What's on Bruno Amaral's Desktop

My name is Bruno Amaral, and for what it's worth, I'm a blogger and an independent worker. Recently I'm starting my own webdesign company, speciallizing in small businesses. I recently re-built my desktop and decided to use the experience to arm myself with all kinds of free programs. My goal was to answer the question of open-source Vs commercial software once and for all...while cutting down the cost of software.

The biggest challenge was without doubt, replacing Microsoft office. Especially since I depended so much on Outlook. I installed the obvious counterpart: Open Office. One of the reasons for setting up my desktop all over again, was to cut some flab. With that in mind I installed Writer, Impress and Calc, the equivalent to Word, Powerpoint and Excel. The smallest challenge was replacing Internet Explorer with Firefox.

Now, for an email and RSS client I chose Thunderbird together with the calendar extension, and there we have it, a replacement for Outlook! I changed the calendar data file location, so it would point to my iPod's calendar file. That way, I need to plug in the iPod to see my calendar but at least I get to view my appointmens on the go through the nano's screen. To make this even sweeter, Yahoo's Widget Engine and the day planner widget display my appointments and tasks on the desktop. On a side note, the only good way I found to get RSS feeds in Outlook was with Attensa for Outlook.

My next big challenge was figuring out a way to manage 10 thousand or so photos. The industry's giant on this field is ACDSee. I gave it a spin a while back and it worked like a charm but for my new system I chose Picasa2 from Google. It also worked great since I store my photos by year and date folders.

As for file tools I chose AVG and Ad-aware for virus and spam protection. It was a no-brainer since they're the most widely used tools. Since I'm always loosing my files, I opted for Google Desktop also. Next, the MP3 collection. iTunes can handle a great amount of files but is a pain to update. So I found iTunes Library Updater to do that for me. That way all I need is to organize the MP3's how I see fit in the My Music folder and run the app.

For my work I needed an FTP client. Filezilla was the obvious choice due to smartftp's license restrictions. To edit CSS and HTML I've been using Alleycode, although it still doesn't feel like home.

And last but not least, my best shortcut tool ever: Colibri it lets you type the name of an application or web address and opens it for you. Well, that covers it. I hope this text was useful somehow!