for free in honour of its 10th anniversary, I considered it exciting news.
One of the features that was free (after a simple registration) was the Top Downloads section of its website. This essentially lets you know what everyone else uses for every category of work or play. For example, the No 1 business application download is Microsoft's Office 2004. That may have been an easy guess, but the No 2 download was a surprise. It is the free (and more highly rated) OpenOffice, which is an open-source office suite. It has close to the same number of downloads as Office, which makes you want to check it out to see how far it has come. When you also consider that NeoOffice, another open-source office suite, is the No 1 word-processing application, it appears, according to the number of downloads, that Microsoft is losing its long-standing hold on the business community.
The same Top Downloads section tells us FastTrack Schedule is the most popular project-management software. This surprised me as well. It is the most expensive and full-featured by a substantial margin but, according to my experience, it is the most difficult scheduling application to learn and set up. Perhaps the programmers listened to user complaints (mine!) and fixed the interface and tutorial system, thus making it the best in class once again. The top educational downloads are predictable. Ultralingua Dictionary is No1. EarthBrowser, an Earth exploration tool that will educationally consume your day if you let it, is No2. EarthBrowser lets you view (zooming in from space) weather events, geological events, geographical locations and thousands of other fascinating things about the world via webcams as they happen.
The other top tenners are: the World Book encyclopedia update; iFlash, for making homemade flashcards; MacFamilyTree, for genealogy; 3D Weather Globe and Atlas; Kid Pix, for children's artwork; CalorieKing, for nutrition information; Aquallegro, for musical-ear training; and ProVoc, for foreign language training on your iPod. It brings home the point that there is so much left to learn.
This VersionTracker feature includes the top downloads for 22 categories, from audio to word processing, and covers every conceivable area of interest. I was surprised to see the No1 download in the miscellaneous category is the free Ten Seconds With Tyler Durden. This simple application has an image of the character Tyler from the film Fight Club appear every once in a while on your screen and offer up a philosophical commentary that will make you ponder your existence - an existence that will now be vastly improved because you have VersionTracker as a web resource.