In the software world, 'applications' are the programs you use day-to-day and are usually the main reason you have a computer in the first place. Here are some useful free applications which are often as good as or even better than their retail counterparts.
An icon editor which supports full-colour Windows icons with options for transparency, import/export, and more.
AcronymGenie is a handy reference tool for checking the meanings of acronyms. Really handy for deciphering geekspeak (OMG WTF LOL!).
Available for almost any kind of PC platform, Adobe Reader allows you to view PDF (Portable Document Format) files. A 'must-have' program.
CD Burner XP Pro is a powerful free program for burning CDs or DVDs, offering most of the functionality of the most popular commercial programs in this field.
This is a text editor designed for creating or editing webpages using HTML, CSS, PHP, and more.
Brilliant for those who prefer coding websites from scratch to using 'WYSIWYG' editors.
CoffeeCup HTML Editor homepage
NotePad is rather limited as a text editor; ConTEXT offers a much more feature-complete and intuitive interface with support for tabbed documents, syntax highlighting and much more.
This program allows you to make thumbnails of pictures with ease, supporting batch conversions, instant previewing and many more powerful features.
Invaluable for anyone needing to make gallery pages, and very easy to use.
Many downloadable ZIP archives include .diz and .nfo files. GetDiz is a freeware program designed for viewing those files.
The GIMP is a powerful and full-featured image editor similar to Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro which is available for many platforms.
The GIMP Website
Windows version | GIMP plugins
Install Creator is an extremely user-friendly and powerful installer builder, with many useful features.
OpenOffice.org is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org is compatible with MS Office and includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a graphics editor, an HTML editor, and a maths editor.
OpenOffice.org is very powerful, with just about everything that MS Office has to offer, and it is just as intuitively designed.
The only problem with OpenOffice.org is that it is not seamlessly compatible with Microsoft Office documents; the layout of a document may vary slightly between OpenOffice.org and MSOffice.
Paint.NET is a halfway house between the simplicity of MSPaint and the power of Photoshop, PSP etc. It's good for quick touchups, resizes, etc, or as a simple editor for those who don't want to mess with something as complex or expensive as Photoshop.
Paint.NET homepage
Note: Paint.NET requires the Microsoft .NET framework.
TheSage is something that should have been thought of a long time ago - a freely available, searchable dictionary and thesaurus.
No more flipping through pages upon pages!
WinZip is the most popular file compression software around, but it's also very limited.
ZipGenius is a much better alternative. It can read most major file compression formats, and can create several different types of archives which offer better compression rates than .zip. ZipGenius is also capable of creating self-extracting ('SFX') archives.
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