programs

I love being able to contribute to the Soapbox because it allows me to share knowledge with both my students at Smith’s 英会話 Hirakata as well as anyone who is interested. If you have read any of my other postings they are a real mix. Sometimes it’s inspirational, at other times entertaining and sometimes downright serious. And with the help of Jerry and Yasuko it really helps to add to the variety. Today’s post is about some useful free programs that I have found in my search for things to make my life easier. As some of you might know I have quite a few computers and use all Windows, Apple and Ubuntu (Linux) systems. All three have their advantages and at the same time disadvantages. I must say though that I am very pleasantly surprised with Windows 7 and find it much more stable than previous models as well as practical. For those Windows users out there I recommend you try adding these two programs

Foxit Reader – this was introduced to me by a friend and it is quite impressive. It’s basically a PDF reader like Adobe Reader but MUCH lighter and has some very useful functions, the most amazing being that you can actually highlight things inside the PDF file as well as add your own comments. PDFs have become the norm in spreading books and knowledge for business because of security issues but at the same time there was no way to mark them which meant you had to print them out if you wanted to keep your own notes. No longer. And the best thing – it’s free.

Fences – this is just an amazing little program that allows you to organize your desktop by creating fences. If you have lots of different things on your desktop this helps eliminate clutter. And it’s also free.

Hope you find them of some help.

Adrian