Tonight I am giving you some of my favorite software that can be downloaded from the Internet for free.   While you may have heard of some, others are so obscure, your friends have never heard of them.  I like free.  I like quality.  I also like supporting the little guys out there.  If they have a donation link on their site and you like it, support them.  I am seeing more and more great quality software available to us little guys.  I can no longer afford the big Microsoft and Adobe type software packages.  If I can find a free one to do the job; I will save my buck.  Don't get me wrong, sometimes you have to buy a software package from a big guy, but if you don't have to - why bother.

Here is just a few software packages I recommend.

Graphics - www.getpaint.net
Paint.Net is a free ( donation only software ) that is very similar to Adobe CS2 type software.  I use it for all of my photo editing, background creations, icon creations and other types of graphical work.

Compression - www.7-zip.org
Z-zip is a free compression software with an API of sorts.  I use it for opening and creating all of my zip and winrar type files.  It supports many compression types. - check it out.

Web Browsers
This is where I am stuck.  I use OPERA and FireFox.  Both have their purposes.  When I need development tools and testing of websites I use FireFox.  FireFox has multitude of plug-ins; but my favorite is the IE tab that I can switch my testing to the IE engine.  

With Opera, I like the graphical tabs and the ability to store passwords safely.  The graphical tabs allow me to see a thumb nail image of the website that the tab is currently pointed two.

This is really a split and I challenge everyone to try both.  I think you will switch from IE.

www.opera.com and www.getfirefox.net

Databases - www.mysql.com
As rumors are always swirling around about MySQL's future, I am still using it.  It is free, robust and multi platform compatible.  I have never had an issue with this database not working and it has been able to grow with my projects.  Until this database dies, I will continue to use it.

Music - www.FooBar2000.org
While this software is fairly unknown, I was turned on to it by my wife's uncle.  I have fallen in love with the search abilities that allow you to search by Genre, Author, Album and Year.  It has many options for creating play-lists and plug-ins to customize the audio library with.

# posted by Mr. Pallant @ 5:02 PM