You should never feel like your hard drive is holding out on you. Anyone should be able to back up, recover files, boot multiple systems, upgrade, or otherwise improve their storage space. These tips explain the possibilities and procedures. More »
If you’re looking to plan out a project, share code design, or craft a funny flowchart for friends or coworkers, Creately is a free webapp that offers a no-software tool with a nice and easy learning curve.
Most of Creately’s diagram and illustration tools, ranging from dead-simple flowcharts to circuit diagrams, are free for signed-up users and allow sharing, embedding, publishing, commenting, and other collaboration tools for up to five people on publicly available works (paid accounts get more shared users and private postings). Like so many web tools, it strips down the interface of desktop offerings like Visio and makes it easier for first-timers to get a grasp on things. Click on a shape or line in your Creately chart, and a context menu offers all the options of moving, reshaping, resizing, or whatever else you can do with it.
We might ask for a more updated look than the steel-gray toolbars of yore, but the end products—stamped with a subtle Creately logo, unless you fork out—are what really matter. Creately is free to sign up for and use.
Windows: If you’re looking for a fast way to visualize and drill down through what’s taking up space on your disk drives, OverDisk generates a radial map of your folder structures for quick navigation.
If you were jealous of the radial map disk view found in the previously posted, Linux-only toolsFilelight and Baobab, OverDisk brings that same circular goodness to your Windows machine. Point it at any disk or directory and it analyzes the contents and returns a radial map of the folders and files found within. Analysis was surprisingly snappy in a test run, as OverDisk crunched the numbers on 800GB worth of files in under 15 seconds.
Once the results are back, you can mouse over the wedges on the radial map to see which folders and files are chewing up your disk space. If the wedges are too small to select with ease, clicking on any given directory in the radial map will re-render the map with the sub-directories and files for that specific location. The graphics might be primitive by modern standards, but the response time is lightening fast and the interface is easy to use. According to the author’s site, he’s working out a bug where multiple refreshes can lead to a crash, but during our testing, zooming around multiple disks and terabytes worth of data, there wasn’t a glitch to be found. OverDisk is freeware, Windows only.
Windows only: Drive space visualizer utility SpaceSniffer takes the mundane task of cleaning up your drive and makes it more pleasant with some impressive graphics.
SpaceSniffer works similarly to previously mentioned SpaceMonger—it provides a drill-down treemap view of your drive so you can quickly identify where your drive space has gone. The difference is that SpaceSniffer does it with style—drilling down into a directory with an animated zoom effect that makes it a lot more pleasant to use.
SpaceSniffer joins a very large group of similar utilities—you can take your pick between: DriveSpacio, Windirstat, Free Disk Analyzer, Primitive File Size Chart, Xinorbis, Simple Directory Analyzer, Treesize Free, and FosiX Lite—all of which do the exact same thing with different graphical interfaces: they help visualize your hard drive usage. There’s no right answer between the different utilities, you should use the one that works for you.
SpaceSniffer is a free download for Windows only—but instead of visualizing your drive usage all the time, you should learn how to use Belvedere to automate your own self-cleaning PC.
Windows only: IKEA has released its own 3D room design tool to help you plan the modernist, clean-lined kitchen, bedroom, or workspace of your dreams. Check out screenshots of what the Swedes have given us below.
IKEA’s Home Planner download site lists three separate downloads, but they all seem to be the same exact file of the same size, and feature the same planning tools. It’s a Windows-only tool at this point; anyone want to give it a shot in WINE on Linux or Mac and tell us how it runs?
Here’s the Home Planner in action:
IKEA Planner Tool is a free download for Windows systems only. Thanks empkae!
