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"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" -- an old adage that you must have heard many a time. In the same way, using your computer for work all time may eventually bore you. Consider using the following feature-packed Internet and Multimedia tools to take away the boredom of sitting at your desktop. This is list of applications is guaranteed to make your experience of the Web and entertainment a fun one -- at no cost.
Internet Tools
Web Browser: Firefox
A Web browser is your window to the world of Internet, hence it makes sense to use one which not only loads Web pages faster but also offers stability and security. Firefox is the one the most popular free Web browsers available today. Some of the features offered by Firefox are tabbed browsing, spell check (really helpful while typing e-mails), incremental find, in-built download manager, etc. But the most noteworthy feature is an integrated search system in which you can add search engines of your choice.
Firefox allows you to add a number of features through the hundreds of add-ons available for it. Add-ons for Firefox are available in various categories including themes, toolbars, language support, bookmarks and so on. Add-ons like FlashGot, which is a "download management" add-on, allows you to integrate a third-party download manager with Firefox. Foxmarks is an add-on from the bookmarks category; it enables users to access their bookmarks and passwords across multiple computers and also takes a back on its servers.
[URL: www.mozilla.com]
E-mail Client: Thunderbird
Since the advent of the Internet, e-mail has been the most important medium of communication. Most of us use more than one e-mail ID and accessing account via the Web browser tends to get cumbersome. In this case, using an e-mail client is the perfect solution. Thunderbird is Mozilla's free e-mail client -- the makers of Firefox. It has an easy to use interface and supports multiple e-mail, newsgroup and RSS accounts.
Thunderbird supports multiple identities within accounts; multiple users can access their individual Thunderbird accounts on the same computer. Like Firefox, Thunderbird too has numerous add-ons across categories such as themes, dictionaries, news reading, etc. In Thunderbird you can even view the Web page of topics downloaded in the RSS feeds within the e-mail client itself.
[URL: www.mozilla.com]
Download Manager: Free Download Manager
Very often we need to download multiple files from the Internet simultaneously. In order to manage these downloads, there could be no better tool than Free Download Manager (FDM). FDM supports HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent protocols. In addition, FDM also enables you to download videos from sites like YouTube, Google Video, etc. FDM has an built-in Upload Manager, which lets you upload your files easily to share them with others. Using FlashGot (the Firefox add-on) you can even integrate FDM with Firefox. If you need to schedule your downloads, FDM gives you a variety of scheduling options too.
[URL: www.freedownloadmanager.org]
Multimedia
Audio Player: Winamp
First released in 1997, Winamp has gained huge fan following for its ease of use, range of features and file format support. Available in three free versions (its fourth version is available for a fee) this media player is highly customizable and also plays back video files. Its free versions -- Bundle, Full, and Lite -- support multi-channel audio, global shortcut keys that can be used while working on a different document, and popular file formats like AAC, AVI, CDA, M2V, MP3, MIDI, MP2, m3u, MP4, MPEG, OGG, ASX, flac, WAV, WMA, and WMV.
The advantages of this player is that it is regularly updated, there is a plethora of skins available with which you can customize your Winamp, and the user interface is intuitive.
[URL: www.winamp.com]
Video Player: VideoLAN Client (VLC)
VideoLAN Client, now referred to as VideoLAN Player (VLC) is a lightweight, no-nonsense multimedia player. It is best suited for those who do not want to deal with the headache of installing additional codecs separately to make different video file formats play. This one-stop-shop of a video player supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS and Syllable. It can also be used as a server to stream to one or more computers in a network (IPv4 or IPv6) -- if you intend to do this, make sure you have the bandwidth. VLC can be controlled with simple shortcuts, through mouse gestures or even infrared remote controllers. It can also re-build and play incomplete or damaged videos downloaded off the Internet. VLC does more than just playback popular video formats, it contains filters that can distort, deinterlace, rotate videos. You can even make a video play as the desktop wallpaper.
Some of the file formats that VLC supports are: DVDs (including subtitles), VCDs, AVI, MPEG-1/2/4, H.263, DV, streaming protocols like HTTP, MMS, and RTSP.
[URL: www.videolan.org]
Image Viewer: IrfanView
IrfanView is a free image viewer application that allows users to view, edit and convert images from one file format to another. IrfanView also provides a plugin pack with which you can extend its functionality to viewing audio/video formats too. It can also EXIF details of an photograph taken from a digital camera.
IrfanView also includes a thumbnail/preview option, file search, batch conversion of files, support for scanning and Photoshop filters. If you want to edit an image in IrfanView then you can cut, crop, draw, sharpen, blur, or use colour filters (includes a colour picker tool) too.
Popular image file formats that IrfanView supports include: BMP, GIF, ICO, JPG, JPEG, PNG, PSD, SWF, FLV TIF
Audio/Video formats (requires the plug-in packs to be installed): MP3, OGG, MID, WAV, ASF, AVI, MOV, MP4, MPG, MPEG, WMA, WMV
[URL: www.irfanview.com]
Also read: Essential Freeware for Businesses: Part I
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In continuation to Part 2 of this series "How to Take Your Biz Online and Beyond", Abhishek M. Gupta, VP (Technology) of Lime Spot Technology, in Part 3, discusses how to increase traffic by by "affiliate marketing". Read on...
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