Ain’t nothing better in this life than free. Particularly when free involves useful and practical applications and programmes for your compy. In celebration of such I have put together a guide to some of my favorite free and open-source downloads:
VLC Media Player (Windows/OSX/Linux)
Top of the list and easily one of my favourite video players has to be VLC media player. Light and quick with a simple UI, this will play almost any video file including quicktime and the dreaded real media format (yup you heard right, no more having to download the hideous Real Player). Available over at the Videolan website.
DoubleTwist (Windows/OSX/Linux)
A viable alternative to the behemoth iTunes, this little beauty will sync to multiple devices (now including Android), download music from the Amazon market and (possibly the best feature) download, convert (to your relevant format) and sync videos to your media device of choice. From the mind of the amazing DVD Jon again this programme is light and simple, although it is sadly lacking a playlist creation function. Available here.
Spotify (Windows/OSX/Linux)
The now infamous cloud based streaming media player. I have to say thanks to Spotify I very rarely use my mp3 collection these days unless I’m on the move. The beauty of Spotify is that you can create a playlist in the cloud so it is therefore accessible from any computer in the world running the software. You can also create shared playlists and email/facebook/twitter the links so anyone can add to them. That’d be the social media revolution knocking at your door then.
Chrome (Windows/Linux(under WINE))
Now officially the fastest browser on the planet, Google have taken the browser, stripped it virtually naked and left you with pretty much the basics for browsing which to be honest was all I ever wanted. I was never a fan of plug ins in Firefox as they slowed an already sluggish browser right down. Chrome has a bookmark manager so you can import from FF and IE and a decent full screen view so you get to see as much of the page as possible. Whilst it does have certain issues with flash (I’ve noticed this mainly with Youtube and the stats section of the twitter client Hootsuite) it is otherwise a swift and reliable browser. Available here.