Firefox is perhaps the best all-round web browser there is. It has a huge library of plugins (including lots of virtually indispensable stuff for web developers), is both standards-compliant and widely supported, and it looks good and works well. But there are lots of alternatives, including Webkit and Chrome (both free and open source) as well as Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (the three of which are free but not open source).
OpenOffice.org provides you with a free Office suite that’s highly compatible with Microsoft’s products, and actually has a few extra tricks up its sleeve (such as a dedicated drawing program).
Cyberduck (if you’re a Mac user) or WinSCP (if you’re a Windows user) are both excellent and easy-to-use FTP/SFTP clients. You may also want to try out Filezilla which runs on both platforms.
For those cases when you need a real text editor (e.g. for programming or editing web pages) you’ll want Notepad++ (on Windows) or Textwrangler (on the Mac) or Komodo Edit on either.
Picasa is as easy-to-use as iPhoto, offers superb integration with Google’s cloud services (of course), and indexes all the images on your hard disk. If you’re not using a Mac and you use a digital camera it’s virtually a must-have, and even if you are using a Mac (and thus have iPhoto) you may actually prefer it.
VLC is great for playing that weird video file that won’t work in QuickTime Player or Windows Media Player. And it’s just fine for playing the files that will. You may also want to try out MPlayer.
Handbrake is great for ripping DVDs so you can play them from your hard disk (e.g. on a media center computer) or mobile device (iPod, iPhone, Zune, PSP, etc.). It won’t work on some DVDs (but neither will commercial packages).
For 3d modeling, animation, and rendering Blender’s features are hard to beat, and its price is impossible to beat. And if you want an unbiased renderer to go with it, look no further than Luxrender.
If you need a free alternative to Photoshop you should look at The GIMP, although Mac users may find the X11 user interface a bit hard to take. If you need an alternative to Illustrator there’s also Inkscape (with the same caveat for Mac users).
And finally, Audacity is a must-have application for anyone who needs to edit or sequence audio files.
Other Software
The programs discussed thus far only scratch the surface of what’s available. All software discussed on this site is organized into categories (what does it do? what does it run on?) and the commercial packages they can replace (OK I need something like Excel…). I hope you find the information on this site useful, informative, and easy-to-find.
January 11th, 2010 in
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LIVES originally stood for the Linux VIdeo Editing System, but it has since been ported to other platforms. Mac OS X users can apparently compile it themselves, while Windows (and Mac) users can run it on a dedicated Linux distro. So, it’s not really very approachable for Windows and Mac users. That said, it seems to be a fairly mature and robust, if not terribly advanced video editing system.
January 11th, 2010 in
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The Open Movie Editor is, as its name suggests, an open source video editing program. It’s currently available for Linux (only). I haven’t used it, but it looks fairly ambitious.
OpenShot is an open source video editing suite for Linux (only). OpenShot has a reasonably comprehensive feature set (comparable to, say, Premiere 5). To quote the developer:
I have a simple mission: To create an open-source, non-linear video editor for Linux. Many have tried and fallen before me, but for some reason I feel compelled to try myself. I am documenting my journey in this blog for all to read. It will be a dangerous journey, and I might not make it back alive. Hold on tight, and enjoy the ride! By the way, I’m calling this project OpenShot Video Editor!
Alchemy is an open source drawing package for creating randomly augmented image. Think of it as being a bit like Painter on Acid. From the website:
Alchemy is an open drawing project aimed at exploring how we can sketch, draw, and create on computers in new ways. Alchemy isn’t software for creating finished artwork, but rather a sketching environment that focuses on the absolute initial stage of the creation process. Experimental in nature, Alchemy lets you brainstorm visually to explore an expanded range of ideas and possibilities in a serendipitous way.
MyPaint is a relatively new open-source alternative to Corel Painter and Art Rage. Unlike many open source programs, its designers are fiercely focused on usability and it shows. Unfortunately, as of writing, MyPaint has not yet been ported to Mac OS X (although they are looking for someone to do the port).
One of the nicest things about the MyPaint website is that they link to a whole bunch of similar (less mature) open source projects. The website is also notably better-designed than a typical open source website, and the forums show some signs of life. Good stuff.
Yafaray is an open source ray-tracing engine for Blender. Note that Blender’s built-in renderer is fully capable of ray-tracing, but Yafary is capable of better output and supports render-farms. Compared to Luxrender it’s much faster, but not unbiased.
Realbasic is a commercial cross-platform software development tool than runs under Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. The Linux “Standard” edition is free.
Realbasic is similar in many respects to VB.NET (and Visual Basic) but it’s much more Object-Oriented than Visual Basic, and much less alien than VB.NET. It has the distinct advantage over either of letting you compile Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of a program from a single project (and — modulo captions fitting inside widgets, it just works).
The one downside of Realbasic is that it makes creating an application so easy that it has gotten a reputation for producing terrible software (much like Visual Basic).
R is “a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS.” It is pretty difficult to use (but then so are SPSS and SAS, its commercial competitors) but has the advantage of not costing a buttload of money and being incredibly buggy.
Advanced Installer is a Java-based tool for creating MSI installer packages for Windows. It’s especially useful for deploying MSI installers in environments where users may not be allowed to download or run .EXE installers. It is a “crippled” version of a commercial product, but the free version is very capable.
MinGW (or Minimalist GNU for Windows) is a package of software designed to allow you to work with GNU development tools — GCC in particular — under Windows. Quite a few cross-platform development tools make use of MinGW as a compiler back-end. If you are a Windows user who frequently finds him/her-self missing the *nix command line and/or programming tools, you may find this or MSYS (Minimal SYStem) a bit of a godsend.
PackageMaker is Apple’s free tool for creating installers for Mac OS X. It doesn’t provide an uninstaller because Mac users generally know how to uninstall programs (you drag them to the trash) — but if you really want to provide an uninstaller (e.g. if your program puts stuff in strange places) then you’ll need to look elsewhere. It’s free, and comes as part of Apple’s XCode installation. (You’ll find it in /Developer/Applications/Utilities if you’ve already installed XCode.)
Nullsoft Install System is a powerful, free, open source tool for creating Windows installers. There’s one downside, and that is you have to write a script to build the installer (no big deal, but other products let you get away with clicking a few buttons in a Wizard). For more complex installations, it may be your best, free option.
Install Creator is a program for creating Windows installers. It works well and is easy to use, but the free version is slightly limited in its capabilities and shows an ad when the install is complete.
Inno Setup is a free program for creating Windows installers. If you develop software for Windows (and I do) then you’ll know that Windows users expect to receive software in the form of an installer, and they expect the installer to provide an uninstaller, allow them to create desktop and taskbar icons, and so forth. Inno Setup does all this, it’s pretty easy to use, and it’s free.
Pidgin is a free, open source, cross-platform, multi-protocol IM client. The Mac version is not native, isn’t easy to install, and the developers refer Mac users to Adium.
Trillian is a free multi-protocol IM client for Windows, iPhone, web browsers, and — apparently — shortly for Mac OS X. I’ve used Trillian in the past but it seems to becoming more-and-more adware/upsellware.
Google Earth is essentially a free interactive 3d atlas that uses satellite image data to render the Earth as it would be seen from space (or at least pretty high up). There is also a non-free paid version which is used — for example — by news programs to show “views from space” of places where news is happening.
Celestia describes itself as “planetarium” software, which I guess is pretty accurate. It essentially lets you see the Universe — limited by our current knowledge and Celestia’s database — from any place in space and time. It’s very easy to use, runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and of course it’s free and open source.
Filezilla used to be one of the better free graphical FTP clients for Windows, but not it apparently supports all the major platforms. It also supports SFTP and FTPS, making it pretty darn useful. It’s definitely not as attractive as Cyberduck (on the Mac), and I still prefer WinSCP’s user interface (on Windows).