Free Software I Use
Click on each image for a larger one.The purpose behind this little paean is nothing more than to illustrate some of the free stuff out there that makes my computing life that much easier. By free, I mean the software has been released as freeware by its creator, or is free under a different license, such as the GNU General Public License. These are all Windows applications I've reviewed here, but not exclusively so. The ones marked with a * come in non-Windows flavours as well.
• Crimson Editor - Arguably the best IDE out there. Freeware. Superb editor; has syntax highlighting for a number of languages, including HTML and CSS, as well as many others. See the screenshot for a list. Its search and replace function is also very good, working across multiple files. The ability to select by column makes it great to edit long lists of tags and other sequential mark-up vertically, that'd otherwise be a chore to do.
It can read and write Windows, Macintosh and Unix file formats, can preview Web pages in a browser, has a simple macro function and a host of other functions. Excellent tool and I solidly recommend it for any type of Web-related development.
• Firefox - * Open Source. In case you were stranded on Mars and didn't know already, Firefox is a standalone browser, made by the folks who brought you Mozilla. It differs from Mozilla in that fashion; it's only a browser and has no other component, no email client, no HTML editor or anything else. I'm not going as far to say this site is best in Firefox, as that defeats the paradigm of standards-compliant coding, but I will remark it looks pretty damned good in it.
It possesses a nice and clean layout that has immediate appeal.
What endears Firefox to me is the freedom from being hijacked by ActiveX that Internet Explorer users sometimes suffer. Hell, at my last job, the public access computers they had in their lunch-room where chocker-block full of malware tool-bars, hijacked home-pages, modified error pages, etc. It was unreal. Freedom from pop-ups too, as well as being free of absurdities like trapping right-click mouse events.
Plus, you get a standards-compliant browser that has much fuller support for the ancient 8 year old HTML 4.01 recommendation and almost-as-ancient CSS 2.0 recommendation. It's great. Do yourself and your computer's integrity a favour and get hold of it now. Millions have; it's usage is estimated at 25-30% of all browser activity. A far cry from the 90%+ near-monopoly Internet Explorer had maybe a year or so ago. The playing field is becoming level again.
• WS_FTP LE Crippleware. By that I mean, although it's free, it lacks the features of its big brother WS_FTP and lets you know about it. These features are probably of no merit to the average user anyway. If you want something to transfer files to and from your website's server, then this application is a no-brainer. It's nowhere near as over-implemented as other FTP applications; throwing far too many silly features at you when all you need is simple file movement. It excels at this, and does everything you expect it to. My only gripes is a lack of a real keep-alive function, meaning your server will time itself out without activity, and it sends a weird time-stamp command to the server after an upload, MDTM, which my site's server doesn't understand. It doesn't hurt anything though. Nice and simple program with few bells and whistles, but it does what you need it to do.
• Open Office - * Open Source. One of a few open source office suites going about. It's aimed squarely at the person who uses Microsoft Office products and it succeeds at emulating them and/or matching them. I admit, I only use the word-processor function of Open Office, but I found it to be as fully featured as say Word 2000. It can do all the stuff Word can do, like auto-format, page numbering, mail merging, etc.
I did all my fiction-writing with it (I went back to Word 97) and I never encountered any major dramas, apart from the bundled help file that came with it was in Japanese or Chinese (I did download the English version.). It's a stable application and it can handle formats from a variety of external programs. It handled the PowerPoint presentations made in Office 2000 my sister sent me without a hassle. It reads and writes RTF not a problem.
It isn't small; it's over 100 megabytes, so keep that in mind.