I've wrote small utility for creating simple GridMove layouts.
It's main task to make easy calculating grid's coordinates (I was bored after making two grids ).
GridStack is a command line application accepting definition of a grid layout and outputing GridMove's template.

Came across this blog today because it had a review of Find and Run Robot, but there are a LOT of really nice thoughtful freeware reviews on the site.

The author of the blog seems like a no-nonsense kind of guy -- it's just a blog full of good reviews.  All he says about himself is he is from Chile.  They must be pretty serious about their software in Chile.  I'm impressed.

His blog deserves a much bigger audience.  I'll be visiting the site regularly.

http://elitefreeware.blogspot.com

I was surprised that I didn't find any mentioning on DonationCoder of Beerwin's PlainHTML. However, the program, which we then don't seem to know..., was updated yesterday, to 5.6.2 But really, I am not much of a coder, so it would be quite untrustworthy of me to try to tell a lot about this program, but I can say that to me it looks very useful for homepage making, be it HTML or CSS, or what do we have.

Beerwin's PlainHtml is a powerful HTML source editor with PHP toolbuttons, many JavaScript and HTML snippets and complete HTML, PHP, Javascript 1.3 , CSS and CGI reference. All this is completed with an Extender which offers the possibility of extending the main program.

-

PlainHTML is freeware.

http://www.beerwin.c...view/14/187/lang,en/

Not too long ago I got really frustrated with the music notation software I was using and decided to look for something better. I run multiple operating systems, so an application that ran on the major three was something I really wanted if at all possible. A musical friend suggested I try something called LilyPond ( http://lilypond.org/web/index ). I'm glad I did.

LilyPond is pure music notation software. It does not arrange music, record it, or do anything else. It just produces very professional scores. But it works differently from just about anything else in that it does not have a GUI. LilyPond uses an ASCII notational scheme that you use to create a textfile with a ".ly" extension. This textfile is then processed - and a very professional musical score is generated.

The notational system is easily mastered if you know anything about music. I found once I got used to it, I sometimes quick scored a composition I was working on using this method rather than going with traditional notation. This notational scheme is great tool in itself. Perfect for those times when inspiration strikes and all you have is a pen and a regular piece of paper handy. No more quickly scrawling a 5-line staff just to get an idea or phrase down.

Unlike a lot of GNU projects, LilyPond has excellent documentation (approx 300 pages). The documentation is also downloadable in HTML or PDF format. Perfect for those of us who hate having to web out to a wiki to just read a product manual.

Additionally (and this should appeal to the programming crowd here at DC) the authors have included an essay where they explain their rationale and goals for the product. It's an interesting read if you're at all interested in program design; or in the history and anesthetics of producing musical scores.

Over at the makeuseof.com blog (otherwise known as the blog that ignores our software when writing about cool tools), writer Jerry Kid is an honest to god real estate broker, and has a really nice set of posts on real estate related websites.

In a series of posts with lots of nice screenshots, Jerry walks us through five different real estate tools: Realtor.com, Craigslist, Yahoo Real Estate, Trulia, and Zillow (with special emphasis on the first two sites).

If you are looking to buy a house this series of posts would be a nice place to start.

So say you want to buy a house. If you read the newspapers or watch TV or even pickup your news online, you can’t help but notice that the US real estate market is in the tank. There are many good deals to be had, if you could only find them, and then be sure that they were really a smart buy.

But where do you start? The local newspaper? The homes for sale magazines in the supermarket? Do you drive around (at $4.55USD a gallon?) and look for signs?

No! You are a reader of MakeUseOf.com and you have a technology slant on the things that you do, so you want to use online tools to find that house. This is your lucky day because today I kick off a five part series on what I consider to be the 5 most significant online home search websites currently available in the United States.

• Read Part 1
• Read Part 2
• Read Parts 3-5

1. Newsletter Editorial

It's clear that we have to make a concerted effort to get these newsletters out every two weeks, because with a month between them there is simply too much to write about.

The first item of news to report is that we have announced the winners of the DonationCoder/Veign Programming contest.  The three main entrants were each so different and interesting in their own way that we decided it would be wrong to choose a single winner.  So, we featured all of the entrants and awarded the main prize (a MSDN Visual Studio Developer license worth over $10k) after asking the three entrants to tell us how they would use the prize if they won it. Read the announcement for all the details and to find out who won the big prize! The winning entrants have even been featured on several big sites (we love to see them getting the attention they deserve!), including Eric Wong's "Circle Dock" -- an extremely cool non-traditional dock/launcher that he continues to improve each day, and Eoin O'Callaghan's ServiceProfiles -- a very professional tool for toggling groups of services on and off.

This month has also seen an abundance of new software releases and new websites by forum members.  I released new versions of some of my programs and we saw very cool new programs from other members of the forum, including a cool utility called LineByter that I actually ended up featuring in a mini-review.  Several members of our forum are also branching out with new websites, which we love to see.  In this newsletter you'll even see a section devoted to such announcements.

If you are new to the website please don't be shy. Just find a forum thread below that piques your interest and jump right into the discussion!