Freeware Guru ! - Free Utility Software Downloads

Dink Smallwood is a fun and humorous adventure/role-playing game made by Robinson Technologies. It was initially released in 1997 before being released as freeware in 1999.

The game features the twisted adventure of Dink Smallwood, a pig farmer who leaves his town and goes on a quest to save the world.

LibreOffice is a productivity suite that is compatible with other major office suites, and available on a variety of platforms. The goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support and without any copyright assignment requirements. As free software, users are free to download, modify, use and distribute LibreOffice. 

If you do not like the excessive iTunes, and just want find a simple music player for Mac，Vox is a choice.

HandBrake is an open-source video transcoder designed to convert MPEG video (including DVD-Video) into an MPEG-4 video file (.mp4) or .mkv containers.

This software is used to convert DVDs into other forms so they can be viewed on iPods, iPhones. It is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

•  Home page: http://handbrake.fr/

Worms is a series of turn-based computer games. Hedgewars is a free and open-source game and is based on the Worms series. It runs on Linux, BSD, Windows, and Mac OS X. Your job is using different weapons to kill the other team hedgehog, hedgehog will explode when life drop to 0, and fell into the water will die.

Prey is a free and open-source software, it helps you keep track of your phone or laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen.

Latest Prey features include wifi autoconnect, an alarm system, screenshot grabbing, hardware scanning and webcam capturing, etc. All of these functions are managed as modules, which can be activated on demand by the user, and new functions can be added by adding new modules.

Xonotic is a fast paced free, open-source first person shooter licensed under GPL. It is a fork of Nexuiz, and a successor of the Nexuiz Project. Xonotic works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. To find out why Nexuiz was forked into a new project, you can view my previous post <Nexuiz - a free opensource FPS game>

The latest 0.1 preview version has been released on December 23,2010. Find screenshots, Xonotic Videos at http://www.xonotic.org/

Image via CrunchBaseTeamViewer is a free and cross-platform remote desktop control software. It supports Windows, Mac and Linux (wine). TeamViewer version 6 was just released several days ago, in this new version, it supports iPhone, iPad, and Android !

Imagine that you control the computer using an iPhone/Android mobile, it is neat!

Image via CrunchBaseLastPass is a freeware password manager and Form Filler that makes your web browsing easier and more secure. It is available as a plugin for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari. And LastPass is now available as an Opera extension. It works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and some mobiles.

Passwords in LastPass Password Manager are protected by a master password and are encrypted locally and are synchronized to any browser you use. You can also import passwords from most major password storage vendors such as RoboForm, 1Password, KeePass, Password Safe, MyPasswordSafe, Sxipper, TurboPasswords, and Passpack.

Here is a list of top 10 free and cross-platform BitTorrent softwares, each of them is popular and worth a try. Apart from BitTorrent and µTorrent, other clients are open source softwares.

 1. BitTorrent (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

BitTorrent was the first client written for BitTorrent protocol.
BitTorrent, Inc's software client allows you to quickly download high-quality digital content such as video, music, and games. Available in over 20 languages, it leverages our community of over 70 million users to securely deliver files to your PC faster than anything else out there. BitTorrent was written in Python. Since version 6.0 the BitTorrent client has been a rebranded version of µTorrent. And now it is no longer open source.

There's no special description needed for this old BitTorrent client.


2. µTorrent (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

µTorrent (or uTorrent) is the second most popular BitTorrent client (after the Chinese Xunlei).


µTorrent is a freeware, closed source BitTorrent client by BitTorrent, Inc. It is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. All versions are written in C++. Very tiny, efficient and full-featured.

 A variety of skins and languages. At the same time, µTorrent has an  App Studio.


3. Vuze (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

Vuze (previously Azureus) is a BitTorrent client written in Java, and uses the Azureus Engine. In addition to downloading data linked to by .torrent files, Azureus allows users to view, publish and share original DVD and HD quality video content.

Azureus offers multiple torrent downloads, queuing/priority systems (on torrents and files), start/stop seeding options and instant access to numerous pieces of information about your torrents. Azureus now features an embedded tracker easily set up and ready to use. Azureus also offers a range of plugins.


4. Transmission (Mac OS X, Linux)

Transmission is Ubuntu's default BitTorrent manager. It features a very simple, intuitive interface on top on an efficient, cross-platform back-end.

It has native Mac, GTK+ and Qt GUI clients, and it can be remote controlled by Web and Terminal clients. It supports add-ons.

Simple interface and Low resource usage are its best features.


5. BitTornado (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

BitTornado is a bittorrent client built on the original BitTorrent
client from BitTorrent Inc. This client features a console and curses mode, and is one of the original bittorrent clients created. It is programmed using Python, the interface is very simple and even a bit ugly.

But it's rather lightweight and easy to use.



6. Miro (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

Miro is an Internet television application, a wonderful video player and torrent downloader. You can search, download, and save videos from YouTube, Google Video, Blip, and more.

The program supports most known video files and offers sound and video, some in HD quality. Miro should be the most special one of these 10 softwares, it is a video player, BitTorrent manage is just one of its function.

It also supports RSS BitTorrent. When a new video is available, the program will notify and download if possible. 



7. MLDonkey (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

MLDonkey is an open source, multi-protocol, p2p file sharing application that runs as a back-end server application on many platforms. It can be controlled through a user interface provided by one of many separate front-ends, including a Web interface, telnet interface and over a dozen native client programs.

Like Miro, BitTorrent isn't its only function. It supports the following network protocols, either partially or completely:
          o Ed2k
          o Overnet
          o BitTorrent
          o Kad Network
          o Direct Connect
          o HTTP/FTP


8. Deluge (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

Deluge is a full-featured, multi-platform, multi-interface BitTorrent client.
Meantime,


Deluge is a lightweight, Free Software, cross-platform BitTorrent client. It aims to be a lightweight, secure, and feature-rich client with Plugin System.

Portable version is available at  PortableApps.



9. qBittorrent (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

BitTorrent client written in C++ and based on libtorrent-rasterbar with a Qt4
user interface. qBittorrent is a feature rich but lightweight client that is
very similar to uTorrent.

The qBittorrent project aims to provide a Free Software alternative to µtorrent. Additionally, qBittorrent runs and provides the same features on all major platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD).


10. KTorrent (Windows, Linux)

KTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in C++ for KDE using the Qt user interface toolkit. It is maintained in the KDE Extragear.

Obviously, KTorrent supports such basic features
as downloading, uploading and seeding files on the BitTorrent network.
However, lots of other additional features and intuitive GUI should make
KTorrent a good choice for everyone. Some features are available as plugins
hence you should make sure you have the ones you need enabled. It takes very little system resources.


Personally, I'm using Transmission & MLDonkey under Ubuntu, both of them have a low resource usage, especially MLDonkey, if you control it just via web, You can hardly feel its presence. Although µTorrent is not an open-source software, I still like it and hope for the improvement of its Linux client.

iConvert is a website which provides the service to convert and create icons easily. When you want to get a icon (256x256 | 128x128 | 48x48 | 32x32 | 16x16) from your picture, iConvert could give you a help.

You may have heard or used the famous image viewer and converter - XnView before, it is a cross-platform image viewer used for viewing, converting, organising and editing graphical & video files. Today I'll introduce XnView's new version -  XnViewMP.

XnViewMP (XnView Multi Platform) will eventually replace all other versions of XnView (*nix and Mac OS X and Windows) using the same source code for all platforms and is intended to have a unified look and feel. It will have native unicode support and be able to load full bit depth pictures, easier handling of native language support (text based files) and a better database.
 

Steel Storm is an old school TPS game with score oriented competitive gameplay, and is designed for people who like fast paced action and have limited amounts of time to play computer games.

The events take place in an alternative universe where you control an advanced hovertank, packed with the most advanced and sophisticated weapons. Your task is simple, but, nevertheless, is not trivial. In the fight with presumed extraterrestrial invaders, you must prevail!  (via game's page) 

The beautiful graphics, the background music is also good, and it's simple to get start, just use WASD keys and mouse to complete control. In a word, it is a nice game for killing time.

Open Sonic is an open-source & non-profit fan-game based on the popular  "Sonic the Hedgehog" universe.  It introduces a different style of gameplay called cooperative play, in which it's possible to control 3 characters simultaneously.
It works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The latest release is 0.1.4 (September 19th, 2010). 

Minitube is a YouTube desktop client. With it you can watch YouTube videos without opening a web browser or without having the need to install Flash Player. Just type a keyword, Minitube gives you an endless video. Minitube is not about cloning the original YouTube web interface, it aims to create a new TV-like experience.

Minitube is a free download released under GNU General Public License. You can get the source code here.

VLC (a project of VideoLAN) is a free and open source cross-platform  (It works on Linux, Windows, Mac and iOS! ) multimedia player. It's a player that fulfills all your needs. It handles various audio and video formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, MP3, and OGG, as well as for DVDs, VCDs, TV cards, streaming protocols and much more.
It is simple to use, yet very powerful, portable and extendable.

Toady  is another disk encryption software, it's open source and cross-platform, it could work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

I've introduced some security softwares, they have different characteristics. You could hide  your files easily with Easy File Locker, and TrueCrypt likes Comodo Disk Encryption, it gives you more sense of security, but TrueCrypt is more attractive in features. It is an absolute ultimate free encryption software.

TrueCrypt could create a virtual encrypted volumes and mount it as a real disk, you can hide it or not. Just like virtual drive software such as Daemon, it could change the disc image file ". iso " into a CD-ROM partition. TrueCrypt could Encrypt an entire hard disk partition or a device, such as USB flash drive and all of these are automatically and transparently in real time. Its principle is very simple and easy to understand, but some advanced features are not easy to use, like hide operating system.