One of the things I find the coolest right now is all the free software and services I get can on the Web. Some of the tools I find most useful don't cost anything. Here are some of my favorites:
Picasa is the great photo organizing program that everybody is using. Now that it has been updated with Picasa Web Albums, it's ridiculously easy to share photos with everyone. And it's free.
Google also makes available the excellent Google Desktop. I'm not a fan of having weather reports, sports, and stocks on the desktop, so I disable that stuff. Instead, I use the desktop search feature on my computer at work. I can find any one of the zillions of documents, emails, articles, presentations, etc. that are scattered around in there. I constantly amaze my coworkers even though they know how I do it.
Video conferencing and chat has also become free and easy. Google Talk is ridiculously cool, the talk is higher quality than my phone, and when you add the free Festoon plug-in you can do video conferencing for free (saving me the monthly conferencing fees!) I'm experimenting with SightSpeed, which only offers one-to-one video conferencing but has excellent video quality and very low lag time between sound and picture. Did I mention it's all free?
Serif software offers older versions of their products as free downloads in hopes that you will love them and want the new ones. I use the free version of Serif PagePlus SE for all my desktop publishing needs, and it works like a charm.
Screen capture is something I do a lot of at work. I use ScreenPrint Gold which allows me to take screenshots of any part of the screen and save them in a wide variety of formats. Again, the trial version is free. (This one I plan to buy.)
Wikipedia for quick information, Google Scholar for literature searches, Dictionary.Com for spelling and pronunciation reference. Crazy. And after you get done with all that work, you can zip over to 4games.com to wind down with a little gaming foolishness.
Got a good freebie? Let me know about it!
1 comment:
No nod to Sketchup?
While impersonating a writer i've been enjoying www.thefreedictionary.com: good definitions; a cool new quote every day along with 2-3 nearly useless factoid postings, all of which draw me in to learning far more than i ever needed to.
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