| If you're not familiar with NANY 2012, it's this year's annual application coding competition held by the guys over at DonationCoder.com . Entering the event means that you're putting your effective, free piece of software out to the public to show your generosity. A few of my favorite and most simple applications were pulled from previous NANY contests. It's an awesome little get together that always spawns innovative and original creations. Since the event ended, the event results have been posted. There, you'll find over 30 homemade and hand-crafted applications, typically for Windows. Though they seem to differ in skills necessary to understand and operate some of the applications, most shouldn't pose a problem. Out of this year's results, I'd like to share three of my favorites and explain their functionality. Image Grid Image Grid is a very simple and effective little tool. All you do is drag and drop whatever pictures you'd like to include in the process, and this application will collage them all together in an even format (dispersed amongst columns and rows, I believe). With this application, you're really supposed to use images of the same dimensions, but you're able to achieve the same effect otherwise (if you don't mind a little blackspace). Here's an example: Image Grid is good for creating your own custom wallpapers or sending a friend a bunch of images all at one time. It just gets the job done. Desktop URL Embed If you used Windows 98 and/or Internet Explorer 4.0, you probably remember Active Desktop . If not, maybe your Windows Explorer process never crashed and forced an annoying, bright white background as your desktop temporarily. That's how I learned of it. Internet Explorer is a requirement to run this application. Basically, this application really does nothing more than create an inline frame of a URL on your destkop. You can determine how big it is, when it will automatically refresh, etc. This is actually a Windows Gadget. Now you can put MUO on your desktop! NoteMe Productivity is very important to me, and NoteMe really helps to keep you on track in a way that most to-do lists and note-taking applications won't allow. Upon downloading the software, you're asked to enter your email address. From there, you'll need to put in your SMTP info (or at least just your password). The concept is NoteMe is simple: You take a note and when you're finished you automate the process of sending it to yourself in an email. If you're like me, you've got your email up 24/7 so it'll be real tough to miss a note or reminder like this. What makes the job even easier is that Gmail (which everyone and their mother should be using) also has a tasks list. Your notes can be added to that list very easily. NANY is a really awesome event where you can find tons of little hidden treasures to add to your software collection. Let me know what your all-time favorite NANY-born application is in the comments and we'll talk about it! |
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