Some of My Favorite Software Tools

Here are some of the Software/Development tools I like, many of which BTW are Open Source and/or free.

Inkscape - Great Vector art program. While Photoshop is something a lot of people live by, I prefer to deal with lines and graphs and repositionable objects, for the longest time it was Appleworks Draw then a while with Adobe Illustrator, but given im not rich and I like to share I pick Inkscape for its portability and its price. Check out the screen shots to knock your socks off on what it can do!

GIMP - Not terribly pleased with some of the features or lack thereof (i,e, you need a tutorial to learn to draw a simple box - really!) but it does great stuff and it has promise. I mainly use it to adjust levels, crop, and convert image formats. Like most highly developed open source applications, it supports just about anything.

Quanta Plus - This is the odd case of a superior web development environment languishing while waiting for a version upgrade. Regardless of the pace of KDE4 tools development, Quanta 3.5 is an excellent web tool, it integrates the excellent KATE editor as well as many HTML tools, and finished it all with a great site development manager. Despite being more unwildy in Ubuntu it is still worth a serious look.

Meld Diff Viewer - While KDE's quantum plus is the bees knees for coding Gnome's Meld's diff utility is a great tool for directory/file comparison. Diff utilities will scan two files - or directory trees too as in Meld's case and highligh the differences. Meld offers great side-by side screens, with easy to follow comparison and click or edit ease of editing either source or target panes.

Gnome/Gedit - Wile I like KATE, Gnomes file manger along with GEDIT make life so much easier. I can do quick fixes on remote FTPs as if I were working on the file locally, that is slick.

IDLE - I haven't done much with Python yet but I like the Python Interpreter IDLE, lets me do on the fly calculations in the interpreter terminal, much more usable then a calculator widget.

OpenOffice.org - Replaces thos commercial Office programs for me, adds excellent drawing tools, can create PDFs on the fly (including fillable forms), and is rightly cross-platform and I can share it with my friends - bliss.

Scribus - High End DTP in open source. Has had a slow start but with 1.3.5 alot of the rough spots have been smoothed out, if you use the like of PageMaker, InDesign or Quark, take a look at Scribus.

Team Viewer - One of the few commercial tools - a remote desktop support that does not require complicated setup to connect. Has offered a free for non-commercial use and just recently a Linux version to go along with the Mac and Windows versions. My work bought a corporate license, probably one of the best purchases we have made.

PHPMyAdmin - Doing MYSql work with PHP or on a webhost and never heard of PHPMyAdmin? Drop what you are doing and check it out. While you should know the MySQL nuts and bolts PHPMyAdmin gives you the power tools to make life less tedious. There is also PHPPGAdmin for PostgreSQL, though somewhat different it looks just as invaluable.

Firebug on Mozilla Firefox - Im just getting into this with CSS, it is excellent for debugging webdesign.

Screen Grab for FireFox - Ever wanted to get an image of a web page as it looks on the browser, not what the printer makes of it? Screengrab is the answer even captures flash.

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