The Free Software revolution

In my opinion, software industry is quite established for some time now. Complex software applications and systems have been developed and deployed to every corner of the world. With its increasing popularity, more and more smaller and simpler software applications are written and freely available for us all from dedicated teams of programmers. Those software do make our digital life a lot easier.

Here is my list of favourite free software:

1. Firefox web browser: very popular, my absolutely favourite add-ons are 1-Click Weather (convenient weather forecast on the status bar at the bottom), All-in-one Gesture (for quicker navigation using mouse clicks/movements), IE Tab (to instantly switch between Internet Explorer & Firefox views), Cooliris (very cool web photo presenter), FireFTP, Stealther, NoScript, Flashblock… (7.1 MB plus add-ons)
2. Paint.NET: who likes Window’s Paint program? Okay, it’s pretty cool in Windows 3.1 15 years back but is merely a pain in the ass to use now. Not many of us can afford or even need photo editing powerhouses such as Photoshop but only need those convenient basic options such as layers, unlimited undo, cut & crop, special effects… Once got this app, I have simply removed Photoshop from my computer. You have to try it out to appreciate it. (Incredible 1.6 MB)
3. SuperFinder: As storage cost getting so much cheaper, we have the opportunity to keep tons of data like music, pictures… making it harder every time we try to dig out something. This tiny application knocks out Windows’s Search function on its super fast finding speed and various search options. (1.3 MB)
4. FastStone Image Viewer: I don’t particularly need an image viewer, but this piece of software offers an awesome stand-alone slide-show creating capability with lots of controls on transitional effects and background music. We all love musical slideshows, don’t we? (4.1 MB)
5. CutePDF Writer: convert documents to pdf files (1.5 MB).
6. FoxitReader: a no-frills replacement for Adobe Reader. I am increasingly irritated with Adobe Reader over time for its bulky, bloated and slow performance. I like the Foxit’s spirit of Keep-It-Simple&Short (2.6 MB).
7. MediaTagger: if you’re an mp3 music fan like me, you’d definitely like a good mp3 tag editor – Media Tagger allows bulk file renaming and tag editing (for MP3, VQF, WMA, OGG and APE), also supports ID3v1 with ID3v2 (1.2 MB).
8. NotePad++: good text editor for programmers working under Windows environment (2 MB).
9. File Renamer: what can a 0.4 MB worth of software possibly do? Actually this tool makes a lot of sense for fans of photography for example. Imagine having thousands of image files stored by camera’s default stupid names, we do sometimes want to get organised with batch-renaming those to more sensibles filenames. So keep this tiny helper in your computer, it will come in handy.
10. Stickies: 1 MB of much better solution for Post-It stickers.

This list will be continuously updated. Share with me your favourite freewares, too!