Monday, August 11, 2008

Gratis Ten

Ten Things That Will Cost You Nothing

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

The recently released version 1.3.3 of Bean is a "small, easy-to-use word processor (or more precisely, a rich text editor), designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable." Multilingual versions available (OS: Mac OS X)

Become the next Doonesbury with the online cartoon generator Create Your Own Comix Strip.

Golden Rules Organizer is a personal organization freeware with "several planning levels, actual effort tracking, mind mapping, and contact management, providing function-rich goal system" (no OS info specified but it looks like a Windows program.)

If you're interested in audio storytelling, check out the advice offered over at Making Great VoiceOvers, which includes a link to download Audacity freeware for Win and Mac and how to use it for your voiceover.

Create a timed quiz to entertain your blog or website visitors with the Make Your Own Timed Quiz generator.

Generate some fun fantasy names for your story elements with Namator (also has name generators for people, companies and planets.)

Scratch is "a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art, and share your creations on the web" (OS: Win2K / WinXP)

Because we can never have too many steampunk stories, the Steampunk Random Story Generator.

StorYbook, an open source program designed to help writers manage their manuscripts, has just released version 2.1.2 (OS: Windows XP/Vista, Linux.)

With customizable word and phrase lists, one-click word usage frequency stats and a displayed worcounter, WordFlood may be the best word-replacement editing freeware out there. If you're curious, watch the demo on the developer's link; it shows everything the program does (OS: Win NT/2000/XP/Vista.)

(Some of the generator links were pinched from Gerard over at The Generator Blog)

4 comments:

  1. Wonderful list. Thank you!

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  2. Hey, that StorYbook looks pretty interesting (I'm always on the search for the "perfect" organizer until I get a Mac and Scrivner). I'm downloading it now.

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  3. Thanks for the list. I've used random name generators on the internet before. They are great, especially if you are trying to come up with a name that is of a particular ethnic group (for instance, an Italian grandfather was my latest).

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  4. Anonymous5:03 PM

    Thank you SO MUCH for the link to the Audacity software. My grandmother is legally blind, and I've been wanting to record a novel for her.

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