Goodies
Cross Platform Freeware:
- Mozilla Firefox (open source)
I recommend Firefox with Google toolbar. See the button on your left! - Mozilla Thunderbird (open source)
A lightweight email client from replacement for Outlook. Great on Mac, great on Windows. Read my article on Breaking the Microsoft stranglehold. - Floola
A cross platform single-file iPod management utility which can be kept and run right on the iPod itself (if enabled as a drive) enables you to both add and download tracks from your iPod. The Mac version is of course nicer. I keep both on my iPod just in case, and I occasionally use them since I work on a mac but do everything else on PC.
Favorite Windows FREEWARE:
- Winamp
My favorite Media player since 1997. The latest version which comes with the excessively functional Bento skin pulls Winamp back to the forefront of windows media players. In particular for playing of the music. Feel the music... Love the music... - Audacity (open source)
After having loyally used Sony Soundforge 5 - 9 (formerly Sonic Foundry Soundforge) for years to record and edit samples, I finally decided it was time to part ways with the now bloated software. After some research, opted for Audacity 1.3.3 (beta), and have yet to look back. - Gimp (open source)
If you like Adobe Photoshop but can't afford it or just can't justify spending a fortune on a piece of software you'll only use sparingly, I recommend The Gimp. - OpenOffice (open source)
It's finally come into it's own. I can't say it's as pretty or embellished as Microsoft Office, but it definitely works as a replacement. Includes programs similar to MS Word (Writer), MS Excel (Calc), MS Access (though not directly compatible with .mdb files - uses ADODB to overcome this) (Base), MS Powerpoint (Impress), and a couple of new ones such as Math - a function creator and imager and Draw - a vector illustration ordeal (nowhere near the caliber of Illustrator or Freehand but it's a start for simple line art). It's also pretty lightweight compared to Office. OpenOffice serves my purposes but if you like the bells and whistles, Office is still king.
Favorite Macintosh FREEWARE:
For some reason, freeware on mac has not only the bonus of being free but because it's geared toward the most user friendly platform, it has the added plus of typically being great looking as well as stable and easy to use.
- Cyberduck (open source)
FTP anyone? I can't begin to describe how useful, stable, responsive and best of all SIMPLE Cyberduck is for what it does in true Apple user friendly style - Adium (open source)
Comparable to Cerulean Studios - Trillian for Windows, Adium, a multi-im client offers skinning, a great deal of customizability, frequent updates and stable operation. Though certain features such as per-program emoticon/smiley sets is missing and some things like auto-linking are missing it more than makes up for it in functionality otherwise. - TextWrangler 2 by Bare Bones Software
BBedit's free little brother TextWrangler has to be probably the best source/text editing software I've tried - free or not - integrates PERFECTLY with Pathfinder, and Cyberduck for on the fly file editing with little resource usage at all. Multiple encoding types support (including UTF8) and code coloring are the icing on the cake.
Other Open Source goodness: