Friday, November 14, 2008

XMind - Mind Mapping And Brainstorming For Free

XMind, a provider of visual thinking and collaborative software solutions and services for brainstorming, idea capture, content sharing, and project management, has released an open-source version of their award-winning mind-mapping application.


With the goal of making XMind more accessible to a broader audience and more powerful for professional users, XMind is making available both a royalty-free open source edition, XMind 3, and a subscription-based professional edition, XMind Pro 3. Both editions are enabled for online sharing and collaboration via Share.XMind.Net, a new web service that allows XMind users to share their mind maps and other visual thinking content with a Web 2.0 style online community.

XMind is available for Windows, Mac OS X and also has a Java-based, portable version that can run under both of those and Linux. There is a alos a Pro version XMind Pro subscribers have full access to all updates, online support, all pro features including privately sharing, inline presentation, exporting to PDF/Word/Powerpoint, Gantt charts with task topics and more.

Related Posts: PersonalBrain MindMapping, Online Mind-Mapping

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Clocking IT - Free, Web-based Project Management

Long have I searched for a free, web-based project management solution that offers no limits and team collaboration facilities but, up till now, that search has been fruitless. Yes I've checked out activeColab but it isn't really free and then there's Project2Manage but I didn't find it rich enough in features.

Clocking IT
Clocking IT does all of the above and for free as well. It offers unlimited online project storage and with it you can plan your projects, see your schedule, know if you're slipping behind and why and it can send out notifications via email, RSS & iCal. It also includes time tracking and extensive reports to help you show your clients exactly what you've done and for how long.

The main iterface is the dashboard, which is fully customizable for whatever information you need and it automatically updates. You can even add Google Gadgets to it as well. You can visualize your project plans with intercative GANTT chart too.

It's available in English, French, Spanish, Basque, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

OCR Terminal - Free, Online OCR Scanning

Thanks to blogger Sarab who commented on my erroneous article for Qipit, we now know that there is a true, online OCR scanning service available…

OCR Trminal
OCR Terminal is a free online Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service that allows you to convert scanned images and PDF documents into editable and searchable text documents. It accurately preserves formatting and layout of documents. It was built to provide the user with a free and easy way of performing OCR without having to install new software or having to pay for it. Automatic layout extraction and segmentation of image areas ensure that the page layout and formatting of the document is preserved accurately.

OCR Terminal supports all popular document image formats including PDF and multi-page TIFF captured as scanned images, photographs, or even screenshots. Extracted text can be downloaded in TXT, DOC, XML or RTF formats or directly e-mailed with a thumbnail of the uploaded image.

The site currently allows for text extraction only from English language documents, but they are working on extending this functionality across other languages as well. They are also currently working on a desktop client that will allow users to upload the document by dragging and dropping all the TIFF and PDF files into the client and get back perfectly formatted Word files.