21 Awesome (But Lesser-Known) Open-Source Applications for Windows
Sunday, April 13th, 2008Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock in Madagascar for the last few years, you undoubtedly already know about the All-Star open-source applications for Windows. I’m talking about applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, OpenOffice, and VLC.
However, there are hundreds of lesser-known but highly-useful open-source applications available for Windows. A few of my favorites are below.
These applications range from moderately popular to downright obscure, but all of them are open-source and FREE. All of them are worth the install time if you have never tried them. As a side bonus, many of them are cross-platform as well.
Here they are, in random order:
1. ZScreen
ZScreen is an open-source screen capture program that quietly resides in your system tray until needed. It can take screenshots of a selected region, the active window, or the entire screen. It can even send screen captures via FTP and copy the URL to your clipboard, all with just a single keystroke. Oh yeah, it can also interface with image editing software, such as Photoshop or Paint.net.
If you frequently take screenshots, ZScreen is light years faster than pressing Print Scrn and pasting into MS Paint.
2. PDFCreator
PDFCreator allows you to create PDFs from any program that can print. Once it’s installed, simply “print” to the virtual printer that it creates, and the resulting document can be read on any computer with Adobe Reader (or comparable software).
There are several similar programs, but if you dig open-source software, PDFCreator trumps many of the others.
