Benevolent Misanthropy

Since I have migrated off of Satan WindowsXP, I thought I’d make a list of programs for that unfortunate OS which I’ve found useful or invaluable that are either free or Open Source. So, here we are:

• RoughDraft — About the nicest writing environment I’ve ever used, excepting perhaps Nisus Writer back in my Mac days, and then only when I had that customized to my tastes.
• CeltX — Screenwriting app based on Mozilla code, this is a pretty decent program. Doesn’t get out of my way as much as I would like, but it’s still being developed, so maybe it will.
• iTunes — Man, I think this is what I’m going to miss most on Linux.
• Firefox — The web browser’s web browser.
• Thunderbird — It’s not Outlook Express, and isn’t that reason enough?
• ExplorerXP — This was more of a blessing for me than for you, but it gave me a way to view files in XP without a bunch of Chinese characters for information — it gave it to me in English.
• SciTE — I’ve gone through a number of text editors on Windows. This one is the best.
• HTML Kit — This is a somewhat overloaded code editor, but has a couple of very nice features: first, you can edit directly on your serverspace, since it has FTP built in; and second, it incorporates HTML Tidy to check your code for you.
• SmartFTP — It’s just about as intuitive as an FTP program can be.
• Sunbird — I don’t do much scheduling through my computer, but what I do is done with Mozilla Sunbird, and it does the job.
• GIMP — You want me to pay how much for a copy of Photoshop I’m going to use once a week or less? No thanks, GIMP is free.
• Password Safe — This is an absolute necessity. Nobody can remember all of his passwords these days, so store them in an encrypted file instead.
• Ad Aware Adware and Spyware nemesis par excellence.
• Spybot Search & Destroy Adware and Spyware nemesis par excellence, and does passive protection into the bargain, “immunizing” your system against the most common threats.
• Avast AntiVirus — It kept every virus threat off my system completely. The two times that Firefox failed to block a threat, Avast picked up the slack like a champ.
• Sygate Personal Firewall I haven’t been attacked, but just having it there is nice. Not sure if they’re still updating the free version, though.
• WordWeb — I don’t need a dictionary program often, and less so when I’m off line, but when I do, this fills my needs quite nicely.
• OpenOffice.org — Because you’ve just gotta be able to open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.

(This post was written long in advance. I’m still technically on hiatus.)