100+ awesome free and open source applications

It has always amazed me quite how many incredible, varied and useful applications are available for free on the Internet.  Be it free, open source, web-based or merely passive trials - the number of top quality items on offer is huge.


The purpose of this list is to help people realise that the free and open source software communities are expansive and generous.  In these tense economic times, raising awareness of such projects is something I'm more than happy to do.  If you feel that I've missed something good off the list, please leave a comment at the bottom - I read absolutely every one.

Image, Image Editing and Graphics

GIMP – http://www.gimp.org
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. Worth a look.

Inkscape - http://www.inkscape.org/
Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Paint.net - http://www.getpaint.net
A really good, lightweight alternative to Photoshop. It offers layers, unlimited undo, special effects and a wide variety of useful tools. The download is around 2mb too so absolutely worth a look – I use this when Photoshop is playing up.

XnView - http://perso.orange.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.html
XnView is software to view and convert graphic files, apparently really simple to use and supports more than 400 graphics formats.

ImageMagick - http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php
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 B?zier curves."

Irfanview - http://www.irfanview.com/
IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative freeware graphic viewer for Windows. IrfanView was the first Windows graphic viewer worldwide with Multiple (animated) GIF support. One of the first graphic viewers worldwide with Multipage TIF support. The first graphic viewer worldwide with Multiple ICO support.

Google Sketchup - http://sketchup.google.com/
SketchUp is a 3D modeling program designed for professional architects, civil engineers, filmmakers, game developers, and related professions. Sketchup may also be used to design buildings to be displayed on Google Earth. It was designed to be more intuitive, flexible, and easier to use than other 3D modeling programs, which often have steep learning curves.

Blender - http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
A 3D Studio Max alternative, very comprehensive and full-featured.

Artweaver - http://www.artweaver.de/index.php?en_version
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 thereby so realistic as possible.

Office

OpenOffice – http://www.openoffice.org
It’s basically Microsoft Office so you need little else with this installed. It has MS Office support (in both reading and writing) so this fantastic suite is fully compatible.


Wink - http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
Wink is a freeware screen-capture and tutorial-creation program written by Satish Kumar. It supports many features such as input-based capture and text annotations. Navigation buttons can be added to any presentation and the bitmaps for all presentation controls can be edited. Wink also has multilingual support and can be used in English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese.

Scribus - http://www.scribus.net/
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 - http://docs.google.com/
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 - http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
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 - http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/firefox/
Firefox is arguably the second most popular browser available (sitting behind the various Internet Explorers). 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.  You almost certainly already have it. 

Opera - http://www.opera.com
This is my personal browser of choice, sexy tabbed browsing, customisable, 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."

Opera web developer toolbar - http://operawiki.info/WebDevToolbar
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 - http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
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++ - http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

Kuler - http://kuler.adobe.com/
A very powerful colour-picking tool, allowing for the easy creation of colour schemes.

Aptana - http://www.aptana.com/
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.

Color Cop - http://colorcop.net
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.

Firefox web developer toolbar - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
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.

Internet Explorer Toolbar - [another long url]
The Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides a variety of tools for quickly creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages. This version is a preview release and behavior may change in the final release.

Firebug - http://www.getfirebug.com/
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.

Wave - http://wave.webaim.org/
With the demise of Watchfire Bobby and WebXact, WAVE has become a great automated online accessibility tool. Either link to a site, paste in the code or upload a file and it will give you a detailed breakdown of how accessible your work is.

JsUnit - http://www.jsunit.net/
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 - http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
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 - http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php
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.

Feng GUI - http://www.feng-gui.com/
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 - http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/
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 - http://browsershots.org/
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 2.1 - http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm
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.

ColorJack - [very long url]
ColorJack is an amazing online application providing users with the ability to match colours that work well together. Perfect for those developers who struggle to get a good colour scheme together.

Development Applications (IDE's)

Eclipse - http://www.eclipse.org/
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.

NetBeans - http://www.netbeans.org/
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 - http://geany.uvena.de/
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

Code::Blocks - http://www.codeblocks.org/
A free c++ IDE built to meet the “most demanding needs of its users”.

SharpDevelop - http://www.sharpdevelop.net/OpenSource/SD/Default.aspx
A free IDE for C#, VB.net and Boo projects on Microsoft’s .NET platform.

Zend Studio - http://www.zend.com/products/studio
While not strictly free, once your trial period expires only a subset of the functionality gets turned off. The really useful bits such as code compete, syntax suggestion and its own SVN client remain fully operational. In reality the only stuff I've found frustrating is that the rename functionality is removed unless you buy the license. Alternatively you could obtain Zend certification and in turn receive a free license - your call.

Operating Systems

Ubuntu - http://www.ubuntu.com
The most popular Linux distro at the moment - offering astonishing performance, usability and support (from a massive online community) all for free.

PCLinuxOS - http://www.pclinuxos.com/
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.

Fedora - http://fedoraproject.org/
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.

openSUSE - http://www.opensuse.org/
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.

Lots more Linux! - Distrowatch has info on lots more
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.

Video Playback and Editing

Media Player Classic - [long url]
Amazingly lightweight and incredibly durable - MPC succeeds where most others fail. It really will play anything and doesn’t even need installing.

MPlayer - http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
A decent video player for Linux.

Kaffeine - http://kaffeine.kde.org/
Another decent video player for Linux (KDE).

Apple Quicktime - http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/
If you've managed to get this far through life without experiencing Quicktime, then you're probably suffering from Alzheimer's. Quicktime is a commonly used media playback application (you probably already have it installed).

VLC Media Player - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
A very popular application; a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats. It will play just about anything too.

VirtualDub - http://www.virtualdub.org/
It's a bit like a really cut down, free version of Adobe Premier... VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images. Worth a look.

Youtube - http://www.youtube.com
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.

CamStudio - http://camstudio.org/
This is actually a screencasting utility so it doesn't really fit into this category very well... CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).

Audio

Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
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.

Songbird - http://www.songbirdnest.com/
Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet. Songbird is a popular alternative to Apple's iTunes.

iTunes - http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
iTunes is one of the world's most popular audio applications, although it breaks through that label by allowing users to purchase media online, schedule podcasts, view artist information etc. Very popular.

Winamp – http://www.winamp.com
While not open source, it is free and very good indeed. Far better than iTunes in my personal opinion.

MusikCube - http://www.musikcube.com/
Another iTunes alternative - very good, just really a matter of personal taste in the end.

Amarok - http://amarok.kde.org/
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.

Foobar2k - http://www.foobar2000.org
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.

Anti-Virus and Security

AVG - http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1
A popular and comprehensive, free anti-virus application. I use it. Simple.

Avast! Home edition - http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html
Also quite popular and available for free.

Antivir - http://www.free-av.com/
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.

Clamwin - http://www.clamwin.com/
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.

Comodo Firewall - http://www.comodo.com/products/free_products.html
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 - http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
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.

Spyware Terminator - http://www.spywareterminator.com/
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Spyware gets terminated. End of.

Arovax Antispyware - http://www.arovaxantispyware.com/
Another free antivirus, another one that does what it says on the tin.

Downloading and Download Managers

Orbit - http://www.orbitdownloader.com/
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.

Utorrent - http://www.utorrent.com/
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.

Filezilla - http://filezilla-project.org/
An awesome FTP client; the one I use the most on a day-to-day basis.

SmartFTP - http://www.smartftp.com/
SmartFTP is an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client which allows you to transfer files between your local computer and a server on the Internet. With its many basic and advanced features SmartFTP also offers secure, reliable and efficient transfers that make it a powerful tool.

eMule - http://www.emule-project.net/home/perl/general.cgi?l=1
eMule is one of the biggest and most reliable peer-to-peer file sharing clients around the world. Thanks to it's open source policy many developers are able to contribute to the project, making the network more efficient with each release.

Azureus - http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
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 - http://www.flashget.com/en/download.htm
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.

Freedownloadmanager - http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/
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.

Remote Access

rDesktop - http://www.rdesktop.org/
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.

TightVNC - http://www.tightvnc.com/
TightVNC is a free remote control software package derived from the popular VNC software. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.

UltraVNC - http://www.uvnc.com/
UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location.

LogMeIn - https://secure.logmein.com/home.asp?lang=en
Their website states "20 million users trust LogMeIn solutions for remote support, access & backup" so that probably says enough.

Putty - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
I wasn't quite sure where to put Putty but I was certain that it needed to be in this list - I use it on a daily basis for remoting into servers, connecting to MySQL databases etc... It's simple and a vital application.

Useful Applications that don't get their own category

CDBurnerXP - http://cdburnerxp.se/
This is an amazingly useful, free burner application. Although I don't believe it works on Vista yet...

AutoHotKey - http://www.autohotkey.com/
AutoHotkey is a free, open-source utility for Windows. With it, you can automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. It's a very useful application and worth a look - especially good for those with limited finger dexterity - because it can automate short-hand typing into long-hand (if set up correctly).

Visuwords - http://www.visuwords.com/
This isn't an installable application but rather a very cool online dictionary/thesaurus. You enter a word and it graphically models that word, with various uses and synonyms mapped around it like a mind-map. A very cool free "service" for writers.

Notepad2 - http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
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.

VIM - http://www.vim.org/
Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. It's useful whether you're already using vi or using a different editor.

Synergy - http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Quicksilver - http://qsapp.com/
When opened, it will create a catalog of applications and some frequently used folders and documents. Activate it, and you can search for and open anything in its catalog instantly. The search is adaptive, so Quicksilver will recognize which items you are searching for based on previous experience. It also supports abbreviations, so you can type entire words, or just fragments of each. When not in use, Quicksilver vanishes, waiting for the next time you summon it. OSX only though...

7Zip - http://www.7-zip.org/
WinRAR and Winzip need paying for (eventually), 7zip is free and does the same thing. That's it really.

JZip - http://www.jzip.com/
Create, open and extract Zip, TAR, GZip and 7-Zip. Open and extract from RAR and ISO. No surprises then.

Google Desktop - http://desktop.google.com/
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.

GNU Cash - http://www.gnucash.org/
GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. This powerful little app manages scheduled calculations, graphing and any number of things that those too lazy to master a spreadsheet will find useful.

Communications

Skype - http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/
Make calls from your computer — free to other people on Skype and cheap to phones and mobiles around the world. Enough said really.

Thunderbird - http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/thunderbird/
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.

Pidgin - http://www.pidgin.im/
Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. Pidgin can work with: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo! and Zephyr.

mIRC - http://www.mirc.com/
A little old school now but IRC is still going strong and this is the most popular client in the world.

Trillion - http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/
Trillian is a proprietary multiprotocol instant messaging application for Windows created by Cerulean Studios that can connect to multiple IM services, such as AIM, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Bonjour, Jabber, and Skype networks (the latter four with Trillian Pro which allows for additional plugins).

Servers, techie stuff

Apache - http://www.apache.org/
Apache really doesn't need any explanation as it is the god of the Internet. I'll just include this and no further deriviatives such as Tomcat/JBOSS/whatever.

XAMPP - http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start. It comes for Windows, OSX, Solaris and Linux.

MySQL community server - http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html
This version of the MySQL database server is free, quite obvious really.

PostgreSQL - http://www.postgresql.org/
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems. I used this for the majority of University - it's excellent.

Nagios - http://www.nagios.org/
Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

EasyPHP - http://www.easyphp.org/?lang=en
EasyPHP is a complete software package allowing to use all the power and the flexibility that offers the dynamic language PHP and the effecient use of databases under Windows. Package includes an Apache server, a MySQL database, full PHP as well as easy development tools for your web site or your applications. This is comparable to XAMPP (see above).

WINE - http://winehq.org/
Again, one I wasn't quite sure what to classify it as (it's definitely NOT an emulator though, heh). Wine is a software application which aims to allow Unix-like computer operating systems on the x86 architecture to execute programs that were originally written for Microsoft Windows. Wine also provides a software library known as Winelib which developers can compile Windows applications against in order to port them to Unix-like systems.

Games

FreeCiv – http://www.freeciv.org/index.php/Freeciv
A free development of the popular Civilisation games created by Sid Meier.

FreeCol - http://www.freecol.org/
Exactly the same but for Colonisation.


Also here is a massive list of open source games for Windows that's absolutely worth checking out.


This list of 100+ applications barely scratches the surface of what is out there; but it's a start.  If you think I've missed something awesome off this list, let me know via email or in a comment below and I'll add it to the next iteration of this list.  I hope this was useful to at least one person.

Read More

Web Programmers need not to do these three blunders

3 Mistakes Web Programmers Need to Stop Making....

Jonathan Goldford is a partner at JG Visual, an Internet strategy company that works with organizations to develop and implement their online presence. You can connect with Jonathan on the JG Visual Facebook page.

Sometimes as programmers, we forget that 99.9% of the population doesn’t care how a piece of text, a button, an image or a video ends up onscreen. Most people just care that it’s fast, easy to use and gives them the content they want. Otherwise, they get upset — and rightfully so. Here are three common mistakes we programmers make, and what we can do to fix them.

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1. Forgetting About Conventions

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Ever since they started using the Internet, users have been trained how to interact with a website. Therefore, they often get frustrated when websites don’t meet their expectations. Here are some examples.

• They hover over an object they think is clickable, but become confused when they see an arrow instead of a hand pointer.
• They click on blue, underlined text, but find it’s not a link.
• They click on the logo in the top left, believing it will return them to the homepage, only to find it takes them nowhere.

Web design doesn’t always meet our expectations. However, developers and designers should always maintain certain rules to avoid user confusion. Here are three.

Clickable Elements Should Have the Pointer on Rollover
Everything clickable should switch to the hand pointer when a user hovers over it. You can accomplish this using simple CSS. The code would look like this

div:hover { cursor: pointer; }

Style Links Appropriately
Links should look different than regular text, and should be underlined within a page’s main content. If you really want to stick with convention, make them blue — research found users engage most with blue links.

Make Logos Clickable

 
The logo in the header of your website should be clickable, and should take the user to the homepage. This is pretty simple: Just wrap your logo in a tag.

<a href=%u201Dhttp://www.example.com%u201D>
<img src=%u201Dlogo.gif%u201D alt=%u201DExample Company%u201D title=%u201DExample Company Logo%u201D height=%u201D100%u201D width=%u201D100%u201D />
</a>

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2. Creating Slowly-Loading Websites

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Users hate slow websites. Studies have shown that 40% of users will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Here’s how to avoid common speed mistakes by new programmers.

Resize Images Outside the Browser
New programmers will sometimes use a very large image, let’s say 600 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall, but will set the height and width so the image shrinks to the desired size. They use the following code. 

<img src=%u201Dbig-domo.jpg%u201D alt=%u201DDomo%u201D title=%u201DBig domo at the park%u201D height=%u201D200%u201D width=%u201D200%u201D />

There are two problems with this method: First, the full image still needs to load. Typically, bigger image files mean longer load times.

Second, shrinking an image using the height and width attributes can render a photo awkwardly, causing the browser to display a photo not nearly as clear as it would be were the image sized 200 x 200 pixels.

To fix these issues, resize and compress images in an editor like Photoshop or Gimp. Then code the image like we did above. Try to use a tool like Photoshop’s Save for Web & Devices to further shrink the file size.

Load JavaScript in the Footer
Many programmers unnecessarily load all the page’s JavaScript files in the head tag. This stalls the rest of the page load. In almost all cases, except for JavaScript critical to user interface navigation, it’s okay to load script in the footer. Then the rest of the page can load beforehand. Try this code.

Rest of the page%u2026
<script type=%u201Dtext/javascript%u201D src=%u201Djs/scripts.js%u201D></script>
</body>
</html>

Load CSS Externally
Sometimes new programmers load CSS on each individual page using inline styles or an internal stylesheet. For inline styles, code looks like this.

<p style=%u201Dmargin-top: 50px;%u201D>Hi Mom!</p>

And for an internal stylesheet, you’d most likely see this code in the head tag.

<style type=%u201Dtext/css%u201D>
p { margin-top: 50px; }
</style>

You should almost never use CSS in the page that holds your html. Store it externally using code like this.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href=%u201Dcss/style.css" />

There are two advantages to loading CSS externally: First, the user’s computer will save the external stylesheet to be used on every page, instead of retrieving the same styles over and over. This greatly speeds up load time.

Second, using an external stylesheet is much easier to maintain. If you need to change the font size of your website’s paragraphs, you’re able change it in one place, without having to access each individual html file.

Learn more about good CSS practices at CSS Basics.

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3. Not Accounting for Potential Backend Changes

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Most programmers nowadays are using a content management system like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal to build their websites. This is great because it gives website owners the ability to make changes and updates.

The problem is that a lot of developers only program for a website’s content at launch time. For example, at launch a developer may only create CSS styles for website headings 1, 2 and 3. What if two months after the website’s launch, the communications director decides to set some text to heading 6, since that’s an option in WordPress’s format? That decision would revert to the default styles of the browser since the developer never styled for it initially. Here is how to avoid this situation.

Include Styles for All the Common Tags
To make sure that the design of your website remains consistent with any backend formatting, programmers should include styles to handle the following html tags.

• Body (<body>)
• Heading 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>)
• Link (<a>)
• Paragraph (<p>)
• Address (<address>)
• Preformatted (<pre>)
• Strong (<strong>)
• Unordered list (<ul>)
• Ordered list (<ol>)
• Quotes (<blockquote>)

It’s best to check the WYSIWYG that your website owners are using to make sure you have all the appropriate tags covered.

Basic styling isn’t the only opportunity for your website to break down. Also make sure to prepare for large image uploads and for copy/paste from Word. Although items like these can seem trivial, educating your website owners about how to add content can make all the difference.

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You’re Smart, But It’s Hard To Remember Everything

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The mistakes listed here have nothing to do with a developer’s intelligence. Like most jobs, things fall through the cracks, especially when you’re just getting started.

Do you agree with the items listed above? Are there any others we should have included?

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Make Your Resume Social

Gerrit Hall is the CEO and co-founder of RezScore, a free web application that reads, analyzes and grades resumes instantly. Gerrit has successfully combined his passion for computer science and the careers space by helping job seekers write the best resume possible. You can connect with Gerrit and RezScore on Facebook and Twitter.

Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a slew of other social media platforms, job seekers are closer than ever to the decision-makers at their target companies.

While social media is wonderful as a stand-alone tool in any job seeker’s toolbox, you should know that it’s even better when combined with other “old-fashioned” standbys — such as your resume.

SEE ALSO: Create an Infographic Resume

The glory of a resume is that it’s completely fluid. A resume can be big, small, online, offline, video-recorded, illustrated, etc. No matter the format, your resume will only improve when combined with social media.

Follow these four tips to optimize your resume with social media.

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1. Link to Social

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Nowadays, 10.9% of resumes include a social media link, and the number continues to rise. The more transparent you make yourself to potential employers, the the more comfortable they’ll be hiring you.

Include your Facebook, Twitter and especially LinkedIn profile URLs along the top of your resume, next to your name, email and phone number. Make sure the links are handy so the employer can quickly learn more about you, without having to do a lot of digging.

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2. Fact-Check Yourself

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While sending your information out in a dozen different directions, it’s easy to overlook outdated information. Therefore, update constantly. An employer shouldn’t see one thing on your resume and something different on LinkedIn.

Keep a list of all the social media and career sites on which have professional accounts or information. Once a month, check to make sure everything is up-to-date and matches your current resume.

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3. Don’t Just Copy/Paste

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Your resume is full of content that also works great for your social media profiles. Feel free to use information from your resume for social network sections like “work experience,” “about me,” etc.

However, remember to share carefully selected content. Don’t just copy/paste your entire resume into your “about me” section. Not only will this flood your profile, but your resume’s formatting probably won’t travel well either.

Instead of copy/pasting, select a handful of solid phrases or anecdotes for your social profile. That way, you’ll guarantee that anyone reading your profile will get the most important information.

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4. Use Keywords for SEO

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Beyond your experience, skills and goals, remember that keywords are king. The unfortunate truth about today’s job search is that potential employers use Google and almighty Applicant Tracking Systems to peruse social media sites for the best candidates.

To stay on top of current industry jargon, study similar job listings for words that pop up frequently. Additionally, a variety of powerful SEO tools, which already exist for marketers, can easily be re-purposed to optimize your resume for search.

What do you think? What other tips should social media-savvy job seekers keep in mind when optimizing their resumes for social media? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Free Antivirus Software From Microsoft

Keeping your Windows PC secure from viruses and spyware can be both difficult and expensive, and some of the popular security suites out there are known to slow down computers.

Yes, there are quite a few free antivirus software programs available on the web but they are often designed to convince you to purchase the professional edition and thus nag users with prompts to purchase the commercial version.

 If you are looking for a non-bloated software that doesn't nag you at anytime, try Security Essentials - it's one of the best anti-virus and anti-malware programs that is lightweight and absolutely free as long as you are running a genuine copy of Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 on your computers.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a capable application that has been streamlined to run efficiently even on notebooks or older computers with low resources. But even on a modern computer with multiple cores and several gigs of ram, a lightweight antivirus solution will definitely make your computer a bit speedier. Security Essentials is also ideal for running in virtual environments such as the new XP Mode for Windows 7.

Microsoft Security Essentials is not just lightweight but easy to use as well.  After downloading the small installer (it's less than 10 MB in size), installation takes less than a minute and it will immediately start protecting your computer from virus attacks. When Security Essentials is scanning your computer for problems, you can still work as normal as the software has been designed to use a limited amount of system resources if a user is using the computer while a scan is in progress.

The software will automatically download new definition from the Internet through Windows Update, and these will be installed on the computer without requiring user intervention. Additionally, Security Essentials is the first product to make use of Microsoft’s Dynamic Signature Service that enables the program to get the latest definitions as soon as their computer suspects a threat.

Although viruses have traditionally been the main security concern in Windows PCs, the security landscape has changed and computers users now have to face threats of rootkits, malware, and spyware in addition to viruses. Windows Defender was designed to keep adware and spyware off your computer but Security Essentials works against most types of threats. The software has received favorable reviews and one of the testers noted that Security Essentials detected all of their sample threats correctly without giving any false positive reports.

Stay secure without sacrificing your computer’s speed or your hard-earned money. Microsoft Security Essentials replaces both Windows Live OneCare and Windows Defender.

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Create Animated GIFs with Your Videos

Animated GIF images may remind you of those cluttered and distracting homepages of the Geocities era but take a peek at this impressive tumblr blog and it might forever change the way you think of GIFs.

The site features a brilliant collection of GIF animations created using frames of classic movie scenes that play in an endless loop. Here are some examples:

 

How to Create GIF Animations?

There are free tools available that let you easily convert video clips into animated GIFs that you can later host on sites like Flickr or Tumblr - not all image hosting sites support animated GIFs but the one mentioned here do.

This is a two-step process – first convert the video into a sequence of image frames and then assemble these frames into a looping GIF animation with some custom delay.

Step 1: Download FFmpeg for Windows from sourceforge.net and extract the ffmpeg.exe file to, say, the c:\ffmpeg\ folder. The .7z files can be unzipped using the 7-zip utility.

Step 2: Now we’ll extract the frames from our video file. The command* is simple.

c:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe -i movie.avi img-%03d.gif

If your video file is in another folder, you need to specify the full path of that file. Also, you may use MP4, MOV or any video format as well instead of AVI.

Step 3: Grab this portable utility called UnFreez and drag-n-drop all the image frames created in the previous step from Windows Explorer into the UnFreez window.

Enable “loop animation” and set the frame delay to say 20 cs (1 cs = 0.01 second).  Click “Make animated GIF” and preview your image is in any browser.

Screencast: Converting videos into GIF movies

[*] If you have a fairly long video file and would only like to convert a portion of it into an image, you need to slightly modify the ffmpeg parameters as shown below: 

c:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe -i movie.avi –ss 5 –t 3 img-%03d.gif

The parameter ‘ss’ refers to the start position in the video while ‘t’ is the duration for which you want to extract the frames. So in the above example, image frames for the file movie.avi will be at created from the 5 second mark for the next 3 seconds on the video. 

If you would like to stop GIFs from animating in the browser, just hit the Escape key.

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Facebook goes old to their News Feed

Today Facebook announced an update to its much contested news feed. This new version builds upon the current hybrid news feed, and has some aspects of the old one. But instead of being able to toggle back-and-forth between "top news" and "recent news," users will see a "sort" button at the top which gives them the option to see highlighted stories first, or recent stories first. 

This is big news for Facebook users, who have complained relentlessly since the news feed switched over to hybrid.
Giving users the option to experience a news feed that's closer to the old one seems like a smart move Facebook.

 

Post by Facebook..

UPDATE on Wednesday, November 9th, 2011: Now you have a new way of sorting your News Feed: most recent stories first.  You can also continue to view highlighted stories first, followed by recent stories, like what you see today.  If you don't have the updates to News Feed yet, you can expect to see them over the coming weeks as the rollout continues.

Originally Published on Tuesday, September 20, 2011: When you visit Facebook, you should see the things you're most interested in, like status updates from your family and closest friends. Last week, we announced improvements to Friend Lists and a new Subscribe button to help you see more of what you care about, and less of what you don't.

But it's not just the people you hear from that make your News Feed interesting. It also matters how much you visit Facebook. If you haven't returned in a week, you may want to see a summary of top stories first. If you've already visited several times that day, you probably care more about recent news.

Starting today, it will be easier to keep up with the people in your life no matter how frequently or infrequently you're on Facebook.

News Feed: See What Matters at the Top

When you pick up a newspaper after not reading it for a week, the front page quickly clues you into the most interesting stories. In the past, News Feed hasn't worked like that.  Updates slide down in chronological order so it's tough to zero in on what matters most.  

Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won't have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven't visited Facebook for a while, the first things you'll see are top photos and statuses posted while you've been away. They're marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner.

If you check Facebook more frequently, you'll see the most recent stories first. Photos will also be bigger and easier to enjoy while you're scrolling through.

Ticker: Join Friends in Real-Time

News Feed often has a time lag. Usually when you're on Facebook, a lot of your friends are too. Until now, there hasn't been an easy way to see and chat with your friends about photos, articles, and other things they're posting in real-time. The new ticker helps you do just that.

Ticker shows you the same stuff you were already seeing on Facebook, but it brings your conversations to life by displaying updates instantaneously. Now when a friend comments, asks a question or shares something like a check in, you'll be able to join the conversation right away. Click on anything in ticker to see the full story and chime in – without losing your place.

If you have a wider screen, slide the grey bar between ticker and chat up or down to adjust how many updates you see at a time. To control who can see your updates anywhere on Facebook, including in ticker and News Feed, adjust your sharing control or apps settings.

We hope these improvements make your conversations on Facebook more lively, no matter how often you visit. For tips about how to use improved Friend Lists, and the new Subscribe button right from News Feed, check out this video.

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Ways to Get Back Accidentaly Deleted Files

It only takes a moment of carelessness to permanently delete important data from your PC. But don't worry, you may still be able to recover most of it, if you stop using your-PC immediately and use data recovery software. When a file is deleted, even from inside the Recycle Bin, it doesn't actually vanish from the hard drive.

Instead, the computer merely changes the file's properties to make it invisible to the user. The file truly gets deleted only when the operating system overwrites fresh data to that space. You can try to recover thedeleted files using free software.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery

This is a versatile software. It can not only recover the deleted files, but also help you save data from damaged partitions, pen drives, SD cards and CDs. MiniTool puts the retrieved files in folders, but you will have to go through several folders, Lost Files and Desktop, for example, before you find the actual files you were looking for. Once you have found the files, just click "save files" to get your data back. www.powerdatarecovery.com

Recuva

This lacks the advanced features of Mini-Tool , but one advantage of using Recuva is that you can see a preview before saving the retrieved files. This is handy because the computer often changes the names of deleted files to something like $ABC.MP3. www.piriform.com/recuva

Glary Undelete

In our tests, this was the slowest of the three. But one good feature is its ability to home in on the full name of the deleted files. This makes finding the right files a lot easier. www.glarysoft.com/products/ utilities/glary-undelete/

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Checkout the Facilities at Google,Facebook,Twitter Workplace

Are you a techie looking for work? We recently offered some tips on landing jobs at Google, Apple and Facebook, but there are more companies in the Valley than those three. And you might be wondering what the culture is like at each of these companies, as well as at LinkedIn, Twitter, Eventbrite, Gaia and Tagged.

Back in August, we brought you word of awesome perks at various startups; now, we bring you perks at a number of Silicon Valley’s largest and finest. From yoga to catered lunches, 401(k)s to dry cleaning, sports teams to vacation days, these tech companies seem to understand that quality of life affects productivity — and that having to run fewer errands after work means you’re more likely to stay at the office.

Check out the infographic below from ResumeBear for a breakdown of who offers what perks. Do you work at any of these companies and take advantage of any of these perks? Let us know in the comments below.

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