Eye Candy Software

For those who like some additional eye candy here's an entry:

Usually software like this comes either with a price and/or free with strings attached (a tool bar or some other spyware crap). So when I see something like this that, even though I may not even use it personally, I try to remember it. There have been so many times that I go to clean a computer and see limewire or the yahoo widget thing or whatever. These programs come bundled with spyware, a toolbar, etc. For the most part, a lot of people do not know that eMule is a great, free, clean alternative to limewire or kazaa.

So I'm starting to keep an inventory of these kinda things for the masses. The first two entries come from two places.

John's Background Switcher:
This is a small, clean program that will cycle through pictures and plaster them up on you desktop. Much like a screen saver but just replaces you background at intervals. It's pretty simple with a lot of options. And I'm actually using it right now.

Rocketdock:
This is another small, clean program that allows you to really pimp your desktop with a dock, much like those fancy ones you see impletmented on Apple's OS. Totally free, updated frequently, and awesome.

Links to these programs are found on the page, look for the Eye Candy Software group.

Have fun.

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Tools and Benchmarking addition

The second set of links below the "Free/Open Source" software is pretty much my day to day toolbox. The best part is that all of it is Free/Open Source programs. I'll be adding more and/or revising as time goes on.

The Free/Open Source scene has matured leaps and bounds in the past few years. What used to be alpha-at-best-software is now practically commercial quality, without the bloat. I remember in early 2k looking for software and downloading crappy shareware after crappy shareware for audio/video solutions. With Audacity you have a lot of your day to day audio needs met. I used to use Nero religiously but now infraRecorder and when I can't use it, I use CDBurnerXP Pro for the simple fact that both programs have a small footprint and exactly what I need. InfraRecorder doesn't even need to be installed. You can download the .zip package, extract the contents and run it. Pure sweetness.

When people (clients?) ask me for quotes on systems, I know I can keep there cost low when you don't need to add pricing for a lot of commercial bloatware. If the person feels comfortable, a decent linux (ubuntu) distro runs approximately $0. But most stick to windows as it's the more popular, less intimidating, and has the biggest software library available at the moment. And no, I don't want the comments to degenerate to a LinuX PWNS ALL flamewar... yes Andrew, I'm looking in your direction. haha. Linux has a big place at the table (a big chunk of the Free/OpenSource software listed was produced first on the linux platform) and is very important to software and intelletual development. But for the time being, windows is the dominating OS out there. OSX, you say? PIPE DREAM... just kidding... or am I... or am I?

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