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Nothing Wrong With Free! Edition #115 — February 9, 2009 Like many, I'm a cautious shopper these days, so before laying out $3200 for some bundled software, I did a little research first. What I found are some great free "open source" software applications. Below is a list of free software for anything from simple word processing to high end layout and design. I was suprised by the sophistication of what I found for free on the internet. There are programmers out there who either work or used to work at big companies but still have their principles intact. They form communities of like-minded people and set out to build software better than the high-priced competition. Some do it for fun because they can make use of their own applications, so they make them even better. OpenOffice.org (win/mac) and NeoOffice.org (mac) Ever heard of Microsoft Office? That's what this is like. The developers behind OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice.org are using open source code from Sun Computers, whose mission was to chip away at Microsoft's market dominance by making their own code free. Sun Computers still sells a professional "supported" version call StarOffice, but OpenOffice is the same and free to boot. NeoOffice is better suited for Mac users Both OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice.org offer a Word processor and Spreadsheet app, a PowerPoint type presentation app, and the ability to save in native MS and open source formats. Good stuff. Go and get it. OpenOffice.org Link GIMP - The Free Photoshop App. (mac/win) GIMP is for working with photographs and doing image manipulation for web graphics. Anyone familiar with Adobe Photoshop will recognize the icons and the workflow. No feature denied, and once again, it's free.
GIMP main site
InkScape - Free Illustrator App. (mac/win) Anyone who has used Adobe Illustrator will know how to run this application. Many features, probably more than Adobe offers, and again, it's absolutely free. The online manual is also available as a PDF version for a donation. NOTE: For Mac users, you can install the "X11" app. and run Inkscape and other programs that normally run on Windows. For intel users, the option to run Windows versions can be done via Parallels for Mac for about $70. Scribus - Page Layout App. like QuarkXpress. Scribus is a sophisticated layout program that may rival QuarkXpress in features and definitely in price. It's free. That's a savings of over $800 USD. Hmmm, not bad! Kompozer - Web Site Creation App. Here's a decent application if you want to build a web site. And if you need a professional web designer, contact me. ;) Well, that's it. I hope that I've provided you with some useful information in this newsletter. See? You never know what you're going to get from one month to the next. Keep reading, and I'll see you next month. Subscribe to free newsletter
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