I am a Sales Strategic Planning manager who needs to visualize business processes, as well as show easy to understand Gantt charts.

For those of you who don’t want to spend the money on a full-blown Microsoft Project application, I recommend GanttProject. GanttProject is a project scheduling application written in Java, featuring gantt charts, PERT charts, resource management, calendaring, and import/export (MS Project, HTML, PDF, spreadsheets) features.

The benefits of GanttProject are:
1) Price – it’s free through Sourceforge.net
2) Ease of use – similar to MS Project and
3) Import export functions for different applications.

The drawbacks are:
1) Limited support – it’s shareware. If you are not computer savvy, or need help, then this solution is not for you.
2) Few pre-built templates online and
3) Limited functionality. This is not a full project management application.

If you mainly use project management software to show dependencies in a slide presentation, or need a tool to see where projects may hit snags, this is a great package to use.

WhiteSmoke is a pioneering software tool that perks up and revises your English writing.

Based on patented natural language processing (NLP) technology, WhiteSmoke executes superior and context-based English grammar, spelling, and punctuation checking, as well as text enrichment to enhance your writing. From well-written letters and emails to friends, through to specialized business citations and presentations. I have been using this tool particularly for blogging to a great extent.

More MP3 Storage for your Mobile Phone or the best quality?

Sometimes the bit rate quality is not important for us, and we need to change the quality for more storage place. You can change the bit-rate quality of music media with one right-click by using 4Musics MP3 Bitrate Changer. You can also use this software for your mobile phones. The bitrate of the mp3’s on your computer is generally 128K. But you may change it to 48K and the mp3 will have a less size. So you can use your mobile phones storage more economically. For example one of your mp3’s is 3 MB and 128K. If you change its bitrate to 48K it’s size will be about only 1MB. You can also raise your bit-rate to 320K for the best music quality. You can also change the IDtag of your MP3’s by using 4Musics MP3 Bitrate Changer. The cost for the full version is $17.00 and a free trial version is available.

EasyTag is a powerful audio file tag editor for GNU/Linux or Windows.

It has support for: mp3, mp4, mp2, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and others. There are many features that make adding or changing tags in your audio files very easy. It can query the CDDB and compare track length to your files to identify music that you are unsure of the artist or album. If you have artist and album info in the filename, it can parse that info into tag entries. EasyTag is also able to change the filenames and directory structure of your collection with user-specified tag info. This will allow you to take a large group of assorted files that have artist and album information and relocate them to a more organized directory structure. The program uses the GTK+ interface, which provides for a simple and pleasant environment for working with your files. The browsing window lets you choose between a directory structure view, or an artist/album view. The tag entry editing window is clearly laid out and provides for many different fields, including album art. There are several shortcut buttons that allow you to quickly access commonly used features. EasyTag makes the task of keeping your music collection properly tagged and organized a simple process.

Apple’s Mail.app is the IMAP/POP email application included with every Mac.

This application is a simple to use and easy to set up alternative to less functional web interfaces and more complicated email applications such as Thunderbird or Entourage. On the whole I would give Mail.app a very positive review. The newest version, included in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, adds some great new features. Automatic setup means that if you use a popular service like Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo, all you need to set it up is a username and password. Another excellent feature is basic RSS feed aggregation. It is a very simple implementation, less powerful than apps like NetNewsWire, but it is dead simple to use. The only negatives to Mail.app are these two things: it only runs on Mac and it’s shutdown behavior is not standard. What this means is that if Mail.app is busy (for example, trying to talk to a server that isn’t responding) it may block you from logging off or shutting down, requiring you to wait or force-quit the app. Despite this shortcoming, I fully recommend Mail.app to any Mac user looking to make the transition from web-based email clients.

Recolored Have you ever came across a black and white photo that you would like to add new life to?

This $29 software that I stumbled upon called Recolored does just that. The 30-day free trial is suitable for small personal projects if you’ll only be colorizing a single photograph or two. At $29 for a licensed copy, I think this application is a steal. Some folks take their photos to professionals who use similar software and charge hundreds of dollars to recolor photos. You could probably even run your own small business with this software. All you have to do is choose a few colors from a color palette, and put a few strokes around the edges that you to be that specific color. When you press the colorize button the image is colorized. Try it out!