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Software & Fonts |
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Pricelessware A very good web site for finding completely free software to fit many different tasks. Scroll down just a bit on the home page and you'll see links to this year's current best-of-breed entirely free software. |
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FileForum An excellent new software list and ratings site, covering both free and nonfree software. Its listings work in concert with BetaNews, a newsletter containing recent data of the same kind. |
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Fort Freeware An interesting free software list run by dedicated folks in New Zealand, with much content unseen elsewhere. |
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ProgramFiles.com An excellent place to find software (shareware, freeware, and demo-ware) downloads for Windows and Linux. |
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TUCOWS A good general directory of software, mostly non-free. Please choose the link appropriate for your system. Windows Linux Macintosh OS/2 Windows 3.1 |
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Freeware World Team An extensive list of software from around the world, all platforms. Both free and unfree software is here, it seems that the word "freeware" is often not accurately translated across languages. This is a huge list, possibly the most complete in existence today. |
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FreewareFind.com A weekly update of the best freeware on the Net. |
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SnapFiles A truly excellent site for general Internet tools. Windows only. |
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Todd
Frazier's Mac Share |
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Norloff's OS2BBS.COM Probably the best OS/2 resource online, including software downloads |
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NONAGS |
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typOasis A web site with many excellent fonts contributed by artists all over. Usage permissions and other copyright agreements vary. |
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Getfreefonts.info An excellent source of free fonts. |
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ShyFonts @ typOasis ShyFonts was a web site maintained by Derek Vogelpohl for the distribution of his own fonts. He cannot afford to keep the web site up any longer, but is still doing the work at The Lab (see first item in this list). Several other people have contributed their web space for his complete original font gallery, and here is one of them. |
| For playing audio and video clips, we recommend the built-in Microsoft player for Windows systems, the RealPlayer for both Windows and Linux, and the jetAudio player for Windows also. When you run into a video or audio clip which none of these will play, you will need to make a stop at Free-Codecs.com, which is a repository for "codecs", software bits and pieces which interpret audio and video file formats. If you are on Windows and are fairly certain as to which single codec you need, it is definitely recommended that you download that one; otherwise, you may simply download the K-Lite Codec Pack. The only reason why not to download the whole pack, is it can load a Windows machine down a bit, with background bits that it does not need. If you have more than a gigahertz of CPU and more than a gig of RAM, it shouldn't matter; otherwise, probably it does, you should be sparing about installing only what you need. |
| There are also some newer audio and video things to do on the Net. The most established of the newer items is probably "podcasting", which for users means (a) downloading of digital recordings, (b) storing them on an iPod or other portable unit or burning them to CD, and (c) listening to them at work or on the road or elsewhere away from one's Internet connection. This works well only with something faster than a basic telephone modem connection to the Internet, because the files are big enough that it would take quite a few hours to download one hour of quality audio, and video is quite a lot worse. But it does work. There are at least two catches. First, podcasting software is not very well established yet: it works, but the user interfaces are not polished, and can be somewhat confusing. This writer is currently using Juice, and is testing others. Second, codec problems abound: one of his favorite podcasts comes over in MP4 audio, which cannot be played on the vast majority of portable units; he had to install a special codec to make the audio files from that source usable. If these files were to be used in most portable units, they would have to converted to MP3, which is time-consuming on most PCs currently in use, which also requires special software and apropos setup. Reportedly, there are a few TV stations broadcasting primarily or entirely on the Net now. This writer has not yet heard of any of them being worth the hassle, yet. |
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Mozilla
FireFox and Thunderbird Mozilla FireFox and Thunderbird constitute the new WWW and email software by the Mozilla Project. These are the new Netscape people. Highly recommended. Windows, newer Macintosh, Linux, and others. |
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OpenOffice OpenOffice, put forth by Sun Microsystems, is a truly excellent office suite which is free of charge. Persons and corporations who desire telephone service help for this suite can buy at very low cost the companion StarOffice, which is the commercial version of the same product. OpenOffice will load Microsoft Word and Excel and PowerPoint documents up to version XP, and it will save in those formats, too. We have come to prefer OpenOffice Writer over Microsoft Word, because it is quite a lot more intuitive; we have heard of others saying the same of the other elements. All in all, this product is very highly recommended. It runs on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and others. |
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Noteworthy
Software Makers of Noteworthy Composer, software for making music scores. This software is extremely intuitive, unlike every other music score software we've tested, and it makes complex tasks amazingly simple. Not free, $40; but at $40 is the very best value of the dozen or so we have tested. Windows only. |
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e-Sword By far the very best Bible software for Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP. Almost all of its resources are free. In several cases, the copyright holders won't give the author legal rights to freely distribute, so keys to unlock those are available for various charges. |
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The SWORD
Project Another excellent Bible, almost as good as e-Sword, but available for both Linux and Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP. This one is open-source; if you're a programmer, you may wish to modify and/or contribute. |
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Online Bible Another excellent Bible. One of the very first computer software Bibles ever. Not open-source. Available for Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP, Macintosh, DOS, and Windows 3.1. Many packages are not available and/or downloadable for Macintosh and especially DOS and Windows 3.1. |
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