The On-going Battle against Monopoly: Free Software Available for all of us

We are all submerged in a capitalist world which promotes the exchange of good and services only by paying for them, usually sums of money totally unjustified and exaggerate. Philanthropy, or the willingness to give in exchange of nothing more than a “thank you” seems not to be something applicable for the modern world. However, what we may call the globalized per excellence phenomena, the Web world, surprises us with an increasing trend towards the development and spread of free software made by people who deliberately attempt against monopoly and capitalist abuse. Yes man…geeks are generous people! They are definitely the Good Samaritan of the modern era!

Let’s have a look at some of the greatest free software we should be grateful for. The offer is really wide, so today I am going to focus on a few of them…let’s say Image Viewers and Editors, and we’ll leave others for a next article…

Picasa

This year, the generous Google guys, who love sharing things, launched the third release of this great software that helps you organize, edit, and share your photos. It's free, and easy to use, thus lovable for beginners and preferred by advanced PC users.

You know what I mean, I have two children, and an incredible amount of pictures which would be spread all over several folders disks in my PC or my husband’s PC, if I had not decided to make use of this great tool that makes it simple not only to have everything at hand, labeled and in chronological order, but which also lets you correct potential errors such as red-eyes or inconvenient sizes and much more. You can also turn photos into movies, collages, slideshows….great enough, specially to be free, isn’t it?

Among the new features of Picasa 3, we can mention: the new tabs, the function to create videos with your photos, an amazing picture viewer and an enhanced collage-making tool.

IrfanView

The black viewing window you are faced to once you open IrfanView does not say much of all the great functions this freeware offers. IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative graphic viewer. Presented by its developers as the “first Windows graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple (animated) GIF support”, InrfanView is a really easy-to-use tool with loads of pre-configured, simple keyboard shortcuts that simplify enormously the handling of images. Its slideshow capability and its simple function to resize images are also great.

Another useful thing is the extraordinary loading time of pictures…it opens the picture you select faster than any other image viewer I have ever tried!

In sum, IrfavView’s image, music and video capabilities make this one of the more flexible image viewers available in the FREE market!

Paint.Net

Paint.NET is a free image and photo editing software for computers that runs in Windows, bearing a user interface designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable.

So as to simplify the handling of multiple images, Paint.NET presents a tabbed document interface. The tabs display a live thumbnail of the image instead of a text description, making navigation absolutely simple and fast.

Your images can be edited by applying a number of special effects, such as blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing. Also included is a unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect.

These and much more are the great features this FREE software presents.

In sum…

No matter if you are short of cash…when it comes to image viewing/editing you are going to find some excellent apps on the web available for you to freely download and use them at ease. Let’s enjoy this anti-capitalist move!