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IrfanView is provided as freeware, but only for private, non-commercial use (that means at home). Companies and most state organisations need user licenses.

The OP says he uses it in a professional setting. Be prepared to acquire licenses or at least talk with your legal department.

Tried Irfanview with its plugins?

http://www.irfanview.com/main_...

(Says it needs Quicktime, but if you're that desperate to open them, it shouldn't be a burden, and certainly easier than trying to load them in an emulator in a browser and somehow convert them).

Windows 7
nearly 10-year-old Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop with SSD
Mozilla Firefox web browser,
AutoIt scripting language,
SciTE and TextPad tabbed text editors with regex support,
IrfanView
FinePrint virtual printer for N-up printing, combining print jobs, univeral print preview, saving without printing, etc.
and VPN client to connect to work.

An interesting program. I just tried it out. It's fast, but no faster than IrfanView, which is my default image viewer. Plus, Irfanview also has some nice features like Adobe plug-in support and batch processing.

Picasa was free (and decent) there were better ones though ---- or at least software that had actual options --- All of them died and are gone, except for a couple majors.

Free:
http://www.irfanview.com/
http://windows.microsoft.com/e...
http://www.faststone.org/FSVie...

Paid; less than $70:
http://www.acdsee.com/en/produ...
http://www.aftershotpro.com/en...
https://creative.adobe.com/pro... (admittedly subscription)
http://www.arcsoft.com/photost...
https://www.ashampoo.com/en/us...

There is no shortage of local photo management and editing applications available for Windows.

Or Email clients

I won't spend a huge amount of time posting more links; this page is pretty comprehensive:
http://alternativeto.net/softw...

I'm assuming that you're trying to avoid MS Outlook for whatever reason, and "Thunderbird" by some miracle never crossed your desk. Windows Live Mail isn't bad at all (it's still even a usenet reader!) Opera Mail, Zimbra Mail, and eM client are all excellent and free.

There is no shortage of either form of software. Alternativeto.net and Softpedia are great resources for this kind of thing.

As soon as Photoshop and Firefox/Chrome start supporting it I can see widespread adoption.

Irfanview would be the crunch application for me. And yes, I might well make a new payment (I've already brought one copy) if it would fund the writing of the module.

Up to 14 bits/pixel/channel (does that include the alpha-channel? If TFA included it, I missed it.) would certainly be a major step up from 8bppc in JPEG, though I do occasionally handle data from 16bppc astronomical sensors, and I wonder about HDR photography, so I wonder if pushing up to 16bppc is feasible. We do have FITS for handling the astronomical data, and TIFF for medical up-to-32bppc imaging, so it's not necessarily unworkable. Actually, considering that this is, by design, a lossy format ... my worries are a non-issue. For serious work, you'd never use JPEG or BPG or any lossy format.

Bellard seriously knows his coding. Impressive breadth of contributions to the world over the years.

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish.

* 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/

* CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n...

* Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n...

* IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/

Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/

* KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/

* LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/

* Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/

* SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co...

* UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg...

* VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, oen source, Linux/Mac/Windows)
http://www.videolan.org/

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish. There are few others, but some are more as needed special use cases. * 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/ * CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n... * Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n... * IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/ Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/ * KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/ * LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/ * Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/ * SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co... * UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg... * VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats ) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.videolan.org/

A patent for a variation in image transition, whether image to image, image to end of file, image to new folder, image to different grade of image whether size or quality, image to different category of image etc. is clearly bullshit as the whole idea of image transitions is clearly obvious and has been explored in media to the nth degree over the last century. Any patent office that would approve is clearly corrupt and is only interested in passing as many patents as possible to fill US courts and make jobs for lawyers. So reality and what is actually happening makes you claims look like blatant bullshit. Something like IrfanView http://www.irfanview.com/ one of the most popular free image viewers gives a image transition when it comes to the last image, it advises you as such and gives a choice, so that or a bounce or any other affect is clearly not patentable as it is truly old and obvious.

Try editing a photo with the command line. Sure, you can do it, but why would you?

Seriously? I'd love to leave it a "Because you can." You're not thinking creatively enough or you must not do much programming. You see the results of it around you every day online! How do you think thumbnails are generated on many websites!? Packages such as Image Magick or GD are powerful command line programs. You may not be aware that photo editing software features command line options for situations where batch jobs make sense.

A scenario would be removing EXIF data from photos (like the latitude and longitude embedded by many devices by default, not so hot if you're a clown distributing pictures of their super secret grow op...). Irfanview is a great example of a GUI application exposed with command line functionality. Say you've got a bunch of photos of a client's (frequently rotating) products featured both in print advertisements and their online store.

Another real life example this last week I wrote a script to automate creating various graphic assets for our user created apps on the various platforms we support (iOS, Android variants) with files users uploaded directly to our web server. If you notice most professional software packages support scripting functionality because it's extremely useful (Maya, Cinema 4D, CAD, Photoshop (macros) etc.).

Please don't interpret this as subtle advocacy supporting command line elitism. Simply put I enjoy being productive, I get more done and my clients/employers as well as I benefit immensely from this. Daily there are times where GUIs are the way to go. For example I find editing documents using a mouse much faster for most situations, multiple copy and paste jobs are night and day faster for instance.

I always use IrfanView to pre-process my pictures before uploading them anywhere. You need to do that anyway (original pictures are usually huge 4000+ pixels wide and forums usually limit you to less than 1280px). When you're saving the image, it shows check boxes to remove all extra information from the pictures (usually camera model and shooting options and so on). Easy. And yeah, it's an awesome and light image viewer and you can edit images too.

It has mass-batch processing capability including mass visible-watermark-addition capabilities, mass-thumbnailing, mass-resizing/reformatting/file-type-change. Earlier versions - 3.8 is one if I recall - had mass JPEG-comment-editing features. I can't seem to get that to work in 4.23. The current version is 4.27.

It or another program that does the same things is a must have if you are going to be making wholesale changes to a lot of pictures.

Windows. Free as in beer for non-commercial users including home and charities.

http://www.irfanview.com/

IrfanView crushes XV in features and it's free.

Irfanview

Notepad++

CDex

FileZilla

Free or open source software that I use frequently have no usability issues. I know there are some horrific free and open source software choices out there. I just don't use the ones that don't lend themselves to ease of use. I stick with the stuff I know works.

Flash's SWF file format is documented well enough that several other products and open source projects can produce it and some are capable of playing it back. The FLA unpublished save format is basically a memory dump of how the Flash program works with the project, so it's considerably harder to develop outside software to save or load that format.

I know ActionScript, but I prefer to write what little Flash stuff I do in HaXe, for example. There are also Rebol Flash dialect (RSWF), an ActionScript virtual machine assembler called flasm, swfmill, Laszlo, and more.

There are also other graphical programs for Flash publishing. Everything from the Zmag web app to SWF Quicker by SoThink and their SWF Easy.

For players, there's at least Gnash, Swfdec, SWF.max, Eltima's SWF and FLV Player, and IrfanView (which is what I use to play Flash games without opening a big memory-hogging browser).

Hell, Adobe's own Flex authoring suite for Flash is supposed to be MPL within a few months. How much more open do you people want?

• EditPlus Programming editor
• IrfanView Image viewer with effects and image manipulation capabilities
• Putty so I can SSH to my Gentoo from winblows
• Ability Spreadsheet as opposed to the spreadsheets in microsoft office, open office, and gnumeric
• Proxomitron Web-filtering proxy
• Flashpaste Copy/Paste on steroids
• WinRAR as opposed to winzip
• uTorrent as opposed to azureus and other java based boulder-weight crap
• mIRC IRC client
• DVD Shrink Rip/decode/encode DVDs, etc.
• Tail for Win32 Wish tail under linux was this good
• RealAlternative as opposed to realplayer
• Virtual Dimension Virtual desktops, as opposed to microsoft's power toys

Here's my list: OpenOffice, e-Sword, Firefox, Google Desktop, TightVNC, Thunderbird, Picasa, AVG Anti-Virus, GIMP, IrfanView, VLC Media Player, FileZilla, 7zip

Stupid lame filter nuked my <ul>

Software isn't like Cable TV, Phone, or similar home services. After all, I don't put my personal data into any of those, and I certainly don't use them to store my own files. If Joe Sixpack misses the 'rent' on his thin client, he's screwed... hard. Even if his files were stored locally, he'd have a very hard time opening media files which can only be opened by the thin client (yes, I can see MSFT --or someone else-- doing that very easily to produce a literal lock-in).

A thin client would certainly free up the average user from routine tasks... but what if the user prefers to use, say IrfanView for managing and viewing his/her image files, instead of whatever the vendor has provided (prolly the MS default image viewer)? I sincerely doubt that the vendor is going to let said user simply install whatever he/she wants, since it would become a logistical nightmare to support on the back end.

There's still too much room for abuse... on all sides. It removes consumer choice from the equation entirely, unless consumers can organize en masse and simply shift to a friendlier provider. Boycotts of that size, especially with personal data and files at stake, will be infinitely harder to organize and execute. Even regular ones today are tough enough to pull off.

Technically, I think it's damned fine. VM's for corporate users saves a ton of cash in hardware. OTOH, those corporations aren't as willing to trust their secrets and business on VM servers that they don't own. Users have very similar reasons.

Don't get me wrong, I can see it happening on some levels... but I just don't see any mass shift towards it (what... you think Joe Sixpack wants his vendor to keep his tax records --or conversely, his pr0n collection-- and not have them within immediate and total control?)

/P

"Oh, and how about GIFs? The patent has expired, folks. Photodeluxe could save GIFs with reduced color counts (2, 4, 8, 16, etc) that embarras the size of JPEG and PNG. Sure would love to have a new tool that could pull that off."

I think Irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ can do that. Image -> Decrease color depth, choose the settings you want, then save the image as usual. (AFAICT PNG saves a bit of filesize over GIF with the same number of colors).

I was trying to post this yesterday, but Slashdot started doing database maintenance >:(

1. AutoIT to create a script.
2. IrfanView to grab the entire screen and/or apply optional transforms to the captured image. This is optional, since AutoIT can probably send the "PrintScreen" command itself, and move the resulting file(s) into a capture directory.

Or is it a certain love for applications that aren't on macs. (surely not)

I second Microsoft Power Toys and add some more:

* AutoIt for simple automation tasks and creating small programs with graphical user interfaces

* Firefox, of course. Opera is also a good choice.

* Daemon Tools for mounting ISOs as virtual CD/DVD drives

* Trillian--AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, and Yahoo messenger client


* QuickTime Alternative

* RealPlayer Alternative

* IrfanView--small, free, fast image viewer



* SysInternals utilities--useful for admins

* Scanner--shows hard drive usage as stacked pie graph of files/folders

* 7-zip: similar to WinZip or WinRAR or StuffIt

* Foxit [PDF] Reader--a lite alternative to Adobe


Following ones aren't free but are very useful Windows-only programs:

* FinePrint--n up printing, universal print preview, etc.

* MaxiVisa--use a networked computer like a secondary display

* TextPad, though I opt for the open-source and FREE SciTE

http://www.irfanview.com/ is great for simple image editing.

it's an excellent image viewer, also lets you adjust the images (brightness, gamma correction, contrast) and resize / resample them. Supports all formats known to mankind.

http://www.irfanview.com/

Irfanview is good for batch conversions, I used it all last summer to resize and greyscale hundreds of photographseach week. At 1.24mb for the whole program folder, and the ability to read almost any type of image file and use photoshop filters I haven't found anything better for quick edits.

.. but I really dislike all the "managers", picasa, nero, hell, I _stopped_ using ACDSee when it became to cluttered (in favor of irfanview ofcourse).

Frankly I just dont see the advantage of having one heavyloading utility for each aspect of your work. Explorer does it's work, if I wanted more power on my workstations I'd be slapping Linux on them where I have amazing powers at my tooltip with some help by perl and bash.

And for the shameless plugging of his own article I can only say: tsk tsk.

IrfanView does all the scaling/red eye removal/etc you could ever want. It has no actual brush tools, but a lot of processing stuff. Plus, it loads extremely fast, reads and saves like 150 image formats (pulled out of my arse), and is an excellent replacement for Microsoft's crappy default image viewer.

Wow! all this talk about photo editors and no mention of Irfanview? Irfanview is simply the BEST lightweight photo tool on Windows. Batch conversion/rename, crop, resize, Photoshop filter support, ect, ect, ect. You're not going to create a FARK.com photoshop contest entry with it, but I only have to fire up the GIMP a couple times a month. And the pricetag? Zero. Free as in beer my friend. Hell, I run it under WINE at home, because it's so damn good. I'm quite fond of the Gimp, and ImageMagick does what I need it to do from the commandline ( abhor its TK'ish UI ), but Irfanview is the best balance I've found.

http://www.irfanview.com/

On PC:

Picassa
Paint Shop Pro
IrfanView
XNView

(Both the last two are good with Total Commander)

On Mac:

AcdSee
I View Media Pro
Graphics Converter (can edit as well)
Aperture

Look at post above yours, Nqdiddles: Irfanview rocks. It's more of a viewer than an editor, but has support for all sorts of basic editing, like crop, rotate, filter (a nice basic set built in, and I believe there are more through plugins), resizing (by percentage or by setting width/height in pixels/inches/cm, with option to preserve aspect ratio), and various other basic operations. And it's pretty damn fast.

Weird name, useful utility.

running Win32? Get the free viewer and the plugins - http://www.irfanview.com/ - this is not a paid endorsement

As a graphic buffer it is fantastic. Quicker and more flexible than Paint, excellent keyboards shortcuts, yadda, yadda, yadda. Love it.

Media Player Classic (open source). Who needs WMP anyway? :)
IrfanView (freeware) for image browsing and very basic manipulation, like gamma correction or applying photoshop filters

IrfanView is an excellent free Windows program that makes converting large numbers of image files a breeze and of course it can convert from IFF. Plus it's my favorite image viewer.

IrfanView is an excellent free Windows program that makes converting large numbers of image files a breeze and of course it can convert from IFF. Plus it's my favorite image viewer.

And of course, for Windows: http://www.irfanview.com/main_formats.htm

I agree. AutoIt is a very convenient tool for all kinds of scripting. If you need to do automated image manipulation, you may consider using this along with Irfanview (freeware,not OSS) instead of ImageMagick. It has a much smaller footprint and requires no installation.

I agree, but this doesn't just happen with Open Source software. There are closed-source applications out there that are free (beer) that have tons of features. One example I like to use is Irfanview. It is a free image program that IMO has no equal. It is light, fast, and has tons of features. It is Windows only, and is closed-source. But there is no trial period, no ads, no gimmicks. And it gets updates often. If you use Windows, try it out. It is really good software. I believe that it has been somewhat innovative, and has things in there that I need. A few things that it has that I use:

Single keys to do certain tasks - F (fit image to screen), R (rotate image), (previous/next image)

Create panoramic images

Create slideshows of images (SCR or EXE)

Screen or window capture

Image manipulations (using plugins)

More complete list

If you're using Windows, open Paint, go to Image->Attributes, put in the correct resolution and select Black And White instead of Colour.

Now, one of the colours you can select should be a black and white checkerboard (6th from the right on the bottom, I think). Use the Fill With Colour tool and use it on the image, and there you have it: a pixel-perfect black and white checkerboard, which is perfect for adjusting analogue-connected LCDs.

Now you just need to display it full-screen. Allow me to recommend IrfanView.

Have you tried Irfanview? http://www.irfanview.com/

What you want is Irfanview. Supports a shitload of formats, plugins, etc. It's lightweight. It saves .ico format. Irfanview is the shiz.

"2.) XP's image viewer is nice for viewing sequences of images."

On the offchance this isn't a total troll..
~$100 PaintshopPro for editing, $0 Irfanview for simple viewing.

I forget why, but it got dumped off my machine pretty damn quick.

So I went back to Irfanview.

So Picasa is better than Irfanview exactly how?

Answer that question or forget about it.

For those who don't know what Irfanview can do, here is a partial list of features from their site:

IrfanView was the first Windows graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple (animated) GIF support.
One of the first graphic viewers WORLDWIDE with Multipage TIF support.
The first graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple ICO support.

Many supported file formats
Multi language support
Thumbnail/preview option
Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
Drag & drop support
Fast directory view (moving through directory)
Batch conversion (with image processing)
Multipage TIF editing
Email option
Multimedia player
Print option
Change color depth
Scan (batch scan) support
Cut/crop
IPTC editing
Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
Capturing
Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
Lossless JPG rotation
Many hotkeys
Many command line options
Many PlugIns
Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like "I Agree" or "Evaluation expired"
No registry changes without user action/permission!
and many more

We don't need another image format... If you want better compression than jpeg then there are lots of alternatives. JPEG2000, Lurawave, FIF (I guess there are many more wavelet based options.) Unless they can convince Microsoft to incoporate the new image format in their browser it's not going to be used much.

So I'll just need yet another plugin for IrfanView or xnview so I can view it and convert it to a lossless format that i can open in my web browser, image editor or whatever. The only place I feel I need better image compression is on my digital camera. And storage is getting cheap now anyway. I can already get 1GB SD cards off ebay pretty cheaply.

• CKRename - Tool to mass rename files in a folder. Works very well for renaming MP3s.
• WinMerge (Use latest RC under beta builds) - Compare document, script, HTML, etc content versions (compares what has changed from revision to revision).
• XXCopy - Extended version of XCopy. This is a great utility for scripting file backups from one drive to another.
• ISOBuster - Open CD/DVD ISOs, BINs, IMGs, etc without having to burn them. Can extract files without burning as well.
• Vim - Improved version of the vi editor.
• IrfanView - Batch Image Processing and viewer (much like ACDSee, but FREE!).
• Diskeeper Lite - An updated version of the disk defragmenter that comes with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This version does a better job of defragging the drive and shows you more information. The site isn't the manufacturer's, but the download does come directly from them. ExecSoft doesn't have this listed on their site anywhere anymore.
• Locate - Windows version of a linux utility. Creates a database of every file on your drives. You can then search and get instant results.
• xvi32 Hex Editor - Very nice hex editor.
• 7-Zip - A freeware file archiver. It supports all of the popular formats (ZIP, CAP, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB) as well as its own format, 7z.
• Max Lister - Create text lists of files in folders. For example, it's useful for an mp3 list.

Installation / Automation

• InnoSetup - Create your own EXE installers.
• ISTool - A GUI front-end for creating InnoSetup installer scripts.
• WinINSTALL LE 2003 - Create your own MSI installers. Also edit existing MSI installers (change options, add/remove components, etc).
• KiXtart - Advanced batch processing language. Commonly used for logon scripts but can be used to accomplish many tasks (comparable to using VBScript and WELL documented).
• AutoIt - Create scripts to send keys to applictions. Commonly used to "silently" install applictions that don't natively support silent install switches.

Multimedia Tools

Irfan View is probably the best image (read: pr0n) viewer out there. It's small enough to fit on a floppy, will read dang near any image/video format, has a thumbnailing feature, batch operations capabilities, and is generally very useful for parsing large directories of images quickly. The Homepage.

Why does anyone use WinMX, Kazaa or any other spy and mal-ware software when both eMule and Shareaza are available? with source?

I guess I spend so much money on my hobby, CGI and the software for that, I just can't handle the thought of buying something when a free application does as good or better.

Some free software that is better than alternative commercial software (or has no alternative):

FREENET

Steel Panthers: World at War

Irfanview

PAF 5 (genealogy software, go to download products, ignore Marie Osmond's attempts to seduce you to the dark side)

GMAX 3D Modelling software

You can also get tons of free software with the purchase of magazines (I know, not really free); you can get the previous version or a free version of just about any graphical app when you buy digit magazine, including software that cost kilobucks as recently as a year ago.