Free Software that made my Life Easier
I am generally an open source enthusiast and try to use free software as much as I can. Here is some of this software those make my life a lot easier, reduce the everyday pain and finally saves my wallet from getting slim.
Office Package: No doubt I do stay on open office, the amazing office bundle developed by sun and thousands of contributors. The recent version of Open Office is really something that can fight with MS Office. I need not to use any other office package for my everyday office work.
Notepad: You may surprise, but I really need a faster editor for editing my daily code files with the feature that I die for, syntax highlighting. I find Notepad2 is amazingly slim and faster and can replace the built-in notepad application with much more rating.
Database: Well, yeah MySQL. That is my first choice over the proprietary Access. It helps me to keep track of my applications with enterprise features and scalability. And most of all, its free.
Blog: There are so many blog engines in the market but I do stay on the oldy goldy WordPress. If you are familiar with extending wordpress, then you definitely know how it can fulfill your entire requirement for everyday blogging, even for a small CMS. I love wordpress.
RSS Aggregator: Here comes the RSS Owl, the open source java based RSS feed aggregator that I rely to keep myself up-to-date. RSS Owl comes with built-in tabbed browser which reduces the pain of opening another browser to check the feed URL. Moreover its customization capability is very powerful and that’s all, I don’t need anything more.
Email: Ha Ha Ha, No place for Outlook. I like and trust on Thunderbird.
PDF Generator: I use Open Office’s built-in PDF printer. That works pretty fine for me and can generate almost every kind of PDF.
Organizer: Hey can you guess which One I do use for organizing me? Aren’t you? Yeah Is Sunbird, the organizer developed by Mozilla foundation.
Web Browsing: I stopped using “Blue E” years ago. I find myself in love with Firefox. I am extremely annoyed on Opera 8x versions because of their lack of support to rich text editors and a bug which sometimes erase your bookmark list after a crash.
Explorer: Here I sometime use Microsoft XP’s built-in explorer but I really depend on Total Commander Power pack edition. That may not be free at all, but it’s a shareware. But the shareware works pretty fine and hey, if you don’t mind buy it for 28 Euro.
Instant Messaging: You may already fall in love with YM or MSN but I do use all-in-one instant messengers. Sometime I use web based solutions and sometime I use desktop applications. For web based edition the Meebo is the most hassle free software. You need not to install it anywhere. Just go to www.meebo.com and start using IMs for free.
FTP Client: Here comes the award winning software FileZilla. It’s free and fast. You can depend on it for every kind of FTP operation.
Photo Organizer: Flickr is worlds most poplar free photo organizer and it do its job pretty fine. I use flickr for storing my everyday photos, organize them and share them with my friends. I really found no alternative of flickr.
Bookmark Manager: Yeah its del.icio.us.
Misc: I also use the following software, services for daily purpose
1. Stickies for sticky management
2. PHP Designer for editing PHP code
3. Unitty for SFTP and SSH
4. Net2FTP for web based FTPing