We are spoilt for choice when considering web tools to download to our computers. There are so many to choose from. Here are a few that you might find useful.
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Ring (ring.cx) is a decentralised, peer-to-peer communication platform designed to preserve user privacy.
Like Skype, it provides voice calls, video calls and text chats. Unlike Skype, however, Ring uses no central servers and all communications are end-to-end encrypted.
Ring is developed and maintained by Savoir-faire Linux, a Canadian company, with contributions from a global community of developers.
Ring is free software, with source code available from Savoir-faire Linux's gitlab site. In addition to using its own eponymous peer-to-peer network, Ring can also act as a standard SIP client to make voice-over-IP calls. Ring is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.
This next tool, Anywhere.link (anywhere.link) is a simple click video conferencing solution allowing users in different locations to connect, to discuss, and to share presentations, software demos and remote technical support to name a few uses.
Using the system, the conference organiser provides a url to join the conference that can be sent to a maximum of six individual participants. Each recipient of the specific conference url need only click the link to join. They will not need to create an account nor download or install any additional software.
An additional feature is the widget which when installed on the organiser’s website, allows customers to speak with him or her in real time.
There are three pricing plans, with Basic free to use. This tool currently supports Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, with work ongoing to add support for other browsers. Companion mobile phone apps for iOS and Android are currently in beta.
Tabula (tabula.technology) is a nifty tool to extract data from PDFs overcoming the painfully slow copying and pasting of rows of data.
To use Tabula, users draw a box around the region in a text-based PDF (not a scanned document) from which they wish to extract data. Tabula then produces a preview of the data. If anything is missing, its easy to revise the selection. Data is then exported to an Excel file, a CSV, or in JSON format.
Tabula is a free software, distributed under the MIT license, with source code available on github. Tabula works on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.
