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Cheapware

This article presents a collection of programs which cover most needs of any user of digital design work, with the added bonus of being free or at least very unexpensive. Some are freeware, while others have a Shareware licence and they can be used legally only within the trial period indicated by the distributor. Shareware programs tend to be economical, in case you wish to keep them anyway.

Our blog frequently comments new programs and good file servers where you can get them. Check it out!

The url where you can download those programs appears by its commentary or, if it is missing, you can easily find the program in file servers like the ones listed below, down the page.

We’ll avoid most commercial programs, more or less expensive and not affordable by anyone. Anyway, most distributors offer some kind of tryout version. There are two main kinds of trials: complete versions with a limited trial period (usually from 15 days to one month, sometimes more), and non-expiring versions which have limited functionality or save-disabled. Thus, some very well known programs aren’t listed in this page. But keep on reading: you’ll like the utilities commented here.

It’s a good idea to take a look at the newstand and see what’s new in the , computer magazines, because they often include a bonus cd with complete programs. From time to time special editions are published, compiling utilities for the web, games, etc. The complete programs are usually some version prior to the last one, but for most users it’s really worth getting it. Some programs such as CorelDraw, Windows Draw, Picture Publisher, Xara Webster, Netobjects Fusion and many more have been offered this way.

There is a nasty tendence among some apparently free programs: the inclusion of Adware (which show some kind of ads while you’re using them) or something even worse and nastier, Spyware: a hidden program that tracks the user movements, navigation habits and sends them all to a third party, unadvertedly by the user. Enough is enough: it’s better to check out before downloading and installing new programs. In websites like www.spychecker.com they keep an updated database with this kind of pest programs (malware, adware, spyware...) You may keep your system free of the ones already affecting it using some cleaner such as Ad-Aware, or Spybot Search & Destroy, utilities which are able to eradicate spy components once installed in your computer and immunize it against new infections.

Office Suites

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StarOffice - OpenOffice.org: to start with, we need a good office package, an office “suite”. There’s an excellent and completely free alternative to the commercial ones, OpenOffice.org (formerly StarOffice, by Sun Microsystems.) You can get it on a CD or download it from the web (www.openoffice.org), but mind you it’s a huge download, about eighty Mb. This is an incredible offer and we have some more detailed information about it in the article about Programs.

Graphic editors and utilities

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Irfanview is a freeware utility to visualize and organize graphic files, with many options both basic and advanced. Very fast and convenient. Other similar freeware programs: XNView and Slowview.

PaintShop Pro was one of the first classics of Shareware, but later it grew to a more sophisticated commercial application. Very easy to use, PaintShop is a very good image editing utility and it’s compatible with Photoshop plugins. It’s possible to get some rather old versions of it, like v.4, but they’re complete and include excellent functionality for free.

An open-source alternative to Photoshop for photo editing and bitmap painting: The Gimp (www.gimp.org).

Xpal - www.xaraxone.com (en el apartado de Shareware) A free utility which lets you create colour palettes in the .pal format, used by most graphic applications. You can import images and it will calculate the palette with the predominant colours in the picture. There is also an option to add harmonious colours to round up the palette up to 256 swatches.

Nadger, Eyedropper, ColorCop, Color Pic and other similar utilities are very handy to sample a colour from any point on your screen, and immediately know its formula in either RGB, HSV, even in hexadecimal code (so you can use it directly in html/css coding.)

GIF Cleaner, JPG Cleaner. These two simple utilities wipe out unnecessary information and comments from GIF and JPEG files. This is the kind of application you can download from a specialised directory of small freeware programs (easy to install, or with no installation, fast to execute): www.tinyapps.org.

If you wanto to create some GIF animation, there are special tools you can download from most file servers, such as GIF Animator or GIF construction set,, and Unfreez Gif animator.

Icon Shop A good icon manager to organize icons and icon libraries. You can import Mac Icons, save as a normal image, etc. At http://www.ping.be/liontech.

Reptile (sausage Software) A texture generator which builds amazing fractal images with the click of the mouse.

Flash toolset: you can access all the graphics, clips and other elements contained in a Shockwave Flash file, .swf.

Mayura Draw a very basic vector drawing program which recognizes standard formats like Adobe Illustrator. It’s a very fast application but somehow limited. More full of features is another commercial vector drawing application, whose Zoner Draw 3 version is free. But the best alternative in vector drawing is probably the open-source Inkscape (www.inkscape.org), whose functionality rivals the one in major commercial prorams like Illustrator or Freehand.

There is a variety of freeware 3D programs, including Strata 3d Base, Blender, OpenFX...

TIP: How do you save some image created with a trial version which won’t let you save?
What’s the trial worth for if you can’t save anything? Just to learn its use? This isn’t completely true, because if you need a not so big image, that is if screen size and resolution is enough, there’s an evident and simple solution: just capture the screen, and save the image in another application. To know more about screenshots / screen capture, read the article we dedicate to this topic.

Internet - online related

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Internet browsers (Explorer, Opera, Netscape / Mozilla...) can be downloaded for free.

HTML Kit, First Page 2000, Arachnophilia, 1st Page 2000, NoteTab Light. Good html editors with absoulte control of the code, for those who know html. They simplify the coding task and they’re full of features. Tidy HTML can be used either as a plugin with other programs or as an independent utility. It clens up html code, making it leaner and standards-compliant.

First page 2000 used to be one of the best freeware html editors you could find, able to edit CSS, javascript, DHTML and with lots of extras, like dynamic script libraries to easily create effects. A program by www.evrsoft.com, with detailed help, it’s a bit antiquated unless they issue a new version, if you compare it to HTMLKit (www.chami.com.)

To manage file download you can use some auxiliar program like Download Mage, Fresh Download or Web reapera. Beware, some download utilities sometimes include some kind of spyware! But they’re very useful, imprescindible if you download big files often. Recent versions of browsers tend to include their own download managers, and in Mozilla it’s possible to expand its downloading capabilities with some specialized extensions.

There’s a lot of file exchange programs, especially used for music in MP3 and other formats. There is a very big variety of p2p - file exchange programs, but again beware Spyware:; there are quite a few horror stories around. Full listings and comments in sites such as www.zeropaid.com.

Most programs and files you download from the net or in a p2p program are compressed. This means you need some utility to compress - decompress the most common formats, like zip, sit, rar, arj...Winzip is one of the best known programs, it’s shareware. But there is a huge variety of free utilities of this type. And don’t forget Windows, up from its 98 version is able to open and save zip files right from the explorer.

To read and print Acrobat-PDF files, the free Adobe program (Acrobat Reader), or Ghostscript. Creating PDF files is a different question; you’ll need a program which is able to export in this format. Many commercial programs already have some export filter. An adware program, pdf995 and a free one, FreePDF, will let you create a PDF document from any file.

Freeware CSS editors: Ystilist y Cascade, Style Studio, XStyle...

Web Images to html from http://www.coolwintools.de/webimages/free/
This pgrogram creates automatically an index of graphics in a folder in html format. Remember this ability is also present in most graphic organizers, like IrfanView.

Web Reaper and HTTrack are a special kind of downloading utilities which let you download a complete website or part of it, following the links in any page to grab selectively the files you specify, rebuilding the remote site in your computer to let you browse it offline. Very powerful: www.webreaper.net and www.httrack.org.

Ws_ftp le is one of the classic file transfer protocol (ftp). You transfer files to and from your server very easily, both in anonymous or authorised mode, with your username and password. Simple and effective. There are also other free ftp utilities, like Filezilla, and many more.

Typography utilities

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From our point of view, Bitstream Font Navigator is one of the best font management utilities around. This program is included as a bonus with CorelDraw (even with its tryout versions; you can keep it later and it will work.) Another excellent organizer, this time Shareware is Typograf.. Other more recent font managers that can be recommended are Font Reserve, Font Agent and Extensis Suitcase. These three are professional programs, specialized in font management, a kind of program many users don’t use much, but something necessary for any designer.

Fontlister was Freeware at first, but from its third version on seems to be shareware (with a few improvements or new features); good to manage fonts, print out samples, install and uninstall... recommended. But if you really need a typographic manager, Typograf is even better. It’s shareware, but its price is very modest in comparison with its many features.

The Font Thing is another good basic font manager.

Font Loader (freeware) is a tiny and useful application that loads and unloads fonts from memory, fast and conveniently.

Download zone:

The programs commented can be obtained either at the distributor’s website or in selected file servers:
www.softonic.com , www.softseek.com  , www.download.com    , www.davecentral.com , www.freeware32.com , www.rocketdownload.com , www.nonags.com , www.simtel.net , www.winsite.com www.versiontracker.com, www.tucows.com , www.jumbo.com  are collections of freeware, shareware and demoware, organized by categories and with public access. You can search or browse; see different matches in a given category, so you see all the applications on offer, new versions and new additions.

Most font distributors offer demos and, sometimes, you can even get a full program from some past version.