No, i will not be talking about the movie. Instead I'm going to blog about some of my recent freeware-related discoveries. You see I used to be a
Downloads.com junkie, checking out each and every freeware released till I got bored in trying out the same thing over and over again. Fortunately a new batch of applications has again revived my interest in trying out freeware applications. I guess the main thing here is that these applications are interesting because they either introduce a new concept or they improve existing ones. I hope I can encourage you guys to try it out and maybe enjoy them as I did.
First on my list is
Konfabulator, a widget based application with probably the weirdest app name ever, maybe thats the reason why
Yahoo! changed it to
Widget Engine when they bought it. It used to be a commercial app later made freely available by Yahoo!. It's definitely an innovative application that is arguably the reason why
Dashboard came out for the Mac. I have reason to believe that
Apple copied the concept, if you don't agree with me then that's your problem not mine :D
Anyway, should you download Konfabulator make sure you include my favorite widgets
1. The Weather Widget
2. CPU Portal
3. Memory Gauge. I need to know if things are getting too heavy resource-wise
4. My Songbook.com. Did I mention I'm a tab junkie too?
5. Nestat. Shows a graph of network activity
6. Nibble Time. I'm a geek and proud of it :D
7. Dictionary. Because I don't carry one
8. What to do?. Just to keep things organized
9. Calendar. Because I hate the default
10. iPod shuffle player. I'm going to keep this for a few days more
11. Google Images
12. Lazy Launcher. Quick silver clone...because I still don't have a Mac :D
*UPDATE: If you downloaded Widget Engine (Konfabulator 3.0) Lazy Launcher won't work, they might have done drastic changes to the engine which caused the widget to crash(or it could just be the widget author's fault). Anyway, I need Lazy Launcher more that the other widgets so I reverted the installation back to v2.1.1, as the old saying goes "if it ain't broken, don't fix it!"Second on the list is
Picasa, an image/picture archiving utility brought to you by
Google.com. Did you notice the trend these days? big dotcoms buying cool apps and making them available to the public for free...or is it really free? :D
Picasa is by far the best in its class, It's fast, unobtrusive, and very user-friendly.
I do hope application developers follow their design philosophy, as I had the grandest time using their application. It works just the way I expected it, no need for manuals, nor online support.
Third and fourth will be
Writely.com's Web Word Processor and
Numsum.com's Web Spreadsheet...although both are still in beta phase, these are not your typical office software applications, these are FREE online apps, which means you don't need to install anything to make it work except a modern day Internet browser (who doesn't have one nowadays?).
Writely.com uses
ASP.NET to deliver a rich online-based word processor experience for their users, offering amongst other things a spell checker, auto saving and get this...collaboration!
Numsum.com on the other hand is an
AJAX-based (thats Asynchronous Javascript and XML...not the detergent :D ) online spreadsheet that is fast, reliable and relative easy to use. It doesn't have a collaboration feature as of the moment though, But if you take a closer look you'd realize that both are actually very revolutionary apps...no more MS Office plus your data is available anywhere you go.
I guess that should be enough for now, I'm be scouring for more "cool" applications such as these. Btw,
this is a bit old but its one of the first online applications that caught my attention. have fun!
