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Every once in a while, a piece of software arrives into the world that is well-written, simple-to-use, and efficient. Now, software that’s 1, or even 2 of those things, appears all the time, but hitting the trifecta is a differnet matter.

ISO Recorder is one of those rare pieces of software. Designed by Alex Feinman, the program (it’s actually just a .dll) does one thing, and one thing well. After you install it, any iso image has the default option to burn it to disk (in the Vista version, this includes DVD images). The install of the software itself is nearly instant, on account of its small file size. There’s no annoying start menu crap or desktop shortcuts to deal with–just a nicely associated .dll ready to burn images.

I needed to burn two images yesterday, one an ISO of the MSDN version of XP, and the other a BartPE boot CD. The MSDN ISO is 600MB, so when the status bar on ISO Recorder started moving fluidly from 0% to 100%, completing in less than a minute, I knew something was wrong, especially since the blank disk I’d used had clearly seen some abuse. Not the case. I popped the disk back in, and the Windows install screen came up. I then used the disk with PE Builder, which ripped the disk cleanly twice in a row. The image created with Bart PE (around 160MB) burned in seconds.

I love ISO Recorder. And it’s free, so give Alex some support and donate through the PayPal link on his pages.

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Orca: free MSI editor or perfect killing machine? Yes.

I’ve been working a lot recently with Macrovision’s AdminStudio package, which includes their popular InstallShield .msi creation software. While it’s safe to say that InstallShield provides a serious level of drag-and-drop ease with their product, it’s also equally safe to say the $1500 price tag is probably out of the reach of most home users who, say, want to package up their GPL app into a nice, clean installer format. That’s where Orca comes in.

A free app available from Microsoft as part of their massive (>1.5Gb) SDK, but better acquired on its own as a tiny download from Aaron Stebner’s blog. The direct link for download is here.

Now, Orca obviously doesn’t include all of the GUI features that you’ll find in InstallShield-after all, it’s a free product from Microsoft-but it’s certainly good for what it does allow you to do: make quick and easy edits to existing .msi’s and create simple installers for free. I recently used it to add in several products to the Upgrade table for an existing installer, a task which is particularly simple with Orca’s direct editing interface. Also, in spite of being less drag-and-drop than its expensive Macrovision cousin, Orca does feature really helpful pop-up dialog boxes that provide the user with paradigms and expected values to enter into the MSI tables, a feature that will be of great help to those just getting started with creating .msi’s. All in all, it’s a really nice tool for Microsoft to hand out for free, and something fun to have on your computer to spy on the inner workings of other people’s installers.

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