Free for All Ten

Ten Things You Can Have for Free

Anki is "a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it is a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn. Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless." This freeware was designed for study, but the features it offers makes it a great multi-media index-card creator, too. For all of you who use them for writing, this one might be worth giving a whirl (OS: Win 98/ME/NT/2K/XP/2K3/Vista/7)

Apophysis is "a windows application made in delphi for creating, editing and rendering fractal flames. Fractal flame is an extension on the IFS fractal." Gerard over at the Presurfer posted this cool animated fractal video which was made using this freeware (OS: All 32-bit MS Windows [95/98/NT/2000/XP])

Kevin Perryman offers two versions of Envelope Print, a freeware which stores and prints return and mail-to addresses; one for Domestic and another for International mailing. This would be a good one for all of you who do a lot of mail-outs (OS: not specified, but looks like Windows)

Fountain Pen is "just what you need to write, with none of the clutter. A menubar, a compositions panel, a toolbar with four buttons… all can be hidden. It’s just you and your writing." I like the sound of that! (OS: Mac Snow Leopard or newer)

Fractalus is a "freeware fractal generator with movie, deep zoom and multiprocessor capability. Hundreds of example parameter files included" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)

I liked the look of the free online photo album generator jAlbum so much that I gave it a personal test drive, and found it to be fast, ridiculously easy, nicely customizable and 100% user-friendly (here's my test album, which took me about two minutes to create.) This will be perfect for the pics I take this year at the County Quilt show. A free account begins with 30 MB, but you can get an additional 70MB free by completing a short list of things like taking a tour, creating a profile, inviting friends to have a look, etc. They also have a free desktop app for download. Quite impressed with this one (OS: Windows [all])

KeepNote allows you to "store your class notes, TODO lists, research notes, journal entries, paper outlines, etc in a simple notebook hierarchy with rich-text formatting, images, and more. Using full-text search, you can retrieve any note for later reference. KeepNote is designed to be cross-platform (implemented in Python and PyGTK) and stores your notes in simple and easy to manipulate file formats (HTML and XML). Archiving and transferring your notes is as easy as zipping or copying a folder." Sounds like it would be an excellent program to use to create and update novel notebooks, too. (OS: Windows, Linux, and MacOS X)

LangOver is "a freeware that helps when you tried to type in one language but the result was in another... Annoying, eh?! That's because the keyboard layout was in a wrong language, and you forgot to use "ALT+SHIFT"... NO MORE! With LangOver 5.0 you'll be able to convert your text quickly between languages. Just Click "F10" and your text will be fixed! LangOver 5 is free and Supports ANY language" (OS: Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7)

Remind Me Later is "one of the Top 50 downloads on the Mac App Store. You can add events to you iCal in a matter of two clicks. You can also sync the program to an iPhone" (OS: Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6), Intel-based Macs, PowerPC-based Macs)

To-Do Desklist is a "Free to-do list software that automatically arranges to-do notes on your desktop. Synchronize your tasks between computers and users. To-Do DeskList has beautiful minimalistic design and multiple themes to choose from. Supports reminders, notes, and more. It is very lightweight, easy and simple to use, and much more efficient than complex task management packages. Features: Simple, nice looking and easy-to-use interface; To-Do Notes placed directly on your desktop; Assigning priority levels to to-dos; All to-dos can have a reminder to a specific date and time
Hotkeys for adding a new to-do and displaying all to-do notes in front of other windows; Sorting To-Do Notes by priority or by date; Well-arranged to-do list on your desktop instead of a complex structure" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)