Ron White

Photoshop's popularity is as high as its price tag, a stunning $999 list. (That's "stunning" as in Taser.) You can, of course, find it for less, even for free if you are willing to prowl the Internet's dark alleys looking for a steal. Really. A steal. But PhotoFiltre will make you an honest artist/designer/photographer without making you hock your grandmother's wedding ring or your soul.

The important difference between PhotoFiltre and the more effusive Photoshop is PhotoFiltre's simplicity--in use, not in what it can accomplish. Tools and menus are more evenly distributed, reducing the need to plough deep into the program's interface just to flip an image 90 degrees. PhotoFiltre lacks some of Photoshop's professional abilities, such as layers, as well as more arcane features, such as stitching photos into a panorama and altering perspective. But PhotoFiltre has an arsenal of plug-ins that provide some tricks of their own, such as a filter that emphasizes shadows, highlights, or both without you having to select the areas of dark and light. A beautiful rippling water reflection is only three clicks away. In fact, most effects take only a few clicks. PhotoFiltre doesn't have Photoshop's jam-packed dialog boxes that permit the fatally fastidious to fiddle with a photo for hours. PhotoFiltre is fast. It's simple. It's powerful. It works. And it's free for personal use.

When it comes to giants in the land of software, none is as big and powerful as the titans of Microsoft. Of programs foolhardy enough to challenge Microsoft, few have returned to tell the tale. (Heard lately from Netscape or OS2?) Most of those that have tried to compete with Office, the hulking battleship of Microsoft's fleet, have come from other big companies such as Sun with the cash to try to one-up Microsoft just for bragging rights.

And then there's Ssuite Office's The Fifth Element. (Yes, "Ssuite" is spelled correctly, and, no, we're not talking about a Bruce Willis movie.) The Fifth Element, which has come from South Africa to take on the Colossus of Redmond, is a collection of office applications with a wider range than those in MS Office. Any decent suite can do word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and e-mail. The Fifth Element includes a browser, tools for managing LANs, holding chats and making calls using VoIP. It provides a drawing module, photo and album editors, sound recorders, and MP3 and video players. There's a search engine, a sort engine, envelope printer, encryption, and a chess game, for more than 30 programs overall. And if it's not exactly the right combination for you, Ssuite Office has several other office software packages of various complexities, all free.

Regardless of whether your computerized musical tastes run to Zamfir, AD/DC, or Zamfir playing covers of AC/DC on his pan pipes, of course you want the best possible software to organize and play your tracks. And that means Media Player. Uh, no, I mean J. River Media Center. Media Player is the Microsoft music player designed first to further the spread of Windows music audio files and its lovely copy protection, and, second, to play music.

J. River Media Center is the ultimate in, not just playing music, but in creating music and audio libraries, editing MP3 tags, filenames, and even the music itself.

There's not a lot of difference in how PC-based music players make your tracks sound. Speakers are a lot more important. What really makes a difference in the software are the tools for organizing a music collection and a player's versatility.

While it is a superlative replacement for Clipboard, think of it as an easily programmable database, and stop thinking of clips as data that you'll never see again once you've pasted them.

The beauty of it is that you don't have to endure the drudgery that comes with most databases: data entry. Because 95 percent of the data you're likely to save in the ClipMate database is stuff you've been copying anyway, it's in the database automatically.

I use it to track the passwords, registration keys, license numbers and all the other codes I need when I inevitably have to reinstall every program on my hard drive. When I get a code, usually in an email, I copy it and paste it into the program waiting to be authenticated. Then a hot key opens ClipMate's database.

Don't be fooled by the new Acrobat Reader that Adobe pushes at you every chance they get. Sure, its free for the download. But its also passive software, letting you only peruse Postscript Document File (PDF) publications that have been created with a higher species of Acrobat. If you want to extract pages from the PDF, add pages, stamp it with "Approved" or "Burn After Reading," do any sort of editing, or if you want to create your own PDF documents, first you'll have to shell out $95 to $450 for some other version of Acrobat capable of creating PDFs.

Or get Pdf995 Suite. It's not exactly free. It depends on how much value you put in being made to look at a nagging ad for Pdf955 and other software produced by the same software company. In return, you get the ability to create standard PDF documents by sending the originals documents to a virtual printer. The virtual machine produces the PDF file as the document would look if it had come out of a real printer. The setup lets you product PDFs from any software that can print hard copy. Another module, PdfEdit995, lets you combine separate documents in one PDF, insert comments and bookmarks, rubber stamps, convert from PDG to HTML, or, for just the text, to a Word .doc. Another module, Signature995, encrypts PDFs and adds digital signatures.

Despite such a panoply of PDF pleasures, it's conceivable you may get weary of watching the same ads each time you use the programs. Then banish all the ads by buying a couple of the modules that make up the suite. Each is $9.95. Or, for 20 dollars more you can buy every program in the company's arsenal, including such worthy utilities as OmniFormat, which lets you convert among 75 file formats, Photoedit 995, which provides the usual necessary touch-up tools, BackItUp995, Zip995 , and Ftp995, which do exactly what you'd think they would, and a half dozen others. The complete package is $29.95.

Blender is a sterling example of what can be done within the GNU free software movement. It doesn't have to hang its animated head in the presence of any commercial animation programs. The work it turns out is vividly detailed--check out the screenshots--and movements are convincingly smooth. It is frequently used to build developers to build complex avatars and environments on sites like IMVU.com, a 3D chat system.

The reason is pretty simple: Blender has all the features you need to produce interactive 3D graphics and games that are compatible across platforms. Its suite of features allows modeling, rendering and postproduction polishing.

--Ron White

Every time I download new P2P software for testing, I cringe at the thought of what dank evil lurks beneath the surface of programs that suck from the Internet purloined MP3s and movies that opened only last week at the megaplex. Peer-to-peer downloaders are perfect booby traps. The appeal of free music, movies and software lures all but the saintly to "experiment" with illegal downloads. And often justice is served when the P2P software harbors grisly viruses, spyware, and, as bad sometimes, sloppy programming.

The pristine cleanliness of SoulSeek would alone make it the first choice among P2P programs. It is Open Source, whose proponents approach software development not simply as a task, but as a calling to create free software that shall go out unto the world to spread digital delights among all. It, along with Azureus, a Open Source bitorrent project, are the only two P2P programs I feel comfortable using without having first backed up my disk drive and sprayed Lysol into the crevices of my computer.

But?here's the really good part?SoulSeek has two features that are even cooler than cleanliness. One is a queue that tells you exactly how many other users are waiting to download the same files. Lines stretching out to the hundreds are not uncommon, but neither are the same songs that have no one at all waiting to download them. Which do you choose? If you need a further hint, check out the average download speed column for the swiftest transfers.

It is possible for software to get too good. Not really too good, but too big, too full of features, too complex, and too difficult to work with. One of the good things about Open Source software is that it's still a boutique operation. You don't have hundreds of programmers, testers, focus groups, managers, lawyers, and marketers, each throwing in their two bits worth.

Money Manager Ex is the Baby Bear of financial managers--not too big, not too small; not too hard, not too easy. It is just right. For anyone whose finances are big enough to need frequent attention but not so large as to need a constant accountant, Money Manager Ex tracks money as it comes in and goes out. It'll let you know how much your investments have earned, when the bills are coming due, and if your cash flow is flowing down the toilet.

While the program can import Excel spreadsheets and produce reports that let you examine your finances from a choice of viewpoints, you cannot pay bills, or make bank deposits or withdrawals, or calculate your taxes. But then, if it could do all that, it would start looking like Papa Bear and you'd wind up hiding from all the work it would try to get you to do.

Today's programs for creating animation are amazing. They can turn the klutsiest artist into a Disney or Chuck Jones by automating the intricate, finger-busting work of turning thousands of drawings into a few seconds of animation. Just as amazing are the programs' prices: Autodesk 3ds Max 2008 costs $3,495, retail. And Autodesk Maya Unlimited 2008 can be yours for a trifling $6,995. Or, you can pay nothing. Zilch. Nada. That'll get you a sizable hunk of what goes into the latest version of Autodesk Maya.

Autodesk must be selling enough of those high-priced programs to feel good about giving away free copies of Maya Personal Learning Edition. It doesn't include all the goodies found in the high end programs. It lacks the speed with which the other programs render their complicated images and the newest innovations, including the latest shaders and skin editors. But you get the rigging and animation technology that let characters move with both soft and rigid body dynamics, Maya paint effects, a complete particle system, toon shading, and four renderers. There is no tech support, but there oodles of documentation, demonstrations, and online discussion groups.

Note: This download takes you to the developer site where you will be required to register to obtain the product.

There is absolutely nothing fancy, colorful, exciting, or gee-whiz about Gnumeric, the Open Source spreadsheet that abrogates any need to install the Excel spreadsheet in Microsoft Office. But do you think that a thesaurus is essential to crunching numbers? Excel has a thesaurus. Gnumeric doesn't. How about translating from one language to another? You can do it in Excel. You can't in Gnumeric. Do you need to calculate the modified Besseli function in (x)? Excel lets you. Gnumeric?. Oh, hold it. So will Gnumeric. In fact when you get down to the more obscure spreadsheet operations I, and possibly you, have never heard of before, Gnumeric can be as esoteric as best of spreadsheets.

The important thing is whether Gnumeric gives the right answers. Frankly, I'm no judge when it comes to financial derivatives, Monte Carlo simulations, linear and nonlinear equations, or, for that matter, balancing my checkbook. Gnumeric's developers have math whizzes in to check it out and the spreadsheet got the same answers as the high-priced spread, only faster.

I will give it to Excel for its fancier and more colorful graphs and charts, no mean consideration if you hope to get approval for that new project by wowing the board with drop-dead graphics instead of simply dead numbers.

Kexi is a Microsoft Access killer of the first caliber. It has a minor limp: Under Windows there is a limit to the number of rows and tables you can create, at least until Kexi recoups its development costs. Meanwhile, if you can live with that, and without tech support, or a manual, go to town with Kexi or switch to the unlimited Linux and FreeBSD versions. Or pay 50 bucks to unleash the Windows limitations and get support. Access is $300 retail. The $50 for Kexi won't buy you the cheapest seat at a Little Feat concert.

And Kexi's well worth it, especially if you need to emphasize visuals in a database. Within minutes, literally, you can create a relational data base with all the flexibility and versatility of Access but with greater ease. As with Access, the database structure is created in a series of tables, but without the fussiness Access imposes on defining far more things than you want to define. My favorite feature is that everything from tables to queries, to forms, are stored in the database, letting you move or share data and design by moving a single file.

You can use Kexi as a stand-along or connected to relational SQL database servers. You'll finally bump into limits, even with the full versions, if you keep pushing the complexity of your design, but Kexi is still a database that fills a deep hole.

Atlantis Nova is a Microsoft Word competitor that adheres to the 10/90 theory of software design: It provides the 10 percent of the word processing features that most people need to get 90 percent of their work done. And it's small enough?684 KB installed?to fit on a thumb drive.

While the free Nova version is not a total replacement for MS Word, it's a delight to use in its own right. Most of your tasks?outside of your basic typing?are done through icon-studded toolbars, controlled by a switch that instantly flips you between two sets of three-line toolbars. Atlantis Nova is perfect for traveling with an underpowered and cramped notebook, and it's not bad back on the desktop.

If you need to include differential equations in your documents or create indices and tables of references, you'd best look elsewhere, perhaps in the direction of the new Atlantis Word Processor, the brawnier big brother of Nova, which costs $35 (30-day free trial) and includes features such as automatic spell-as-you-type, double precautions against losing documents, drag-and-drop, encryption, and a "control panel" to handle complex layouts.