whats the best freeware you've used

[yvanc]

Hello everyone, freewares nowadays are simply amazing. Although its doesnt have features like those retail software it still enough to get a job done ^_^

Whats the best freeware you have used? May it be any software like image manipulation, 3d, word processors etc....

[PyTom]

Ubuntu Linux. With a couple of clicks, or a command line entry, you can grab software to do anything like that. (Debian is also nice, but harder for untrained users to use.)

[chronoluminaire]

I'd say GIMP, Open Office, or Firefoxare the big hitters. They're immensely complex and powerful programs that are completely free to use, which is amazing. And contrary to your initial statement, they have features completely comparable to the competing retail software.

But a far less well-known freeware program that's really handy is called RemoteKeys. You customise it to add a number of buttons into its window, and those buttons can do more or less anything. Launching programs, moving windows around and resizing them, modifying the contents of your clipboard, opening URLs based on modified contents of your clipboard, calculations, playing with your music volume or changing CD tracks, or just pasting long strings of text with a single click. I started using it when I had RSI and couldn't use a keyboard; but I've kept using it since then, because it's immensely useful to be able to (for example) take the string on the clipboard, remove any spaces before and after, then open a URL with that string embedded in a particular place... with just one click.

[Jake]

Probably the ones I use the most - and therefore, from my point of view, the 'best' in terms of being most useful - are TightVNC (graphical remote terminal control), PuTTY (command-line remote terminal control), FileZilla (file transfer - FTP and so on) and Tortoise SVN (version control).

That last one is particularly useful in the game-making arena, and I'd recommend everyone use it or something like it, really. I have it set up on a second computer, when I'm done for the day I commit all my changes to the SVN repository, and it serves not only as a backup on a different PC but also allows me to look through past versions of the same file, compare differences, etc... I don't have to worry when I'm making large potentially-breaking changes, because if I screw up too badly I can always roll back to a previous version of the file. When I'm done with a project, I can write the whole SVN repo to a DVD to save it in case I need to come back to it later.


(It always kind of saddens me to see the GIMP mentioned in this kind of discussion, 'cause it highlights a lot of the bad things about open-source/free software as well. It's a very functional program, but last time I tried it the UI was nothing short of terrible - obscure names for things, odd workflows and practically no thought for usability - particularly compared to the commercial equivalents that people inevitably think of. I've known people who have come away with a bad impression of free software in general from a bout with the GIMP's UI. :/ It's undoubtedly used, and in a big way, but I have to wonder how many people using it actually use it in direct preference to a different package, and how many people use it out of necessity or politics...)

[monele]

Mm... VLC for video... VNC for remote access (awesome to help parents with their computer ^^). VirtualDub for video compression.
Ren'Py for VN making?

There's not really *one* best freeware... there's just a bunch of them in their respective categories.

[papillon]

the best piece of *tiny* freeware that I can't imagine doing without is Launchy because I always hated navigating the start menu...

[mrsulu]

Linux, always.

Python for everything. It's glue in my life that everything would fall apart without.

GIMP, because it's not better but very much cheaper than Photoshop. (I have PS too, but only on one computer and I have about 10 more that I use.)

GTK/gcc are both wonderful tools if you have to write C++.

emacs, because there can be only one editor and it's not vi.

mplayer, because it plays everything.

Not to talk about how much snow fell on my way to school, I can remember the world where for every game you wrote you had to write an image editor to go along with it. I'm talking about a world before MacPaint, a world before hard drives, before agreed-upon image formats. That's how old I am. I'm SCARY old. You kids, get off my lawn![/list]

[Jake]

because there can be only one editor and it's not vi.

Ooh! I forgot to mention nano.