Photography & Photoshop Alternatives

Sumo Paint

Photoshop Alternative

This is a fully operational photo editor, graphic design, and painting tool. The application works right in your browser without the need to create an account. Most of the features are beyond my skill level. Some of the images people have created are amazing. It doesn’t matter if you use Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating systems. All you need is Flash installed in your browser and you’re off to the races! It allows you to save in .jpg and .png formats. They also have a downloadable version which is $19. The Pro version comes with a lot of nice bells and whistles (which are probably over my head as well).

Note: Other great photo editors Pheonix by Aviary, SplashUp, PixelMator, rSizr,

One-Touch Photo Fixing

This application is like magic. Upload an image, click fix, and presto chango! Your picture looks much better. My wife looked at the example below and asked “Why did they take away her freckles? I like freckles.” If you have people in pictures with freckles this thing may clear them away.

Want an alternative to PicTreat? Try Picnik, FotoFlexer

Communication

Online Phone Service

If you are familiar with Skype you’ll love JAJAH. This IP service is free (in the USA) between account users. No need to install any software. There is no need to be stuck to a computer either. JAJAH connects two existing phones at the local level instead of charging long distance fees.

Online Faxing

The free service lets you fax 3 pages with an ad on the coversheet (which they create for you). Upload PDFs, Doc, or Docx files and press send! It’s that easy.

ScreenToaster – Online Screen Capture Software

After loading a Java Applet ScreenToaster works right in your browser. It is completely free and you can start recording without an account. Once the video is done you can upload your screen capture to ScreenToaster or YouTube. You can also save a hard copy of your video to the .mov or .swf file formats. Editing is no problem either. Now you can easily make a screen capture without downloading anything to your computer. Compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux. Creating an accounts let’s you save videos to screentoaster directly. It also gives you access to their active community.

Note: For a downloadable app, Jing is awesome

TinyChat – Instant Video Chatting

If you like things that ‘just work’ you’ll like this application. Nothing to download. No complicated set-up process. Create your chat room and your mic and webcam take over. You’re live video, audio, and text feed are displayed for other members to see (you can turn your video and audio feed on and off). Blocking other users is also an option. Sign in with a TinyChat, Twitter, or Facebook account. The streaming quality is decent. When you create a new chat room it generates an small URL you can email to friends and relatives. As new people enter the room their video shows up just above the chat window. The video area will resize and adapt to the number of users with their webcam on. If you’d like to keep up long distant ties with friends and family this tool would be invaluable.

Note: For easy voice chatting try Voxli.

Combine Chat Accounts

Combine all of your chat accounts under one roof. Users can keep in touch with friends across dozens of IM platforms, including AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, MySpace IM, Facebook Chat, and more. Visit Meebo

Charts, Diagrams, & Flowcharts

Drag and drop simplicity and power. Create nice looking charts and flow charts to communicate the structures and processes you have in mind. LovelyCharts requires an account creation to start using their software. They require a name and email address. As a free member you get to save one project at a time. It is possible to export as many .jpg and .png charts as you’d like. The graphics that come pre-loaded with this app are professionally designed and charts come out looking high class. This is defiantly one to have in your arsenal.

Note: DrawAnywhere is a nice free tool too. Creately has a nice free edition with no limit on diagrams just space. Need an online whiteboard? Try Twiddla.

Browser Operating Systems

Browser Based Desktop

Ever forget an important file on your home computer? Have you ever wanted to show someone something but they didn’t have the software needed to show your file? This solves those problems and more. Upload files, edit, and login from any computer with an internet connection. The application comes with a host of common programs like spreadsheets, writing software, and more. The advantage of using a portable OS is that the software is the real software (not a watered down version). It may not make sense for the bulk of daily work but if you are traveling this could be a life saver. Visit StartForce

Note: There is also an opensource browser OS called eyeOS that is both lite and powerful. Google is also releasing ChromeOS in the middle of 2010. This is the next big step for personal computing.

Audio & Multimedia

Multi-track Audio Editing

In the past professional audio editing software has been expensive. With the advent of Garage Band from Apple and other open source alternatives these types of programs have gotten very reasonable. My first recordings were done on a cheaply made four track cassette recorder. Those days are gone and now you can mix a track in your browser. Chop, Loop, Stretch and Reverse a number of tracks. Perform fade-ins, apply none destructive effects, and throw some automation on those faders for the perfect mix. This software seriously rocks!

Edit Video Clips Online

Jaycut lets you upload and edit video files online for free. The interface is simple to use and understand. Go give it a try.

Office Suites – Word, Excel, PowerPoint Alternatives

Writer, Sheet, Presentation, & More…

While writing this post I could have just included this one link to Zoho and called it a day. They do everything a freelancer, student, or average user might need. They have a wide range of software solutions from writer, sheet, presentation, wikis, chat, CRM, invoicing and more. They could be your one stop stop for most productivity solutions. Everything they do is online and browser based.

Note: Google Docs is also very good. ThinkFreeOnline lets you open, view, or convert any office document without downloading any software. Writeboard let’s you collaborate on a single document for free.

Upload & Share PowerPoint Slides

This is a nice way to share your PowerPoint presentations online. In addition to being able to privately share your presentation you can also make it public. Embedding the slide show is the slickest way to publish online. You can record audio on top of each slide show to make a nice presentation/webinar. You will need an account to use the software.

Note: Prezi is a fun web app that changes the way slideshows are displayed.

Files & Data Stuff

File Conversion

Convert document, image, video, music, and compressed formats. Heck, they even convert between Auto CAD formats. Just about every file format of each type is supported. If you’ve ever been stuck with an odd file that you can’t open or read, this will save you. Using the software doesn’t require you to open an account. Although, opening an account lets you convert big files and store them for later.

One more thing, Zamzar can download and make a downloadable video file from YouTube. Good videos die young on YouTube.

Drag & Drop File Backup

DropBoks is a little website that allows you to securely store your files online. No bells and whistles, just simplicity. 1 GB in total with a limit of 10mb per file size. Use this for school papers and assignments, songs, pictures. This is like an online jump drive.

Need to send files up to 2GB? Try YouSendIt. If you’re into a downloadable app dropbox is cool. For a password protected place to store up to 25GB try SkyDrive from MSN; you will need a hotmail/msn account. Here’s a place that allows you to transfer 5GB with a link FileDropper

Edit & Combine PDF Files Online

Combine, edit, and make PDFs secure. Simply upload your PDF file(s) and PDF Hammer will let you go to work. No need to download or install anything. It works in your browser. Updating the PDFs meta data is also included. Start a new project

Personal Finance

Personal Finance Software

Track your spending across multiple accounts. Create a budget, view historical trends, and more. Mint is dead simple and free. Don’t spend money on personal finance software, mint.com does it for free.

Want another option, try JustThrive.com Their software will help you reach your saving goals. Also try, Wasabe

Just for Fun

Create & Share Floorplans

Floorplanner is the easiest, quickest, and best looking way to create and share interactive floor plans. Using point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools, you can make your house plan in minutes, and rearrange it as often as you want. Then you can save, send, and print your designs to share them, or place them on your own website.

Fast Online Dictionary

This is the fastest best online dictionary. Works just like it should without all the popups and ads on other dictionary sites.

Make & Share Custom Fonts

Create, share, and download completely custom fonts. You build your font design with their flash work area. Choose from a number of geometric patterns, shapes, and designs. Don’t want to spend the time making a font from scratch? Browse through the library of hundreds of fonts you probably have never seen before.

Make Small Images Big

Convert images like JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs to the crisp, clean, scalable vector art of EPS, SVG, and PDF. World class tracing software. Automatically traces over blocky bitmap lines and converts them to smooth vector lines/shapes. Free to try, no account required.

Create Scrapbook Pages

Scrapblog’s drag-and-drop tool is so easy that everyone can use it. They have a lot of cool ‘one click’ things that are really fun. You can create and download pages.

Paint your Home without Paint

Want more free stuff? Visit our lists of downloadable free essential software.

Note:If you enjoy this list of software you might find these FREE online applications & tools helpful. No need to install or download anything, they work in your browser.

Free software can save you hundreds and possibly thousands of dollars. The software listed below is completely free, doesn’t have malware or adware, is completely legal, and I use each of them personally. Most of them are Open Source. If you aren’t familiar with what Open Source is please read The Free Software Definition.

This list includes the most popular software within their categories. You’ll find a software solution for all of your daily needs. If you have any suggestions or ways to improve the list please leave a comment.

Operating System

Ubuntu – Designed as a Linux alternative to Windows or Mac operating systems. A free operating system makes really cheap PC’s possible. Ubuntu is getting better all the time and its getting easier for the average user to install. One thing you’ll notice is that Ubuntu is FAST. Starting up your computer is fast, download times online are faster, and programs open quickly. If you know someone (read: parent) with a slow computer that always gets viruses and has a frustratingly slow computer install ubuntu. If you have an old computer/laptop install a copy and start getting used to it. You’ll be happy you did.

If you are thinking about upgrading to Windows 7 or getting a new computer Ubuntu is a great alternative. Ubuntu is designed for everyday use. The biggest downside is that it can’t run most of the big games for Windows. Smaller applications can be run inside a Windows emulator. Ubuntu comes pre-loaded with a bundle of free Windows alternatives. Ubuntu is gaining momentum and becoming more popular each day. If you use Ubuntu and like it please share what you know with your friends and family.

Anti Virus

AVG Anti-Virus – the most popular free solution available at no cost to home users and provides the high level of detection capability that millions of users around the world trust to protect their computers.

• Easy to use, low system resources
• Automatic update functionality
• Real-time protection as files are opened and programs are run
• AVG’s Virus Vault for the safe handling of infected files

Note: Avast also offers top rated anti virus protection

Personal Firewall

Comodo – The Award-Winning Free Firewall Software

• Complete protection from Hackers, Spyware and Identity theft
• Secures against internal and external threats
• Host Intrusion Prevention System stops malware ever being installed
• Delivers total end-point security for Personal Computers and Networks

Web Browser

FireFox – I’m an avid fan of Firefox for many reasons. Between the design, usability, and lack of features Explorer had me unsatisfied. Explorer has tried to update their browser but it looks like a thinly veiled ripoff of Firefox. In addition, the new Explorer froze up more often. Works with Windows, Linux, OS X

Most people that start using FireFox can’t live without it. The tabbed browsing and the customizations are very hard to beat. These other features are icing on the cake:
*Improved Tabbed Browsing
*Spell Checking
*Session Restore
*Web Feeds (RSS)
*Pop-up Blocker
*Phishing Protection
*Protection from Spyware

FireFox also has over 1,000 add-ons to choose from. You are sure to find something to make FireFox your own.

Email

Mozilla Thunderbird – It’s now even easier to organize, secure and customize your mail.

Office Software

OpenOffice – Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. Includes a robust word processor (Word), spreadsheet (Excel) , presentation (PowerPoint), and database (Access).

Photo Organizer

Google’s Picasa – The easy way to share and manage your photos.

Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you:

* Locate and organize all the photos on your computer.
* Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
* Share your photos with others through email, prints, and on the web: it’s fast, easy and free.

Take your photos further with Picasa from Google.

Direct link: Picasa for Linux

Music Player & Organizer

A big thanks to Brian for leaving a lot of great suggestions in his comment. He’s right, iTunes can make me crazy sometimes. I guess I have a soft spot for it because it helped me get into podcasting. But one of his suggestions is a downright winner (sorry iTunes).

SongBird – Not only does Songbird have everything you’d want in an audio program it also comes with a full library of add-ons. Customize your player ’til your hearts content.

Drawing & Photography

Gimp – This software is a free photo editing software that is a decent replacement for Photoshop.  It’s good for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

If you’re used to Photoshop Gimp takes some getting used to. I still use it regularly because there is such a strong community providing great help and resources.  Look for some tutorials online (there are tons of them).

Screen Capture/Recording

CamStudio replaces expensive Camtasia recording software.

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer
and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in
SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly
Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

Here are just a few ways you can use this software:

• You can use it to create demonstration videos for any software program
• Or how about creating a set of videos answering your most
  frequently asked questions?
• You can create video tutorials for school or college class
• You can use it to record a recurring problem with your computer
  so you can show technical support people
• You can use it to create video-based information products you can sell
• You can even use it to record new tricks and techniques you discover
  on your favourite software program, before you forget them

Screen Capture (for quickies)

Jing - If you need to make a quick screencast of your computer desktop Jing is your best buddy.  It’s drop dead easy and gives you either a flash file or it uploads it automatically and provides you a link to send someone.  The biggest limitation is that it only lets you do 5 minutes (but who wants to watch a screencast longer than 5 minutes anyway).  I’ve been using this for a year or more and turn to it often.

CD & DVD Burning

CDBurnerXP – a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Everyone, even companies, can use it for free. It does not include adware or similar malicious components.

Media Player

VideoLAN – VLC media player – Thanks to Steele in the comments for suggesting this one. When I can’t get a different media player to run my movie files VLC always does.  VLC supports a huge amount of video and audio formats. The interface is simple and clean. I know this will be a program I use for a very long time. Thanks again Steele!

From VLC’s website:
* It is a free cross-platform media player
* It supports a large number of multimedia formats, without the need for additional codecs
* It can also be used as a streaming server, with extended features (video on demand, on the fly transcoding, …)

Audio Recording

Audacity – a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

* Record live audio.
* Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
* Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
* Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
* Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
* And more!

3D Modeling

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems.

Features include:

• Revolutionary non-overlapping and non-blocking UI delivers unsurpassed workflow
• A range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, PostScript, OpenType)
• Fast skeleton creation mode
• Automated walkcycles along paths
• Diffuse shaders such as Lambert, Minnaert, Toon, Oren-Nayar, Lambert
• Realtime 3D/Game Creation
• View all the features

Video Editing

Avidemux – a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities.

File Compression/Zip

7-zip

• Supported formats:
  Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
  Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS
• For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Integration with Windows Shell
• Powerful File Manager
• Powerful command line version

FTP Software

FileZilla – a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface.

• Easy to use
• Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
• Cross-platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, OSX and more
• Supports resume and transfer of large files >4GB
• Powerful Site Manager and transfer queue
• Drag & drop support
• Configurable Speed limits
• Filename filters
• Network configuration wizard

HTML Editor

Aptana – an industry leading web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with thousands of additional plugins created by the community

Looking for an alternative to Dreamweaver, NVU, or Bluefish? Aptana Studio is uses the powerful eclipse engine for professional grade coding. And its completely free. I wasn’t willing to fork out $400 for Dreamweaver and started looking for something better. I had used NVU (can you say ugly code?) and Bluefish but neither could handle everything I wanted to do. Aptana is designed for the hard core developer and it will likely make you a better coder by using it. The built-in FTP site management is very nice and there are probably hundreds of other goodies I don’t even know about.

NotePad++ is a powerful application that replaces your regular notepad.  The real benefit comes from it editing component and is a real help for programmers.  Most average users won’t truely appreciate its capabilities and most programmers already have it.  But to keep this list of ‘ultimate’ software complete I had to add it.

IM Chat

IM all your friends in one place! This little power house is compatible with everything. All your chat accounts will work here. It supports: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, Zephyr.

Note: Try the ‘Off the Record’ plugin for added security. Everyone you chat with needs to have the OTR plugin installed too. For offices and regular conversations this added bit of privacy is nice.

Here’s where I tell you I lied. You actually get all the functionality of office without the cost but you don’t get Microsoft Office exactly. There’s a program I’ve recently downloaded that I LOVE and it’s free! Yes, it is completely legal and everyone is encouraged to use it. The program is called OpenOffice.

OpenOffice includes a database (like Access), word processor (Word), spreadsheet (Excel), presentation (PowerPoint), and even throws in two extra programs; Math and Draw.
Installation
The installation was easy to do and there were no problems. The download was easy but it took a little while to finish. Once I unzipped the package things went smoothly.

Writer

You can see from the tool bar and menus are very close to what you are used to in most word processors. There are two features that I really like about Writer: 1) There is an auto complete that offers a suggestion for the end of the word you’re typing. If you agree with the suggestion simply hit the space bar and OpenOffice will finish the word for you. 2) They offer an export to PDF button in the menu.

One of the best features about OpenOffice Writer is that it can open almost any file type. It doesn’t matter if it’s a .doc, .wps, or .xml it will open it. That feature alone is invaluable.

Calc

Calc is OpenOffice’s spreadsheet program. It looks to have a robust set of tools and standard features like you’d see in Excel. The one thing I’ve really appreciated is that Calc has many of the word processing featured built in. The spell-check-as-you-go works great. It saves me the embarrassment of sending out a spreadsheet riddled with my poor spelling attempts.

Base

Base is a database creator like Microsoft’s Access. Like the other applications it allows you to open and edit third party files. If you were to buy Access you’d have to pay extra for it because it’s generally not included in the standard office suite.

For a startup business OpenOffice’s Base could be a life saver.

Impress

Impress offers a wide range of tools and resources to make eye popping presentations. Because the community is so active you won’t have any problems finding new templates or add-ons to spice up your presentation. Impress definitely rounds out the OpenOffice offering, making it a very attractive tool for all your business needs.

Draw

OpenOffice Draw provides the flexibility you might not find in a word processor or a power point slide. Draw gets out of the way and allows you to make a page with video, audio, charts, graphs, shapes, text, and more if you’d like. If you had a notepad and you were trying to write down all your ideas Draw gives you the same flexibility. So cut loose and create something fun with this one.

Summary

OpenOffice has done a great job in providing an alternative to the standard office suite. There has been a lot of thought put into each of these applications. In many ways they have invented a better mouse trap and are giving it away for free.

Download OpenOffice