My Top 5 Open Source Software Picks

As promised, I have compiled a list of open source software. After thinking about it for a few seconds and in an effort to not overwhelm anyone, I decided to only list those software items that I use on a daily basis at my job. This will demonstrate the real-world usability of these packages. It should be noted that all of the packages I am explaining below are available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS X.

OpenOffice.org – Think MS Office, only without the $500 price tag (not sure exactly what it costs). OpenOffice contains a word processing application equal to MS Word, a spreadsheet application equal to MS Excel, a presentation application equal to MS PowerPoint, a layout application similar to MS Publisher, and a database application that is almost on par with MS Access. In fact, the word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application is almost 100% compatible with MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, respectively. In the area of macros, I believe that StarBasic (comparable to VBA in MS Office) is capable of doing most common automated tasks. But for the average small business, I feel that OpenOffice can provide a superb alternative to MS Office.

GIMP – Adobe Photoshop has become an “industry standard” in the world of graphic design, be it for print design or web design. I should mention that of the commercial software companies out there, Adobe is one of my favorite. However, spending $1000 on a suite of software that I might or might not use every day is an investment I'm not ready to make, especially since I'm not that good at design. But the Open Source community has come through again and provided a tool that, in my mind, is 99% as capable as Photoshop for editing photos and creating pixel based artwork. It's the GIMP (which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program). The GIMP offers many tools for image manipulation and adjustment. Some of the more advanced ones are: image level and curve adjustment, Gaussian Blur and Unsharp Mask. It is easy for a novice computer user to get lost in the complexity of the GIMP. It is again my hope to post a tutorial on some of its basic functions.

Inkscape – Again, Adobe holds the market in vector graphics editor with their Adobe Illustrator software package. And again, the Open Source community has thrown a punch back at them with Inkscape. If you are unfamiliar with Adobe Illustrator, you might wonder what vector graphics is. A vector is a mathematical term for a line, thus vector graphics is artwork that is created through the use of lines. In vector graphics software packages, like Inkscape and Illustrator, lines can be given texture, shape, colors, and some other cool effects. The advantage to vector graphics is amazingly enough the same downfall of pixel based artwork (the GIMP does pixel based): the inability to make an image larger without losing quality. That is, you can take a piece of vector artwork and increase the size of it indefinitely. Therefore, vector graphics is extremely useful for printing artwork or when you need multiple sizes of the same piece of artwork. In all of these basic areas, I have found that Inkscape is very comparable to Illustrator.

Audacity – Most computers have a plug-in on their computer for a microphone, but I imagine that the majority of people don't use it. This might be because there was not an easy-to-use, inexpensive recording software package. Audacity is this software package. The Open Source community again came through and created a very robust software package that turns your computer onto a digital sound recorder. In the same way that you put a cassette tape in the recorder and it the record button, when you click the record button in Audacity it begins recording every sound your microphone picks up. When you are done recording, you can save your recording as a WAVE audio file or an MP3 audio file instead of fumbling with those tapes (you must some additional software to save as an MP3). A couple cool features of Audacity is the ability to do multi-track recordings and add special effects to your recordings. Audacity is very comparible to any audio recorder I have used that you have to pay money for.

OpenClipart – Unless you are a extremely creative artist (which I am not), if you want to add some flavor to a document or presentation you reach for a piece of clip art. OpenOffice, unlike MS Office, doesn't come with a complete clip art library. Don't worry, because again the Open Source community has come together to create an extensive library of vector based (Inkscape) and pixel based (GIMP) artwork. The library contains many categories with hundreds of pieces of clip art. If you want to place a piece of clip art directly into OpenOffice or whatever application you are using. If you want to tweek the artwork a little bit before you use it, you can open the vector based artwork in Inkscape and save it as a pixel based piece of clip art. This might seem confusing, but I plan to do a post on this vector-to-pixel conversion process.