Cheapskates rejoice!
d f tweney
Today, PC World published my feature story, "101 Fabulous Freebies,"
which will be in the May issue of the magazine. It's a huge grab bag of
free software and free web-based services. There's a ton of great stuff
in this story, and the online version includes handy links so you can
download programs immediately.
From the story:
> There's never been a better time to be a cheapskate. Free utilities?
> We've got 'em. Want a full-fledged image editor? A few gigabytes of
> mail storage? How about an entire office software suite? We can top
> that, easy. Take the whole earth and solar system. Free!
>
> If you thought that the golden age of free stuff ended when the
> dot-com bubble burst, guess again. The past few years have seen an
> explosion of giveaways--both Web-based services and free software--that
> make the anemic home-page building apps and first-generation Web
> mail services of the late 1990s pale in comparison.
101 Fabulous Freebies
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,124883,00.asp
What surprised me when I was working on this story is how much free
stuff is still available online--and how good some of it is. I'm still
using a healthy handful of the hundred-plus programs and services I
tested. For example:
FoxIt Reader -- a fast, lightweight PDF reader:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,62648,00.asp
IrfanView -- a super-easy, lightweight image editor
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,5648,00.asp
FolderSync -- a tool for syncing the contents of two folders
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,62376,00.asp
And I have been using many other freebies for months or years, including
Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Desktop, and Trillian.
If I were a developer of consumer software, I'd be worried. There's so
much good stuff available for no money, it's a wonder anyone spends
money on software at all.
--dylan.
--
Dylan Tweney writer/editor
t: +1.415.373.6003 e: dy...@tweney.com