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OpenOffice.org (tested v3.0.0)
Productivity suite
Developer: Sun Microsystems
OS: Windows/Mac/Linux
Price: Free
Site: http://www.openoffice.org/

OpenOffice.org has stood for several years as the open-source David to Microsoft's Goliath. And what a Goliath: Office may be the most dominant program Microsoft produces, even more so than Windows. After all, plenty of people can name alternatives to Windows, like OS X and Linux. But how many people can name an alternative to Word or Excel?

OpenOffice.org suffers from a marketing problem: not very many people know it exists, and those who do are often still skeptical of its ability to work with Microsoft Office files. After all, even if you switch to OpenOffice.org, there's still the rest of the world to deal with, and they're still using Office. But OpenOffice.org has been able to open and save Word, Excel and Powerpoint files with ease for a long time, and with version 3, Sun has introduced the ability to open Office 2007 files as well (though it can't yet save them).

In general use, the suite of applications are functionally indistinguishable from prior, non-ribbonized versions of Microsoft Office. Depending on your comfort level with the new ribbon interface, this could be a pro or a con, but either way the productivity suite goes out of its way not to scare new users back to the Microsoft option. And in most of the ways general users are likely to notice, OpenOffice.org is every bit the equal to Microsoft's offering. Of course, OpenOffice.org has the added benefit of being free, which makes it a very compelling alternative, especially if you don't already own a copy of Office.

Printer's Apprentice (tested v8.00.0021)
Font manager Developer: Lose Your Mind
OS: Windows
Price: $25 )U.S.) for a 30-day free trial
Site: http://www.loseyourmind.com/pa80.asp

Perhaps because most people don't own or use any fonts beyond Helvetica or Times New Roman, the rudimentary font management interface in Windows has seen little evolution over the years. Though everything from MP3s to Internet bookmarks can be dumped into a database and sorted in a nearly infinite number of ways, Windows offers no modern method of viewing and organizing fonts. Instead, they're treated as just another collection of files.

Many font managers exist for professional use, such as the various versions of Extensis Suitcase, but for those who don't need the advanced features of more expensive packages, there are more modest programs like Printer's Apprentice. The shareware font manager has all the important features a designer needs to efficiently manage fonts: the ability to preview both installed fonts and uninstalled font files, to view and compare several different typefaces, and to print out contact sheets for some or all of your fonts, so you can browse through your font collection on paper as well as on screen.

Printer's Apprentice also offers easy ways to quickly install and uninstall fonts, thus making them available to your other programs as needed. It can even manage font groups that can be activated or deactivated all at once – handy for storing fonts needed for a particular project. Though more advanced gizmos like on-the-fly font activation are lacking, amateur designers likely won't miss them, and Printer's Apprentice is still a major improvement over the standard Windows interface.

Norton UAC Tool (tested v2008.1.0.11 beta)
User Access Control replacement
Developer: Symantec
OS: Windows Vista
Price: Free
Site: http://www.nortonlabs.com/inthelab/uac.php

In one of its popular television commercials starring Justin Long and John Hodgman, Apple lampooned the well-known tendency of Windows firewall programs to pester the user with security prompts. So it's no surprise that one of Windows Vista's most hated features is User Access Control, a security feature that blocks access to programs requesting elevated system privileges with – yup, you guessed it – a series of annoying security prompts.

It's not that UAC is useless; Linux distributions make similar “sudo” prompts one of the cornerstones of their security interfaces. But Vista's implementation tends to be more annoying than useful, which leads people to turn it off entirely and live without the prompts – but also without the fairly substantial system protection it offers. A better option would be a tweaked UAC that isn't quite so annoying, and that's exactly what Symantec promises with Norton UAC Tool.

Symantec's UAC offering differs in two key ways. First, it offers more information on the process requesting elevated privileges, like whether it's running from a protected folder. Secondly, and more importantly, Norton UAC Tool adds a “Don't ask me again” box for frequent actions. For example, anti-virus software updaters can be added to the whitelist so that they never trigger a UAC prompt again.

There is one catch: Symantec has been using the tool to collect data on what applications get whitelisted. You can turn off this feature by unchecking the “enable submission on UAC prompts” option during installation. Don't let this easily sidestepped issue turn you off, though – Norton UAC Tool is worth installing on every Vista machine.