Tip. Trick. Mod. » Misc

List of the best open source software applications

Ryan — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:29:36 +0000

There’s nothing new about the term “open source” as it relates to software – it’s been around for more than a decade now. However, as being a tad tech-suave has settled into the collective consciousness, the reliance on commercial software solutions is dropping daily.

Whereas the connotation initially was that open source projects were buggy and unstable (I mean, how could anything being worked on for free not be?), and commercial software was solid and trusted – over the last 10 years these ideas have changed – if not virtually reversed.

Though there is an “official definition” of what open source is; simply put, open source is any software or webware which has been released with its code available for review, modification, adaptation and improvement. Oh yeah, and it’s usually free.

Here is a list of what I feel to be the best or most notable open source applications:

Browsers / Mail / Office Suite

Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser, which is the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer. Firefox is a standards-compliant browser which uses the Gecko layout engine. It includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system. Its strongest feature, however, is that it can be infinitely expanded through countless additional add-ons created by third-party developers.

OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages (as of v3, it can even read MS Office’s Docx format). It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Mozilla Thunderbird: Like it’s browser cousin, Firefox, Thunderbird is free and open source. A full featured e-mail client, it easily replaces Microsoft’s Outlook Express, and through the use of add-ons, is quickly gaining ground on the power of MS Office’s Outlook

(see how to add full appointment/calendar functions to Thunderbird).

Google Chrome: Though quite new, Google’s open source entrance into the Internet browser market shows quite a bit of potential. It is lacking some of the slick add-ons that Firefox features, but it’s isolated sandbox and ground-up modern build make it a fast and secure alternative that is destined for great things down the road.

Multimedia / Audio / Video

Miro: Miro is a free open source application for watching channels of internet video (aka video podcasts and video rss). Miro is easy to use and offers full-screen viewing abilities. You simply “subscribe” to the video (or audio) podcast you want to watch and Miro will then automatically download the latest videos for skipless and stutter-free viewing. You can tell Miro to automatically download the newest videos, only download the ones you wish, and if you’re short on hard drive space you can specify how long the downloaded videos stay on your system before being cleaned up.

VLC Media Player: VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols – basically it can pretty much play whatever you throw at it. Additionally, it is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, Syllable, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS and Solaris, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads.

Audacity: Audacity is a free, easy-to-use cross-platform audio editor and recorder. You can use Audacity to record live audio; convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs; edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files; cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together; change the speed or pitch of a recording; and more. With the proliferation of home recording and podcasting, Audacity is a program that should be in everyone’s toolbox.

Songbird: Though still under “active” development, Songbird is a promising open source music player. Features included (or to be included) are library management, multi-language support, media importing, album art display, meta data management, customizable UI and automatic updates. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s a project to be watched.

MediaCoder: MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding.

HandBrake: HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter. Basically, it’ll rip any DVD (or DVD-like) source into an MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM. It also supports the ripping of subtitles (burned into the video).

Graphics / Design

GIMP: GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program that can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. Like it’s commercial counter-part, Photoshop, it is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.

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. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.), and it’s streamlined interface makes it easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Paint.net: An alternative to GIMP – or commercial apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor – Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It offers support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Blender: Blender is a full-featured open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems. I don’t know the first thing about 3D modeling, but one look at the Blender Gallery and it’s easy to tell this is an impressively powerful free program.

OS / Utilities / Misc

Ubuntu: Deriving its name from the Zulu word for “humanity”, Ubuntu is a free, open source, operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. Generally considered the most popular Linux distribution, and there are a lot of them, Ubuntu does pretty much everything your OS should – what can we say, it’s an OS, not inherently interesting. It’s decently pretty, damn simple to install and use, and has an extremely active community of users/developers.

Pidgin: Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. It supports [deep breath]: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, and Zephyr. About the only big IM it doesn’t cover is Skype, because Skype’s protocol isn’t open.

Filezilla: If you have reason to connect to a server via FTP, FileZilla is the FTP program of choice. The FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. It also supports drag and drop transfers, resumption of upload/download, configurable speed limits, keep-alive scripting and automatic upgrades.

7zip: A fantastic replacement to Windows’ default ZIP archiver, 7-Zip is open source software that offers a 2-10% compression increase over PKZip or WinZip. It also packs and unpacks 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR files; while also supporting the ability to unpack RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS files. Additionally it fully integrates with Windows and offers localizations for 69 languages.

You’ll notice that this list is entirely client-based software applications – no web apps. I’ve intentionally left that for part two – coming soon(ish).

Know some great open source applications that haven’t been mentioned here? Please share them in the comments below.

4 free online personal finance tools

Ryan — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:38:41 +0000

I’ve recently dug in and decided to add some method to the madness that is my finances.

Perhaps not unlike many of you, I’m quite clueless when it comes to financial planning. It, in the same way as exercise, is one of those things I know I should do, I put large amounts of effort into thinking about doing, but never actually get off my ass and do it.

Well, no more. I’m power walking my dog twice a day and am going to contemplate my stock portfolio, or lack thereof, the entire trip!

To balance my virtual checkbook (I’ve not had an actual checkbook in nearly a decade) I decided to turn to the wonderful Web 2.0 world and see if it had a solution for me. Here are four free services I found and my notes on each.

A couple things first – (a) I’m Canadian, so being able to add Canadian banks is a must. (b) I use Paypal quite a lot and so used that as a bit of a litmus test for the various services.

Geezeo (www.geezeo.com)

Summary: Of the four, I liked Geezeo (pronounced G-Z-O) the most. It seemed to offer the best combination of practical features with superfluous tools.

Allows for auto-updating of transactions from most US and Canadian banks, but doesn’t seem to offer connectivity outside of those two countries. However, you can upload an OFX file to import transaction histories and manually create accounts.
Because manual account creation is limited to the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) format, currently it can’t handle Paypal accounts, or any account that doesn’t export OFX format. Part of the blame goes to Paypal for not exporting to this format, and part goes to Quicken-creators Intuit for charging a licensing fee to financial institutions that use it – this is a big con for me as tracking Paypal is essential.
Geezeo’s budgeting tools look nice and are straight-forward.
Allows mobile access to your account.
Offers a system to create goals (both unique or community generated) and track progress by assigning the goal to an account or tag (ie. if “savings” equals or is higher than $6000, “3-month cushion goal” is reached). However, despite adding several goals, I couldn’t get them to display or access them after creation. Rather than having a page listing all your goals, the “My Goals” link oddly brings you to a sidebar module on the program’s dashboard. Promising in concept, but falls short in actually working.
Inline editing of transactions for quick adding of tags, categories, amounts, etc.

A Geezeo tour video with painfully mixed “background” music can be found here – if you’re able to hear half of what the screencast says over the music, you’re doing better than me.

Wesabe (www.wesabe.com)

Summary: Wesabe is similar to Geezeo in a lot of ways. Both focus heavily on offering social networking features such as “groups” and “tips”.

No auto-update from bank. To create an account you must download the transaction history from your bank and then upload it to Wesabe. Supports OFX, QFX, QIF, OFC file formats.
Slick graphs and charts show you where your money is coming from and going to right from the dashboard.
Doesn’t allow you to add individual transactions to your checking/saving accounts. Manual insertion of transactions is limited to “Cash Account” mode.
“Goals” system a bit clunky and confusing. I couldn’t get my goals to connect to tags and I couldn’t find a way to show the goal’s progress over multiple months.
No intuitive budgeting tools.
Inline editing of transactions for quick adding of tags, categories, amounts, etc.

Check out a video tour of Wesabe’s features.

Mint (www.mint.com)

Summary: Mint.com was the site that originally kicked off my exploration of free online personal finance tools. I stumbled upon Mint while getting some financial advice at The Motely Fool. Sadly Mint is only available to users of US-based financial institutions with no way to manually create accounts with downloaded financial data. The site looks sharp though, and if the tour is anything to judge by, when Mint finally does burst out of Île de America they’ll have a user in me.

Yodlee (www.yodlee.com)

Summary: My least favourite of the group. Whereas the others have focused on creating Web 2.0 Web app features (perhaps overly so), Yodlee’s Moneycenter looks very much like an online banking interface – which, fittingly, is the company’s core business.

Registration is stupid – no information is given about the program or its features. I had no choice but to sign up, just to find out if it was actually remotely the service I was looking for. And though registration allows you to choose one of a long list of countries, you MUST enter a valid US state and zip code. Clever, huh.
For what its worth, despite all the sites going to great lengths to tout their tight security measures, Yodlee really makes the user “feel” secure. Multiple security checks illustrate the site’s all business.
The site will automatically download financial information from a number of accounts – including my Canadian accounts and Paypal – however, I had nothing but problems with the results of the downloads. It would only download the current month’s transactions from my financial institution and only downloaded outgoing money from Paypal – additionally, wrongly indicating that I had a zero balance. This effectively ended my review of the site.

Conclusions

From my points above I feel that the sites have a little bit further to go before they replace their desktop counterparts. Online financial management is a service that virtually everyone can use – it’s not limited to if you like digital photography, blogging, sharing videos – so that the sites haven’t matured further than they have is a bit surprising, and I have to admit, a bit disappointing.

That said, they all (with the exception of Yodlee) show a lot of potential and will definitely be worth watching as they improve their features.

One thing that the sites will need to be careful to balance is the over-implementation of “web 2.0 features” such as “groups” “friends” etc. These are definitely interesting and appealing features, and I’m sure it’s them that are bringing in the venture capital and keeping the lights on. However, when it comes to personal finance services, basic intuitive features that allow the inexperienced (like myself) to quickly understand their money are key – way key.

While writing this I came across the following comment on the Consumerist. Just FYI:

Be aware that when you store information online, it can be accessed by the government with a subpoena rather than with a search warrant. This doesn’t matter to most people, and honestly they can get a lot of that information with subpoenas anyway by going directly to your financial institutions, but if you have any records that you don’t want the government grabbing, I’d recommend against storing your financial life online.

Adrift in the sea of technology

Ryan — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:44:38 +0000

So this is it – the launching of a new blog. I can’t seem to get the images of a sea-side farewell with a smashed bottle of Champagne lying on the ground out of my head.

Somewhat fitting perhaps, considering the high-tech ocean around us, and its penchant for driving us me to drink.

Jokes aside, this blog is birthed for that very reason – the sea of information looking to crush us with her digital waves. It seems I spend a solid portion of my day navigating the Web in search of ways to make navigating the Web more efficient. I load my computer with application upon application in hopes that one of them will speed it up or trim it down.

In short, I waste my time in a sometimes seemingly futile attempt to save time. And I don’t think I’m alone.

Tip. Trick. Mod. is a blog for folks like us. People who want to make all this technology start working for, not against, them.

Every day our writers will bring you practical tips, tricks and modifications that you can use to better your Web site, browsing experience, home computer, mobile phone or just your life in general.

Tip. Trick. Mod. is published by yours truly, Ryan McLaughlin, as well as Rick Martin – just two average guys that spend far too much time online and far too little of it being productive.

Though we also do our share of the writing, much of the content comes from much smarter Webizens than us. Bloggers from all walks of life. Young and old. Women and men. All size, shape, colour and creed. Because, lets face it, when it comes to the great ocean that is the ‘Modern World’, we can use all the help we can get.

So let us be your guides, your hunters, your tow to calmer waters. And by all means, if you can return the favour, drop us a line and let us know your tip, trick or mod.

After all – life’s about the customization.