AbiWord

The best thing internet has done to mankind is the newfound kindness that it has brought along, to this world.. a lot of quality materials are now available on net for free.. There are great souls who keep working on to make this world a better place than they found it.

AbiWord is an open source word processor, distributed as a freeware. It is cross-platform enabled.. i.e, it can operate virtually on any modern operating system. It has a cute interface which is feature rich and functional. Anybody who is familiar to the interface of MS Word should feel comfortable to use it. A nice set of extra tools can be downloaded as as plugin file (643 KB). The source code of AbiWord is also made available. Click here for more screenshots of AbiWord. You can open .doc files created by MS Word and save your files as .doc files.

Download AbiWord
Windows
Mac OSX 10.3/10.4
Mac OSX 10.2
Linux

Gimp

If you love to play with photos…., if your favourite software is Adobe Photoshop, then here is a free open-source alternative that can even overpower Photoshop. GIMP is an acronym for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”.

Click here to visit the GIMP homepage. The source code can be downloaded and if you have the stuff, you may engineer it for better. Click here for some tips on using it. For tutorials, click here.

DOWNLOAD GIMP
Windows
Macintosh
Unix & Linux, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD

Hassle free browsing

“A stitch in time saves nine” is true in the case of web surfing too. Your choice of browser determines how much headache is in store for you. If you want to enjoy web surfing hassle-free, then avoid Internet Explorer and use Opera Web Browser. It has a multitude of nice features. Using Opera can make you less prone to spyware and virus attacks. Further, the introduction of the latest free version without any ad banner makes it even more desirable. Opera supports custom skinning. To download new Opera skins, click here.Firefox too is quite good, but when compared to the utility of Opera, it is no where near. Download Opera To learn more about custom tweaking your Opera, click here. If you want to tweak the search engines enlisted in the dropdown search tool, download Opera Search.ini Editor 1.26.