Freewares that I use...

Here is a list of free (as in free beer) softwares that I had downloaded from the web for my own personal use, along with a very short description of it's usage.

1. Web Browser - Firefox: THE browser for those who wants simplicity, but can be extended to fir their own needs. While simple and elegant in design, it's support for extensions and the huge community to code myriads of extensions had won it many converts from the once insecure Internet Explorer. However, as it's market share continues to grow, more and more exploits had been associated with this software. As said, nothing can be truly safe online...

2. Image Editing - GIMP: GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a powerful image editor that rivals even the venerable Abobe Photoshop series, but without the associated costs. Many seemed to not able to get used to it's interface though, as it's a lot different from Photoshop.

3. Image Management/Viewer - Google Picasa: Voted by many tech editors are the best image management software, it's very simple yet very powerful. I use it mainly for it's intergration with Blogger and Picasa Web, as well as to browse my collection of photos easily.

4. CD/DVD Burning - CD Burner XP Pro: A decent alternative to Nero Burning ROM/Express. It's clean interface is easy enough for me to use it for everyday burning. I do test lots of Linux distributions, so disc burning had became a norm for me. and CD Burner XP Pro provides just that for free.

5. File (De)Compressions Program - 7zip: It's simple to use and supports huge amounts of compression formats, including .zip, .rar, .ace, and lots more. It's own compression mechanism, 7z provides the best compression ratio and is being adopted within the Linux community for their uses.

6. FTP Client - Filezilla: Small program and good performance for usage with ftp servers.

7. Music Management - iTunes 7.0.2: I use this music management program simple because of it's automatic sorting of my music files accordingly. While there are complaints against it's latest version for being buggy, the latest version, 7.0.2, which had just been released yesterday, seemed to had fixed more of the more serious problems. One very annoying bug that had been fixed is the cracking sound produced, finally I can play my music smoothly.

You guys might have noticed an earlier post regarding Songbird. Well, I am using it as my secondary media player, interchanging it with iTunes. It seemed to be a very promising project, and I will track it's progress all right. But for now, it's just a bit too buggy for normal consumption. If you feel adventurous, do give it a try, it's cool all right.

8. Movies (Codecs, Movie player etc.) - K-Lite Mega Codec Pack: This nifty little package contains all that you will ever need to play all kinds of media formats. And it also comes with my favourite movie player, Media Player Classic. Of course, you can opt not to install this player if you don't like a bland interface, it's codecs can work with any movie player that supports Microsoft Directshow interface.

That's all for introduction to the freewares that I am using with my own computer. It's specific to my Microsoft Windows installtion though. Under Ubuntu Linux I am using another set of softwares for the same needs. That I will dedicate another post for it.

Till next time, c'ya

seehua
*Let's create a world full of LOVE~