Alternatives to Windows, Mac, Linux and online software

AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Tell us what application you want to replace and we give you suggestions on great alternatives! Instead of listing thousands of more or less crappy applications in a category, we make each application into a category. Think of it like forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you're not satisfied with. And the "blog posts" are generated by you through suggestions, comments and votes.

Categories for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Web-based applications are listed. On each platform page, there are tabbed listings for recent additions, most viewed, and most liked software (I'll skip "OMG FAIL", since you're likely not looking for a "worse alternative" anyway). You'll find all the usual suspects listed, like Photoshop, Nero, Word, as well as user-recommended replacements.

Unlike most software guides, where you can look for programs based on a category, AlternativeTo.net is organized by program name.

ScrnShots: Share your screen inspiration

ScrnShots is the best way to take, find, and share screenshots of web and screen based design. ScrnShots is a community for designers to share screenshots. Upload as many screenshots as you want, embed them in your blog and discuss them with your contacts.

ScrnShots is a way to take and share screenshots of web and screen based design. Upload as many screenshots as you want, embed them in your blog, discuss them with your contacts and become a better designer!

It works pretty much like flickr. Take a screen shot and save it on your computer. Upload it, add a description and tags. Embed it using the provided html. They do ask that you link back to them which is the same thing flickr asks.

On the social side, I've found that people frequently comment on shots. It's fun to browse around and look at the shots other people are taking. I'm going to try to post at least one interesting shot per day and I'll try to comment on any interesting ones that I find.

Pixelformer : A bitmap editor

Pixelformer is a bitmap editor, specifically optimized for creating, modifying, and converting small and medium-sized images, such as icons, buttons, avatars, web graphics, game graphics, etc.

Pixelformer is faster, smaller, easier, more precise, and often more efficient than large bitmap editing tools; at the same time it is more powerful than any classic simple icon editor.

Pixelformer can be a complete solution for those who need to create, edit, resize, or convert icons or other small images. Even if you prefer to create graphics in some sophisticated high-end image editor, Pixelformer would be a useful tool for doing final tweaks, conversions, and optimizations.

The main features of Pixelformer are:

• no restrictive limits for image dimensions
• support for different color depths up to 32-bit RGB with alpha channel
• semi-transparent colors
• multiple layer support
• free-form masking
• in-place supersampling
• lossless target color depth switching
• independent access to color and alpha channels
• support for multiresolution icons
• dynamic palette generation
• multiple file format support
• icon extraction capability
• PNG size optimization
• Vista icon optimization
• alpha premultiplication
• deep undo buffer

LinkWithin : Related posts with thumbnails

LinkWithin is a blog widget that appears under each post, linking to related stories from your blog archive. It retrieves and index all stories from your blog archive, not just recent stories, making them accessible to new or casual readers of your blog who would not otherwise encounter them.

The widget links to stories that are relevant and interesting to readers of a particular post, keeping them engaged with your blog, and increasing your traffic.

The widget is free and ad-free. It takes a minute to get the widget up and running on your blog, no signup required!. Stories are chosen based on several factors, including title, tags, and content.

The widget shows text links when most of the recommended posts in the widget do not have an image.

ICONlook - Icon Search Engine

Iconlook is a search engine exclusively designed for icons. Icons play an important role in the web world and no one can afford to have lousy icons for his site. Imagine a webpage without any icon; it would be similar to imagining the world without colours. ICONLOOK allows you to search for hundreds of icons with just a single click.

Just go through the website, search for your desired icon(s) and get stunned by what you get to see. You can also have a look at the most popular icons. The service also allows you to stumble through random icons (something that we owe to Stumble Upon). Search can also be aided by the use of the tag cloud.

ICONLOOK has made its mark on me as the web design is not messed up at all. The site is simple, yet useful and will surely help people who are in search for Icons. ICONLOOK can also go on to allow web designers to market their icons and provide contact details besides those icons for people who are looking for a custom job.

Gickr lets you instantly create Animated GIF online and free,

Gickr lets you instantly create Animated GIF online, free, right now! Just upload pictures or grab them from your Flickr. Create funny flashy slideshows with you and your friends, cartoons, previews, banners, etc. Post them anywhere you can post pictures: MySpace, Bebo, HI5 etc. No need for flash. Show them to people in our Gallery.

This service is fun, easy to create, and takes a few minutes. Once your done, your GIF can be featured in the Gickr Gallery and other users will be able to admire your amazing artistry. Or, post it up on a Myspace bulletin, put it in a Facebook note, and let your friends enjoy.

You can either let Gickr pull images from a specific tag on your Flickr account, or you can individually upload images (maximum of 10) to Gickr that you want turned into your animated GIF. Gickr works with snappy AJAX-y goodness (but who doesn't these days), and really does provide a simple way to create an animated image (whether you're going for a time lapse or just slide show). This kind of tool may come in handy if you want to put together an animation/slideshow but you don't want to embed something that requires a little Flash

BeFunky : Turn your photos into incredible artwork with one click

BeFunky makes it easy to get photos from your favorite web sites. Apply special photo effects and save back to your account. The experience starts with a photo or video, and BeFunky tools turn it to a masterpiece work of art and give back to you within seconds.

BeFunky Photo Effects allow everyday people to easily create photographically rich and artistic results from their digital images without the need for any technical knowledge. These "one-click" photo effect options produce desired results effortlessly and each effect comes with the option to make simple adjustments.

BeFunky Labs recently innovated advanced tools interpreted into various artistic styles like oil painting, drafting, pen and ink-art, pop-art. And 100s more are in the pipeline that will be live within a couple months.

PicTreat: Get Perfect Skin in One Click

PicTreat, one such brand new online photo editor, is catering to our vainer side by promising fully automated online facial retouching in just one click. The web-based application is primarily for enhancing beauty shots of human faces by removing blemishes, red-eye, and performing color-correction.

Once you determine the photo you want to correct, PicTreat will provide with a few photo treating options, and once you click okay, it will automatically and quickly correct the photo. The final result is a treated photo, with the original still accessible for comparison. Should you be happy with the results you can save it to your computer, share the image URL, grab the embed code, crop it as a profile pic for Facebook, Twitter (Twitter), Delicious (Delicious), or MySpace, or post to a myriad of different social sites.

PicTreat is a simple app that works wonders on close ups (I didn’t know I could look so good), and there’s absolutely no learning curve. Now if only they could create a way so that we could auto-correct all of those terrible photos that we’re tagged in on Facebook too.

Qwiji : Web-Shows publishing platform

Qwiji is the world’s first Web-Shows publishing platform, it’s free, and no download is required.
Web show is an exciting alternative to casual browsing, allowing you to lay back and watch the web as it was meant to be. Same as a TV program, the show host will guide you through the most interesting and relevant web sites & videos within our interactive show-board interface.

Our motivation is to provide you with a smart, simple & fun on-line experience. We encourage you to PLAY shows, create your own shows and share with your friends. Starting Feb/2009 Qwiji is in Beta, your participation and feedback is vital to our success, go a’head and join us. Qwiji is on the move, we’ll keep uploading new features, Web-Show genres and much more, so stay tuned.

Qwiji is a self-funded, privately held start-up, established on mid 2008 by two enthusiastic web entrepreneurs.

OpenWith : Free programs to open any file extension

Have a file you don't know how to open? Think you need an expensive piece of software to open it? Chances are there is a great free program that's just as good as the expensive one, and you'll find it here.

OpenWith.org provides detailed information about most file extension and links to free programs that can open and create each type of file. All of us at OpenWith.org have found ourselves helping our parents and friends open obscure file types time and time again, and decided that this information was best shared with everybody.

There are plenty of great programs out there that will cost you hundreds of dollars to do what you need. What you probably don't know is that there is usually free software that is just as good. You just don't know about it.

SUPERAntiSpyware : Remove malware and spyware free

SUPERAntiSpyware features our highly advanced Real-Time Protection to ensure protection from installation or re-installation of potential threats as you surf the Internet. Used in conjunction with our First Chance Prevention and Registry Protection, your computer is protected from thousands of threats that attempt to infect and infiltrate your system at startup or while shutting down your system.

SUPERAntiSpyware Professional will detect and remove thousands of Spyware, Adware, Malware, Trojans, KeyLoggers, Dialers, Hi-Jackers, and Worms. SUPERAntiSpyware features many unique and powerful technologies and removes spyware threats that other applications fail to remove.  SUPERAntiSpyware Professional includes Real-Time Blocking of threats, Scheduled Scanning, and Free Unlimited Customer Service via e-mail.

SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition is 100% Free and will detect and remove thousands of Spyware, Adware, Malware, Trojans, KeyLoggers, Dialers, Hi-Jackers, and Worms. SUPERAntiSpyware features many unique and powerful technologies and removes spyware threats that other applications fail to remove. SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition does not include real-time blocking or scheduled scanning.

Produle: An online tool for creating customized flash widgets

Produle is an online widget creator that helps users to create highly customized flash widgets with any coding involved. It comes with a full featured WYSIWYG editor, asset manager, dozens of web components and live data services. Users can also easily share and track their widgets across social media.

Produle’s editor is easy to understand overall. There are several sections where you can add content like video, images, text, slideshows, and maps. In addition, you can incorporate some nifty visual effects to make your widget stand out. You can also build fully-functional sign-up forms and menus within Produle.

The simplicity or complexity of your widget is really up to you. In the center is where you can arrange your content and add your assets. If you want to get a deeper picture of Produle, we suggest trying out the demo.

Social Marker : Automated Submission to social bookmarking sites.

Social Marker is a service designed to aid in the process of submitting websites and web pages to social bookmarking and social news sites like Delicious, Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon to name a few. In a few days after it was launched in late 2007 it became one of the most used service of its kind mainly because satisfied people wrote about it and made a buzz.

Until now there were just a few changes made to the website in order to provide better experience for the users and some features have been added but feedback has been gathered and we are making plans to update SocialMarker and get users involved in the process.

It can help you spread a link on 49 of the best social bookmarking sites in under 15 minutes!

• It helps you get a lot of backlinks.
• It helps you increase your traffic.
• Your link gets indexed by Google in a matter of minutes.
• Best of all, it's free!

SwfUpload : Multipurpose Uploader with JavaScript

SWFUpload is “a small javascript/flash library to get the best of both worlds – The great upload capability of flash and the accessibility and ease of html/css.” The SwfUploadComponent is a piece of code that you can drop into your components directory and immediately integrate with your controllers to handle uploads from SWFUpload or even from a generic HTML form.

• Upload multiple files at once by ctrl/shift-selecting in dialog
• Javascript callbacks on all events
• Get file information before upload starts
• Style upload elements with XHTML and css
• Display information while files are uploading using HTML
• No page reloads necessary
• Works on all platforms/browsers that has Flash support.
• Degrades gracefully to normal HTML upload form if Flash or javascript is unavailable
• Control filesize before upload starts
• Only display chosen filetypes in dialog
• Queue uploads, remove/add files before starting upload

CinePaint : A deep paint image retouching tool

CinePaint is a deep paint application that edits EXR, DPX, 16-bit TIFF, JPEG, PNG and many other types of image files. CinePaint is available as a native application for Linux, Mac OS X, and BSD. There's currently no Windows version.

• Support for 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels of deep paint.
• High fidelity image file types such as DPX, OpenEXR and 16-bit TIFF. These files can't be opened in ordinary 8-bit image applications (e.g., GIMP) without crushing them.
• High Dynamic Range. HDR images can go brighter than white. Ordinary images can't be brighter than a white sheet of paper (0=black, 1.0=white).
• Gallery-quality printing. B&W photographs have only one color channel and degrade quickly when manipulated as 8-bit images. CinePaint has higher fidelity and offers a 16-bit printing path to the print-head using GutenPrint.
• Color Management System. CinePaint uses LittleCMS.
• Flipbook. Movie playback of short sequences of images in RAM.
• Innovation. CinePaint offers features that go beyond ordinary painting tools.
• It's used to make feature films at major studios.
• Open Source. With various OSS licenses, because it uses code from various sources, including GPL, LGPL, BSD, and MPL.
• Free.
• Friendly professional developers. Polite discussion forums.
• Being a CinePaint developer can be a good career move. CinePaint developers have gotten jobs at companies such as DreamWorks Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Apple.