I know that we all can’t afford to buy the shiny new toys, or software, but there are tools that a TechWise TechWarrior needs. Here are my 5 Favorites with the price of zero.
The First thing I want to tell you about is coconutBattery from coconut flavor.com. See the link on the side bar in the category of links on the podcast. This app is free, though donations are accepted. It’s for the Macintosh, and it’s really for the laptops. It will tell you information concerning your battery. Things like current charge, current maximum charge capacity, number of load cycles on your battery. While this information is not a wowzer, it does give you valuable information concerning your battery.
The next Free App is an office suite. This is the big kahuna of an Office Suite, and that is OpenOffice. This is more than just A word Processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software, it’s also a database client, a mathematical formula builder, and a draw program. I’ve been trying to get everyone to use the product. If you do use it, please consider donating a little cash to the cause. I’d like to see this product flourish. Yes, I have donated. You don’t get anything special. This is available in the big three OSes.
The third item that I’d like you to consider is a Mind Mapping software called FreeMind. This is, as I said before, mind mapping software. Part of the reason I like this product is that it has a core of Java, a language I deal with very often. Another is that this does what you need at a very good price(free.)
The fourth item is an absolute gem. It’s a to do manager that is also free. The name of this product is Anxiety. It uses Ical and the mail to do and provides another client for those to do. If you can’t afford or want Things, then Anxiety will refurbish your to do’s.
The fifth free app is rather unusual. I find that there are some software that I need, or teach that still are Windows only. I did run Bootcamp for some time, but the need to access Windows software while in the Macintosh was extreme. I found Parallels, and it did the job, but for a price. While the price is not that much I decided that I might want to look for other kinds of virtualization software, and what I found was VirtualBox. This is an open source virtualization software. While this does not try to fool you into thinking that you are running Windows software in a Macintosh environment like Parallels, it still does provide another, cheaper way of running Windows in our Mac. It does run other kinds of OSes as well.
Do you have some favorite tools that are free? Share them with us in the comments section below.
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