2009 has been a mixed year for most people. Financial crisis and some bizarre world events have left most people wishing they could completely wipe 09 from memory.

However, 2009 also brought us some of the greatest advances in technology (both in hardware and software) from the amazing Motorola Droid to Google Wave, from the rise and rise of Twitter to the Android operating system. Damn I love technology.

Well to celebrate what was a big year in tech circles, I have compiled a list of my favourite free online resources. Most are older, but have made some great changes over the last year. I have categorized each of them and there are probably heaps that I have left off, but these are the ones that jump to mind. The ones I would be lost without: ....

 

Bookmarking:

Delicious - Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. Really simple to use (there is a plugin for each of the main browsers to make it even easier) and it means I have access to all of my bookmarks from any PC

CMS:

Joomla - Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Joomla is my preferred choice for CMS and for quite a number of reasons (the main one being that I am so familiar with it lol). In my opinion, the best CMS on the market and yet open source and free.

Communication:

Skype - Free calls, video calls and instant messaging over the internet, it’s as simple as that.

Creativity:

Mindmeister – A free and simple to use mind mapping service. I use this to brainstorm and new project I am working on. The free service only allows you to have up to 3 mind maps, but you can share and collaborate even on the free plan.

Design:

Kuler - The web-based application for generating color themes to inspire any project. Experiment with different colour schemes or browse through thousands of themes from the Kuler community.




Viewlike.us - A new site that allows you to check out how your website looks in the most popular resolution formats. No need to download anything, simply type in the url and click ‘Check Up’. Extremely useful and completely free.

File Conversion:

Cometdocs - a free online document conversion site that offer a large set of document conversions most of which cannot be found anywhere else online.
It even has on the fly OCR. And of course, it’s all free of charge.

Font Management:

Myfontbook - A unique online font viewer that provides a number of tools to view installed fonts quickly and easily. Completely platform independent, browser based and best of all, free

 

What the font - Online font recognition system, simply  upload a scanned image of the font and whatthefont will find you the font that is the closest match.

 

Organizing:

Google Calendar - Keep track of important events, meetings, birthdays etc all in one place. Share Google Calendar with family and friends and view schedules that others have shared with you. You can get event reminders via email or have text messages sent right to your mobile phone.

 

Remote Management:

Logmein - LogMeIn Free gives you remote control of your PC or Mac from any other computer with an Internet connection. It’s as simple as installing the free application on the computer you want to access then log into your account from anywhere in the world with an internet connection (works through your browser. It’s safe, secure, powerful and best of all free.

 

RSS Reading:

Netvibes – More than a RSS reader, netvibes is the ultimate start page. Add rss feeds from your favourite sites, check email, even manage Facebook and twitter.

 

Twitter:

Tweetdeck – The ultimate Twitter management tool. Far too many features to list here. The most useful features I use are the ability to manage multiple accounts, easy Retweets, built in url shortener, popup notifications record and share video through tweetdeck and online sync capabilities all from the
comfort of your desktop or smartphone.