This section contains some useful programs in five categories. File
sizes may have changed since last check.
Image Editing |
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Easy Thumbnails (freeware, 1.1 MB)
Create thumbnail images quickly and easily! Almost all the
thumbnails on this site have been created with Easy Thumbnails. The program
is handy when resizing bigger images as well.
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GIMP (open source, 16 MB)
A free image editor with a relatively wide range of advanced features.
Probably not too easy to a newbie, but I'd say it's worth learning.
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WWW Gif Animator (shareware, 291 kB)
Quite a good program for making animated GIF images.
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Music & Sound |
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CDex (freeware, 2 MB)
Copy music from CDs to MP3 or WAV files. Can also
convert MP3 to WAV and WAV to MP3.
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mp3DirectCut (freeware, 200 kB)
Cut and fade mp3 files.
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Mp3tag (freeware)
A program for editing tag info of media files. Can edit
multiple files at a time. Supports a
wide range of formats, e.g. mp3, wma and ogg.
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TuxGuitar (freeware)
TuxGuitar supports Guitar Pro tablatures with which you can not
only see the notes of a song for different instruments but also hear them played.
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Winamp
Probably the most popular media player, Winamp has heaps of
different features and a wide range of supported file formats.
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Office Programs |
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CutePDF Writer (freeware)
A program for printing any file into PDF format. It will be visible as a
printer in your system. Requires GhostScript or another corresponding
software to work.
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OpenOffice.org
A fairly good Office pack. Even though it cannot beat MS Office in most areas, OpenOffice is worth trying if you don't want to pay for your software. OpenOffice contains most of the functions that MS Office has.
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PDFTools (freeware, 3 MB)
A simple tool for creating, splitting, joining, encrypting and
decrypting PDF files.
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PDF-XChange Viewer (free)
An alternative to Adobe Reader with more features.
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Programming and Text Editors |
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Eclipse (open source, 170 MB)
An open source software development platform. Mostly targeted for Java,
but it is possible to use other languages too, such as C++ and PHP. Eclipse has a huge amount of extension packages and utilities.
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NetBeans IDE (open source)
An IDE with a wide support for different technologies. NetBeans is
mostly Java oriented, but other languages, such as C++ and PHP, are
supported. Web applications, web pages and traditional single machine
programs are created equally easily. You can also design with UML and
generate code based on the diagrams or create diagrams by reverse
engineering a program. From web page point of view, built-in FTP functions
are very handy.
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Notepad++ (freeware)
Advanced text editor which recognizes dozens of different programming
and markup languages. HTML, PHP, C++, C#, XML, Ada, Perl...
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NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) (open source)
A program to create Windows installers. Simple self-extractors can be created easily from a ZIP file. If more advanced functionality is needed, a scripting language made for the purpose of creating setups is used. Customizable installers and uninstallers can be created easily just by using a few lines of code!
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SharpDevelop (open source)
Open source IDE for .NET. SharpDevelop feels almost same as
Visual Studio, in good and bad.
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TeXnicCenter
A rather advanced text editor for writing LaTeX documents.
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TortoiseSVN
A version control software that integrates itself into the context menus of Explorer.
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Tools |
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7-Zip (open source)
An open source archiver. Supports most common archive formats:
packs and unpacks e.g. ZIP and TAR an unpacks ARJ, RAR, LZH and MSI.
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Bulk Rename Utility (freeware)
Lets you rename multiple files at a time.
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Console Calculator (freeware)
A great console-like calculator program. I've used it
since I got fed up with Windows' Calculator as it lacks
some important features.
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SharpKeys (freeware)
Lets you edit the system registry so that you can remap any key on
the keyboard. Doesn't work on the Fn key of a laptop though.
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Web |
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Google Chrome
A light and free web browser by Google.
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FileZilla (freeware)
Quite a good and free FTP program. FileZilla has more
features than WS_FTP.
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Mozilla Firefox
Quite a popular web browser with advanced features.
Offers lots of plugins. Newest Firefox versions are not so light
as the first ones.
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Opera
In my opinion, the best browser. There are lots of features that
make it very good to use. There are also lots of plugins.
It seems that Firefox has actually copied most of its features from Opera. ;)
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Mozilla Thunderbird
The email client I use. Supports also RSS feeds and newsgroups.
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