Top 10 free apps you might not have heard of

I get through a lot of new programs on my computer all the time. I don’t know who said that the most common way of installing apps is by CD because 99.9% of my programs come from a cool place known as the Internet. A few of these are so useful to me that, instead of junking them after a few uses, they find their way into my most frequently used programs list.

Today, I’ve got a list of 10 programs – some Windows only, some multi-platform – that are 3 things. 1) Free. 2) Awesome. 3) Obscure (in that not many people have heard of them). Without further ado, let’s get on with the apps!

1. ImgBurn - If you’re a Mac user then this is something that you’re not going to need, since it’s built in to your operating system! However, for the odd few Windows users out there (all 87% of us) then the ability to burn ISO or image files to disk has been missing since day one. A good free program that I have been using for God knows how long, ImgBurn makes it very simple to save, write and copy .iso files to CDs or DVDs. A great piece of simple software with some clever tricks for advanced users.

2. SpeedFan – Another thing Macs come with: a temperature monitoring utility. Again, this has been missing from Windows for ever. If you find your computer randomly shutting down sometimes, or would just like to keep an eye on core temperatures, this is the app for you. This is especially useful for notebook computers as they tend to suffer more from overheating due to the closely packed components. Check it out – early discovery of overheating can save hard drives and processors from dieing prematurely.

3. FBackup – Yet another thing that comes pre-built into Macs, backup software. On the post I wrote a while back about this, you will see why I recommend this app so much. It’s the only free backup program for Windows with the ability to do incremental, time-scheduled network backups. If you’re still using the old method of copying your Documents folder to a DVD every so often, get with it! Give this a shot, it’s a great piece of software.

4. Inkscape – If you’re serious about vector illustration you’ll probably be using Adobe’s Illustrator. For those of us that can’t afford the high price tag of that and just want to tinker around with some vector graphics editing, Inkscape is the answer! I have been using this for several months and love it. It can be used for logos, web design, illustration and general doodles. It’s fully compatible with most graphics tablets and has a budding community. And best of all, it’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

5. Shareaza – As P2P software goes, there are quite a few out there. The main reason I use Shareaza is that it doubles as both a P2P and a torrent client, meaning I can use it for BitTorrent files as well as sharing via P2P. If you are looking for some new P2P/torrent software, try this out! It has lots of customisability options and lets you pause a download, completely shut down the software, and then let you resume from where you left off once you restart it again.

6. IceChat – Put simply, in my opinion this is the best free IRC client. If you do any sort of IRC chatting then you will need a client for it, and I would definitely recommend IceChat for that. It has a host of different options for advanced users and keeps all your chat windows as tabs in the one program. If you like your colours then you will want to check this out as every aspect is colour customisable. An excellent IRC program.

7. RocketDock – If you’re into customising your computer, you’ll have probably heard of something like this. RocketDock basically recreates the Mac OS X dock on your Windows PC, allowing you to launch apps right from your desktop in a nifty way. There are many themes available from their website, so check this out if you’d like to clean up some of the icons cluttering up your wallpaper. It’s free and Windows only (though I don’t see why you would want to run it on a Mac anyway).

8. VirtuaWin – A feature that has been used on many Linux installations for years has been the ability to switch between various virtual desktops. These are like different screens and allow you to easily move from one to the other – for example you can have work on one ‘desktop’ and, say, IM widgets on another. VirtuaWin brings this feature to Windows and lets you simply and easily switch from one to the other by simply holding down alt and flicking the mouse in the direction you want to switch (other combinations are available, I just prefer this one). Very useful for productivity.

9. Orb – If, like me, you regularly use other people’s computers, or if you have, say, a netbook and want to stream music from your main PC, Orb is for you. Once you set it up, you can access all your media files on your computer from any other computer with internet access. This includes music, videos, photos and even some types of documents. This has the advantage over web-upload solutions as your disk space is only as limited as your computer and you don’t have to upload all your media before you can begin.

10. HTML-Kit - If you do any type of web development, you will know that it is pretty hard to work well in a plain text editor like Notepad or Textedit. What you need is some sort of syntax-highlighting assistemnt program, and HTML-Kit is just the one. Contrary to what the name suggests, this is compatible with many major languages like PHP, CSS and JavaScript. It also provides you with access to the most frequently used commands and has auto-fill should you want it. Every coder should have it.

Oh, and there is one more free app which I disovered a while ago and have been saving until now. This is an awesome app which completely changes the way you interact with your desktop. And it’s coming soon. My post containing the review of this app is coming in the next week or so, so stick around for that.

2 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

1. This is an awesome list of apps. Thanks for posting. I’ve just installed XP on my Mac (using Boot Camp) and some of these will be really useful for me.

   Comment by Jake Wright — June 15, 2009 #

2. Where’s Bumptop? You had it in the Coming Soon box but have replaced it with surprise. ;)

   Comment by Robert — June 16, 2009 #

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

CAPTCHA Code