Put Away Your Wallet Ten

Ten Things That Won't Cost You a Dime

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

1. BrainFlow is "a small text editor designed for brainstorming for creative writing. It displays numerous real-time wordcount statistics and shows progress toward daily and long term goals. Designed for use with the NaNoWriMo contest." (OS: All 32-bit MS Windows [95/98/NT/2000/XP])

2. ccArtist is "like Wordpress for people who don't have a great deal to say. ccArtist allows you to create a web site (rich, themeable) for your works (audio, video, etc..) Manage your works and licenses. Designed ground up to be Creative Commons aware." (OS: None listed)

3. Creative Side is "a group of projects designed to unleash creativity through multimedia, allowing you to easily create digital content and share it with friends, and home to the following open-source projects: creative, ultimate dictionary and examples finder, flash video album creator, crosswords, movie player plus, easy backup." (OS: WINE, All 32-bit MS Windows [95/98/NT/2000/XP])

4. Pierre Cayer and Mike Weir's Engine001 freeware allows you "to create Action Role-Playing games with ease." Includes the ability to design maps, characters (playable and non-playable), vehicles, items, etc. If you like RPGs and have always wanted to design one of your own, or just want a different way to promote your fantasy novel, could be fun (OS: Win 98/ME/2K/XP/2K3)

5. FishingCat is "a free, open source application to help authors record and track information about their writing, their submissions, and the markets they're interested in."(OS: OS Independent [Written in an interpreted language])

6. Mindscape RPG Tools is "a character generator and other rpg tools some of the rpg tools will be usable in other paper and pencil rpg's. The text for the game is also open source. The creative things that you create for the game is important to the game." (OS: All 32-bit MS Windows [95/98/NT/2000/XP])

7. OxygenOffice Professional is "an enhanced version of free OpenOffice.org what is a multi-platform office productivity suite. OxygenOffice Professional contains more extras like templates, cliparts, samples, fonts and VBA support." (OS: Linux, Win 98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista)

8. Greenfish Corporation's Relief Map Generator (scroll down to the bottom of the page) "generates random images which resemble real relief maps. The randomized maps contain settlements with random names, hills, plains, lakes and seasides. The program can generate random town names (which are fictious and do not exist anywhere), or pick them randomly from a provided text file. The generated images are public domain and can be used anywhere." (OS: Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP/Vista)

9. Step "can be used for writing digital books, organize 'stuff', create tree data structures and family trees, and it can be used for online documentation(once Step Reader is completed). . . In terms of reader, Step is an alternative to PDF, Word Documents and HTML documents. Like some magic book, a page from a Step can be exported and shared with others, and each Step is recorded like an auto-bookmark. It is very light and not bulky compared to PDF. It consumes less space than PDF, Word Documents and HTML documents, and it is oriented for reading on a computer." (OS: OS Independent [Written in an interpreted language])

10. StorYBook is "a free, open source story writing software for creative writers, novelists and authors that helps to keep the overview over the strands when writing a book, a novel or a story. StorYBook assists you in structuring your book. Have all your data in one place. With StorYBook you can manage summaries, characters and locations and assign them to the related chapters." (OS: 32-bit MS Windows [NT/2000/XP], All POSIX [Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes], OS Independent [Written in an interpreted language], Linux, Vista, WinXP)