freeware

freeware

One of the most important and impressing things about the internet in my regard is what you can get for free. It is sometimes incredible what software, help, bits & tools or services people and companies create and spread over the net at no cost (or sometimes with advertisement, which is bearable...we all still watch tv also, or?) On my computer there are dozens such programs and tools that help me to such extend! So here I want to recommend some of them, with links to the homepage and also some links to freewaresites.

Quotes on programs and programming:

"BASIC - A programming language.  Related to certain social diseases in that 
those who have it will not admit it in polite company." 
-Anon. 
"I speak BASIC to clients, 1-2-3 to management, and mumble to myself." 
-Anon. 
"If you're masochistic enough to program in ADA, we're not going to stop you." 
-Matt Welsh 
"Don't get suckered in by the comments ... they can terribly be misleading." 
-Dave Storer 
"If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an 
activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or 
a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas." 
-Harold Abelson 
"Optimization hinders evolution." 
-Anon. 
"Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman 
numerals." 
-Henry Spencer 
"The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland; but that's 
because it's the best book on anything for layman." 
-Anon. 
"The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is 
responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the 
form of computer programs." 
-Joseph Weizenbaum 
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when 
you do, it blows away your whole leg." 
-Bjarne Stroustrup 
"He who hasn't hacked assemply language as a youth has no heart. He who does as 
an adult has no brain." 
-John Moore 
"Pascal keeps your hand tied. C gives you enough rope to hang yourself." 
-Anon. 
"Perl - The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption." 
-Keith Bostic 
"A program is a spell cast over a computer, turning input into error messages." 
-Anon. 
"Real programmers are those that can sleep in front of terminals ... with their 
eyes opened." 
-ricS 
"Real programmers can write assembly code in any language." 
-Larry Wall 
"Real programmers don't work from 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 
9am it's because they were up all night." 
-Anon. 
"Real programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide 
whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN." 
-Anon. 
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so 
simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it 
so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far 
more difficult." 
-C.A.R. Hoare 
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple 
system that worked." 
-John Gall 
"A crash is when your competitor's program dies. When your program dies, it is 
an 'idiosyncrasy'. Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 
'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates 
how many more months of testing the product should have had." 
-Guy Kawasaki 
"There are two ways to write error-free programs. Only the third one works." 
-Anon. 
"f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmmng." 
-Anon. 
"Old programmers never die. They just branch out to a new address." 
-Anon. 
"Old programmers never die. They just can't C as well." 
-Anon. 
"As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and 
have failed repeatedly, in real applications." 
-Dave Parnas 
"Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should 
be hard to understand." 
-Anon. 
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of 
your life." 
-Michael Sinz 
"Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers." 
-Leonard Brandwein

The firstmost program I can truly recommend is

STAR OFFICE5.1 by Star Division. For those who do not already know: it is a complete office suite, like MS Office; a writer, a calculation, DTP, grafics, database in dBase, a photopaint-program and a WYSIWIG-html-editor,...
For a wysiwig-tool the editor is good.
The StarWriter beats the HECK out of Word!! It is absolutely great.
The other program parts are also good, and: the whole package is absolutely watertight: everything is integrated, no matter if intranet or internet, it has it`s own desktop if you want. You can even run it as groupware completely on Java (!!).
For us poor neglected technicians one detail is a blast: the formula editor. It is bi-modal: you can choose the functions from a drop-down list or if you already know the commands you can type it straight in. Works like a dream.
The greatest thing about StarOffice: the whole, uncut, newest version is absolutely free for non-commercial use (which would cost over $1000!!). Does this sound good or are you stupid? JUST that the whole shabang is a good 65 MB download... (You`re NOT at a university!? Hm...better do it at night :D !)
Here`s the adress (in US and in Germany)

http://www.stardivision.com/Star Divisions homepage US
http://www.stardivision.de/Star Divisions homepage Germany

This homepage would have been impossible without the next two programs: the first is

Phase5

Ulli Meybohm's HTML Editor Phase 5. It is text based, but it offers great help by instantly setting hyperlinks, including grafics, headlines, colors, tables... whatever you need. Also supports direct scripting of Java and stylesheet, has an inbuilt previewer, debugger and explorer. I wouldn`t know why I should spend a lot of money for front page. It is freeware, the link is

http://www.thoha.de/meybohmUlli Meybohm's homepage

And then there is

Self-HTML, a widely known and justly famed tutorial on html, style sheets, Java script and perl cript by Stefan Münz. It is in German, I don`t know if there's also an english version. Too bad for you guys if so, because it is really great. If you have any question on these subjects you are very likely to find a quick answer to it in there. It is a html-project itself, and is absolutely huge. It is a masterpiece of coordination. The cross-references and tons of examples are really showing what good html can make of tutor-programs. I have it open even as I write this and needed it so badly through creating this homepage!
The link is

http://www.teamone.de/selfaktuell/ homepage of the Self-HTML project

The next program that I use almost every day is

IrfanView by Irfan Skiljan who is studying at the technical university of Vienna.
Look at any freeware-page and you`ll find a comment like >can open zillions of formats, includes video and musicrepeat,...what is there that this program can`t do?< . It was the first viewer at all to feature animated gifs! It has a very comfortable menu, 'eats' anything, cut 'n paste is a cinch, also palette-editing, re-formatting, resizing. And it is tiny and fast. Great program. The link to the programmer's homepage is:

http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e9227474 homepage of Irfan Skiljan. Very good design!

I couldn`t get any real use out of either the stupid Ulead- or the MS Gif Animators that are freeware. The animations on these pages (the ones that I did myself, not most) are done with

Movies5

Movies5 by Jan Verhoeven. It has the basic movements and is sufficiently practicable. Also has the possibility to slow down or speed up the whole animation or single frames. It works. On his homepage he has got quite a few mostly grafics-orientated freeware-programs that might be great... I guess I`ll never find out because I`m just a 'dumb-user'... the guy writes everything in Delphi4, and he seems to be a programmer to his core! You probably know what I mean: His menus are SO confusing and no-intuitive...looks like sourcecode itself. You ask yourself 'What the Hex' !? But it sure has tons of ways to influence. I just could never do the samples that are included in the programs... Don't be scared. But I really got along with Movies5. Compliments. The homepage-adress is

http://home.wxs.nl/~verho037/freeware.htm homepage Jan Verhoeven

Another program with some interesting features is

Ultimate paint by MegaLux. It is a painter-program (oh, really?) with some interesting effects, a color-picker and most of all a great pattern-generator! Most packgrounds on these pages are created with the program. Their homepage is:

http://www.megalux.huMegaLux homepage

Now: I don't particularly like Micro-so-often, BUT I got to admit that they have the only freeware tools to encode streaming media, video or music. And they are really good!! On their homepage they offer the
MediaTools for download. They are free unlimited Betas and can transform anything into streaming ASF- format. Neat! They feature a full-grown AVI-capture with the fastest driver I`ve seen anywhere, encoding of videos in multiple bandwidth (!) (expl.: it creates one file, but it will check itself what resolution your connection allows. Isn't that wild?), a feature for concealment of audio-loss, possibilities to influence the brightness and sharpness of the video, clipping videos (!), adding markers and script-commands (!), fade-in and/-out and templates to publish it on the web. And more. Many exclamationmarks here, but it's really amazing. Awesome tools. Look at their homepage for them, also for the new MediaPlayer Release!

http://www.microsoft.com(one of the slowest servers on earth... must run Windows...! ;-D )

other programs I can recommend are (please look for them on the freeware-pages)

- RepTile and Buttons'nTiles for creating background images,
- Go!Zilla as a very good download manager,
- screen capture by nestsoft.com,
- close popup against the annoying pop-up windows, also WebWasher (more complicated but good control)
- SoriTong as a great freeware MP3-player,
- Security Officer as a good protection program (creation of sysops and users with accounts and limiting the access to folders, buttons,...)
- WS FTP as a good solid freeware ftp-client,
and of course - ICQ (see my ICQ-page).

Two free services I can really recommend are

V3 redirect-services (http://come.to/ )They give you a domain name that makes more sense or is shorter like my 'Welcome.to/' -adress. You can choose freely and there`s no banners, just their logo. That is cool.

And of course Fortunecity (http://wwwfortunecity.com ) where I have my homepage. The banners... ok. Still acceptable.
If it's for free there are ads most of the time, right? At least no pop-up windows
as on geocities or the like. Pretty fast server mostly and 20 Megs of free diskspace (!!).
I wouldn't have thought I'd need that much, but with the music- and videostreams it gets nicely big!
Also interesting communities there.
The alternative is Tripod at http://www.tripod.com (also have some national servers, just like fortunecity).
Only 12 MB free space, but no banners, just one pop-up window all the time.

I hope very much that these links are correct and work!

here follow my freeware-links (a few are also shareware):

http://tucows.fh-reutlingen.de/TuCows (famous, also shareware)

http://www.the-best-freeware95.de/ 'Erlesene' freeware

http://www.freewarehome.com/ Freeware Home

http://www.freewarewizard.de/ Freewarewizard

http://www.freewarepage.de/ Freewarepage

http://freeware.intrastar.net/'Only freeware'

http://www.pcwin.com/freewarePCW freeware

http://www.saarcom.de/freeware/index.htmSaarcom (Uni) Freeware

http://www.freeware-archiv.de/Freeware-Archiv

http://www.webattack.com/freeware.shtmlWebattack freeware

Darth Gates!