The 40 coolest free applications around

Seopher.com has a nice list of open source applications that users can download and use. There are a lot of more tech oriented things like IDEs, but things that ordinary people can use too. I must say I haven't used too many of these, but OpenOffice.org is pretty good (though its scripting editor leaves a lot to be desired, especially compared to Microsoft's VBA editor). The page also links to a nice list of open source games.

One rant, though. Eclipse is listed in the IDE section. Now, I use Eclipse at work as it is the supported IDE for java development. But why does it get such high marks? It does very little for you. I use NetBeans for my own stuff and it does so much more. Define a property in a bean and it generates the necessary code to support it. It has a visual editor and property sheets for GUI development. In J2EE code, it'll generate the code to set up a session bean or a web service, to send JMS messages, and it will create your entity beans by logging into your database and reading the schema. I haven't Eclipse do any of that.