Software

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Contents

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Introduction

Today in the computer world much of the software industry is controlled by large businesses like Adobe Systems and Microsoft, that hold virtual monopolies over their products. This allows them to charge ludicrous prices for their products, for example: a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 costs around $650 and the Home & Student version of Microsoft Office starts at $149.95 (the Professional version costs $500!). These prices make it so regular people have to pay through the nose just to buy basic software. Fortunately there exists a lot of open source software that you can get for free and is just as good as the overpriced mainstream software. From Linux to Frets on Fire there exist many free (or at least very cheap) alternatives to expensive software.

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GIMP

GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is basically the open source version of Adobe Photoshop. It has many of the same features similar to hotoshop features. These features include: Color support, selection and masking tools, paths, effects, scripts, and filters. One of the advantages over Photoshop is that GIMP does not take up the whole computer screen while you use it, all its windows can be shrunk down to make them more manageable. Also there are many communities and forums for GIMP users. These communities give tutorials and allow artists to communicate and display their art on the internet.

Versions available for Windows, Mac and Unix.


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Inkscape

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Available in Windows, Mac and Linux.

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Scribus

Scribus is a document creating software similar to Adobe PageMaker and Adobe InDesign. It allows you to create PDF files and allows you to manipulate your documents much better than Microsoft Word. It features different fonts and allows you to insert images and text. A full tutorial can be found on Google Video.

Versions are available for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, OS/2, and Windows.

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OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is a full function, multi-platform office suite that is basically the open source alternative to Microsoft Office. It includes a word processor and desktop publisher ("Writer") , a calculator ("Calc"), a presentation program ("Impress"), a database ("Base"), a vector graphics editor ("Draw") and a mathematical formula editor ("Math"). In short, it does pretty much what Microsoft Word, Publisher, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Equation Editor all do, but it's free to download and use, supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange and has no licensing hassles (PDL and LGPL). To quote the website, "the software looks and feels familiar and is instantly usable by anyone who has used a competitive product". It is available for Windows (98 through Vista), Mac OS, Linux, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX platforms. You can even burn copies onto CD-ROM and give them away.

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NeoOffice

An offshoot of OpenOffice.org (a free and Open Source alternative to MS Office) designed exclusively for Mac OS X.

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Audacity

Audacity is a free-to-download software that allows you to record sound on your computer. You are able to choose between your computer's direct input, microphone input, phoneline, and stereo mix. Not only is Audacity good for recording your own music (as it allows an unlimited number of tracks per file [however, adding too many tracks slows down the program and makes it glitchy]), the stereo-mix record function allows you to record whatever is playing through your speakers. This means that you can easily rip music from live-stream web-radio, playlists, Purevolumes, MySpaces, etc.

It comes with some basic built in studio effects, like a hard-to-control reverb and delay patch, a quality fader function, phaser, flange, tempo/pitch controls, right v. left pan control, and volume control.

The interface is very basic and easy to use, and allows you to manually effect and change any bit of any track you're working with.

Versions available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/Unix.

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SUPER

SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) is a Windows freeware program that can convert almost any audio or video format into any other, including I-pod format, mp3, mobile phone video, DVD format, and many more. It's free for unlimited use, and very simple to use.

The program runs on Windows 98 SE up to Vista and requires 1.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor or equivalent and 512MB of RAM.

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Frets on Fire

Frets on Fire is an open source computer game that is a clone of the Guitar Hero games. To play you hold your keyboard like it is a Keytar, using keys F1-F5 as the frets and pressing enter to strum. The game features three songs by Finnish guitarist Tommi Inkilä, a tutorial, three levels of difficulty, a song editor which allows you to make the frets for other songs, and hammer on and pull off notes. Another feature is the ability to download different themes and songs for Frets on Fire off of fan communities and forums.

Versions are available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

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Tremulous

Tremulous is a free and open source first person shooter game. It is multiplayer and can run on almost any halfway decent computer. The game has two teams, humans, using traditional weapons, and the much more original aliens. It is a 100mb download, and installed takes up exactly 99mb. Therefore it is portable. It runs on Window$ or Linux, and an unofficial mac version exists.

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Related Websites

TinyApps is a site where very small application software can be found (Mostly for Windows, but there's Mac and Palm available). Nearly everything is free and nothing listed on the site is larger than 1.44 Meg. "IDEA", a symmetric key block cypher, is a mere 448 BYTES!

Open Clip Art Library is described thusly: "This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project should be placed into the Public Domain according to the statement by the Creative Commons."

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