Alien Skin Image Doctor 2

Alien Skin’s Image Doctor 2 is a set of filters designed to streamline common retouching tasks.

Image Doctor 2 is, according to Alien Skin, “the new version of its powerful yet easy-to-use software for photo restoration, retouching, and repair” for Photoshop and software compatible with Photoshop plug-ins. It consists of five filters: Dust and Scratch Remover, JPEG Repair, Blemish Concealer, Skin Softener and Smart Fill. All of the filters, with the exception of the JPEG Repair tool, require a selection before applying the tool. This is important from a workflow perspective.

The second tool is the Dust and Scratch Remover. It only seems to work well in a limited set of circumstances. It replicates areas of the image automatically to fill in selected scratches and tears. It works very well with areas of uniform color and detail, but is useless for sections with more specific and important detail – like the tear in this photo of a group of World War I soldiers. And even when it works well, it isn’t better than the healing patch or clone tools in Photoshop, and once again breaks workflow with a needless select->open filter->move sliders until-you’re-happy method.

The third filter offered in Image Doctor 2 is called JPEG Repair. It “repairs” over-compressed JPEGs by making them into blurry, sharpened JPGs. It seems to have some smart math behind it, and it does a good job at its designated task. If the repaired JPG is only a small web image or in a brochure the quality might be acceptable. But the repaired JPEGs will never actually look good.

The jewel of the Image Doctor software is the Skin Softener filter. This is a tool designed to smooth uneven skintone and texture. Finally, the filter controls work towards simplifying the intended task. The Skin Softener effect can easily be recreated with existing Photoshop tools, but not as elegantly. What would require multiple layers and filters with Photoshop is distilled into one simple dialog box with just two sliders. One slider adjusts the selection, the other adjusts the effect. The effect is very nice, only allowing the appearance of plastic doll-like textures if pushed to extremes. If used sparingly it does a great job at reducing glare and minimizing pores while keeping the skin believable.

Image Doctor’s final filter is called Smart Fill. At first glance it seems to be an overly complex version of Photoshop’s Healing Patch tool. But it uses detail detection to sample areas of the image that best match the area being removed. On simple patches it did not do as good a job as Photoshop’s Healing Patch tool. But I know that’s not its intended use, so your mileage will vary. If you often find yourself removing roads from forest scenes, you might want to give this one a try.

Overall, Image Doctor 2 seems to be a mixed bag. The first three filters seem like filler. They simply reinvent the wheel and make it less efficient. I understand the plug-ins are not only designed for Photoshop, but that is likely where they’re going to end up, and a lot of the functionality is redundant and slows you down. If they’re installed as standalone software or as plug-ins for something less than Photoshop then they will be more useful. The Image Doctor filters are also slow. Even with moderately sized selections on high-res files, each change took a considerable amount of time to update. Keep that in mind when making selections and try to keep them small.

Music & Video

AIMP Portable

A full-featured music player designed with sound quality and wide, customizable functionality in mind. Over twenty audio formats are supported. Audio is processed in 32-bit for crystal-clear sound. The player features an 18-band graphics equalizer with extra built-in sound effects. You can extend the existing functionality adding Input, DSP and Gen plug-ins from Winamp. You can convert AudioCD to MP3, OGG, WAV or WMA. Similarly, you can grab sound from any audio device on your PC to MP3, OGG, WAV or WMA formats.

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Audacity Portable

• Record live audio.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
• Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
• Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
• And more! See the complete

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CDEx Portable

CDEx supports the following features:

• Supports multiple encoders (Lame MP3, Fraunhofer MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc)
• Direct recording of multiple tracks
• Read / store album information from/to a local and/or remote CD Database (CDDB)
• Support CD-Text (if your CD-drive supports it)
• Advanced jitter correction (based on the cd-paranoia ripping library)
• Indicates track progress and jitter control
• Normalization of audio signal
• Supports many CD-Drive from many manufacturers
• Conversion of external WAV files
• Support for M3U and PLS play list files

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CoolPlayer+ Portable

CoolPlayer+ Portable is an easy to use audio player with lots of great features:

• Custom PortableApps.com Skin by NeoRame with support for standard, equalizer and shade mode (fits into a Windows titlebar)
• Simple User Interface
• Advanced Playlist editor
• Internet streaming
• ID3 Multitagger
• File Renamer
• Fast mp3->wav converter
• MAD mpeg engine
• OGG Vorbis support
• FLAC support
• Winamp input plugins support
• Smallest executable programmed in blazing fast 'C'
• Continuous play
• 8 band convolution equalizer
• Lot's more...

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Mp3splt-gtk Portable

Mp3Splt-gtk is a utility to split mp3 and ogg vorbis files selecting a begin and an end time position, without decoding. It's very useful to split large mp3/ogg vorbis to make smaller files or to split entire albums to obtain original tracks. If you want to split an album, you can select split points and filenames manually or you can get them automatically from CDDB (internet or a local file) or from .cue files. Supports also automatic silence split, that can be used also to adjust cddb/cue splitpoints. Trimming using silence detection is also available. You can extract tracks from Mp3Wrap or AlbumWrap files in few seconds. For mp3 files, both ID3v1 & ID3v2 tags are supported.

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XMPlay Portable

XMPlay is an audio player, supporting the OGG / MP3 / MP2 / MP1 / WMA / WAV / AIFF / CDA / MO3 / IT / XM / S3M / MTM / MOD / UMX audio formats, and PLS / M3U / ASX / WAX playlists. A load more formats are also supported via plugins. It's accurate, has multichannel output, has gapless playback, includes a full audio library and supports a number of visualizations.

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VLC Media Player Portable

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, WMV, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

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fre:ac Portable (formerly BonkEnc)


fre:ac is a free/open source audio extracter, encoder, and converter. You can use fre:ac to extract audio files from CDs, encode and reencode audio files to a lower bitrate, and convert audio files to and from various formats, including:

• MP3
• Ogg Vorbis
• MP4/AAC
• FLAC

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Media Player Classic - Home Cinema 
(MPC-HC) Portable


MPC-HC is an extremely light-weight media player for Windows. The player supports all common video and audio file formats available for playback.

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Photodex ProShow Gold

ProShow Gold makes it easy to create a slide show with your photos, videos and music in a few simple steps. Just drag and drop your content into a show, edit photos, add effects, set the timing and you’re done! You can easily create a unique and personalized photo slide show for any occasion whether it’s a birthday, anniversary, graduation, holiday, wedding or just showing-off vacation photos. Drag and drop your photos, videos and music into ProShow Gold’s easy-to-use interface. There you can add borders to photos, crop and edit video and audio clips, use built-in editing tools like red-eye removal and more.

Create spectacular effects by adding a pan, zoom or rotate to any photo in your show. Choose from over 280 transition styles including dissolves, fades, wipes, and shapes. Add custom captions and backgrounds to any photo. ProShow Gold will output your slide show to over 40 formats including DVD, Blu-ray, CD, the Web and dozens of devices like the iPod®, iPhone® and Blackberry®. You can even upload your slide shows directly to click it.

Features:
• Add an unlimited number of layers to any slide
• Drag and drop to easily add content to a show
• Supports 100+ file types
• Transparency support for PSD, PNG, TIFF and GIF files
• Turn any layer into a fully-customized mask to conceal or reveal aspects of underlying layers
• Add a gradient or solid color as a slide layer to a layer to get incredible results
• Spice up a presentation using interactive slide actions to launch PDFs, spreadsheets, webpages and more
• Set transition effects for individual layers
• Optimize your workflow using built-in image correction tools like sharpen, colorize, saturate and more
• Create enhanced borders for your photos and videos with ProShow Producer's all-new vignette effect
• Create Hollywood-style greenscreen effects with the all-new Chroma Key Transparency tool
• Specify opacity for any layer on a slide
• Add depth to your composition by adjusting the color and opacity of a shadow on any layer in a slide
• Crop and rotate your photos and videos with precision
• Use the red-eye removal tool to correct any photo in your show in seconds
• Use adjustment effects to produce spectacular effects. Make a video move through color shifts or create a sequence of photo fades
• Add multiple keyframes to each adjustment effect
• Add motion like pan, zoom and rotate to any layer on a slide for a cinematic effect
• Zoom X and Y coordinates for a layer individually and zoom out further than ever before
• Create complex motion paths by setting multiple keyframe points on the keyframe timeline
• The fully-customizable slide preview grid allows you to accurately position your photos and videos on a slide
• Control the font, size and color of captions in your slides
• Use caption keyframing to create multiple caption motion effects on a single slide
• Animate your captions with more amazing effects to choose from than ever before
• Add interactive captions to launch actions like Pause, Resume, Next Slide, Previous Slide, Write Email and many more
• Gain greater design control over captions with ProShow Producer's new caption styles, caption line spacing and caption character features
• Enhance slide shows by dropping in any MP3 or WAV audio file
• Save an audio track directly from a CD and drop it right into your slide show
• Crop your audio and set fades using the built-in Audio Trimmer
• Built-in soundtrack waveform in slide list
• Add interest to your slide shows with solid colors, gradients, or videos as backgrounds
• Use the new, built-in backgrounds to spruce-up your slide shows
• Control the adjustment levels of your background content
• And many many more...

notepad++

About

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Based on the powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness,Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.
 

TurboC Simulator

BSEditor: The Turbo C

Simulator, is the world's first dedicated specifically coded simulator which simulates Borland's Turbo C/ TurboC ++ on any versions of Windows. By using this software you can install Turbo C , fix any existing installation or configure the way Turbo C runs on your windows machine.

Turbo C simulator uses an internal simulation engine which makes it possible to run Turbo C on any versions of Windows, especially Vista and 7, as if it is run in a native environment . It doesn't make any difference whether you are on a 32 bit or 64 bit version of Windows.

Turbo C simulator provides a set of settings which gives you even more control on how Turbo C runs. You can specify at what resolution Turbo C runs, fixed or full screen. If you choose fixed resolution , you can still switch to full screen at any time by pressing Alt-Enter .

Turbo C Simulator uses a refined High-Quality internal filtering system, so that when you run your Turbo C at different resolutions you get the sharpest possible result .

The engine runs in the background and thus is invisible to you,all you see is your Turbo C running
perfectly
before your eyes.

The simulation engine is originally based on the well known DOSBox emulator, which you can make sure of its superiority and high quality to any existing simulator at present time. 

Astyle css editor

This tool offers graphic tree-type views of attachment files and the CSS structure, grouped view of properties and selectors, and a conceptual model of editing. It also provides automatic selection and grouping of CSS selectors from a structured document and active WYSIWYG preview of CSS properties and HTML tags. It offers an icon associate dictionary and supports drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste operations.

It also provides automatic selection and grouping of CSS selectors from a structured document and active WYSIWYG preview of CSS properties and HTML tags. It offers an icon associate dictionary and supports drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste operations.

Spider man 2

Spider-Man2 has had a wee bit more luck with games than most of his fellow superheroes. His first outing as an interactive crime fighter, repeatedly swinging up a blocky building to catch a mess of pixels that was purportedly the Green Goblin, didn't exactly leave people floored, but the Atari 2600 wasn't famous for its breathtaking action.

Cut to today and you'll see the difference between 1982 Spider-Man on the Atari and 2004 Spidey on the Xbox is even more pronounced than the difference between this year's movie and the chintzy 1970's releases starring Nicholas Hammond. It's a whole new world.

"You're not Superman, you know"

Spider-Man 2 succeeds to an incredible extent in putting the player behind the mask. Not only is the web swinging pulled off strikingly well, roaming around the vast city stopping petty crimes and retrieving the occasional balloon really captures Spidey's "down time." The Spider has always been as impressive capturing purse snatchers as he is, say, taking out one of Galactus' heralds with a single punch.

Both web and fist swinging are satisfyingly deep and a handful to control at first.

Fighting is controlled through button taps, and the action is context-sensitive, with some moves dependent on Spider-Man jumping or dodging first. He can web thugs to street lamps, twirl them overhead, yank away their weapons, launch them into an air combo, dizzy them, and even pull off a spinning piledriver. (Those last few abilities shouldn't surprise you. The Webhead is in a few Capcom fighters, after all.) The only move missing is a web shield, but Spider Sense makes that extraneous anyway. You get a visual, aural, and tactile (rumble) clue every time Spidey's about to get beaned, so it's your own fault if you're knocked silly. And the counterattacks are lightning fast.

Traveling is even more stylish than pummeling, and if one thing makes it intact in the inevitable sequel, let's hope it's Spider-Man's wild acrobatics.

First off, if there is no object for the web to stick to, you aren't swinging. No more shooting webs off the top of the screen without a second thought. Jump off the tallest building in town and you may have to wait a sec before you have anything else to latch on to, so enjoy the freefall. At one point, the action moves to Liberty Island, and part of the challenge is getting there without a normal bridge or ferry. And don't think for a minute you're going to swim there.

Using webs to get around is a mini art form. Depending on when and how you let go and where and if you apply a speed boost, the results can vary wildly. Let go at the bottom-most part of the arc and you will be propelled forward. Let go at the end and you will fly up. You can use two webs to catapult Spidey and shoot out a quick line forward to pull him closer to the ground or the side of the building. Wall running and mid-air stunts add style points and also figure into the gameplay.

It's a phenomenal engine, and once you master it you might wonder how any previous game was worthy of the Webslinger. This isn't some slapped-together superhero title; someone put a lot of work in. 

"Spider-Man [the movie] no more"

Great getting-around makes this game a should-play, but if you're going to justify a purchase you'll want more. But the two things you might expect a lot of - adventure and unlockables - aren't all that special in Spider-Man 2. Apart from a couple of thrilling boss battles and a handful of engaging cut scenes featuring ally Black Cat, it's slim pickings.

Story mode is short, maybe six or eight hours to the final boss battle. (I got there in about eight-and-a-half taking my time.) It hits the high spots of the movie but doesn't follow them to the letter. The train battle, for instance, is extremely watered down. As mentioned, there is a side story with the Black Cat that works wonderfully, but it's really there to substitute for the "Spider-Man no more" subplot of the movie.

After the climactic final showdown with Dr. Octopus, the game continues, but the story doesn't. The epilogue is long. The goal is to earn 50,000 Hero Points - likely more than you did in all the previous chapters combined. Since the majority of the playtime in Spider-Man 2 is meant to be spent accumulating Hero Points by beating challenges, finding tokens, and saving citizens, these tacked on chapters are probably there to get you doing those things if you aren't already.

The game keeps a tally, accessible off the pause menu, of how many of each kind of token you found, how many of the 200 hint markers you activated, how many times you performed each type of heroic deed, etc. It's a very long list of stats, and it even covers gallons of web fluid used and distance crawled. Unfortunately (I feel like saying, "Tragically," but I'll leave the drama to the villains), finding everything and beating every challenge (e.g., swinging through a series of rings while performing tricks) doesn't seem to unlock anything of real value.

While I did not personally complete all of the challenges, the only major unlockables I found were the two you get for finishing Doc Ock - and one of those two is so laughably bad it's not even worth counting as an extra. There are a couple of items unlocked in the epilogue, but they only help you complete more challenges to not unlock more things. I guess Treyarch blew its wad with the superb extras in the first game.

Here's the most telling part: in addition to all the other collectible icons/markers that do zero, there is a group called "Secret Tokens" that nets you absolutely nothing. It's not exactly false advertising, but it is annoying to spend all that time hunting just to find out it was meant to be its own reward. At least some of the challenges, like the pizza delivery missions, are interesting.