007Choices, Choices: Part II

posted by admin on December 28th, 2007

Once again, I’ll highlight some of the programs that have made my computer powerful, productive, and efficient in lieu of their weak counterparts.

Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) is a multi-protocol instant messenger, allowing chatting between AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and Jabber networks. Pidgin is also completely free and open-source, having the added benefit of being cross-platform - unlike the Windows-only, commercial Trillian.

RocketDock is a “smoothly alpha-blended application launcher”, highly reminiscent of the dock found on Mac OS X. It allows for complete customization through skins and docklets. Competitors such as ObjectDock or RKLauncher are beat out by RocketDock’s ease of use, smoother magnification algorithms, and ability to work on older computers.

7zip delivers universal extracting of all compression formats, ranging from the obscure .lzh to the well-known .rar or .zip. In addition to this, it allows for password-protection of these compressed files, demonstrating greater flexibility than its bundled Windows counterpart, which can only extract .zip files. 7zip is free, open-source, and cross-platform.