Yesterday, a good friend called and asked me what “must have freeware apps” should he know about for his brand new work laptop. After a good 4 or 5 years of full blown Windows power using dorkdom, I figured what better time to round up some of the apps that had a positive impact on my life. Many of these are covered in countless dig posts, and freeware lists around the web, but why not add to the confusion?

Images:



Picasa / IrfanView / XnView – all three are good for different things, but all have helped me in some way or another. Picasa is good for managing large collections and doing simple editing.

Graphics:



Paint.NET – great for simple graphics editing and drawing. Used this to create the wireframes for some websites too.

Video:



VLC Player - the only way to go. It plays anything, plays it fast, and doesn’t bring your machine to a crawl.

.PDF:



Foxit PDF Reader/PrimoPDF – Foxit was great for viewing, and Primo is a decent .pdf generator, not great, but ok and FREE.

Networking:

Bonjour - Zero-configuration networking software, from the Mac crew.

Backup:



Folder Sync - a very simple way to sync the contents of folders across multiple computers that have an internet connection. OSX too! Great for keeping backup copies of important files.

Compression/Archiving:



Izarc - hardly knew it was there, that’s a good thing.

Disk Storage:



WinDirStat – great visual way to see that your hard drive is completely over run with bad music and large video files you’ll never get around to watching.

Desktop Search:



Copernic – I tried a few desktop searching engines, most sucked. Copernic didn’t suck bad, and it found what I needed it to find a good 80% of the time. Its no spotlight or quicksilver on the mac.

Misc:



Synergy and Launchy - i reviewed them here.