Open Source or Free web aps that make your life easier

[Andrew Schreiber]

Foxit Reader A lighter weight alternative to Adobe's PDF reader. The free version works wonders on older machines. Not Open source though.

For really great ad blocking and pop up blocking lynx works for me.

I will throw another vote in for Ubuntu, having a system be up all the time is a nice thing. My current uptime is about 42 days and the last time I turned it off was due to a power outage.

On Ubuntu my list of handy apps are:
libsensors - Command line tool for checking temperatures.
grep - Command line text searching tool. (http://schreiaj.ath.cx/FRC/ is done entirely using grep at the moment)
curl/wget - Command line tools for getting web pages.
Apache - Best Web Server EVER
Webmin -For people who dont like terminals, web based server configuration.
MySql - Amazing database for storing info, many commercial sites use this as their back end.
PHP - widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.

That is all I can come up with at the moment.

[JohnBoucher]

Dia a diagram program like Visio.

[coalhot]

Gaim portable, and Firefox portable.......IE sucks so badly, and thats all they have installed in the Free library of Philadelphia....and web-based im software is soooo slow.....

[DCA Fan]

Pidgin
VLC
FastStone Photo Resizer - Batch editing/resizing/renaming, massively useful for galleries
Openoffice
IzArc - Decompresses Zip/Rar with a right click, batch decompress
Audacity

[DMetalKong]

RocketDock - Mac-style program dock for Windows.
CCleaner - Cleans up Windows temp files, uninstalls, and scans registry for invalid keys.
XmlPad - I use this over Notepad++ for XML documents because it has built-in DTD checking.
FileMenu Tools - Great program for tweaking Windows Explorer.
Everything - Very quick index-based search for Windows.
Active@ ISO Burner - Free ISO burning utility.
avast! Antivirus - Free antivirus. I find it more responsive than AVG.

[daltore]

Forgot to mention a couple of command-line things:

-Timidity++ - MIDI sequencer with some of the best voices I've heard.
-Rhythmbox - iTunes replacement for Linux.
-apropos - Type in a keyword and it'll give you every program, library, or general topic having to do with it
-aptitude - Linux package manager, fast, automatic, no dependency hell.
-motion - Connect any webcam and this program will detect a moving picture and interpret it.
-occrad - Optical character recognition program, the computer-based version of what we have on this year's controller
-wget - Command-line file download program, takes the headache out of writing programs based on server files

All of these are on Linux, sorry, but I think a few of them have Windows ports, and you can force them into Apple/Darwin if you're determined enough.

[Jeff Rodriguez]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Evernote yet. Keeps notes and things available on all your devices.

[JohnBoucher]

Originally Posted by Jeff Rodriguez

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Evernote yet. Keeps notes and things available on all your devices.

or Remember the Milk

[pogenwurst]

Originally Posted by daltore

-apropos - Type in a keyword and it'll give you every program, library, or general topic having to do with it

Sounds really useful.

Originally Posted by daltore

-aptitude - Linux package manager, fast, automatic, no dependency hell.

I can't put into words how much I love aptitude. I cringe now whenever I have to install software on a Windows machine.

Originally Posted by daltore

-Piklab - Clone of MPLab. Unfortunately, no clone of C18 yet.

SDCC has at least some support for PIC18s as targets. That said, it doesn't like the C18-specific extensions in the code for the old control system.

My contributions:
-> Eclipse can be a bit daunting, but it's really useful, if only because it, through plugins, supports more languages and development tools than you can shake a stick at.
-> GNU find is amazing. If you're unlucky enough to be tied to Windows, install Cygwin right now even if it's just to run find.

[bkwrm92]

Digsby

A very useful (if slightly bloated) application that links social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and others), IM clients (AIM, MSN, and others), and E-Mail clients (Yahoo, G-Mail, Hotmail, and others). It is nice to have everything in just one program, without having to open 4 different programs and 6 different browser tabs just to get caught up with the morning news. RSS feed integration is in the works, and I can't wait.

Best of all, it's free.

[Xeno_117]

For 3d modeling, I recommend Google Sketchup. I'm surprised it was not mentioned. The only thing you can't do is make a sphere by drag and drop. also, you can use google earth export files (KMZ) and convert the innards of such into a .3ds file.

[Ryan Albright]

Gmail- Cant live without it

www.logmein.com - Don't know if this counts but I make all my relatives install it so I can log into there computer and fix it. None of them are tech savy

Joomla - for me who doesn't program website from scratch this is a great thing. so many extensions

Firefox

Openoffice - love that open office can handle almost any extension

Google Analytics - track my websites I run

Google Doc's

Wootylzer-- So I know when Woot up dates

Cannot think of anything else at this moment

[Jreed129]

My life revolves around technology and I can say that a few of the greast programs and websites I have used are:

www.logmein.com - Great for remote use when i'm out of school and need to work on animation only place that has the program is in school

www.theopendisc.com- great for all of the open source programs taht are on that covers everything from web browsing to coding

gmail.com -this is a great free email host by the owner of the internet

Mozilla Thunderbird - Great program for RSS feeds can store a great amount of new news in one program. saves me from running from website to website morning.

Google Chrome - This is a great new web browser host by google. the thing i like the most about it is how it stores the websites that you where on incase the computer crash or restarts (tends to happen alot here)

If I think of more I'll post them but they are all awsome programs and free to use

[yoshibrock]

ImageJ- Not the best image processor, but it opens much faster than photoshop, and is perfect for small changes.

Finale Notepad- The very best free sheet music editor and creator EVER. I use it all the time, and it has so many capabilities. The only thing better is Finale itself, but that's like $600.

Disk Defragmenter- yes it comes with windows, and yes it doesn't make your computer run THAT much faster, but it's satisfying to start up and just hope that you might get a little more speed.

[Uberbots]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

For really great ad blocking and pop up blocking lynx works for me.

Lynx saved me the first day i tried using ubuntu and accidentally rendered gnome unusable .

Besides that, i use notepad++ all the time, though i cant really think of any other open-source programs im a fan of.