Free plugins from Digital Anarchy

Digital Anarchy is now offering their plugins Texture Anarchy and Backdrop Designer for free. At one time they were pretty expensive but as the company explains in their newsletter:

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We’re releasing Texture Anarchy and Backdrop Designer as free products! These cool Photoshop plugins for creating textures and backgrounds have been a staple of our product lineup for a long time. With the release of the next version of Mac OS (sometime next year) they will become obsolete and no longer work. (you know... like FCP 7) So we’re discontinuing them. BUT… we’re making them available for free on both Mac and Windows

I once owned an older version of Texture Anarchy and it was pretty cool. Download from digitalanarchy.com

As far as I know the plugins work only from within Photoshop, since they are described on the Digital Anarchy website as being Photoshop filters.

I might mention that in my opinion they are suitable only for people who like to experiment a lot and are willing to watch the tutorials. The UI is unconventional, and I personally never did anything with it other than to click on an effect thumbnail which created another variant. I found the random variants to be pretty ugly and not very useful. However, there are loads of parameters that can be tweaked, so if you know what you are doing I am sure it is possible to create a unique custom texture that is exactly what you want. One reason I never bothered to spend more time on it is that my mouse cursor became almost invisible within the plugin, appearing as a tiny dot that could be mistaken for a speck of dust, so it was too arduous for me to find it and use it to adjust sliders.

Since the topic is freebies, does anyone have recommendations for favorite free art/design programs? I'm playing around with Sculptris and Krita at the moment myself.

FotoSketcher is nice for some effects, I just wish it wasn't limited to saving jpegs.

I'm looking into painting in Blender, but the learning curve seems vast.