Image, Image Editing and Graphics

Office

Web and Web Development

Development Applications (IDE's)

Operating Systems

Video Playback

Audio

Anti-Virus and Security

Downloading and Download Managers

Remote Access

Games

Useful Apps that don't get their own category

Image, Image Editing and Graphics

The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a Photoshop replacement that doesn't have "quite" as much functionality but it's excellent for free. It comes installed by default on many Linux distros and is also available in Windows.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities sililar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the w3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

A really good, lightweight alternative to Photoshop. It offers layer, unlimited undo, special effects and a wide variety of useful tools. The download is around 2mb too so absolutely worth checking out - I use this when Photoshop is playing up.

Xnview is a software to view and convert graphic files, apparently really simple to use and supports ore than 400 graphics formats.

A lesser known application but it offers the ability to "create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (about 100)". Use it to "translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear, and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses, and bezier curves".

A 3d Studio Max alternative, very comprehensive.

Artweaver is a simple Freeware program for creative painting, i.e. Artweaver offers you all artistic effects which you need for your work. You can create sketches from photos and experiment with a wide range of brushes. The brush simulation is therby so realistic as possible.

It's basically Microsoft Office so you need little else with this installed. It has MS Office suppport (in both reading and writing) so this fantastic suite is fully compatible.

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

Google documents is a free service that simply requires registration in order to use it. You create Microsoft-Office-esq documents in an online environment and they store them on their servers. You can export them and save the files to your hard drive too. In addition, Google allows multiple user collaboration which means numerous people can all be working on the same document at the same time and it will update in real time. Very cool stuff.

Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 2.1 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Foxit Reader supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7.  Web and web development.

Firefox is arguably the second most popular browser available (sitting behind Internet Explorer 6). It's extendable, customisable, secure and massively popular. You can develop plugins for it, other people develop plugins for it - it's just worth having.

This is my personal browser of choice, sexy tabbed browsing, customizable, standards complient and fast. As they put it themselves: "The award-winning Opera Web browser The coolest, fastest, and most secure free Web browser available."

The web developer toolbar is a menu and toolbar setup for Opera which brings together functions related to web development, validation services and links to standards and other documentation.

Amaya is a Web editor to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium. Amaya started as an HTML + CSS style sheets editor. Since that time it was extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG. It allows all those vocabularies to be edited simultaneously in compound documents.

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

A very powerful colour-picking tool, allowing for the easy creation of colour schemes.

The Aptana IDE is a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code.

A very handy tool for capturing colours anywhere on your screen. Color Cop makes it quick and easy in those situations where you need to know what colour is being used.

The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues. It is very similar to Bobby and usefull to anyone wishing to check the accessibilty level of their templates/site.

JsUnit is a Unit Testing framework for client-side (in-browser) JavaScript. It is essentially a port of JUnit to JavaScript. Also included is a platform for automating the execution of tests on multiple browsers and mutiple machines running different OSs.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth (TM) checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Vischeck is a way of showing you what things look like to someone who is color blind. You can try Vischeck online- either run Vischeck on your own image files or run Vischeck on a web page. You can also download programs to let you run it on your own computer.

Find out how people View your website or image and which areas are getting most of the attention. The ViewFinder Heatmap service, is an artificial intelligence service which simulates human visual attention and creates an attention heatmap.

Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

Browsershots.org is a free open-source online service providing screenshots of your web site in a multitude of different browsers. It is not as advanced as BrowserCam but a fantastic tool none the less.

Expresso is useful tool for learning how to use regular expressions and for developing and debugging regular expressions prior to incorporating them into your code. It provides a very cut down version of RegexBuddy but most importantly it is simple to use and free.

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. It’s quite hardcore in my personal opinion so certainly not one for beginners.

All the tools software developers need to create cross-platform Java desktop, enterprise and web applications. Runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS, as well as Solaris. I never got on well with NetBeans but it is a good application, just not one I choose.

Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features 

A free c++ IDE built to meet the “most demanding needs of its users”.

A free IDE for C#, VB.net and Boo projects on Microsoft’s .NET platform. 

The most popular Linux distro at the moment - offering astonishing performance, usability and support (from a massive online community) all for free. 

One of my favourite Linux releases; PCLinuxOS is very different to Ubuntu but powerful and usable in equal measures. I find it a lot more intuitive but purely though personal preference. It too is supported by a healthy community.

I'm not a Fedora user but there are an awful lot of them. Fedora was the daddy long before Ubuntu appeared on the scene and therefore it inherits a lot of excellent features from how long these guys have been doing it. Excellent software, strong communities and worth a look. This is Linux too incase you didn't know.

Quoted as being one of the more fully featured, usable editions of Linux - openSUSE has a lot of users and is one of the major players in the scene today.

Linux is free and it is becoming a viable alternative to Windows these days; here is Distrowatch - a site that links to reviews on each release as well as offering a brief description, background and links. 

Amazingly lightweight and incredibly durable - MPC succeeds where most others fail. It really will play anything and doesn’t even need installing.

A very popular application; a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats. It will play just about anything too.

Youtube is maybe an odd choice to put into the video playback area but there's a good reason for it. You can upload your videos to Youtube quite happily for free and there are hundreds upon thousands of hours of footage on there. From the illegal to the completely random Youtube has more video playback options than your wildest dreams.

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

While not open source, it is free and very good indeed. Far better than iTunes in Kerrigan's personal opinion.

This is one of the best media players I have ever encountered, unfortunately it's purely limited to Linux (KDE environments only) so it's beyond the reach of Windows users and the "Ubuntu mainstream". It's amazing though and I highly recommend it. 

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats. 

A popular and comprehensive, free anti-virus application. Kerrigan uses it. Simple.

Also quite popular and available for free.

A free antivirus application (although it doesn't detect spyware). It apparently has one of the best detection rates out of the free antiviruses on offer. 

A free antivirus with a high detection rate for infected files. It's not very invasive because it doesn't do on-access virus scanning - you specifically need to say which folders to scan. This is both good and bad - good if you're IT savvy because you don't need on access scanning because you're not stupid enough to do "dodgy" things unprotected. It's bad if you're not because it won't tell you that there's a problem until you tell it to look. 

The greatest firewall on planet earth, (unless you have 64 bit vista...) Comodo Firewall, rated by PC Magazine Online as an Editor's Choice, constantly monitors and defends your PC from internet attacks. It's easy to install and use and passes the industry's most stringent firewall "leak" tests. 

Windows Defender is a free program that helps protect your computer against pop-ups, slow performance, and security threats caused by spyware and other unwanted software. It features Real-Time Protection, a monitoring system that recommends actions against spyware when it's detected and minimizes interruptions and helps you stay productive. It's Microsoft though, but good enough I suppose. Not my sort of thing but a lot of people use it.

Does exactly what it says on the tin. Spyware gets terminated. End of.

Another free antivirus, another one that does what it says on the tin.

Orbit Downloader, leader of download manager revolution, is devoted to new generation web (web2.0) downloading, such as video/music/files from Myspace, YouTube, Imeem, Pandora, Rapidshare. And to make general downloading easier and faster. 

The single best torrent application available. I've used many many alternatives and this is the single greatest one around. It has a tiny footprint (only a few Kb of RAM) and doesn't need installing. Excellent. 

One of the most popular torrent clients available, this Java built monster does the job very well. My gripe with it is that it munches it's way through your RAM at an alarming rate (being a Java application). Good though, just a bit hungry for machines are left online 24/7/365 like mine is.

FlashGet is a leading download manager and has the highest amount of users on the internet. It uses MHT(Multi-server Hyper-threading Transportation) technique, supports various protocols and has excellent document management features. FlashGet is a freeware without any adware or spyware. 

FDM is a powerful, easy-to-use and absolutely free download accelerator and manager. Moreover, FDM is 100% safe, open-source software distributed under GPL license. 

rdesktop is an open source client for Windows NT Terminal Server and Windows 2000/2003 Terminal Services, capable of natively speaking Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in order to present the user's NT desktop. Unlike Citrix ICA, no server extensions are required. 

Their website states "20 million users trust LogMeIn solutions for remote support, access & backup" so that probably says enough.

This is an amazingly useful, free burner application. Although I don't believe it works on Vista yet...figures.

It's basically notepad but more helpful for doing code and stuff in. It's just notepad with more functionality; which makes life a bit easier. Code highlighting is handy and it doesn't need installing and it doesn't touch your registry. It's safe, simple and very useful. 

Mozilla's alternative to Outlook. It's just brilliant, possibly the best email client I've ever used; which I use on a day-to-day basis.

WinRAR and Winzip need paying for (eventually), 7zip is free and rocks.

This is a surprisingly useful application to have. It has desktop search (it searches through all your files and folders for what you've searched for, including your email - which is VERY useful). It will also do RSS updates straight to your desktop, news updates, weather information, to-do lists, notepads, you name it. It does it all. 

A free development of the popular Civilisation games created by Sid Meier.

Exactly the same but for Colonization.

A new challenge in more than 50 levels with loads of new bonuses.]

Space Invaders OpenGL is a 2D/3D game based on the old arcade classic in which you must destroy enemy ships by shooting them up.

Falling Block Game is a puzzle game that is similar to the Hasbro classic, Tetris. Many such games have been released for a variety of platforms, but most have passable graphics or poor gameplay/piece control.