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Free Software
The Best Thing in Life are Free.- By Jan Birkeland.
Free software is not just free of cost, like free pies. It is free as in freedom.
It is free as in freedom. Free software gives you the freedom to use a program, study how it works, improve it and share it with others. Most free programs come as a response to software that is often very expensive to get. You will be amazed how much a free program can do for you.
Programs like the ones below are also called open source software, because their source code is available for anyone to study or use. These programs are for Mac users. There are thousands of other free and open source programs, including the Mozilla web browser, the OpenOffice.org office suite and entire Linux-based operating systems.
A cool program that lets you mix, record and play around with almost any audio-source available, including live recordings. You can also convert your old tapes and records into digital formats. It is easy to install and use and you can customise the program by downloading and installing add-ons.
Have you lost those precious photos of that guy you met at that place last year? With Jalbum you'll be able to arrange your photos quickly and easily. Jalbum supports most formats and languages so if you want your album in Russian or Norwegian, you're free to do so. English is also available. You can share your photo albums online with ease, or view them from your hard drive or CD.
Have a Picasso or maybe a Michelangelo inside you, screaming to get out? This cool little program is the brainchild of Kiwi company Ambient Design. They have won a ton of international awards and recognition for this arts program that lets the user work on a digital palette as if it were real paint. Every brush and colour behaves like it was real life. It is very easy to use and a lot of fun.
Ever wanted to go into space, but afraid of flying? Celestia may be the answer for you. This software lets you explore space in three dimensions. The software allows the user to explore solar systems and visit stars. You can also download add-ons offering other objects like spacecrafts and satellites.
Pando Calendar Get it at pandacorner.com
PandoCalendar is a good little program that will give you the ever-important desktop calendar. It is fully customisable, letting you choose your font and size to change the look of it. You can mark certain days to remember appointments, and it will even set off alarms for you. You can also plot in the days you are working, which is great for part-time work.
Thunderbird is a popular email client made by Mozilla, maker of the web browser Firefox. It is easy to use, and features strongly in the security section, with spam fi lters and pro- tection against phishing and other scams. It is fully customisable, which means you can change the look and feel of the program.
There are many ways to manage your digital images when you save them from your camera to your computer, but few are as well designed as Google's Picasa image service. Picasa organises the images and movies on your hard drive into a library. From there, you can copy, move and delete your pictures. Picasa's image-editing features let you crop, rotate, colour-correct and apply special eff ects to your images. Although you'll see the results of your editing appear in Picasa's various views of your photos, none of your changes di- rectly alters your original picture, which Picasa preserves. To make your changes permanent, you must export a copy of the edited image to another folder.
You can group photos into albums with custom labels without having to make copies that take up additional disk space. And it lets you generate image galleries for the web, email photos and order prints from online services.
Icon Restore Get it at users.rcn.com/taylotr/icon_restore
Sometimes you might start up your PC and notice that suddenly your desktop icons are in disarray. Lots of things can bump icons out of place. Icon Restore installs two new commands to the list of options you get when you right-click on your My Computer icon (as well as on most other system icons). You can set your icons the way you like them: right-click My Computer and choose Save Desktop Icon Layout. Thereafter, any time your desktop gets cluttered or mixed, just right-click My Computer again and choose Restore Desktop Icon Layout. The program has no built-in uninstall capability if you decide you don't want it anymore, so be sure to download the companion Uninstall Icon Restore program.
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