Are you sick and tired of paying hundreds of dollars to write and design software that doesn’t work?
You may want to try the following open source programs.
1) Open Office, the king and queen of office suits. Available for PC, Mac and Linux platforms. Totally free and comes with spreadsheet and slideshow programs too. It even has a built-in PDF creator! You may be surprised at all the goodies you can download for free from The Open Office website. I have been using Open Office for over a year. I couldn’t recommend it higher.
2) Abi Word. A lightweight word processor for those who don’t need the complexity of MS Word to write simple notes and letters. It runs even on archaic hardware that doesn’t support Open Office or MS Office. It has many features that you would not expect in a free Word program.
3) Scribus is an open source program that offers award-winning professional page layout for Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “print-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. If you can’t afford Adobe InDesign or QuarkXpress, try Scribus.
4) Firefox, in my opinion, is the best web browser out there. I use it on all my machines. I love their tabbed navigation pages and it never fails. Experts agree that it is more secure than MS Internet Explorer. And it’s free too.
5) Nvu is a complete web authoring and HTML editor for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users, similar to rival programs such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Personally, I don’t use Nvu much because I love Adobe GoLive’s drag-and-drop CCS “floating boxes” that maximize web page design in a snap. But, if you don’t want to pay a dime for your HTML editor, I wholeheartedly recommend Nvu. It works pretty well once you get past its interface. It even has a great built-in FTP engine.
6) GIMP is the reason why Photoshop should be afraid, really afraid. Once they get layer functionality as polished and convenient as Photoshop, I think it would be hard to stop GIMP. This sophisticated and free raster image editing program will really amaze you with its many PS-like features. I use it regularly.
7) Inkspace may become a serious competitor to Adobe Illustrator once they (again) improve layer functionality to the Adobe level. It’s an excellent vector drawing and editing program that is used fairly regularly, though I find Illustrator easier to use just out of habit. But Inkspace is also free and its Bezier curves are as good as Illustrator’s.
8) Wink is a tutorial and presentation creation software, mainly intended for creating tutorials on how to use the software (such as a tutor for MS-Word/Excel, etc.). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanation boxes, buttons, titles, etc. and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
9) PDF Creator easily create PDF files from any Windows program. Use it as a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application.
10) Gaim is an instant messaging application available for free download. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. It is compatible with many instant messaging networks, including AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, IRC, Napster, Gadu-Gadu, Zephyr, and SILC.
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