Written on 16 March 2014
Best Free Software
During these tough economic times businesses and individuals are looking for cheaper alternatives to some of the more expensive photo manipulation, web development, audio software etc... So we have decided to compile a list of some of the best FREE alternatives to expensive programmes such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office etc...
Gimp:
Gimp is an freeware alternative to Photoshop. It doesn't have all of the advance features that the latest incranation of Photoshop has, but it does offer a very good photo manipulation and design suite for those on a budget in need of a versatile graphics manipulation package.
Click here to download Gimp (available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris)
Apache Open Office:
Open Office is a great open-source alternative to Microsofts 'Office' software. Suitible for creating all office suite files such as word processing, presenations, spreadsheets and databases. This easy to use and free software can read and write files from other common software packages and is available in many languages.
Click here to download Open Office and used for free (available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris)
Audacity:
Audacity is a free multi-track audio editor & recorder. It allows you to crop/adjust volume/clean audio and loads more to most audio file formats, and it is entirely free.
It is a great starting point for people looking to get into audio editing, or those that need a simple audio editing suite for a multimedia project.
Click here to download Audacity (available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/Unix)
Mediacoder:
Mediacoder is a great tool that allows you to convert almost any file format into another. Got a WMV file that you want to make into an AVI, or a WMA that needs to be an MP3? then this is your tool.
Click here to download Mediacoder
Filezilla:
Filezilla is a free open source FTP solution for client and server, that allows you to upload and download files from your web server. It is designed to be really user friendly and is nice and quick.
Click here to download Filezilla (available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)
Win Rar:
Win Rar is a free .RAR file extractor. Win Rar zips up RAR and ZIP files, aswell as extracting them. Rar files usually end up with smaller file sizes than Zip files, and are becoming a more commonly used compression method.
Click here to download Win Rar (available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)
VideoLan VLC Media Player:
VLC Media Player is an open source video/audio player. It can play pretty much any file including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, MP3, OGG, AAC and many more without codec packs needed, aswell as having the ability to play DVD's, Audio CD's, VCD's and streaming media.
Click here to download VLC Media Player (available for Windows and Mac OS X)
Autodesk DWG Trueview:
Autodesk is a free stand-alone DWG viewer that rund on the same viewing engine as the AutoCAD
Software, so you are able to view .dwg and DXF just as you would in AutoCad. TrueView allows you to view print and track changes to both 2D and 3D Designs without any other software.
Click here to download TrueView (available for Windows)
Aptana:
Aptana is a free open source option to Adobe's Dreamweaver and similar web development tools. If has a graphical user interface that allows you to write and edit HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Ruby, Rails, PHP and Python. It is a very useful tool, and what's better is that it's absolutely free.
Click here to download Aptana (available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)
SketchUp:
SketcUp is a free piece of software for 3D Modelling, it has great usability without having to sacrifice functionality. you can start by drawing lines and shapes. Push and pull surfaces to turn them into 3D forms. Stretch, copy, rotate and paint to make anything you like.
The software has a great tutorial section with lots of free model downloads and plugins.
Click here to download SketchUp.
Panda Security Antivirus:
Panda cloud is a great open-source alternative to paid for antivirus services such as Norton or McAfee. Unlike some other antivirus softwares, Panda Cloud is easy to use, secure and light on resources.
Click here to download Panda Cloud (available for Windows 7/Vista/XP and 2000)
Dropbox:
Dropbox is a free 2GB online storage account that allows for any file type and will automatically sync with all your computers, phones and tablets allowing for easy access anywhere. a great advantage of dropbox is its simple to use, and easy to access as it has various platform capabilities.
With dropbox the mroe you share with others the more storage your entitled to so this can become a great sharing tool between you and others in your organisation.
Click here to get a Dropbox account