Jim Karpen Tips

Tucows: A leading site for
downloading software

July 2000

Tucows has an apt visual theme for Iowans: a cow. And every software program on the site is rated on a scale of one to five cows.

This clever (or distracting) visual element aside, Tucows has long had the reputation for being one of the best sites to download software. You can find freeware, shareware, postcardware, and demo versions of commercial software-thousands and thousands of programs available for downloading for almost every type of operating system: Macintosh, Windows, Unix, Linux, Palm, and more.

Freeware means you pay nothin'. Shareware typically carries a small charge of $5-35. Many of the shareware programs are full versions and depend on your innate honesty to send in the money. Other shareware programs, like the demo versions of commercial software, are only partly functional or work for a limited time, and you must make payment in order to get full functionality. Postcardware means that you simply send the author a note saying how much you like the program, which is yours for free.

You can find every kind of software here, from word processing to games. When you first go to the site, you choose which operating system you have. You are also asked to identify the region of the country where you're from. This way, when you download software, it will be coming from a server near you-which supposedly makes the download time faster.

Once you've made these selections, then you arrive at a main page that has a list of links along the left side. Click on Software, and you will go to the page that has all the categories of software in a well organized directory. The top-level categories include Appearance/Sounds, Applications (auction, business, database, health, personal information managers, word processing, etc.), Browsers, Educational, Entertainment, Tools, System, Utilities, and more.

Once you click on a subcategory, it will return a long list of programs. Each one is rated, has a short (sometimes long) description, and tells the type of license (freeware, etc.), cost, when it was last updated, and file size. You can view the list of software programs alphabetically, or you can have it sorted according to rating, license, or cost.

In addition to viewing the software in a directory structure, you can also view it in various list forms by clicking on the link at left titled Index. This simply lists every item alphabetically, as well as a variety of other views. You can, for example, select to view a list of all the freeware. I use a Macintosh, and clicking on this link showed me a list of nearly 1,000 programs available for free-which is the price I like to pay.

© 2000 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D. (#224)