Free Software

Posted by Chris

There's no point in paying for software when perfectly good alternatives are free. Below is a list of free, reliable software. Most of it is open source, too (meaning that the code the program uses is also distributed publicly, for anyone to inspect). Some of the programs have Mac and Linux versions, but I'll focus on PC software for now.

-- Keynote is a wonderful little note organizer. Here is a bit on the program cribbed from the help file:

Keynote is a flexible, multi-featured tabbed notebook, based on Windows standard RichEdit control. It's always accessible with a single keypress, even if you work in another application. It's certainly more fun to use than pen and paper! A large number of text formatting functions allows you to create very readable, clear, and well-organized notes.

The basic idea in KeyNote is that you can have many separate notes within a single file. This means that you do not need to open several files - for most purposes it is enough to create only one file and several notes inside it. With the addition of the tree-type notes, you now have a three-dimensional notebook: many notes within one file and a multi-level, nested pages within a single note. (Read more about KeyNote files)

All Explananda posts are written on Keynote, in case you cared to know.

-- By the same programmer, Oubliette is a great password manager. It encrypts all your passwords into a single, uncrackable file. Up until recently, I was in the habit of storing all my passwords in a single plaintext file. So . . . this is an improvement.

-- Thunderbird is a great email client (from the same people who brought you Firefox) which I use for Explananda-related email. I have about a hundred hits a day, and if one out of every 10,000 hits results in an email, well, you get the picture: It's a veritable torrent of electronic communication. Thunderbird is up to that job.

-- For word processing documents, I use OpenOffice. Why? Well, I can't afford Microsoft Word, and I can't be bothered to pirate it. And really, what excuse would I have, when the existence of a perfectly good alternative undermines any possible claim to necessity? OpenOffice is very intuitive for anyone used to Microsoft Word. It can read and store documents in word format, so document sharing with the rest of the Microsoft-lovin' world is not an issue (unless, I imagine, the documents have an awful lot of fancy-schmancy formatting). And it has a nifty little PDF button that Microsoft Word doesn't have yet. (And if you shelled out $90 for Adobe Acrobat just to produce PDFs, I can only say: Sucks to be you!) My thesis is currently being procrastinated on in OpenOffice.

-- I don't need to do much with graphics, so I can easily get by with Gimp, which is a free, open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

-- For archiving files, I use Saintly Folder Zipper. This works for little jobs, but if something better came along, I might dump it. Anyone?

-- Finally, I use Notepad++ as my HTML editor, since it's better than the one you get with OpenOffice.

(If you're interested in free security-related software, see this earlier post.)

How in the world would someone find out about these? Lots of ways, but here are two. First, Pricelessware.org has a great selection of high-quality, free, open-source programs. The other thing to do is just go browsing through Sourceforge, which plays an invaluable role coordinating a kazillion different open-source projects, at every stage of development. The number of projects at Sourceforge is enormous, but each search allows you to add filters in order to narrow down what you're looking for fairly quickly.

Happy software hunting!

(Disclaimer: It should be obvious that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Take my advice at your own risk.)

Posted by Chris at July 22, 2004 10:54 AM