Payless 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.

Cha-Ching allows the user to "manage your finances quickly" and "quickly create a budget, enter transactions and track spending, all within a beautiful user interface that will make managing your finances a true pleasure. Cha-Ching 2 is re-written from the ground up to take advantage of the very latest features available in Mac OS X Leopard" (OS: Mac OS X)

Countdown Calendar is a "widget that helps you remember important dates like your wedding anniversary, Tax Day, birthday, Christmas…anything you want!" (OS: Mac OS X 10.4 or greater)

Gramps is a "free Software Project for Genealogy, offering a professional genealogy program, and a wiki open to all. It is a community project, created, developed and governed by genealogists." I thought this one might be of use to those of you who are writing series or epic novels and have to keep track of extensive character trees (OS: Linux, MAC OS X, and Windows)

Hornil Stylepix is a "free graphics editing program. It's light and powerful photo and image editor with professional tools for mid-range of users. Key features: Full features for raster graphics editor; Multi layer and grouping support; Various region selection tool; Various drawing tool; Practical image filters like level and curves; Correction-restore and enhancement tools; Batch processing; Intuitive user interface and convenient working environment;
Supports 53 languages." (OS: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7)

Paintstar is a "versatile digital image processing software suitable for such tasks as retouching of photographs, composing and authoring images, image morphing, screen capture, and displaying image thumbnail in Windows Explorer context menu. It supports alpha, layer, path ,and the most common editing techniques. PaintStar has many of the tools and filters you would expect to find in commercial offerings, and some interesting extras as well" (OS: Win 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP)

Piggydb is "a Web notebook application that provides you with a platform to build your knowledge personally or collaboratively. With Piggydb, you can create highly structured content by connecting knowledge fragments to each other to build a network structure, which is more flexible and expressive than a tree structure. Fragments can also be classified using hierarchical tags. Piggydb does not aim to be an input-and-search database application. It aims to be a platform that encourages you to organize your knowledge continuously to discover new ideas or concepts, and moreover enrich your creativity" (OS: Multi-Platform [Java])

Baen's Universe has posted Shoresteading (Part I and Part II) by David Brin online for free reading; donations or new subscriptions welcome.

Suvudu Free Library has some new freebies up for grabs in April: Point of Honor and Cross Purposes, two short stories by Elizabeth Moon, and Make Believe, a short story by Michael Reaves.

True Transparency is a "free application that allows you to replace your windows´ borders by skins composed with transparent images. With skins highly configurable, a one-click skin selector, a low memory usage and without installation process, change the look and feel of your windows GUI has never been so easy. Bring Vista transparency to your XP desktop with TrueTransparency" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)

Vocabulary Trainer is a "free and open source software for learning vocabularies. Vocabulary Trainer is implemented in Java. Skip vocabularies which you have already learned or if you are no longer interested in learning them with one button click. Ask the program for the solution to continue learning in an uncomplicated and direct manner." Could also be of use to you homeschooling parents out there (OS: Multi-platform; runs on Java virtual machine)