Software piracy is a crime and many of us don’t realize it and use pirated software in our office and home. Whatever may be our reasons, by installing pirated software we’re committing a crime according to the law. Another issue with pirated software is security. All those crack sites and crack files may have some kind of viruses or trojans in it and you may never know whether your personal data is compromised.

Does this really mean we need to buy expensive software and make those software companies more richer with our hard earned money? Not at all. We can really do most of our work without buying any expensive software or worrying about software piracy. All you need to do is explore the web and find alternative software which are free or open source. In this article I will try to list out free or open source software for most of your needs.

The simplest solution

The most simple solution is to install a GNU Linux operating system like Ubuntu in your computer. The advantage is, you’ll get all the applications for your normal office or home usage and you’ll never need to worry about piracy. If you’re not comfortable with installing operating systems, you can ask your local hardware dealer when you buy a computer or ask your friends or relatives to install it for you.

Get the latest Ubuntu (11.04)

If you’ve already installed a GNU Linux OS, you can safely skip the rest of the article. But, if you plan to buy Microsoft Windows OS or already installed one with a valid license (if you buy a branded PC or laptop, most probably you will) please read on.

Office Applications

LibreOffice

Libre Office is an open source office suite based on OpenOffice but unlike OpenOffice, LibreOffice is purely community based. It is a very powerful alternative to Microsoft Office and is compatible with Microsoft Office file formats and can even create PDF documents without installing any additional software.

Other options: OpenOffice

Email clients

Thunderbird and Zimbra Desktop are excellent open source alternatives to Microsoft Outlook. Zimbra Collaboration Server can even power email servers of small to medium level business organizations.

Archiving / Backup

IZArc is an excellent tool which can handle almost all compression formats like zip, rar, 7zip etc. It can also password protect your archive files.

Diagram / Flowchart

Dia is an excellent application for creating most type of diagrams or flowcharts.

Blogging

If you’re into blogging, Windows Live Writer is an excellent offline blog editor which can integrate with almost all blogging platforms. You may tryout the LiveWriter tips and tricks.

Multimedia

VLC Player

VLC Player is the Swiss army knife of media files and comes with tons of features

Other options: KMPlayer, Mplayer (for excellent subtitle support)

Video editors

Windows movie maker is a good and and easy to use tool for editing your video clips.

VirtualDub is a simple video trimming and editing is tool.

Video Encoders

Handbrake is an excellent and easy to use encoder for most of your encoding needs.

Audio editors

Audacity is a more than adequate tool for audio editing and creation.

Media center

XBMC – XBox Media Center is a very powerful software which can make your PC a complete MediaCenter.

Image management

Google Picasa

Picasa is a very good image manager from Google. It features basic editing features and integrates with Picnik online editor if you want more powerful editing functionality. The face recognition and tagging feature is the best.

IrfanView

IrfanView can handle most of the image formats and even videos. Available as a small download. It can also do many powerful batch conversions.

GIMP

If you want Photoshop like editing features, GIMP is an excellent software. Though the interface is not the easiest, it is very powerful and can do most of your editing needs.

Other option: Photoscape

3D Animation

Blender – Though it is not in the same level as other professional 3D tools, it is a powerful software and there are many short 3D animation movies made with it.

You may also try Google SketchUp

Programming / IDEs

Eclipse

You can find an Eclipse plugin for almost any programming language and hence a very useful alternative to commercial software.

Netbeans

If you’re a Java developer NetBeans is the best IDE you can get.

Aptana

If you’re a web developer (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP etc) Aptana is even better than many commercially available IDEs.

Security

Antivirus

AVG Antivirus is a very good free antivirus application. You may also consider Avast and Avira antivirus

Firewall

Comodo firewall is an advanced yet free firewall with tons of features.

Spyware detection

Spybot Search & Destroy (Spybot S & D) is a great spyware detection and prevention tool.

Encryption

Truecrypt is the best open source software to protect all your personal data from prying eyes by dynamically encrypting a complete partition, file or thumb drive.

Games

Though not excellent as commercial games, there are many free interesting games including some open source 3D games. You can also play a lot of flash based games and try many of the game demos where you can play at least a certain level.

Flash games

http://www.flash-game.net/
www.miniclip.com/
http://www.freegames4all.net/

Open source games

Torcs car racing
Tux Racer

More open source games
Other free games

How to find free applications for your needs?

Though the above list has all the applications required for a normal user, sometimes you might need to replace a specific application. In that case you may find the following sites helpful.

Alternativeto.net

In this site you can find alternatives for your application by searching the application name. It has a freeware / open source filter so that you can find free alternative software easily.

Softpedia

Try to find a free software in world’s largest database of software applications

cNet Downloads

Another excellent database of applications

Google

Try googling. Someone, somewhere might have already solved your problems. You might want to check the Google & Bing search engine tricks for searching efficiently in Google or Bing.

I hope I’ve discussed about most of the applications required for normal use. If you have any query please feel free to post in the comments section. I would be glad if I can be of any help.

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1. MAMP

To test your dynamic web site you need a web server and database. MAMP comes bundled with apache 2, mySQL  and phpMyadmin along with some other tools so that you can build and test your dynamic websites very easily.

Url: http://www.mamp.info/en/index.html

2. Aptana Studio

It is one of the best IDEs even if compared with paid alternatives. Built on eclipse, it has the additional advantage of extending features through plugins. It is simply the best IDE for javascript/AJAX based web development. Supports almost all javascript frameworks, PHP, CSS and HTML. Plugins are available for Ruby on Rails and Java development. It supports Subversion as well for your versioning needs.

Alternatives are NetBeans IDE for PHP and Eclipse.

Url: http://www.aptana.com/

3. FileZilla Or CyberDuck

Filezilla is an open source FTP, SFTP (Secure FTP) client which will be enough for your FTP needs.

Another application you can try is Cyberduck which is also open source and supports FTP, SFTP, WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning), Amazon S3 and Mosso Cloud Files.

4.  VirtualBox or Remote Desktop Connection

Though we develop in Mac, most of the users are going to be from the Windows world. So we need to test our web site in Windows and mainly in IE. Either you can connect to a Windows machine through remote desktop connection or you can run a virtual machine which runs Windows.

If you opt for the remote desktop option, Microsoft has a Remote Desktop Connection client for mac. It is fairly easy to connect to a Windows machine. All you need is the IP address or domain name.

The recommended alternative is to use a virtual machine. You can download Sun’s virtualization software VirtualBox for mac. Another advantage is you’re not limited to any operating system. You can check your work, in virtually all platforms. But please make sure that you’re not violating any law of software piracy

Url: VirtualBox
Url: Remote Desktop Connection

5. Firefox

If you’re developing for web Firefox is your best companion. You can have plenty of extensions that will help you in web development. Some of the best extensions are Firebug, Developer toolbar, Color picker etc.

Url: Firefox

Other recommended tools

Skitch

This is not directly related to web development. But you’ll rather need this tool  often for taking screenshots and annotating it with comments. You can take a screen capture, highlight or mark some area, add a text comment and then drag it to anywhere to save as a file.

Url: http://www.skitch.com/

SC Plugin

If you need Subversion integrated into the Finder this is the tool you need.

Url: http://scplugin.tigris.org/

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Recently I tried Windows Live Writer, a free offline blog editor from Microsoft. When I heard about it first, I thought it can only work with Microsoft’s blogging platform (Windows Live Spaces). But to my surprise, it supports almost all blogging platforms including WordPress, blogger, typepad etc. The application automatically detects the blog platform using the blog url and uses the blog platform’s APIs.

Features

The features are  excellent for a free tool. A very unique & interesting feature is, this application downloads the theme (css style sheets) from your blog and you can always preview your post when you are editing it and you can even switch to the full preview without going online.

Interface

The interface is good. The toolbar has the common editing options. It also supports heading (h1 – h6) tags. In the footer, there are three tabs to switch between Edit, Prview and Source mode. And below that you can set categories, tags and Publish date. It can be also expanded to show more options that are specific to the blog platform. For a WordPress blog, it showed the option to change slug, excerpt, password, author selection etc.  In sidebar, you have the option to switch between blogs, open draft posts and the insert options.

Image & Video support

It has excellent image & video support. Images can be resized into three configurable options and can also add nice effects to it on the fly(shadow, photo border, reflection etc). It also has Photo Album support, but these images will be uploaded to your Windows live account.

You can insert videos using embed code or direclty from Youtube and Soapbox (Micrsoft’s own video sharing service). Or you can select a video from your local machine and it can be uploaded to Youtube or Soapbox.

Other features

Unlike many other blog tools, it supports tables. Tables can be inserted & edited easily.

The integrated spell checker is a good thing. It will highlight misspelt words as you type and you can right click to look for a matching word.

Code generation

I have also checked the code generation. Most of the time it is good and produces XHTML valid code. Bold or italic text produces correct XHTML code (<strong> and <em>). But sometimes, it produces a lot of nested <div> tags and inline styles, mainly for images & video, which could have been avoided. Also the code for table is XHTML valid, but it does not produce <thead> or <tfooter>.

Advantages

• Supports virtually all blogging platforms through the blog’s APIs.
• Table is supported
• Image & Video support
• Map support (Not supported offline)
• Tag support
• Can show preview of the post while you’re editing even in offline mode
• Good spell checker
• XHMTL valid code generation
• Split post support (This will enable you to show a certain part of the post in home page and will show an option to read more).
• Can edit almost all details like slug, password protect etc (Specific to blog platform)
• Can extend functionalities through plugins.

Conclusion

This is a surprisingly good application from Microsoft. The best thing is, it supports non Microsoft platforms and tools. The features can also be extended using plugins -there are already a lot of live writer plugins.

If you’re searching for the best free offline blog editor for Windows, your search ends here.

You can check more features and download the software from Microsoft site.

URL: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

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But Zip Genius is one of the best compression utility that is available for free which is on par with any commercial alternative like WinZip. In fact, IMHO it is better than lots of commercial ones.

It can handle ZIP, RAR, CAB, ACE, 7-zip, ARC, SQX file types. Besides it can read ISO, NRG (CD Images) which is a very good feature. You can check the supported formats here. You can also check the FAQ page.

Also, it has an option to add additional plug-ins (add-ons). There are some useful plugins already available.

ZG Tools

By installing this one, you can have

• Cutter – That is a file splitter. You can split a large file into multiple files so that it can be fitted into a floppy, CD etc.
• Rar2Sfx – Can create self extracting rar archives
• Zip2ISO – Using this, the zip can be converted to ISO format (CD image) so that it can be directly burned to Disc.

There is also other add-ons. Check them here .

Download

You can download the main program and add-ons from the ZipGenius site .

Verdict:

If you don’t want to spend $20 – $30 and hate to install pirated softwares then this is the one for you. Also,it comes with many features that is not even available in some commercial alternatives.

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