Free Software!
I love the Open Source/Free software movement. It has provided me with some incredibly powerful tools to solve problems, not to mention hours of fun tracking down and playing with this stuff.
The following is a list of some of my favorite open source or free software tools. I’m always looking for more so please post your own favorites as comments and, assuming it makes my Geek-o-meter twitch, I will update the list as time goes on.
- XMind – Mind Mapping and Storming
- MindMeister - Online Mind Mapping (multi-edit – great for collaborating)
- GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program
- Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office
- Ubuntu – Linux
- Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder
- CamStudio – Free Screen Recording Software
- CCleaner – PC Optimization and Cleaning
- JDiskReport – Graphical disk space analysis
- LibreOffice – Free office suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
- OpenProj | Serena Open Source and Hosted Project Management Software
- PDFCreator – The free PDF Creator and Converter
- Skype – Free audio / video communication
- TOAD (Tool For Application Developers)
- MySQL Database
- Joomla – Open Source CMS System (a great way to create your website)
- VMWare Player – Run multiple Operating Systems on one PC
- Jira – Bug and Task tracking tool. Not free but for $10 for a 10 user license, it practically is.
- Talend: Open Source ETL and Data Integration Software
- FileZilla – Excellent free FTP tool.
- Lastpass – Great web based tool for keeping all of your passwords in one place. Works on almost all platforms.
- 7zip – Free compression (zip) program that can handle multiple compression formats.
- Irfanview Image viewer and editor – fast, free, easy to use
- Notepad++ A great text editor – much better than Notepad, especially if you are working on HTML code.
Here are some free programs I enjoy using:
* 7-Zip handles zip files and other archives http://www.7-zip.org
* Irfanview program and plugins from http://www.irfanview.com
Image viewer and editor – fast, free, easy to use
* Notepad++ is much better than Notepad http://www.notepad-plus-plus.org
* honourable mentions to Dropbox, Filezilla, Lastpass,
MP3 Tag Tools, Quick HTML Color Picker, WinDirStat.
Hmmm…some ones there I haven’t tried yet. 7-zip looks interesting in that it can handle zip and TAR files.
I have used Filezilla extensively and actually thought I had listed that one.
I haven’t used LibreOffice. I believe that, so far, the two are still very similar. Time will tell whether Oracle locks things down I suppose.
I’m a recent convert to Lastpass – ironically because they were hacked. What I liked was that they IMMEDIATELY notified everyone recommending that they change their passwords, even though the files were encrypted. I’ll have to try the others out.
Thanks for the recommendations – I’ll update as I try them out.
Hi Barry, I can only guess you downloaded CDex from somewhere dodgy in a repackaged format. The original is on sourceforge http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/?q=download and behaves properly for me.
You may be right – I’ll try again (on a virtual sandbox this time
) and add it if it checks out.