Top 10 Free Programs Normal People Should Know About

Spread the word! Chances are, anyone who likes computers and free things has heard of/used just about all of these. But the non-geeks need to see the light! So off we go:

Opera

Opera is a web browser, just like Internet Explorer and much hyped Mozilla Firefox. However, Opera just seems to do things a little bit better. Speed tests show that Opera is just one of the fastest browsers around, beating IE and Firefox, among others. It has built in RSS Aggregator, email client (which is where I get my Furman and Gmail messages routed to), mouse gestures, contacts, notes, blah blah blah. Plus it's skinnable. And it has some features that most others lack (such as a magic wand that saves your usernames and passwords for any website so you can log in automatically, a BitTorrent downloader, a speed dial which is like bookmarks on acid, and thousands of widgets to add more functionality). Opera is the man.

Audacity

Audacity is a free program for audio-editing. It's easy to use, does a good job, and is cross-platform. What more can you ask for?

The GIMP

The GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is basically a free and open source Photoshop. It has most, if not all, of the functionality of Photoshop. While the user interface is pretty wacky at first, once you get used to it it's hard to turn back. I use it pretty much every day for one thing or another. For anyone who has ANY interest in photos or graphics whatsoever, why not give it a shot? It's free, right?

Google Desktop

For anyone who hasn't heard of desktop search tools, they're pretty dang cool. They index anything and everything on your hard drive, so whenever you want to find a picture, document, song, whatever...all you have to do is type part of the file name or the contents and results instantly pop up. Saves me the time of searching through all of my folders trying to remember where I stuck something. While Yahoo! and X1 have decent desktop search tools, I like Google's. Press ctrl twice for it to pop up, or you can just stick a little search box on the taskbar.

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org provides a free and open source office suite. It looks and acts a lot like MS Office, but costs a couple hundred less dollars. OO includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a database management program, a math function creator, and a drawing program. I haven't been able to find anything in MS Office that's missing from OpenOffice, so go ahead and support open source and save money.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a really cool free drawing program that works a lot like the expensive Adobe Illustrator. It is VERY capable, pretty user friendly, and not too bad looking either. It is vector based, so it stores each object as its own object which can be modified, rather than working in layers such as The GIMP. Check it out.

Winamp

Winamp is an awesome little media player. I used it religiously before I moved to Linux and switched to Audacious. It's skinnable, leaves a relatively small footprint on your CPU (i.e., much less than Windows Media Player but still more than something like Quintessential Player), has a built in Media Library, retrieval of streams from Shoutcast, and supports most video formats as well. It's probably the coolest media player for Windows there is.

Yahoo! Widgets

Yahoo! has a little engine for widgets, which are basically little tiny things you can put anywhere on your desktop to do almost anything you want. Look at the screen shot to really understand this. You can find computer information monitors, weather forecasts, media players, picture frames, note pads, even some that tell you where to find the cheapest gas or what is coming on TV that day. Part of the reason that Yahoo!'s system is so great is just because of the sheer number of widgets out there. There are TONS of them. Check it out.

Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird (from the same guys that make Firefox obviously) is a really popular email client. As far as free email systems go, it's pretty much the cream of the crop. Through plugins, it can even be set up to receive http messages, such as Hotmail and Yahoo, which most email clients aren't capable of. It's also skinnable (do we see a pattern developing?).

Picasa

Picasa is a program made by Google for managing and editing photos. It will organize, crop, modify, and view, and look really cool doing it. Anyone with a lot of photos should check it out.

Well that's that. Stay tuned for version two, which will be some programs that even the computer nuts may not know about.