Free and Legal Commercial Application Software

Following on from last year's free and legal commercial games here's a list of the download links for application software I use daily, and some of which you may already know.

Serif Software - I can recommend free PanaramaPlus 2!
Giveaway of the Day - fully licenced promotional copies of commercial software that changes day to day.
Open source software - a very wide range of free software, including some software such as PDF Creator
Microsoft Security Essentials - Microsoft's very own antivirus.
Microsoft Windows Defender - anti spyware software useful for those people who only have Windows XP
Nero 9 - I paid for the Nero suite a few years ago - this is a bargain!

Softpedia Mirror Now Available

Softpedia has started mirroring some Silent Software that is GPL licenced ...although I didn't actually list some of it!! The following software has been awarded the Softpedia logo shown on this page.

Aerofoil on Softpedia
Image to ZX Spec on Softpedia
Gesture Magic on Softpedia

Please note some of the software available on this blog whilst free to download is NOT GPL (CPL and closed source). I'll be sure in future blog descriptions to make the licence more clear.

The latest versions of the software will always be on this blog first. As the copyright holder the source code (for the GPL and CPL software) will be available here as long as I distribute the binary downloads.

Aerofoil 1.5.0 Released

UPDATE: Aerofoil is now at version 1.5.1.

Original post follows.

The award winning Aerofoil has now been updated to 1.5.0(_03)!
Aerofoil extends Vista and Windows 7 notebook battery life by:

• Allowing you to manually disable Aero Glass.
• Optionally managing Aero Glass user interface.
• Optionally managing sound muting.
• Optionally managing your chosen power plans.
• Optionally managing Windows Sidebar.
• Optionally showing a quick hibernate button.
• Changing icon colour to show your power type.

Benefits over earlier versions and similar software:

• Much more efficient - Aerofoil is 100% unmanaged C++ (no .Net Framework!).
• Much smaller memory use (about 25%-30% of the size of similar software).
• Unlike other apps, Aerofoil doesn't poll battery level continuously allowing the CPU save power by being idle more often.
• UPX compressed meaning Aerofoil.exe is as small as it can be.
• No configuration file - everything is customised with the installer.
• Tried and tested on Windows 7 (thanks to D. Schiferli!)
• Open source and free - no expiry date, adware, spyware or malware, download and compile it for yourself if you prefer*!

What reviewers of Aerofoil have had to say:

"Aerofoil Extends Your Battery Life Approximately 25%", "you really should download"
(netbooknews.com) Disclaimer: Aerofoil's author's (my) personal best has been (only) 10-15%, or ~10 minutes, on a 2 hour battery 17 inch HP notebook (DV9233EU) with power saver mode using the lowest screen brightness.

"This is definitely a worth-while little app for road warriors"
(Metro Area Personal Computer Club, Iowa, USA)

"great for gaming and notebook applications alike"
(Official Windows Magazine - 47th of top 100, 37th of top 40 Hot Apps / TechRadar)

"Aerofoil, though, is far, far smaller and more efficient"
(Dave Johnson, Bnet)

The great advantage of AeroFoil is little resource consumption..... works perfectly with Windows 7"
(Kavya, Techno360)

"a must for every Vista laptop user."
(Wim Van Acoleyen, ZDNet)

"Great utility for gamers and laptop users."
(The Glitch)

"simple yet amazingly effective software that the corporate bigwigs couldn't figure out"
(Umar, Techtites)

Downloads

Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_03 Installer

Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_03 Source Code (C++)

If you use Windows Vista and receive the message "Side-by-side configuration is incorrect" you may also need a Vista update - the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable

* Note Aerofoil.exe is compressed using UPX so you will find your compiled executable is larger. You can find UPX here. The source code has dependencies on the WxWidgets framework (2.8.8) and the project is for Visual Studio 2008.