Now, I know this is a craft blog not a tech blog. Despite this I have blogged about some slightly tech­ie top­ics before where it’s rel­ev­ant to crafters, or at least to this crafter. This post falls into that cat­egory.

Previously I’ve blogged about two pro­grams that I use in my design­ing; Inkscape and The GIMP. (Incidentally, is it just me or does Inkscape and the Gimp sound like a 80’s TV show? Just me, then?). They’re both open-source pro­grams; free and main­tained by volun­teers. If you’ve been think­ing about check­ing out some open-source soft­ware, you could do a lot worse than look­ing at Ninite.

Ninite is a very simple way to install open-source and tri­al soft­ware without hav­ing to worry about find­ing the latest ver­sion, identi­fy­ing the right ver­sion for your com­puter, and step­ping through a com­plex install­a­tion script try­ing not to say yes to a stu­pid taskbar (“tick this box if you don’t not want to not un-add this tool­bar”).

Ninite does all the tricky stuff for you; you just pick what you want off a list of the most pop­u­lar free/trial soft­ware, and Ninite builds a cus­tom installer that does the work without any mess­ing. I highly recom­mend it.