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Contents
Personal Knowbase |
Software
This page describes some Windows computer programs and applications which have proved useful in therapeutic work and its administration. Preference is given to software which takes little disk space and memory, and which is portable or requires minimal installation. Most of the software recommended can be run easily from a USB flash drive hosted by any Windows computer. Links to further information and download sites are also provided. Please check the licence agreement and copyright statement for any piece of software before using or distributing it. |
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Personal Knowbase is an outstandingly useful and well-crafted database manager for freeform text. It is ideal for storing client records and notes of therapy sessions. Great for distributing databases, organizing training records, contact details and research notes too. You will find that its applications are almost endless!
Personal Knowbase uses a unique keyword-based system to store and retrieve related information in a natural way, by association. Its ability to assign an item of information to multiple keywords has a great advantage over tree-based organizers (such as TreePad) where each item can belong to only one branch. You can also build and save customized queries in Personal Knowbase by combining keywords with logical operators.
Articles are the basic units of information held in Personal Knowbase, and these can be formatted in various styles. Text information can be entered into articles directly from the keyboard, pasted from the clipboard, or imported from a variety of common document formats. Articles can have attachments and contain hypertext links to further data sources. Articles can be sorted and retrieved by their title or date as well as by keywords. There is a tagging facility to instantly access important articles. Facilities to export data are also provided. There is no limit to the size of databases or the length of articles which can be stored. For added security, a database can be encrypted and protected with a password.
Support from the supplier Bitsmith Software is excellent and there are also helpful forums. Please see the detailed screenshots of the program in operation. A fully functional 30-day trial is available. Very highly recommended.
Operating system requirements: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP (also unofficially NT, if certain DLLs are available)
Download a trial copy of Personal Knowbase from Bitsmith Software
Order Personal Knowbase
Personal Knowbase Reader allows you to share Personal Knowbase data files with colleagues, students or friends, even though they don't have a copy of Personal Knowbase itself. With the Reader, your associates can view, search, export, and print Knowbase articles, but cannot modify articles or create new ones.
Personal Knowbase Reader is free for personal use. For business or government use, a licence is required.
Operating system requirements: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP (also unofficially NT, if certain DLLs are available)
Visit Bitsmith Software to download Personal Knowbase Reader
UK's Kalender is a small, self-contained program which helps you to organize your appointments and tasks, reminding you of upcoming and overdue events. It offers a surprising number of powerful features, with the emphasis on usefulness and efficiency rather than unnecessary decoration. Weekly, fortnightly, monthly and yearly views are all available. Kalender handles many types of repeating events, multi-day events and can even attach a document or another program to an event. Warnings and alarms can be set (with or without sound), and it offers a 'snooze' function to override them if necessary. Categories of events can be devised and templates stored for repeated use. Events can be highlighted or coloured in various ways, and can be copied to the Windows clipboard. Additional holiday modules are available for several countries, including the UK and USA.
Although Kalender stores its data in a proprietary file format, it can export events and todos to HTML and CSV formats. Printing is achieved via an HTML export to your usual web browser. Kalender is unlimited freeware and can easily be run from a USB flash drive instead of a hard drive if you need portability.
Operating system requirements: Windows 98/2000/XP and possibly others, but not Windows NT
K-Meleon is a lightweight and extremely fast web browser which is based on the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox and other Mozilla browser derivatives. Running completely independently of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, K-Meleon offers greater security and can be highly customized. K-Meleon loads significantly faster and is lighter on system resources than Firefox, while providing more immediately useful features for browsing. K-Meleon is free, open source software.
Portable K-Meleon versions, such as Pocket K-Meleon, are available which are ideal for running K-Meleon efficiently and securely from a USB flash drive, leaving no trace on the host computer.
Operating system requirements: Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP (9x systems may require some updated DLLs)
Download Pocket K-Meleon and other portable versions
Visit the K-Meleon project home page
Thunderbird is a free Mozilla product which has matured into a leading email client. It is fully-featured, highly customizable and secure, avoiding many of the vulnerabilities which have plagued Microsoft email clients such as Outlook and Outlook Express. Although quite substantial in size, it can be compressed and tweaked to save computer resources. Thunderbird can be easily configured to run from a portable drive.
Operating system requirements: Windows 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP (Linux and Mac also)
Foxit Reader is a free viewer and printer for PDF documents. The download package for this program is only around a megabyte in size and installs very simply. Foxit Reader takes a modest amount of system resources and opens up almost immediately, unlike the increasingly bloated, slow and resource hungry Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Operating system requirements: Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003
Mind Mapping®, originated by Tony Buzan in the late 1960s, is a powerful graphic technique to represent your ideas and thoughts in two dimensions. A Mind Map has branches and keywords radiating out from a central topic, showing their relative importance and how they are associated. The full range of cortical skills - word, image, number, logic, rhythm, colour and spatial awareness - can be used to enhance a Mind Map, making it more memorable and promoting greater insight, problem-solving or planning. The ability of a Mind Map to give you an overview of the whole picture while still seeing where the details fit in is a huge advance on one-dimensional, linear ways of thinking. Mind Mapping reflects much better how our memory and emotions work by association.
Mind Mapping can be applied to many aspects of life where improved learning and clearer thinking matter. In particular, therapists and clients can use Mind Maps to explore emotions, relationships, problem-solving, decision-making, personal values, beliefs, and so on. Also, Mind Maps can be a most valuable tool for trainers and educators, aiding brainstorming and summarizing information in one page which could take several in text form. MindMan Personal is a freeware piece of software, albeit quite old now, which provides a good introduction to Mind Mapping - see example above.
Operating system requirements: Windows 95/98/NT and possibly later
Download MindMan Personal - version 3.0, freeware, 856kb
Check availability of The Mind Map Book at Amazon.co.uk
See the Mind Mapping entry in the Google Directory
Visit Mindjet - supplier of MindManager and formerly MindMan Personal
Two other good pieces of software for mind mapping, eMindMaps and MindManager Smart, have unfortunately been discontinued. However, you may still be able to obtain copies since both were provided free with some computer magazines over the last few years. The big brother of all these programs is MindManager, but this may be too complex and expensive for most people's personal needs.
Created with MindMan Personal
dsCrypt by Dariusz Stanislawek is a very small (only 25kb) but highly secure file encryption program. Whenever you need to ensure the absolute privacy of data, such as client details or session records, dsCrypt is a fast and effective solution. The program is freeware and totally self-contained.
dsCrypt uses an advanced AES/Rijndael file encryption algorithm and offers some unique enhanced security features. In particular, dsCrypt overwrites original files, does not create any temporary files, and completely erases the data and password from memory after use. It does not save your password in any form. You can open files directly or drag-and-drop filenames onto dsCrypt's window.
PassPack by Dariusz Stanislawek is an incredibly compact (only 15kb) and high security manager for passwords and other confidential information. It features exceptional resistance to brute-force password search attacks, easy copying and pasting of stored data, and both data import and export. The program is freeware and totally self-contained.
dsDEL, also by Dariusz Stanislawek, is a tiny (8kb) secure file deleter. You simply drag-and-drop filenames onto dsDEL's window. It overwrites the target files with a bit pattern before deleting them. Files can be overwritten once or twice, with the second run using a reversed bit pattern. Again, the program is freeware and self-contained.
Note that Windows does not remove any data when you "delete" a file - it simply marks the space on disk as available for re-use. To ensure confidentiality, you must use a specialist utility such as dsDEL to actually obliterate the data in the file.
Operating system requirements for dsCrypt, PassPack and dsDEL: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP
Visit Dariusz Stanislawek to download dsCrypt or PassPack
Temporary download for dsDEL (currently missing from Dariusz's website)
WinBZip2 by Irnis Haliullin is a small utility for compressing a data file to a very high degree, using the BZip2 format. It can also decompress and test the integrity of such files. The disk space saved is much more than can be achieved using other traditional ZIP programs. Note that WinBZip2 only compresses a single file at a time - it can not produce an archive containing multiple files. WinBZip2 is freeware and requires no installation.
Operating system requirements: Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP
Visit Irnis.net to download WinBZip2
Read more about WinBZip2
If you need to compress several data files and store them in one archive, then WinImp is highly recommended. WinImp not only reads common archive formats such as ZIP and RAR, but also has its own high performance IMP archive format. WinImp can create ZIP and IMP archives with high compression, and can produce self-extracting archives too. WinImp is now freeware, and uses less than 1MB of hard disk space - much less than the paid-for alternatives!
Operating system requirements: Windows 95/98/NT/2000 and probably later
UPX is the acronym for the open source Ultimate Packer for eXecutables. This means it can take most program .EXE and .DLL files and compress them down to a fraction of their original size, with practically no performance or memory overhead. For anyone who needs to save disk space (for example, on a floppy disk to make a program portable), this is an invaluable utility.
Operating system requirements: DOS, Windows, LINUX, etc
Google & Gmail privacy concerns
Concerns are escalating regarding Google's dominance of the search engine field. Google places a peristent 'cookie' with a unique identifier on your computer's hard drive, and every time you use Google to search the web, your identifier, internet IP address, time and date, and search terms are recorded. This data is apparently being retained indefinitely, for uncertain purposes in the future (the American government has also attempted to tap into it).
Please refer to Google Watch for further details. You may also consider using alternative search engines such as Scroogle or Clusty which do not have such privacy concerns.
Gmail is the free web-based email service offered by Google which is becoming increasingly popular. Gmail is supported by advertising and it uses "content extraction" on all incoming and outgoing emails in order to target advertising to the user. However, this practice raises serious privacy issues, especially for senders who have not consented to the content of their emails being scanned and interpreted by Google. With Gmail's almost unlimited email capacity and Google's ability to track search engine queries, there is an unprecedented potential to pool information on individuals. Moreover, Google may keep this information indefinitely, and give this information to whomever they wish.
Both therapists and clients should be fully aware of the privacy issues concerned when emailing messages to or from a Gmail account. Please refer to Gmail Privacy FAQ and Creepy Gmail for further details.
Disclaimer: This website only provides general information derived from research findings. It is not a substitute for a consultation with a mental health professional about an individual case. While every effort is made to ensure the accuracy and objectivity of information on this site, the authors accept no responsibility for the consequences of errors or omissions. Information about the practice of psychotherapy and counselling in Scotland and/or the United Kingdom may not be applicable in other countries. External websites are linked in good faith, but their contents cannot be vouched for.
Copyright © 2004-2007 Talkingcure.co.uk. All rights reserved.
Last updated 13 December 2007
