The free software thread

[Lissa]

Everyone likes free stuff - especially when it is as good (if not better) than stuff you have to pay for. Luckily, amongst all the capitalistic splendour of the internet, there are people and groups who produce really good software and just give it away. Some of this is open source and some is just plain old freeware but the price is the same. I've kept (and occasionally maintained) a list of free software which can be found here but that's just a list. This thread is for you to share your freeware and open source discoveries and tell us why they're great. To kick us off, Q10 which is a word processor with a difference. Launch it and it takes over your entire screen, cutting you off from the rest of the computing world. This can be terribly useful if, like me, you're easily distracted. Suddenly, nothing exists except the blankness of the page. A blankness that will only go away if you fill it with words.

It has no tool bars and no interesting gadgets to get in the way of your inspired productivity. No messing with fonts, no twiddling with weighting or text size, no wondering what it would look like if you did all the verbs in red and all the nouns in green. The only slight concessions are a clock in the bottom right corner...

...and Q10's single best feature - the live word count in the bottom left corner.

I've yet to find another word processor with a live word count. I'd love to have one in Word, Open Office, Lotus Symphony - anything. But I've not found one since ditching the Mac and denying myself Office for Mac (Microsoft apparently CAN do it but clearly don't want to). I hate stopping every few minutes and - gasp - having to press a button to find out how close I am to having to come to some kind of conclusion.

Q10 isn't ideal for all writing purposes. It would be rubbish - for example - at script writing as that needs basic formatting tools. It's also not very user friendly when it comes to spell checking and other essentials (though it does have a few useful gizmos hidden under an F1 menu).

It's more of a first draft system than a fully functional word processor. It focuses the mind on the important things and stops you flipping back and forth between Word and the sum total of human knowledge. I've been using it for a few days now and I really like it. And it's free.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

Great idea for a thread. I love that list on Vervoid, and I've favourited that page a while ago!

Launch it and it takes over your entire screen, cutting you off from the rest of the computing world. This can be terribly useful if, like me, you're easily distracted.

Now you do surprise me. I tend to have loads of windows open at any one time, especially when I'm writing, cos I'm often doing the odd bit of research "what was that name again?", "did X come after Y?", "how much by composition does the Moon have in hydrogen".

I've often threaded something up, then found out through research I have is all wrong, and have to do a serious rethink of what i'd planned. And then how the air turns blue ...

[Lissa]

I'm talking mainly fiction where I don't need actual data. It's useless for things like serial recaps. But if I do need to know something from another window it is only a WIN+TAB away.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

I'm talking mainly fiction where I don't need actual data.

This is why I don't write much fiction these days ... as even fiction needs to be researched. You can't just make it up as you go along!!!

[Lissa]

I'll remember that next time I'm writing about life on board a lost space ship in the 28th century. Although I do watch the Sensorites from time to time just to brush up on how barmy the man John really is and how brave and dynamic Captain Maitland can be when the hour cometh.

Anyway, free stuff - TreeSize is something I seem to use every day. No matter how big hard drives get, they never seem to have enough space on them. TreeSize shows you exactly where your disk space is a goin' with a quick scan.

Right click on any folder to open it in Windows Explorer where you can delete unnecessary files and save yourself a few gigabytes. I used to use something similar from JGoodies but TreeSize is ten times faster and gives the same results.

[Jon Masters]

A big thank you to Lissa for her Vervoid bit and link to SpyBot - having picked up a very annoying Trojany thing I've spent the last 24 hours running Wndows updates and virus scans and letting Spybot do its t'ing - and fingers crossed everything seems to be OK now.

Now if only it could give me a name and address for the t@##er who created the scam-adware thing so I could go round and set fire to his PC.....

[Lissa]

Firmly residing in the category of "things that seem too good to be true" is Format Factory. I originally thought it was just a DVD ripper - albeit the best one I'd ever found - but now I discover it converts audio and video files, lets you bulk convert photos, rip DVDs in many different ways and join audio and video files together into bigger, single files. All of which I could do with other programs but never as well as Format Factory does them. Yes the user interface looks cheap and nasty but it is well laid out and it seems to work really, really well.



Try it here.

[Paul Monk]

That looks really cool. I'm not sure I can find a use for it at the moment but I'm sure I'll think of something.

[MacNimon]

I'll try that one out. I'm always on the lookout for new converting software, as there always seems to be something which causes me problems!