Open Source or Free web aps that make your life easier

[JohnBoucher]

There are many free open source or web based graphics programs out there. Like all teams, the last thing we need to spend money on is software. Can we make a list here of your favorite free open source or web based applications that make your life easier. Let us know what you use them for and tips on how to use them.

I'll start with 4 image manulipation programs.

Sumo Paint (http://www.sumopaint.com/web/) I just found this. Web based application. Photoshop stuff

Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) I have this on a flash drive. It is a great photoshop clone. There are many programs that you can run from a flash drive. Our school does not allow installing software on the computers, so running applications from a flash drive works for us.

Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/) VECTOR GRAPHICS.... If you want an image to scale, you need inkscape. The takes the place of Illustrator. This is a perfect tool for making logos.

Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.net/) Nice image editing. Best feature is the ability to batch process images. Want to make all images the same size for a web page? Use this.

What's in your toolbox?

[samir13k]

I have many different portable apps, but this is what i use.

OpenOffice Portable (http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable)-Replaces MS Office, but can save as MS Office compatible
Opera Portable (http://www.opera-usb.com/operausben.htm)-My favorite web browser
Firefox Portable (http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable)-My second Favorite web browser

I get most of mine from Portableapps.com (http://portableapps.com/apps)
They seem to be really useful at school...considering some of the school computers wont even let us download anything...

[daltore]

As far as graphics programs, I second Gimp and Inkscape. I also like Blender as much as I don't know how to use it. Also:

-Hugin - Panorama creator
-Xara Xtreme - Vector graphics program in case Inkscape doesn't work on your computer

Other open-source programs I love:

-Audacity - General purpose audio editor with thousands of available plugins
-Rosegarden - MIDI composition program, similar scale to Finale
-Avidemux - Basic-function non-linear video editor
-VLC - Media player and converter (through Transcode)
-Pidgin - Multi-service IM client. Supports Jabber through MSN.
-Rhythmbox - Audio manager similar to iTunes, but free. Maybe only Linux, not sure
-Firefox and Thunderbird - Web browser and e-mail client. Obviously, just mentioning.
-Piklab - Clone of MPLab. Unfortunately, no clone of C18 yet.
-pictools - Java version of IFI Loader, works on Linux.
-Ubuntu Linux - Free operating system, some of the best compatibility of all the Linux branches.

Web-apps:
-http://compiler.amadis.sytes.net/compiler32_form.php - Fully functional public Windows 32-bit C[++] compiler.

I love open-source, so if you want some more lists, send me a message.

[FourPenguins]

PSPad http://www.pspad.com/
Everyone seems to have their IDE of choice, but this one is mine. It's great for HTML/PHP, but with a bit of tinkering, you can link it to a compiler for Java, C, C++, etc.

WinRAR http://www.rarlab.com/
A powerful and free zip archiver.

FileZilla http://filezilla-project.org/
A free FTP client and a free FTP server. I've used both and am very happy with them.

Apache http://www.apache.org/
The king of all webservers, and it's free.

ZoneAlarm http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/home.htm
Free, very useful, easy to use, and functional firewall.

The Scanner http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/
Gives you a cool concentric pie chart of your drive usage. Great if you want to see what's taking up all that space.

[MasterRobot]

7zip- is a great file compressor that can compress and decompress a variety of file types

MPlayer is my favorite media player. it can play almost any type of media file and is very quick to start up

[Boydean]

Gimp, thats all I can think of for images.

Gmail - I can't live without Gmail.
Google Docs - Online manager/editor of a world of documents. Our whole team runs off Google Docs
Quicksilver(mac) (http://www.blacktree.com/) - An app launcher and can MANY other things just using keystrokes
Firefox - enough said
Open Office(.org) (http://www.openoffice.org/) - MS office replacement
Notepad++(windows) (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm) - My favorite free text/code editor
Netbeans (http://www.netbeans.org/) - Mainly a Java IDE but also has others.

Thats all I can think of for right now. I'm not really into image editing software. Although I do want to download Blender sometime soon, and start learning that.

[Elgin Clock]

MS has a ton of powertoys tools.
The best I use all the time to easily resize pictures for uploading to web applications, is called Image Resizer & can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Downloads/powertoys/Xppowertoys.mspx

[keen101]

I don't have any web specific apps, but i have a list of open source ones.

#1. GIMP - nice all around image manipulator
2.Inkscape - vector images
3. 7zip - great zip archiver/decompresser
4. Scribus - nice pamphlet and document program. (microsoft publisher replacement)
5.Blender - 3D animation, but hard to learn
6.Ubuntu Linux - great OS (especially if you need a system with practically no down time (ie. no viruses))

[JohnBoucher]

Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/) is a professional quality desktop publishing program. Definitally a Microsoft Publisher replacement. I have both Pagemaker and Quark and Scribus is better than both.

NVU (http://net2.com/nvu/) is a free WYSIWYG html editor. Writes very clean code. Renders floats better than Frontpage.

Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/download.php) Text/html/php, etc editor. This is a must if your coding goes beyoud WYSIWYG

[Andrew Schreiber]

Foxit Reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php) A lighter weight alternative to Adobe's PDF reader. The free version works wonders on older machines. Not Open source though. :(

For really great ad blocking and pop up blocking lynx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(browser)) works for me.

I will throw another vote in for Ubuntu, having a system be up all the time is a nice thing. My current uptime is about 42 days and the last time I turned it off was due to a power outage.

On Ubuntu my list of handy apps are:
libsensors - Command line tool for checking temperatures.
grep - Command line text searching tool. (http://schreiaj.ath.cx/FRC/ is done entirely using grep at the moment)
curl/wget - Command line tools for getting web pages.
Apache - Best Web Server EVER
Webmin (http://www.webmin.com/) -For people who dont like terminals, web based server configuration.
MySql - Amazing database for storing info, many commercial sites use this as their back end.
PHP - widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.

That is all I can come up with at the moment.

[JohnBoucher]

Dia (http://live.gnome.org/Dia) a diagram program like Visio.

[coalhot]

Gaim portable, and Firefox portable.......IE sucks so badly, and thats all they have installed in the Free library of Philadelphia....and web-based im software is soooo slow.....

[DCA Fan]

Pidgin
VLC
FastStone Photo Resizer - Batch editing/resizing/renaming, massively useful for galleries
Openoffice
IzArc - Decompresses Zip/Rar with a right click, batch decompress
Audacity

[DMetalKong]

RocketDock (http://www.download.com/RocketDock/3000-2072_4-10856104.html?tag=mncol) - Mac-style program dock for Windows.
CCleaner (http://www.download.com/CCleaner/3000-2144_4-10315544.html?tag=mncol) - Cleans up Windows temp files, uninstalls, and scans registry for invalid keys.
XmlPad (http://www.download.com/XmlPad/3000-7241_4-10252051.html?tag=mncol) - I use this over Notepad++ for XML documents because it has built-in DTD checking.
FileMenu Tools (http://www.download.com/FileMenu-Tools/3000-2094_4-10810545.html?tag=mncol) - Great program for tweaking Windows Explorer.
Everything (http://www.download.com/Everything/3000-2379_4-10890746.html?tag=mncol) - Very quick index-based search for Windows.
Active@ ISO Burner (http://www.download.com/Active-ISO-Burner/3000-2646_4-186232.html?tag=mncol) - Free ISO burning utility.
avast! Antivirus (http://www.download.com/Avast-Home-Edition/3000-2239_4-10019223.html?tag=mncol) - Free antivirus. I find it more responsive than AVG.

[daltore]

Forgot to mention a couple of command-line things:

-Timidity++ - MIDI sequencer with some of the best voices I've heard.
-Rhythmbox - iTunes replacement for Linux.
-apropos - Type in a keyword and it'll give you every program, library, or general topic having to do with it
-aptitude - Linux package manager, fast, automatic, no dependency hell.
-motion - Connect any webcam and this program will detect a moving picture and interpret it.
-occrad - Optical character recognition program, the computer-based version of what we have on this year's controller
-wget - Command-line file download program, takes the headache out of writing programs based on server files

All of these are on Linux, sorry, but I think a few of them have Windows ports, and you can force them into Apple/Darwin if you're determined enough.

[Jeff Rodriguez]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Evernote (http://evernote.com/) yet. Keeps notes and things available on all your devices.

[JohnBoucher]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Evernote (http://evernote.com/) yet. Keeps notes and things available on all your devices.

or Remember the Milk (http://www.rememberthemilk.com/)

[pogenwurst]

-apropos - Type in a keyword and it'll give you every program, library, or general topic having to do with it

Sounds really useful.

-aptitude - Linux package manager, fast, automatic, no dependency hell.

I can't put into words how much I love aptitude. I cringe now whenever I have to install software on a Windows machine.

-Piklab - Clone of MPLab. Unfortunately, no clone of C18 yet.

SDCC has at least some support for PIC18s as targets. That said, it doesn't like the C18-specific extensions in the code for the old control system.

My contributions:
-> Eclipse can be a bit daunting, but it's really useful, if only because it, through plugins, supports more languages and development tools than you can shake a stick at.
-> GNU find is amazing. If you're unlucky enough to be tied to Windows, install Cygwin right now even if it's just to run find.

[bkwrm92]

Digsby (http://www.digsby.com)

A very useful (if slightly bloated) application that links social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and others), IM clients (AIM, MSN, and others), and E-Mail clients (Yahoo, G-Mail, Hotmail, and others). It is nice to have everything in just one program, without having to open 4 different programs and 6 different browser tabs just to get caught up with the morning news. RSS feed integration is in the works, and I can't wait.

Best of all, it's free.

[DMetalKong]

Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.net/) Nice image editing. Best feature is the ability to batch process images. Want to make all images the same size for a web page? Use this.



You can also get the GIMP plugin David's Batch Processor (http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html).

[keen101]

just thought I'd post this link for Windows users. Most of the ones people are mentioning can be obtained here:

http://www.theopendisc.com/

[AustinSchuh]

Irfanview Nice image editing. Best feature is the ability to batch process images. Want to make all images the same size for a web page? Use this.

I use ImageMagick for command line batch image editing. Its probably just another way to do the same thing. My dad and I have used it in the past with a python script or two to decide which images are too big in our collection and scale those down accordingly.

I don't know if this quite fits on this list, but I use wpa_supplicant for wireless configuration, and am able to get it to fire off a script after it connects to the school wireless network. The script uses Lynx to navigate the website to log me in to the campus network.

I love the "locate" tool. It is similar to "find", but it uses a database, so you can search your entire hard drive an order of magnitude faster.

I don't know how I could live without VIM (text editor). I imagine that other people feel the same way about EMACS and Notepad++.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Just came across a free application (for non commercial uses)
http://sol.gfxile.net/atanua/

It is a real time logic simulator. Very handy if you are designing digital circuits.

[daneelshof]

Here are the things I can't live without:

• TextWrangler (free, not open source) http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

This is a really neat text editor. It has so many features, you'll be amazed. It is like the free cousin to BBEdit. Mac only :(

• Synergy and SynergyKM (open source) http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergykm

This allows you to share one keyboard and mouse across several networked computers. It's really handy to only have one keyboard and mouse on my desk with three to four computers. Synergy is available in GUI form for Windows, command line for Unixes and Linux. SynergyKM is a pref pane for Mac OS X that makes it really easy to use.

• VirtualBox (open source) http://www.virtualbox.org

This is Sun's open source virtual machine. It works really well and has a good Windows seamless mode.

• Songbird (open source) http://www.getsongbird.com

Face it, iTunes is less than ideal. Songbird is a great alternative, built on Mozilla XUL and it has a ton of plugins. It is pretty stable although it leaks memory if you leave it open for a couple of days. All platforms.

[DMetalKong]

For anyone feeling a little adventurous in their CNC'ing capabilities, I found this (http://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/template.html) neat little flash app that spits out the HPGL plot for a given gear.

[Zholl]

-Google Chrome it's fresh out of beta, so it can be a little buggy at times, but it's pretty darn fast and I like the streamlined feel it has, plus the ability to create application shortcuts makes using Docs and Gmail even more convenient. Unfortunately, it's not quite as functional in some aspects as Firefox, so I still use that as well.

-GIMP I actually use this in conjunction with Photoshop, since this I can run portably and there are a few tasks I can't seem to do with PS, and vice versa

-Google Docs Web based office suite. Not as functional as Office or OpenOffice (which I also use), but it's much more streamlined, which I like, plus its being online has saved my skin at school more than a couple of times

-Gmail nice web based email app that I've grown to like much more than my old Thunderbird setup

-Google Reader very convenient way of keeping up with any kind of news available through RSS. I've even been using this for our teams news, which is kind of redundant I guess, since I'm in charge of that...

-Launchy an application launcher that can be extended to do a number of other tasks, such as search Google, launch any websites you set, basic math, and anything else you can download for it

-Display Fusion a wallpaper manager for multi screen setups, lets you set up wallpapers on both screens however you want, instead of dealing with the limits Windows imposes. There's a pro version, which costs money, but the extra features aren't anything worth paying for

-Rainmeter a desktop customization program that lets you put anything on your desktop you can come up with, limited only by your programming skill or what you can find online. I personally use it to display a clock, todo list, and system usage

-Keepass an excellent password manager, compatible with all browsers, since it's an independent program. It can also be run portably, and generates more secure passwords, so you're no longer limited by what you can remember. Works with anything that uses a text box to enter login info, and can be fully automated so it works with a simple, custom keystroke

[richalex2010]

Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/npo/index.html) - free for nonprofits, can customize, use your own domain (use the address someone@somesite.com with the Gmail interface, features, etc.), and such.

A couple of others:
XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html) - invaluable for local testing of websites, themes, etc.
Free Download Manager (http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/) - Downloads large files fast, with no continuity problemt(you can pause, restart from an unexpected shutdown, etc. unlike, say, the Firefox download manager). This works great for downloading things like 3DS Max or Inventor (faster and more effectively than the FIRSTBase downloader program from Autodesk)

EDIT: Just thought of this one (because I need to use it): nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/). It allows you to customize Windows XP installations (a similar tool, vLite (http://www.vlite.net/), is available for Vista). It lets you slipstream updates (service packs, as well as normal updates), drivers, settings, etc. into the installation. You can preconfigure users, product keys, themes, network settings, etc. You can also tweak a few things, or remove unneeded things (that annoying dog in the search menu).

[JohnBoucher]

Two sites I check out for free apps are
Giveaway of the Day (http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/)

Make use of (http://www.makeuseof.com/)

[Xeno_117]

For 3d modeling, I recommend Google Sketchup. I'm surprised it was not mentioned. The only thing you can't do is make a sphere by drag and drop. also, you can use google earth export files (KMZ) and convert the innards of such into a .3ds file.

[Ryan Albright]

Gmail- Cant live without it

www.logmein.com - Don't know if this counts but I make all my relatives install it so I can log into there computer and fix it. None of them are tech savy

Joomla - for me who doesn't program website from scratch this is a great thing. so many extensions

Firefox

Openoffice - love that open office can handle almost any extension

Google Analytics - track my websites I run

Google Doc's

Wootylzer-- So I know when Woot up dates

Cannot think of anything else at this moment

[Jreed129]

My life revolves around technology and I can say that a few of the greast programs and websites I have used are:

www.logmein.com - Great for remote use when i'm out of school and need to work on animation only place that has the program is in school

www.theopendisc.com- great for all of the open source programs taht are on that covers everything from web browsing to coding

gmail.com -this is a great free email host by the owner of the internet:ahh:

Mozilla Thunderbird - Great program for RSS feeds can store a great amount of new news in one program. saves me from running from website to website morning.

Google Chrome - This is a great new web browser host by google. the thing i like the most about it is how it stores the websites that you where on incase the computer crash or restarts (tends to happen alot here)

If I think of more I'll post them but they are all awsome programs and free to use

[yoshibrock]

ImageJ- Not the best image processor, but it opens much faster than photoshop, and is perfect for small changes.

Finale Notepad- The very best free sheet music editor and creator EVER. I use it all the time, and it has so many capabilities. The only thing better is Finale itself, but that's like $600.

Disk Defragmenter- yes it comes with windows, and yes it doesn't make your computer run THAT much faster, but it's satisfying to start up and just hope that you might get a little more speed. :yikes:

[JohnBoucher]

Pencil (http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/Home.html) Add on for Firefox

The Pencil Project

The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.
Top features:

Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping
Multi-page document with background page
On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
PNG rasterizing
Undo/redo supports
Installing user-defined stencils
Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating...
Cross-platforms
Adding external objects
And much more...

[JohnBoucher]

Check out this posting from FreewareGenius (http://www.freewaregenius.com/2007/10/29/reinstall-windows-and-outfit-your-system-with-all-freeware-programs/). Replacing all your applications with freeware.

[pyr0b0y]

VisualSVN (http://www.visualsvn.com/server/download/) This is a great SVN sever to store team data

[Uberbots]

For really great ad blocking and pop up blocking lynx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(browser)) works for me.


Lynx saved me the first day i tried using ubuntu and accidentally rendered gnome unusable ::ouch::.

Besides that, i use notepad++ all the time, though i cant really think of any other open-source programs im a fan of.

[JohnBoucher]

Web Based Project management
http://gantter.com/