time to help guide your content strategy. Post final document to your website.
Google Mobile – Get Google Maps, Sync, Gmail, YouTube, Latitude, Places, Books and more for your phone.
AUDIO & VIDEO
Wavosaur – Free sound editor, audio editor, wav editor software for editing, processing and recording sounds, wav and mp3 files. Wavosaur has all the features to edit audio (cut, copy, paste, etc.) produce music loops, analyze, record, batch convert. Supports VST plugins, ASIO driver, multichannel wav files, real time effect processing. The program has no installer and doesn’t write in the registry. Use it as a free mp3 editor, for mastering, sound design. The Wavosaur freeware audio editor works on Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Format Factory – Multifunctional media converter for the nongeek.
DVDVideoSoft – Download FreeStudio for a cornucopia of terrific apps! YouTube apps, video and audio conversion and editing, image and photo, burning and ripping and more!
ExpressScribe – Professional audio player software for PC, Mac or Linux designed to assist the transcription of audio recordings.
FTW Transcriber – FREE transcription software from Tyger Valley Systems that has all the usual features you expect, plus much more! Displays business opportunities for transcribers, plays huge range of file types (it plays whatever Windows Media Player can play), plays video files (mpeg, wmv, flv, etc) with visuals displayed, plays files either on your local drive or on remote servers without downloading first, local files play instantly – no wait for loading, range of features including auto-backspace, hotkeys, speed adjuster, etc., can be used with hotkeys, Infinity USB pedal (same as Express Scribe pedal) or Olympus RS27 and RS28 pedals.
Audacity – Open source software for recording and editing sounds. Available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and other operating systems.
ANTI-VIRUS – SPAM BLOCKERS – COMPUTER OPTIMIZATION
MailWasher – The ultimate free spam blocker. Not only is MailWasher very simple to use, it quickly sorts your spam email from your good email so you get only the email you want. One of the benefits of MailWasher is it lets you view all your email on the server before it gets to your computer.
CCleaner (from Piriform for Mac and PC) – Freeware system-optimization, cleaning and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing computers to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it’s fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware! Note: We recommend UNCHECKING to delete cookies and passwords so they are not deleted.
Defraggler from the company that brought you CCleaner, now offers a free defragmentation tool. It differs from other defrag tools on the market, by enabling you to quickly and simply defrag the files you want to, without having to process the whole drive. Simply run it, select the file and defragment in seconds. No more struggling with the Windows defragmentation tool! And remember like all Piriform products, Defraggler is completely free for both corporate and individual use. Note from OTG: If you like Piriform’s programs, please consider making a donation to support their development work!
AVG Anti-Virus Free - Available for single computer use for home and noncommercial use.
Malwarebytes – Works great with AVG. Identify and remove malicious software from your computer.
WEBSITE & BLOG APPS – WIDGETS – FREE IMAGES – MOBILE APPS
Codebox – Free PDF to Flash Page Flip Converter.
Stock.xchng – Free stock photography for websites and desktop publishing.
Free Consumer Calculators – Free, ad-driven compact versions of CalcXML calculators for blogs and websites. The small footprint of these calculators work great as “teaser” calcs on a home page, blog or social network site.
DISQUS – Great for blogs – Realtime comment system, notification and reply system, inline media embedding, mobile commenting.
CLASSES – LESSONS – TUTORIALS
MIT Opencourseware – MIT is committed to advancing education and discovery through knowledge open to everyone. OCW shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1800 courses spanning MIT’s entire curriculum.
Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) – A collection of openly available and free online courses and course materials that enact instruction for an entire course in an online format.
Notre Dame OpenCourseWare – Free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners throughout the world.
