Freebie Ten

Ten Things You Can Have for Free

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

Gamer Alert: Construct is "a free powerful and easy to use development software for both DirectX 9-based games and applications. It includes an event based system for defining how the game or application will behave, in a visual, human-readable way - easy enough for complete beginners to get results quickly. Optionally, advanced users can also use Python scripting to code your creations" (OS: Win 2000/XP/Vista)

You Information Are Important: The freeware edition of Essential PIM "allows you to keep all you information in electronic form. All your appointments, tasks, to do lists, notes and contacts are stored in a graphical and easily accessible form" (OS: Win 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP/2K3)

Free, Conditionally: Harpercollins/Avon Eos hasn't stopped celebrating their tenth anniversary; this month they're offering a free e-book version of City of Pearl by Karen Traviss. As with last month's free e-book download offer, they still have some bizarre age & residence prohibitions, and you still have to jump through some hoops to actually get to the download, but essentially it is free for the taking until August 31, 2008. (Unless you're European. Or twelve. Okay, I'll stop bitching now.)

Track the Linkage: Thinking the Web's Linking the Web "monitors backlinks to your site. If some of the links don't exist, contain wrong anchor, are covered by a "nofollow" flag or hidden by robots.txt then you will be immediately notified by email. Also the program can keep track of your purchased links and notify you about their expiration dates" (OS: Windows, all versions)

Sasha Rules!: Author Sasha White has generously posted her story Meandros as a free read on her web site; no hoop-jumping required at all (thanks to Charlene Teglia for the heads up on this one.)

Need More Desktops? Fusion-Software's MultiDesk "extends the size of your desktop by creating multiple "Virtual Desktops". It can expand the size of your desktop from 2 to 10 times allowing you to divide your work across them and work in a less cluttered enviroment" (OS: Not specified, but looks like a Windows program.)

Raising the Freeware Quality Bar: PaintNET is an "image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP or 2000. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems" (OS: Win XP/2003/Vista)

Edit That Photo: SunlitGreen.com's PhotoEdit is "a lightweight yet powerful photo enhancer and editor. It enables you to view, resize, rotate, apply color corrections and effects to your photos in a professional way" (OS: Not specified, but like MultiDesk, looks like a Windows program.)

Mac User Collaborators, Rejoice: The free trial version of SubEthaEdit is "a powerful and lean text editor. And it's the only collaborative one that is a joy to use. By combining the ease of Bonjour with the world's best text collaboration engine, it makes working together not only possible but even fun" (OS: Mac OSX 10.4)

Color Me Small: The Picker 2.0 is a "very small and simple color picker utility. It sits at the top of the screen where it is always visible but still totally unobtrusive. The window of The Picker is so small that it won't interfere with your work area. You no more need to work with a color picker whose window itself takes up half of your screen. The Picker's main window shows the proximity area of the mouse pointer with 2x zoom" (OS: Win 98/ME/NT/2K/XP/2K3/Vista)