Free Download A Day

Transmission is a free BitTorrent client with a difference. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, it just has what you need and none of what you don't. Its clean interface lets you work the way you want to. You're in control, with the ability to speed your torrents up or down, depending on bandwidth availability.

It supports Growl notifications, so you can do what you need to do, knowing that when Transmission is done, you'll be the first to know about it.

Transmission is available as a Universal Binary for Mac OS X (10.4 or later), or you can grab a tarball and roll your own for Linux, FreeBSD, and others.

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Collaboration can be a real challenge, especially if your team is scattered around the office or the world. Keeping in touch with everybody can be a challenge, and running a handful of apps just to stay in contact can quickly exhaust your screen space, to say nothing of your system resources.

Spicebird is a collaboration tool that helps people work smarter together. It integrates all the tools necessary to make sure that everybody's on the same page: calendar, tasks, contacts, email, and chat are all represented. Built on top of Mozilla's Thunderbird (email), Sunbird (calendar), and SamePlace (chat) platforms, you have access to all these tools in a single application.

Individual tools are accessed via applets that sit on the desktop. You can choose which applets to activate, and customize their content, adding, for example, your favorite news feeds to the RSS applet.

Each of the individual tools boasts the standard functionality you would expect: the calendar allows you daily, weekly, or monthly views, for example. The email tool will examine incoming messages and if it spots time information, it will ask you whether you want to schedule an event that corresponds with that time. The email and chat tools let you know in real time whether your contacts are online, making it easier to ping them right now if you need to communicate with them.

Spicebird is a free download, and is available for Windows and Linux.

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Virtual Private Networks (VPN) allow you to use a public network as if it were a private one. Imagine being able to send your sensitive data across the Internet, for example, without fear that your privacy will be compromised.

While there are a number of VPN applications available, Hamachi is different in that it allows you to create a tunnel even between hosts that are behind firewalls or NAT routers. Unlike other VPN setups, Hamachi's servers help to facilitate communication between machines that use non-routable private IP addresses. Once the connection is made, the server steps out of the way, so none of your data actually flows through their network, guaranteeing you the privacy and security you're looking for.

With the ability to create up to 64 networks with 16 nodes each (or 256 networks with 256 hosts each on the paid version), you can connect a sizable number of machines even though they're spread all over the world.

Hamachi is available for Windows systems running Win 2000 or later. A console version (no bells and whistles) for Mac OS X and Linux can be downloaded also.

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KompoZer is a high-end WYSIWYG web authoring system that just happens to be free. With power like Dreamweaver and a price of $0, how can you go wrong?

Built on the Gecko rendering engine, the same one used by the Firefox web browser, KompoZer is fast and reliable. It doesn't require that you know any HTML in order to create killer web pages. It builds good HTML, not like some word processors, so you don't have to go in and fix what the tool created. With built-in validation, you can verify that you're putting clean code out there. Making extensive use of stylesheets, your code will be rendered more accurately by most web browsers. With tabbed documents, you can have multiple files open at once, and each one can be viewed in normal WYSIWYG mode, as well as HTML Tags mode, to see where the important tags are located, and even in source mode, so can see the underlying code, though you don't have to. And finally, with built in FTP support, you can use the same tool to create your pages and then publish them.

KompoZer is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

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Glide is pretty close to an entire operating system's worth of applications and tools, available online. With nothing to download or install, just about anybody with a modern web browser can take advantage of its capabilities.

Along with email, instant messaging, and a calendar app, Glide also has tools for website creation, a presentation tool (like PowerPoint), a text editor, photo editor tool, and a bunch more. There are applications that support sharing media, whether it be photos, music, videos, or documents. There is also a spreadsheet app that runs in conjunction with the Glide Sync tool.

You can also use Glide's Sync tool synchronize files living on multiple machines. This tool must be downloaded and installed and requires Windows 2000 or later, or Mac OS X 10.4+, or Linux (kernel 2.6).

With Glide Mobile, you can harness the power of Glide through your web-enabled phone or PDA. The publishers recommend it as the perfect accompaniment for the iPhone.

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Is peer-to-peer file sharing not for you? It's too complicated to set up, and how about all those security issues. Does FTP scare you? What do all those arcane command line arguments mean anyway? You've got a file that needs to get from Point A to Point B. How do you do it?

Enter PipeBytes, a slick file-exchange service that only requires two users–the sender and the receiver–with a web browser each. Rather than sitting on somebody's server out there on the Internet, your file is actually copied directly from your machine to the target system.

To use the service, the users at each end simply go to the PipeBytes website.
The sender clicks on the Send File button, browses to and selects the file to be sent, optionally adds a text message, and clicks on the Start Upload button. The service returns a Pickup Code and a Pickup URL. The recipient then either clicks the Pickup File button on the PipeBytes website, or enters the Pickup URL into their browser, sees your message and a description of the file (filename, size, and MIME type), and clicks on the Start Download button.

Only at this point is the file actually uploaded from the senders machine. It never sits on a server anywhere, since it's immediately transmitted from the source to the destination machine. That means it's more secure, because it never sits anywhere waiting to be broken into. Encrypt your file, and you're using what has to be one of the safer file transfer methods out there.

PipeBytes is an online service, so it will work with just about any system out there that supports a web browser.

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Who can live without email? We all use it multiple times a day. If you're looking for something beyond what you're currently using, you may want to give i.Scribe a spin.

i.Scribe is a lightweight email client that combines email functionality with an integrated contact database, as well as a calendar. It doesn't require an installer (one is included for user convenience), so it can be dropped wherever you want it to live, including USB drives, making it super easy to bring along with you.

It starts up fast, requiring only a second or two to get up to speed. It may be one of the safer email clients out there, since it supports HTML email but not embedded scripts, so you won't have to dread opening emails like in Outlook. It features a Bayesean spam filter, so it will learn what you consider spam and react accordingly, getting smarter and more efficient over time.

i.Scribe supports only a single account (they have a paid version that supports multiple accounts), so it may not be the most flexible tool you own, but you can't beat the price.

i.Scribe is available as a free download. It runs under Windows (most features run under 98/ME, more under 2k/XP), Linux, and a beta-level version for Mac OS X.

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No matter where you wander on the Internet, you leave footprints. Each time your browser requests a web page, it also tells that server a lot about you. Multiply that by the number of websites you visit in a day or week, and that's a lot about you spread all over the place. Is there any way to help keep that from happening?

One way to leave fewer footprints–or at least footprints that nobody knows belong to you–is to use proxy servers. These get between you and the other servers, and as far as the web server is concerned, it's the proxy, and not you, that made that page request. The down side there is that the proxy knows who you are. How about making it so that nobody knows who you are?

Tor–The Onion Router–is just such a tool. Actually, it's a confluence of three different pieces that come together to make you as invisible as possible on the Web. Tor is the actual application that woks on your behalf behind the scenes. Vidalia (notice the nice onion metaphor continues) is a GUI for the
Tor app, And finally Privoxy, a web proxy that works in conjunction with the other two. All together, these pieces running across a network of widely dispersed proxy servers makes it nearly impossible for anyone to figure out who you are or to tie your activity back to you. It's probably as close as you can come to anonymity on the Web.

Tor is a free download, and is available for Linux (and other Unices), Mac, and Windows.

Download Tor - The Onion Router

HTTrack is a website copier. Even in this day of total connectivity, there are still times and places where you can't connect to the 'net, but you need to browse a website. With HTTrack, you can grab your favorite site, download it intact to your local machine, and take it with you.

With versions available for both Windows (WinHTTrack) and Linux (WebHTTrack), you'll be able to download your target site, including its directory structure, all images, and even PDF documents and other content from the site.

HTTrack supports multiple connections, so you won't have to wait all day to download your target site. It can update your mirror when the original site changes, making sure you have the latest version of the site available. Interrupted downloads can be resumed where you left off. You can configure HTTrack to choose how deep you want to go, so that you don't try to download Amazon's entire catalog, for example.

Offline doesn't mean out of touch any more.

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Juice Receiver is all about podcasts. Those little media-rich RSS feeds are a way of like for many of us. Juice plays the part of the aggregator of content.

You can set Juice to receive podcasts the way you want to collect them. Whether it's once or twice a day, or even every 30 minutes, you get to call the shots. You can also configure it to grab all back-episodes that you might have missed along the way.

Juice doesn't incorporate a media player, so you can use it in conjunction with your favorite player. It interfaces automatically with iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp, or you can choose "No player" and have it use your default media player, or you can even handle the details yourself. Either way you will know that you have the latest and greatest and that you will get to listen and view the latest podcasts on your own terms.

Power users can even set Juice to run a command, batch file, or shell script after each download, making Juice even more useful as you get your fix.

Juice Receiver is available for Linux, Mac (OS X 10.3+) and Windows (Windows 2000+).

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