writer

Review: Writer's Cafe Portable provides a powerful tool for scribes

As a nifty program full of cool tools, Writer's Cafe Portable helps you improve and organize your writing. Its layout won't win any design awards, but it's so packed full of neat and fun features that you won't really care. If you need help finishing or starting that novel you've been talking about for years, this is the program you want.

Since it operates as a portable application, you can install it to a USB drive just as easily as on your computer. Once you're inside the program, it offers tons of cool features … Read more

The Week on Download.com, April 10-16, 2013

Every week, we compile the best new reviews, products, and features from the Download.com software catalog and blog, package them up in a tidy little newsletter, and e-mail it out to all of our lovely subscribers.

If you are a registered CNET member, you can sign up for the newsletter yourself (it's listed as "CNET Download.com Software Dispatch" under "Software News and Reviews"), or check back every Tuesday to read our latest roundup.

Notable New Products

BitTorrent Surf brings the power of BitTorrent to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox Mok Force is a … Read more

StreamWriter 4.4 Review

More and more radio stations are streaming online, and there's a lot of great music and other programming broadcast throughout the Interwebs everyday. With Alexander Nottelmann's fab freeware StreamWriter, you can record streaming audio as easily as you could pop a tape in a deck and press "record" to capture traditional broadcasts. Not only is StreamWriter free, it's open source and community supported, with regular updates, bug fixes, and enhancements. StreamWriter can record multiple audio streams simultaneously and save them as MP3 or AAC files and worked great for me in my evaluation.

StreamWriter offers … Read more

The 404 1,245: Where we print with fire (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- "FireWriter" is a far sexier way to describe an inkjet printer.

- What do gangsters do on the Internet?

- New Brad Paisley, LL Cool J song "Accidental Racist" sparks controversy.

Bathroom break video: Slacktory Supercut: The best fake Web sites from TV shows.… Read more

Printing images with fire

If you have some random bits of wood floating around that you just don't know what to do with, perhaps you could take a leaf out of Lucien Langton's book. The 25-year-old student at the Lausanne University of Art and Design (ECAL) in France has built a functioning printer for wood that uses fire as a medium.

FireWriter consists of a repurposed inkjet printer controlled with Arduino Uno, a calibration module equipped with an optical sensor and fitted with a Dremel torch loaded with a mixture of butane and propane that burns at up to 1200 degrees Celsius.

A black-and-white image has to be fed into Processing software; it then creates a Wiring script that's fed back to the Arduino unit. … Read more

Burn discs and more with FeyWriter

When we first saw the name FeyWriter, it conjured up a creative-writing app, but in fact it's a pretty nice little freeware optical disc burning utility from FeyTools. FeyWriter can burn data, audio, and video discs, read and copy discs, and write disc images. It supports rewriteable and multisession discs, on-the-fly recording, and dual-layer discs. FeyWriter requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 or better. The latest release of FeyWriter supports Windows 8.

FeyWriter's simple, colorful Welcome Screen has six buttons: Data Disc, Audio Disc, Video Disc, Write Image, Coy Disc, and Read Disc, plus a toolbar with icons … Read more

'Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day' gets canned

If you've been spending the last few days thinking up adjectives to use on Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day, you'll have to save "dreamy," "hunky," "handsome," and "hot" for another occasion. Leigh Alexander, the writer who first proposed the special day for February 1, has called an official halt to the festivities before they can begin.

Alexander's original idea was to make February 1 a day when people sharing articles written by male tech writers would add an extra comment about the writer's appearance. This was in response to ongoing issues she has encountered with people making comments about her appearance, something she feels few male tech writers have to deal with.

It was all supposed to be lighthearted and humorous, but Alexander received feedback that sparked concern about the day going in negative directions it wasn't intended to take.… Read more

Get ready for 'Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day'

There's a very special day coming up. It's one where we express love and shower certain people with compliments. I'm not talking about Valentine's Day. I'm talking about Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day on February 1.

Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day encourages everyone to add an extra comment about the appearance of a male tech writer when tweeting or otherwise sharing an article. For example, you could tweet, "Awesome Android app article from that hunky Seth Rosenblatt! @cnet."… Read more

Active ISO Burner packs a lot into a simple interface

To burn discs with your PC, you need two things. The first is a CD burner, or (better) a DVD burner, or (better still) a Blu-Ray burner. The second is disc-burning software. For the first, you're probably limited by the burner you already own, and your burner's capabilities will determine what kinds of disc you can burn, how much and what kind of data they can hold, and how long it takes to burn them. But for the second requirement, the burning tool, you have a lot more choices, and a lot of them are free. Active Data … Read more

Edit PDFs with PDFill PDF Editor

PDF files are easier to read than their Microsoft Word counterparts. However, in order to make changes to them, you need to have a rather pricy program such as Adobe Acrobat. PDFill PDF Editor is a great substitute. You can edit your PDFs the same as you would edit your Word documents. It gives you so many options that you might be overwhelmed.

PDFill PDF Editor smartly tries to mimic Microsoft Word with its layout. Sadly, it doesn't replicate Microsoft Word's ease of use. There are about 100 or more icons that all do different things. While this … Read more