Your FAVORITE FreeWare

[private]

Originally Posted by dlaf

Great thread idea, Lori!

My first thought was google's Picasa for editing and viewing photographs. Not as powerful as the GIMP, but quick and easy all the way.

Debbie, I thought since Lori changed her Avatar people would stop confusing us...LOL

[private]

I had no idea there was free anti-virus software! I will be ALL over it.

[WolverineX]

first freeware program i can recommend is irfanview ( http://www.irfanview.com )

Some IrfanView features:

* Many supported file formats (click here the list of formats)
* Multi language support
* Thumbnail/preview option
* Paint option - to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
* Toolbar skins option
* Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
* Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
* Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
* Fast directory view (moving through directory)
* Batch conversion (with image processing)
* Multipage TIF editing
* File search
* Email option
* Multimedia player
* Print option
* Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF
* Change color depth
* Scan (batch scan) support
* Cut/crop
* IPTC editing
* Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
* Capturing
* Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
* Lossless JPG rotation
* Unicode support
* Many hotkeys
* Many command line options
* Many PlugIns
* Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like "I Agree" or "Evaluation expired"

just be sure to also download plugins from the same site to expand it's capabilities and formats it can read

[anthonybeard]

but Tierazon is my favorite freeware program. basically, it generates fractal algorithms based on your selection of inputs. you can zoom in on any given area... and zoom in... and zoom in... anyone with a fast PC and an interest in higher mathematics should definitely check it out.

[inkista]

Few of mine, most are non-photography, and there's a decided bias towards GNU and things found on sourceforge...

• Google Chrome (fast replacing Firefox for me).
• ClamWin (free antivirus). ClamAV-based app. (Sidenote: Spyware Blaster and/or AdAware are also good things to have on a Windows box.)
• VLC. The swiss army knife of all video players. Plays Matroska just fine as well as all your usual suspects, not to mention turning your dvd-drive-equipped computer into a region-free PAL/NTSC-converting dvd player.
• TrueCrypt--encryption software. The only solution I found for keeping my stuff encrypted on a USB stick and still use the files on Linux, Windows, and OSX. And hey, who doesn't want to use the same encryption as the NSA?
• Hugin. Damn fine pano stitcher.
• Mathmap. One of the few GIMP plugins that has no peer on the Photoshop side.
• XAMPP Portable. I like carrying a working Apache/MySQL/php installation with me on a USB stick. Being able to turn any box into a development webserver with all the bells and whistles, yet leave no tracks behind, is a good thing.
• OpenOffice. Sun does good things. OOO is finally getting mature enough to be not just a free office suite, but a good office suite.
• Eclipse. Ok, it's funky and the plugin mares' nest can be hideous, but it's still one cool IDE that everybody's tweaked for themselves so you can use it for developing in everything: C++, C, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Ada, shell scripts, (not to mention accompanying makefiles and SVN/CVS integration) hell, I wouldn't be surprised if you could do Basic and Fortran in the sucker. And it's not just for programming: HTML, XHTML, XML, XSLT, **********, PHP... Eclipse is endlessly useful. And it's a heckuva lot easier to use for developing XSL transforms than plain ol' Xalan.
• Subversion. What? You think version control is just for open source programmers? Remember that the next time you're writing the great American novel, and you think you want that one paragraph back that you had in the passage you deleted two weeks ago...

Let's hear it for open source.

[dlaf]

Originally Posted by private

Debbie, I thought since Lori changed her Avatar people would stop confusing us...LOL

Ooops! Sorry, Pat! I didn't confuse you much when your avatars were the same, but was always conscious how similar they were and I guess it still sticks in my subconscious. Weird brain pretzel happenings.

[private]

Originally Posted by dlaf

Ooops! Sorry, Pat! I didn't confuse you much when your avatars were the same, but was always conscious how similar they were and I guess it still sticks in my subconscious. Weird brain pretzel happenings.

YOU are not the only one - I guess I'll change mine - one day...

P.S. I totally get it b/c she looks exactly like my Aunt (well in her pics anyway...)

[JoesPhotos]

[QUOTE=WolverineX;346992]first freeware program i can recommend is irfanview ( http://www.irfanview.com )

Oops I forgot that one. Yes very helpful indeed. Can quickly resize pictures to your liking. I use it as my default viewer for all pictures & even .avi & .mpg

[EOBeav]

I run Linux/ubuntu, so everything on my computer is 'freeware'.

Somebody mentioned GIMP on here: For the money (free), it's tough to beat. It gets compared to Photoshop quite a bit, and understandably so, but it's not a PS clone. It's its own app.

[dcorrin]

besides irfanview, which I've use for years, another useful image viewer is

faststone www.faststone.org

I use trillian for chatting. have for years. may be something newer and better, but it works well enough never needed to look again.

http://www.trillian.cc/downloads/

I hate ms word more than MSIE, and so OpenOffice is the best.

www.openoffice.org

and don't forget google earth