Better Paint App, Paint.net!

Alright, I know many of you still use Paint that comes together with your Windows. What's not to like? It's easy to use, able to capture and edit your screenshots, and even do a simple manipulation such as adding text and snipping the wanted picture.

What if you want something more? What if you want to be able to add different variants of text onto an area that is so hard to do on Paint? What if you want layers? You want layers to help you edit a specific part of your picture so that you don't perform a destructive edit?

There's a solution. There is GIMP. But GIMP is not made for normal Paint users. GIMP is made for advanced Photoshop user. Despite a Photoshop user myself, I find that I'm struggling when using GIMP. This is why Paint.net comes so useful for me. It provides the basics of Photoshop but never overwhelms you with advance tools that you probably never use. It's a bit more advanced than Paint itself and doesn't go overboard.

http://www.getpaint.net/

Sublime Text

Previously I told you guys how I love Notepad ++. Well aside from the syntax highlighting, I feel that the world of text editor has nothing more to offer to me.

Oh boy was I wrong.

A fellow programmer introduced me to Sublime Text. Great interface because it has this little preview that you can click to fast forward to that location that you want to get to. Syntax highlighting blends so well especially I'm working on Javascript. And did I tell you it's free? They have no crippling feature except every day, they'll they ask you to buy.

But you can just keep on pressing Cancel.

http://www.sublimetext.com/

Daemon Tools Lite

Don't you just hate it when you received a huge file and realize it's an ISO file.

Under normal circumstances, you need something like CD Burner XP to burn them into a disc but what if you don't have an optical drive or a blank disc? This is where Daemon Tools come in. It basically creates a 'virtual drive' for your system. You use it to mount your ISO file (could be any image file formats) and then pop it up in your system as if you have an optical drive.

Just like magic.

Just make sure you get Daemon Tools Lite. You could pay for it but what if you've got a dog that constipates all the time?

http://www.daemon-tools.cc/downloads

CD Burner XP

Most Windows have native built-in support to burn your CD/DVD. However, what if you want to copy the disc to a data image format so that you can use them again and again without having to stress the mechanical portion in your optical drive?

This is when you need a burning software suite. A standard optical drive burning suite, such as Roxio can cost relatively cheap, but you still have to pay. Sometimes a college student need that money to pay for his beers! Well, I'd say you don't have to pay a cent at all. CDBurnerXP does exactly the same thing without you paying a single cent.

What's great about CDBurnerXP, aside from its burning capability, also include a tool where you extra the exact CD image of the optical disc. This in turn will allow you to read the image itself and mount in as a volume which means your computer will see it as a virtual optical drive. For this, I'll continue this in another post about Daemon Tools.

Aside from extracting CD images, CDBurnerXP also allow you to create various types of optical media, from data CD pure text with hierarchy tree directories (or folders), supported by most operating system to audio CD (which is governed by audio tracks).

However here's lowdown of the software. You need a .Net Framework. If you're running Windows XP (or anything before XP), you will need to download 50-200 MB of .Net Framework installation