This is a small (and now pretty old) collection of links pointing to sites in the web which I find very useful, informative or which provide free and useful software of high quality.
Software
Here are some really good software products which I find very useful (most of it for Microsoft Windows only, alas). Everything listed here is either freeware or open source, but a few are free for private use only.
Office, Word Processing, Planning
| OpenOffice.org | This is a complete free office suite which I've been using from the very moment it was released, and I must say that it is much better than Microsoft Office. You can use it on Windows and Linux. It can open and save almost all Microsoft Office documents up to Office XP. And it offers all features you'll ever need for your everyday life, small stories or largest projects. It's stable and reliable, try it! |
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Word Viewer Excel Viewer PowerPoint Viewer |
You don't need to buy Microsoft Office just to view documents created with it. There are free viewers available at Microsoft's site. They work with documents up to Office 2000 at least. Maybe Office XP, I don't know that. If the links I provided here arent't valid any more, go to the Microsoft Office Download Page and enter "viewer" and "word", "excel" or "powerpoint" in the "search for" box. |
| PDFCreator | This tool allows you to convert your documents into PDF-format. You just have to print your document to the virtual printer "PDFCreator" and can then save it as a PDF-file. |
| Freemind | A nice tool for organizing your thoughts, ideas or whatever in so called "Mindmaps"(EN) (DE). You'll need to have Java installed on your computer. |
Internet and email
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Firefox (English) (Deutsch) |
If you are tired of hearing about security issues in Internet Explorer, if you maybe already got one of these damned viruses or trojans, if you want a browser that complies to web standards and if you want a highly configurable browser, use this. It is much safer than Internet Explorer, it even blocks nasty popup windows by default. You have to download and install Java and all multimedia plugins (Shockwave Flash, RealPlayer, QuickTime and so on) yourself, but that's easy. Most of the plugins detect the location of Firefox automatically. If you type about:plugins in the location bar of Firefox you'll get a list of all plugins installed. If you're not sure what to do, look here:
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Thunderbird (English) (Deutsch) alternativ: Deutsches Sprachpaket als Extension |
Thunderbird is a next-generation email/newsgroup application, which is very easy to use and which is much safer than Microsoft Outlook Express. You won't get email-worms with it, you won't be fooled by faked attachments and you won't get spied out when reading emails in HTML format (some of the many great features of Outlook Express). If you are used to Outlook Expresss, switching will be very easy.
Help for Thunderbird:
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PrefButtons and PrefBar |
Great enhancements for Firbird. Enable or disable lots of important options with one click in this toolbar. Java, Javascipt, nasty popups and much more can be switched off really fast with this. |
| GoogleBar for Firefox | Installs a new toolbar into your Firefox browser for easy access to the different search facilities of Google. Similar to the GoogleBar that Google itself offers for Internet Explorer. |
| Adblock for Firefox | This extension for the Firefox browser filters pictures and flash animations (most adverstisements are one of these) while you're browsing. When installed freshly, it doesn't do anything, you have to create your own rules in order to make it work. If you find advertisements on a homepage, just click on "Adblock" in the status bar at the bottom of Firefox. You'll see the URLs of all pictures and flash animations of the current page. Mostly the ads are something like "http://adserv.bla.bla.blaaaaaaaaa...", so your rule would for example be "*/adserv.*". The asterisk "*" is used in the same way as the wildcards in filenames. |
| Charamel Theme for Firefox and Thunderbird | Ok, this is just a theme and brings no new features or enhancements to Firefox and Thunderbird. But it gives them a great, sophisticated, classy look, which makes using them just a little bit more comfortable. Something for the eyes. |
| HTTrack Website Copier | Downloads whole websites so you can read them offline. |
| FileZilla | Great FTP-client. |
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Analog and ReportMagic |
Analog is a fantastic tool that creates very detailed reports about your website statistics (if you have a provider who gives you access to the web logs of your site). ReportMagic uses the files generated by Analog to create reports with the same data, but with much better layout and graphics. Really revealing (and funny sometimes) for me was the information about the searches people entered in search engines right before they surfed to my site. |
Security
| StartupMonitor | Great and very very small tool that runs in the background and monitors all locations of your system where the programs are registered that run on startup of your system or on user login. Every time a program tries to register itself in these locations, you'll be asked if it is allowed to do so. Be careful when installing new software: in some cases you might see dozens of message boxes asking for permission. |
| Autoruns | One of the small but great tools from Sysinternals. It gives an overview of programs that will be run on startup of your system and login. You can disable, enable or delete entries. |
| Eraser |
Do you still think that your files have gone to nirvana when you delete them from your garbage bin? Yes? No, they are not! A lot of data can easily be reconstructed after that with some special tools (don't ask me how). So if you have sensitive data and want to be sure that they are really deleted - or if you're just paranoid - use this tool. It can easily be accessed when you right-click on a file or folder in Explorer. I recommend to erase all your personal data or better whole partitions with Eraser before you sell your PC or the harddisk to an unknown person - you never know. But beware: some programs like Micosoft Office or lots of ZIP-Tools make temporary copies of the files you open. So if you have a file "MyPasswords.doc" and edit it, Word opens it as a temporary file and after saving your changes, it deletes it. This will be out of your control and your disk will have remains of your doc here and there, its number increasing with every edit. So using Eraser's delete-function won't suffice in this case. You then have to run the "Unused Space on Disk" task of Eraser. |
| GnuPG | Encryption tool, similar to the famous PGP. It is used through the command-line interface, but the are graphical frontends there as well. However, there are several front ends in development. I encrypt sensitive data on my PC with it so that in case that someone hacks my system these data are protected. |
| WinMD5 | Check the MD5-sum of a file you just downloaded to verify that no one has messed around with it during download or on the server you got it from. If the site you downloaded from provides a MD5-sum, you can check it with this tool (there are others, but this is small, easy to use and supports drag and drop). |
Utilities
| 7-Zip | Tool for compressing and uncompressing files. The user interface is different from other well known tools, but you get used to it quite easily. And it has a command-line interface as well - good if you're backing up your files with batchfiles. |
| ArsClip | A very good multi-clipboard that remembers a history of texts you cut to the clipboard. You can easily access this history and paste text from it to your application. |
| Sequioa View | Ever tried to find which folder is eating up your disk space? With this tool you can view the space files occupy on your disk as a grahpic. You can then easily see the big files and their location. And it just looks really cool. |
| QuickDic | A free dictionary for translation from German to English and vice versa. It has a huge database and I prefer this to Babylon. |
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RFSGUI and YAReG |
These are tools to access the Linux ReiserFS file system from Windows on dual boot machines (similar to explore2fs for Linux ext2fs partitions). RFSGUI is a graphical front-end for RFSTool. Both RSFGUI and YAReG have read-only access to ReiserFS partitions, but you can't write to them. |
Audio
| CDEx | For me this is the definitive tool for audio grabbing. It can convert whole music CDs to mp3s with a few clicks. You can query the freedb.org CD database for album and track information which is used to automatically create filenames and mp3 meta information. |
| Audacity | A WAV audio recorder that helps you recording sounds into your computer, which you can then enhance with a lot of effects. |
Graphics
| GIMP | Great program for drawing and manipulating graphics. The user interface is unfamiliar for Windows users (has a more Linux-like look and feel), but you'll get used to it. |
| IrfanView | Small but great tool for viewing and converting any kind of images. A real must have! |
Software development: Delphi tools and extensions
| GNU gettext for Delphi | This is a great tool for localization of Delphi applications. It's based on the same idea as GNU gettext but is a complete reimplementation of the GNU gettext library with many enhancements. |
| GExperts | A great collection of experts for Delphi and C++-builder which integrate themself into the IDE. |
| DUnit | A framework for automated testing of Delphi applications. Based on the JUnit test framework which was developed for Java. |
| Want | A build tool for Delphi. Replaces your batch or MAKE files and is much better to maintain. Build scripts are in XML-format. Based on the Ant build tool created for Java. |
| JediCodeFormat | A source code formatter. |
| UnitExpert | What a great tool. Simple but saves a lot of time: UnitExpert does an incremental search for units in alle directories that are set in Delphi's environmnt "search path". Just press CTRL-U, type any part of the unit's name you're looking for and open the unit in the IDE. Fast. |
| Delphi-JEDI JCL and JVCL | A huge collection of components and a big code library which can make your day easier. Contributed by Project Jedi, which has a lot of other stuff you maybe find helpful. |
Software development: other tools
| jEdit | Great text editor written in Java. It offers syntax highlighting for lots of programming languages and there's a huge collections of plugins available which can extend the editor to your needs. Though it eats up a lot of memory, I still prefer this to any other free editor I've tried. |
| SciTE | Another text editor, very small and fast. I use this instead of the Windows Notepad. Comes with syntax highlighting for dozens of programming languages. |
| Inno Setup Compiler | Distribute you programs by creating a single setup file with this setup compiler. The created setup does all the installation steps commonly used when programs are installed. |
| Subversion TortoiseSVN CvsGui |
CVS stand for Concurrent Versions System. It helps you manage the version history and changes of your source code and other any files in the development process (or any other process where you need to keep track of the change history of files). Subversion (SVN) is a new revision control system that aims to replace CVS in the future and which has most of it's features. I think it's much better than CVS and recommend it. Since SVN itself is only command-line, use TortoiseSVN which integrates into the Windows-Explorer. CvsGui is a graphical user interface for the CVS command line and available for a lot of platforms. There's a CVS NT Server for Windows NT/2000/XP. |
| WinMerge | A visual file and directory comparison tool with the possibility to merge differences. Can be used with WinCVS, for example. |
| Resource Hacker | View, modify, rename, add, delete and extract resources in 32bit Windows executables and resource files (*.res). |
MOVIES
| Internet Movie Database | Find everything about movies here. They are rated by lots of people, and if you take a look at the 250 Top Rated Movies, you'll find that all these top movies are at least very interesting. |
MUSIC
Some links to good bands are on my music page.
| TripHop Music | Nice site with lots of infos about TripHop and with sound samples. Yeeees! |
OTHER LINKS
| Telepolis | This is an online magazine only avaiable in German which publishes lots of very intersting articles to all kinds of topics |
| deviantART | This site contains huge amounts of artistic digital artwork in several forms. Wallpapers, pictures, themes and so on. A few really great artworks there. |
| Baumwunder | (engl.: Tree-Miracle) Site with pictures of trees that have overgrown all kinds of stuff, like traffic signs or barbwire. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes unbelievable and sometimes spooky (site is only in German). |
