Favorite Freeware Programs

In My Humble Opinion
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Lets share our favorite freeware programs. I am hoping to focus more on little nifty programs than big ones like Google Earth. I’ll go ahead and link to most of the major freeware ones. Please add the ones you use, especially nifty little programs. Widgets for Yahoo and Panes for Google desktop are included in this. If you are going to post a program please give a brief description, and a link to the download site.

The Big ones:

The Mozilla family. Very nice browser and e-mail clienty.

Opera. Web Browser

Google Desktop. A very powerful indexing tool, plus neat little programs that run on your desktop. Things such as news tickers, weather or sports scores.

Google Earth. Fly around the world and look at satellite pictures.

Yahoo Widgets. Similar to Google desktop but more applets. Get TV schedules, weather and system information on your desktop.

iTunes and Winamp. Music playing software.

The GIMP. Open source Photoshop replacement.

That should cover most of the big ones, but I am sure there are more.

Nifty ones that I use:

Rainlendar. A nice little calendar that sits on your desktop. It has a task list, that displays your upcoming appointments, and a To-do list.

Power Menu. Ever get stuck switching between windows to input data? Not any more, Power Menu allows you to keep a window always on top or semi-transparent. Plus, it allows you to minimize stuff to the tray to keep your taskbar clean.

RUNit. A neat little launching program. It pops up a menu of programs that you choose and allows you to launch to them. Beats going to the desktop or the start menu. The menu pops up if you right click one a side of your screen, or by hitting cntrl shift. Very helpful.

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For those that use Internet Exploder, IE New Window Maximizer is the best thing since sliced bread.

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I use some of the programs listed by the OP: Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird), Opera, WinAmp, Google Earth.

In addition, i have the folliwng freeware products installed, and use most of them on a pretty regular basis:

I have installed Open Office, and would like to use it for everything instead of MS Office, but the OO word processor doesn’t integrate fully with my Endnote citation software, so i have to use Word for that.

Audacity, an excellent free sound editor/recorder.

CDex rips CDs to mp3 for storage/listening on your computer, portable media player, etc.

Autostich, a great little program for stitching together multiple digital images to form a panorama.

TMpegEnc and VirtualDub for joining, editing, and encoding mpeg and avi video files.

Media Player Classic, a small and non-bloated media player that, in conjuction with ffdshow (a codec library), RealAlternative, and QuicktimeAlternative, will allow you to play just about any video file you’re likely to come across, including DVDs.

SmartFTP, an FTP client that i use for downloading movies from the Internet Archive.

Worldwind, a satellite viewer similar to Google Earth, provided by NASA. And Celestia, a space simulation program that allows you to zoom around the galaxy.

AnyPassword, a program that stores all your log-ins and passwords in a protected file.

Skype, free internet telephony if the other person also has Skype; if they don’t, calls are still cheap. Works great, and i use it for all my international calls.

Nvu, a free WYSIWYG webpage authoring program that is pretty good for people who would like an easy-to-use interface, but can’t justify the expense of Dreamweaver or (shudder) Frontpage.

If you prefer to hand-code, there are some good free html editors out there. I have a few installed, just for fun. 1stPage is pretty nice, as are AceHTML and Arachnophilia.

For giving me a good overview of my hard drive usage, i like Treesize

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Handyshopper. I use it every day!

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FRACTINT. Yes, it’s a DOS program. Yes, I’ve been using its various incarnations for almost twenty years.

I’ve used the hell out of that puppy. I’ve made a few custom formulas, but I’m especially proud of a few simple programs I’ve written to generate text file pairs to drive FRACTINT.EXE to output frames for animation using user input and a variety of unusual inputs.

FRACTINT is a freaking great source of raw images to use with other graphic utilities. (I worked up a nice Photoshop automation to convert fractint images into anaglyphic 3D pictures that kick the ass out of the built-in feature.)

It’s great if you have no knowledge of how it works and just want to explore various fractals – but it’s hands-down the best fractal program if you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty. Open-ended, customizable, and more versatile than any 32-bit fractal application going.

There’s a small parameter file (mudd.par) I made around '97 hosted on the TRIUMF site that contains one of my favourite fractals ever – It’s not super-self-similar or a particularly baroque image – it’s just Lippy the Lion, in fractal form.

I freakin’ love that program. It’s ridiculously free, of course.

Similarly reiterating geeky goodness: Lparser. Lparser takes Lindenmayer strings and a few variables as input and produces models of the 3D objects they represent. I used it a lot more when I was doing a lot of stuff in 3D Studio. You can get it to export autodesk .DXF files that can be imported into 3DS. Great for quick-and-dirty trees, plants, and flowers for use as detail – or just ridiculously psychedelic and impossible objects for more fanciful scenes. Great proggy.

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FileZilla
Another excellent and free/open-source FTP client. Best I’ve used.

IrfanView
Extremely powerful image viewer/batch editor. Difficult to use and interface could be better, unfortunately.

SmartMorph
Freeware program that lets you morph from one image to another and save the result as either an image or an animation.

Picasa by Google
Excellent freeware photo album program that can also handle basic photo manipulation tasks. Uses non-destructive handling of images.

CutePDF
Freeware PDF printer. Print to PDF files from any application.

Xampd
If you like XM Radio Online, this freeware program provides a much better front-end to the service.

PSP Video 9
If you want to watch videos on your PSP, this freeware conversion program makes it a pretty painless process.

Autostitch
Generates high-quality panoramas from your photos automatically. You don’t have to line them up or do any work; the program automatically handles everything from photo placement to correcting every aspect of the photos to make them look seamless.

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ColorIt! v2.3

Freeware paint program. I got it on a 3.5" floppy with a Macworld book, back in 1994. Still use it today. I have other paint aps that I use in addition, but this one’s still at the core.

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Ethereal - A awesome network packet sniffer and protocal analyser

Pixel Toolbox - A great tool for creating and editing icons for Windows systems.

Trillian - Combines all the major chat clients (AIM, YM, MSN, ICQ, and IRC) into one easy to use chat program.

Truecrypt - Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk… plus a whole lot more. I’m surprised this one is free.

FreeRamXP Pro - A great little memory manager to help Windows systems become more stable.

rjhExtensions - A simple utility that will add a number of useful functions to the context menu of Windows Explorer. For me this is a MUST HAVE on any computer I own.

SaverStarter - Can run and/or disable the screen saver when the mouse is in a corner of a screen. It also can start the current screen saver quickly and gives easy access to the screen saver configuration settings.

FreeUndelete - A freeware data recovery program for deleted files.

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HideOE

Minimize Outlook Express to the system tray.

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www.belarc.com
Great system inspection utility (“download” button at top of belarc page).

http://www.f-secure.com/blacklight/
Black rootkit inspection and eliminator for identifying stealth malware, keystroke loggers and other deeply hidden resident programs

http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html
Hijack This- Great spyware detector for especially pernicious stuff

www.driverguide.com
lifesaver when trying to get drivers for older hardware
Use “drivers” and “all” as login and password

http://toolbar.google.com/
Second Google toolbar recommendation - It has a very nice spellchecker you can use for web postings including the Straight Dope Message Board

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Everybody already have XP Powertoys already?

If not, it’s pretty cool.

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As have I, but these days I don’t use it much except to generate regions for SimCity 4.

Have you tried the Windows port?

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I like using 7-zip instead of WinZIP (or god-forbid windows built in zip support). It also supports ACE/RAR and a bunch of other formats. Basically, you won’t get nagged to donate / register.

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Sorry, it doesn’t support ACE. I still like it better than WinZIP though.

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ZipGenius is an excellent program. It includes 20 archive formats including 7-zip and CAB.

Inkscape is a nice Vector based drawing program (compare to Adobe Illustrator).

There are some great resources out there: DownloadSquad SourceForge

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nedit a great text editor (for linux only?) with customizable syntax highlighting and other features. Looks an operates like windows notepad or wordpad so no learning curve like vi or emacs. I use it for pretty much all code development and latex.

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nedit isn’t linux only. It’s been compiled for the X11 environment of OS X, and I’m rather fond of it. (BBEdit still rules in general, but when you’re in Unixland and have Unix-style line endings all over the place, nedit is better)

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I noticed nobody mentioned my favorite anti-virus program, AVG

For those of you who have caller ID and sometimes get calls from unfamiliar area codes, there’s Quick Info

Password Safe is a nice program to help keep track of all your usernames and passwords.

For you Palm OS users out there, there’s Mega Memo , which lets you create memos that are much longer than Palm Desktop will let you create

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I forgot to mention Folder Size , which will show you the size of each folder in Windows Explorer.

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Can’t believe I’m the first to mention gaim.
It combines several chat protocols, including AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and others. It’s not bloated like the native clients, and saves you RAM and CPU cycles because it’s just one program, not two or three. I prefer it over Trillian, because last I checked, Trillian wouldn’t show links in AIM profiles whereas gaim does.