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 I just found this. Web based application. Photoshop stuff

Gimp 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 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 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-Replaces MS Office, but can save as MS Office compatible
Opera Portable-My favorite web browser
Firefox Portable-My second Favorite web browser

I get most of mine from Portableapps.com
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) - An app launcher and can MANY other things just using keystrokes
Firefox - enough said
Open Office(.org) - MS office replacement
Notepad++(windows) - My favorite free text/code editor
Netbeans - 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/D...powertoys.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 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 is a free WYSIWYG html editor. Writes very clean code. Renders floats better than Frontpage.

Notepad++ Text/html/php, etc editor. This is a must if your coding goes beyoud WYSIWYG

[Andrew Schreiber]

Foxit Reader 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 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 -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 a diagram program like Visio.

[Uberbots]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

For really great ad blocking and pop up blocking lynx works for me.

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

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

[DMetalKong]

Originally Posted by JohnBoucher

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.

You can also get the GIMP plugin David's Batch Processor.

[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++.