ZoomIt — The Complete Guide: Zoom and Draw on Screen During Presentations and Design Reviews
ZoomIt from Sysinternals zooms into part of the screen, lets you draw on it and records video — all via hotkeys. Free, for showing small details in reviews.
Guides and Articles
Paint.NET — The Complete Guide: A Fast Windows Image Editor for Preparing Report Photos
Paint.NET is a free Windows image editor with layers and plugins — for cropping site photos, adding arrows, blurring details and preparing figures for reports.
Excalidraw — The Complete Guide: A Virtual Whiteboard for Concept Sketches and Explaining Ideas
Excalidraw is an open-source browser whiteboard with a hand-drawn look. For concept sketches, explaining an idea on a call and shared design reviews.
Mermaid — The Complete Guide: Diagrams and Schedules Written as Text
Mermaid is an open-source library that turns a few lines of text into a flowchart, Gantt or state diagram. Diagrams live as text in Git and on GitHub.
yEd Graph Editor — The Complete Guide: Free Diagrams With Smart Automatic Layout
yEd is a free diagram editor that lays out nodes and links automatically — flowcharts, org charts, networks and BPMN, with Excel import. OK for commercial use.
Logseq — The Complete Guide: Outliner Notes and a Daily Work Journal in Local Files
Logseq is open-source outliner note-taking with a page per day and local files. For design-meeting notes, project tasks, PDF annotations and a knowledge base.
Obsidian — The Complete Guide: A Local Knowledge Base for Projects, Design Decisions and Lessons
Obsidian keeps notes as Markdown files on your computer, with links and a graph view. Free even for commercial use; sync and publishing are paid add-ons.
ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors — The Complete Guide: A Free Office Suite Built Around Office Formats
ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors is an open-source office suite with docx, xlsx and pptx as native formats — for reports and calc sheets, plus a PDF and form editor.
calibre — The Complete Guide: An Organised Digital Library for Textbooks and Technical Manuals
calibre is free, open-source software for managing e-books and technical manuals: a catalogue, EPUB, MOBI and PDF conversion, a reader and access from a phone.
ActivityWatch — The Complete Guide: Automatic, Private Time Tracking for Accurate Timesheets
ActivityWatch automatically logs which program and window you used, and the data stays on your PC. For engineers billing hours to several projects — free.
gImageReader — The Complete Guide: Free OCR That Turns Scans and PDFs Into Searchable Text
gImageReader is a free, open-source graphical front end to Tesseract OCR. Scanned specifications and old standards become text or a searchable PDF file.
Double Commander — The Complete Guide: A Two-Pane File Manager for Projects, Drawings and Versions
Double Commander is a free open-source two-pane file manager in the Total Commander style: batch rename, archives as folders, content search and FTP and SFTP.