Many things in life don’t come free, like COEs (I just got wind that COEs for 2000cc and above is above 70 grand. Insane.)
However, like some wise sage have said before, the best things in life (like friendship, love and air) are free!

Here’s a list of free (woohoo!) programmes that help us a lot in our daily work and hopefully will be equally useful to you too. It’s in no particular preference order, okay okay, it is, its in the order which my memory can serve me.

1. MPEG Streamclip: This programme is a god sent. Very powerful media converter. It’s our “go-to” programme to convert our videos to different formats. Works flawlessly and it does multiple files at the same time. NICE.

2. Google Calender: We load all our shoot schedules and company meetings onto this. Its great because its cloud computing, meaning everyone’s calender is always up to date. It’s our slave-driver.

3. VLC: THE ultimate media player. Need I say more? Plays ANY and EVERY format/codec imaginable. I have yet to find a format/codec that VLC cannot play. Maybe this should be my challenge for 2011.

4. Thunderbird: Mail client from the folks at our favourite web browser, Firefox. It’s quite idiot proof and it syncs many emails together (your gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, company mail etc) into one nifty programme. Great for people who like things organised and are a little anal retentive.

5. Oynx: This programme is a maintenance programme for Mac users. Because of the way the OS is built, after using for a while, the OS will start to develop weird errors and behave oddly. We use this super programme to “clean” up our OS and return things to their default state if things get out of control.

6. Testdisk: This has got to be the “Programme of the year” in my books. It’ll probably be useless to most people though. Ever formatted your SD card/ CF Card or have your harddisk crash? Welcome to the amazing world of Testdisk. It’ll magically bring your information back to life as advertised, the more amazing thing? It really works, and is free. Did I mention its the “Programme of the year” in my books?

7. Dropbox: This programme is sort of a virtual storage space that multiple users can access to. Basically you download the programme, it then creates a folder on your computer. You then put stuff in it, and it uploads it to an online server and everyone who has access to that folder will have the file automatically downloaded into their desktop folder. Amazing!

8. Celtx: Great programme that can help you write scripts, comics, screenplays, theatre dialogue and other film/visual kind of stuff.

9. Openoffice: IBM’s response to Microsoft’s Office. Except, it’s FREE. Works great albeit the formatting needs a little getting used to if you’re all too familiar with Microsoft Office.

10. Yousendit: Nifty little programme that allows you to send large files to your clients, friends, colleagues, lovers, enemies. There’s a limit of 100mb for free accounts though. But I’m sure its great for 90% of your needs.

Lets hope in 2011 we’ll have more open sourced programmes and more kind programming souls out there who will continue to provide excellent free programmes to make our lives all a little more efficient!

Here’s me wishing all undervalued/under-appreciated programmers a Merry X’mas!

DT

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