Software Tools
[Short Reviews and Comments]

This page lists freeware software that I use a lot. These are all freeware for personal use, with no annoying advertisements, no shareware, no booby traps like time-limits or other restrictions. Totally free to use and much better than most shareware or adware or commercially available applications. ("Free" as the word would be understood by a kid, as different from the "free" meaning used by FSF/GNU.)

One final section here does list commercially available software that I use often. Commercially available software is a much better proposition than most shareware --- if you wait a few years to buy commercial software, the older releases can be had at much reduced prices, a advantage old shareware releases do not have. Remember - older software works much better than newer releases - the bugs are all known and bug-fixes are available! No software company releases software today without introducing a whole bagful of new bugs; stick with older releases as long as you can.

Online Tools Online ITRANS CD/DVD Inserts & Envelopes aub - Assemble Usenet Binaries Linux Linux - now on Fedora KDE & QT FontForge Mozilla & GIMP External Freeware IrfanView Viewer Mutt Email Pop-Up Stopper zip/unzip/vim Commercial Quicken 4

Online Interfaces [ Hosted On This Site ] Here are some tools that I built online web interfaces for, so anyone with a web browser can run these. These are hosted on a Fedora Linux box, running Apache. Online Interface to ITRANS       [Most Web Browsers] Enter ITRANS encoded text in a window, click the button, and get PostScript/PDF/GIF output in an Indian Language Script. [ April 2001 ]   Online CD/DVD Inserts & Envelopes Creator       [Most Web Browsers] Need something to print out CD/DVD Jewel Case Inserts or CD/DVD Envelopes? Both front cover and rear tray card inserts can be printed, as well as foldable front cover inserts for slim cd cases. Based on the cdlabelgen program. [ April 2001 ]   Assemble Usenet Binaries       [Perl - Linux / Windows ] As for March 2001, AUB is being maintained by Mako Hill, you can visit his page for latest version: aub home page or on freshmeat aub project page. [ March 2001 ] This is for perl programmers only. There is this very old program perl called "aub", which can be used to assemble and decode binaries posted to Usenet. I made a few minor updates to this, don't think there is any central location where this is maintained, so am offering the version with my updates right here (note: only useful to programmers, no user level support available). [ November 2001 ]   Online Interfaces - Legal and Privacy Policy       The Online Interfaces hosted here have no support for privacy, it may be very easy for others to view the data you input and the output and temporary files created by the online interfaces. Linux Here's where I begin my new experiment, to make Linux my primary work machine. Will continue to report here on how things go, including a list of software packages I plan to install. I need to read Email and run Quicken on a PC. For Quicken, I think I'll stick to Windows, but rest of the stuff can be done as easily on Linux. Fedora Project       [Linux / XFree86 / KDE] Operating System and Utilities. Fedora: This is the current distribution I am using. Slackware: This was the distribution I used until 2004. [ May 2007 ]   K Desktop Environment       QT Crossplatform GUI       [Windows on Unix] "Graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations" This is one of the most incredible packages out there. QT by Trolltech is the "crossplatform GUI development" tool that KDE uses, and the QT/Windows framework is now freeware for non-commercial developers. [ August 2001 ]   FontForge       [Outline Font Editor] "Lets you create or edit postscript, truetype, opentype fonts" I used this package some years ago, and it was not ready yet. Today, this package has come along way - good enough to create fonts. The complexity required to suppport font creation is huge, so a big kudos to the author of this package. At this point, the truetype hinting mechanisms are not fully baked yet, but I am sure in time that will work too. [ December 2004 ] External Links Cool programs, best in their class! These are all freeware, with no annoying advertisements, no shareware, no booby traps like time-limits or other restrictions. Mozilla       GIMP       [Linux / Windows ] Web browser and image editor. Now regulary use Mozilla Firefox for all my browser needs. [ November 2004 ]   IrfanView32 - Graphic Viewer       [Microsoft Windows] "IrfanView is a very fast FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) 32-Bit graphic viewer for Windows." Found this program to have the best set of features, have tried many freeware image viewers before this, IrfanView supports so many different image formats, including some video formats. [ April 2001 ]   Mutt E-Mail Client       [Unix] "Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based mail client for Unix operating systems. " Yup, still using text-based email client. Start mutt in a bash shell, that is my main email program. [ April 2001 ]   zip / unzip / vim / etc       [Most platforms] Command-line and Unix-like utilities for Windows, Linux, etc. Use Info-ZIP's Zip and Unzip for handling ZIP archives, available for most platforms. Still do my editing using vi, using Vi IMproved in vi-compatible mode. [ June 2001 ]   Commercial Programs The key here is to always resist buying latest releases - not only do you save a lot of money, but you also avoid the bugs and crashes every new software release comes bundled with! Quicken 4.0 & 2001       [Microsoft Windows] Personal Finance software. Until 2000, I was very happy using my very old Quicken 4.0, and then I was handed a free copy of Quicken Basic 2000, and then a free copy of Quicken Basic 2001. I upgraded - what a mistake! There was nothing in these new releases that offered anything I wanted. And after using these for a while, I could no longer take my data files back to 4.0. And I am not sure if 4.0 will even run on the next Microsoft operating system. And, even though this is a commercial package, I have to suffer through ads when I use Quicken. Quicken is still a very useful program to me, I just wish it were more light-weight and had not fallen prey so much to software bloat. [ April 2001 ]

Use FreeBSD or Linux with the K Desktop Environment.