I’m a big fan of a beautiful thing called open source software. I’m sure you also fancy of software which is employed free software model, and solve your tasks without paying a single penny. In that spirit, isn’t it a smart move to check out a site which provide you a few alternatives you name it for the software you going to spend on your computer or mobile phone.

As the name suggests, AlternativeTo is a site that suggests you with the list of alternatives for the application you want to replace. For instance, if you want to replace Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 with some paid or free software, that page will wow you with some noteworthy alternatives. For those who has no money to spend on software anymore, you’ll be impressed with the list it provide to you.

At present, AlternativeTo is focusing on the software from two main categories that are Desktop and mobile phone. For each category, you can scroll through the results with the help of some filters such as “Most Views,” Most Likes,” and etc. Of course, to save your time in browsing through the list of application, perhaps you can delve deeper into the main categories and go to the sub-categories such as Windows, Mac, Linux, Online, the sub-category of Desktop for instance.

For now, if you can’t the alternatives for the application you want to replace, you also can sign-in to the site and suggest one for them and then waiting for the community contributors to name the alternatives for you. As long as you found the right alternative to the application you want to replace, I believe it is a right site you want to bookmark with.

Diagram is one of the core of an application, but many of the programmers are found it hard for creating their online diagrams. Now, thanks to Cinergix, a Melbourne, Australia based startup, Cinergix has developed a Web app called Creately that makes it easy for programmers to design and collaborate on online diagrams, UML designs, flowcharts, UI mockups, and many other visual objects in particular.

Creately, currently in private beta, not only helps their beta users in creating online diagrams, also offering all kinds of visual treats. Users can drag-n-drop the objects, or multi-select, resize, rotate, skip and skim the objects on the Creately’s interface. Also, interaction between the objects is also enabled by an one-click connection, or by using the arrow symbol. What’s more, the viewing pane looks as attractive and well designed, for those of you who are not programming nerds, Creately makes it very easy for you to create online diagram with a three-steps, that are choosing the name, and the type and template, you can start to play around the diagram on the viewing pane.

In short, there are a lot of impressive and robust features offered by Creately. So if you’re looking for an app for creating online diagrams, you won’t want to miss out this tool. Perhaps if you want to collaborate a diagram drawing project with your team-mates, Creately offers some collaboration tools that allow members of your project to work, share, and edit the diagrams that you all have made.