Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Best Software: Internet Apps

This is the second in a series of articles about some of my favourite software. I hope my decades (yikes!) of experience will help you make a quick decision as to what to download. This article will cover software to help you get the most from the Internet itself.

Free Agent is not Open Source but it is a handy newsgroup and email client that I've been using for more years than I can remember. It hasn't changed much in that time, which means that while it may not be terribly exciting now, it was very full-featured compared to the competition when I first adopted it. In fact, though there is a free version, I long ago considered the extra features to be essential. This may have been the first app I bought over the internet.

Thunderbird x o is the counterpart to FireFox in the world of email & newsgroup reading. I will do no more than mention it here, since I do not have significant experience using it. But maybe if I was starting over I'd use it instead of Agent.

PuTTY o is a SSH and telnet client for win32 and Linux. It does the job whenever I need to connect to a remote computer, which is often, given the nature of my consulting work.

There are many download managers but TrueDownloader o for Windows is a rare Open Source choice. A few interface glitches detract from a capable programme. You may wish to use FlashGot to integrate it with Firefox, but it only saves a click.

o Open Source
x cross-platform

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