Freely 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.

30 Days of Worldbuilding offers an entire month of free guides you can use to create and flesh out your fictional universe.

Compositions is a "minimal, well-designed text editor for iOS and OS X" which "allows you to focus on the content. It features a clean white background, and a full screen mode that gets rid of almost all of the interface chrome, leaving just the text on the screen" (OS: Mac)

Dreamstime is my favorite stock photo site, not only for the great royalty-free images they sell, but also for the large, searchable archive of photos that are free for registered users to download and use (and registration is free, too.)

Eusing Clock is a "small desktop clock application that will place a great looking, colorful clock on the screen of your computer. You´ll be able to not only see your local time, but also the time in cities and countries across the globe. Eusing Clock enables you to quickly customize the looks, time format and standard as well as the background opacity level. You can set alarms to display messages, shut down or restart your computer, and more" (OS:Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7 [32-Bit/64-Bit])

Flashnote is a "quick notes manager created for such cases. When you need a rough copy to save or to process some pieces of a text, Flashnote is small, quick and convenient. Press the shortcut-key combination and a rough copy is on the screen in a flash of a second. Press ESC and the program hides. It's that simple. You don't need to find a place for text, to run Notepad or huge heavy PIM. Flashnote is a lightweight notes manager, everything gets done quickly, simply and in a more convenient way" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7)

The Internet Typewriter is an online writing environment that will "take care of saving your work automatically every few minutes, when you start a new document, and when you open a different document. Your documents will still be here when you come back later. The site remembers you by placing a cookie on your computer. Click here to choose a login just in case you lose your browser cookies or if you want to use Writer on a different computer. Totally optional. You can customize colors, fonts, and other settings in your Preferences. Saved documents are listed at the bottom of the page. Open one by clicking it. The document you are currently working on will be saved automatically first." Seems to work best in Chrome and Firefox.

JustNotes ($9.99 to buy, but they offer a 15 day free trial download) is a "simple, beautiful and powerful notes app. The nice user interface lets you focus on the important things – just notes. JustNotes synchronizes your notes with Simplenote, so you have access to your notes also from your iPhone" (OS: Mac)

NotePuppy is a "minimalist text editor designed to keep your notes and ideas in text files, in one place. If you like keeping a lot of notes in text files, and would like to keep them all in one place with the minimum of fuss, this could very well be the text editor for you. The editor saves the files as you work on them, saving you from the chore of having to remember to press Cmd+S every few minutes or (worse) having to find places and names for however many text buffers you have open if you should need to reboot. It also protects you from crashes if you are on an OS which isn't overly stable: NotePuppy has been succesfully deployed on a bleeding-edge crash-prone Linux machine before, and so that was useful. All the files managed by NotePuppy are stored in a central directory. If you are on a Unix machine (Linux or Mac), you can add symbolic links to the directory, and keep files from several places under the loving care of NotePuppy." (OS: Linux, Mac)

Task List Guru is a "free task list organizer ideal for personal task management and small project management. You can organize not just tasks, but also task lists, notes and reminders. Task List Guru has a hierarchical task list tree with icons that allows you to organize all your todo lists and notes in a structure with icons. You can choose from 48 different colorful icons for your to-do lists - this makes using this organizer fun" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)

One final reminder, to do my part for NaNoWriMo I've posted my writing how-to, Way of the Cheetah, online for anyone to read, download and print out for free; it goes back into the vault on December 1st.