Software Cooperative Launches Free Windows Apps

In celebration of the new year, software cooperative DonationCoder.com has released more than a dozen free Windows applications that range from the useful to the whimsical.

The site, which has more than 42,000 registered members and about 1,800 software contributors, holds its New Apps for the New Year challenge every year. This year's event reaped 16 programs. While the software is free, donations to the author are encouraged.

Among the 2008 bounty is WTF? Music Info, which offers the lowdown on a person's digital music collection. The program provides a visual depiction of stats based on artist, genre, or year. "I intend on building this up in the future, but for now it's a neat little app to let you know what you got," the author, who goes by the name of "seedling," said on the site.

For slackers, app contributor "mouser" wrote Point Motivator to help encourage people to get things done. The software focuses the user's attention on a reinforcement score that provides immediate feedback about the person's actions. There's a visual display for showing progress over time, and users can configure tasks and their associated value, and share these configurations with others. The software is meant to help people stay on track with dieting, exercising, schoolwork, and other activities.

For people wondering how much money they have in their coin jar, "hamradio" has written the Coin Jar Calculator. The software can estimated the amount of money based on the weight of the jar, and the number of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollar coins in a handful taken from the container. The program only works with U.S. currency.

For people looking to become instant artists, author "TPReal's" Tim - Image To Text Converter converts an image in either JPG or BMP format into lines of text to create a grayscale picture. The user can choose any mono-spaced font and font size, and any set of allowed characters. The result can be saved as a text file.

As a final example, developer "CodeTrucker" has written the Trucker's Log Watch to help big-rig drivers log the amount of time they're on the road, off duty, or sleeping. "Basically, this is a program I'll be using in my truck driving to make sure I can stay nice and legal on my logs," the author said on the site.

DonationCoder.com was founded nearly three years ago by Jesse Reichler, who at the time was a doctorate graduate student at the University of Illinois. The site is now run by a cooperative of moderators.