Top Best 50 Freeware For Design and Developing

Finding freeware for design and programming can be a hard task. Here there are 50 of the best. By using these programs, your projects will have a superior quality. Some of them will save you a big amount of time. Maybe you never thought in using some of them. But they will surprise you so much, that you won't be able to avoid testing them. 2D Graphics The Gimp, is a complete tool for photo retouching, designing and creating images. It has fantastic effects, filters, layers. It's a very well known freeware. DeepPaint, is an artistic painting program, similar to Corel Painter. You have tools for: oil, acrylic, chalk, watercolors... And also different canvas and fully editable brushes. Inkscape, a vector graphics editor, similar to Adobe Illustrator. It uses the SVG file format. It has shapes, text, cloning, gradients, ... ArtRage, is a beginner's program for artistic painting. Very easy. MegaPOV, Do you know POV? POV is a program that makes realistic images using a simple programming language (there are also modelers). This is a improved version of POV. ScreenHunter 5 Free, is an useful screen capturer. The best of this program is that once configured, you just have to press a key and all captures go to the folder you like. Hugin, is for doing a panorama image from photos. A panorama is an landscape image that repeats without no visible borders. It can be very useful for a website header. JR Screen Ruler, although this seems a simple tool, this is hard to find. It's a rule and very useful to center images, logos, compare sizes of graphics... Pixia, his original author was Isao Maruoka, and used it to make manga drawings. It has layers, editable brushes... ColorCop, is a color selector. You select with the eyedropper anywhere in the screen and you get the number of the color. You can copy it and you have the exact color you wanted. 3D Graphics Art of Illusion, despite the obvious difficulty of 3d modeling, this program is really intuitive and powerful. With this program you can do everything in a simple way. CBModelPro, is an organic modeling program. It has sketch based modeling and blobs. For now it's in free beta. Anim8or, you can not only model with this, but also render pics of your models and make videos of your animations. gCAD3D, a very hard to find tool. It's free CAD software for industrial design or architecture. Texture Generators Wood Worshop, makes seamless wood textures. Texture Processor, a tool for easy making seamless textures of all kinds, for websites or 3D. Very easy and can also make random textures. So even a person with no computer skills can get something interesting. Video CinePaint, a collection of video and image tools used by companies like Imageworks. It has been used in movies like Harry Potter, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Looney Toons, Showtime, Stuart Little, Planet of the Apes... FreeMorphing, turns an image into other and makes a video on that (morphing effect). CreaToon, is for making cartoon movies. Miro, is a video player that can play all known video formats. Jahshaka, a complete system for editing video in real time, making effects, sound, music... It's like a video studio in opensource. CamStudio, a simple tool that captures all the screen or a part to a video. It can save to many formats, and comes with a flash converter. Once configured you must only press a key to start and stop recording. Sound Mp3MyMp3 Recorder, can record all that sounds in your PC to a mp3 file. Anything that your sound card plays can be captured. It also has easy controls and it can use skins to alter its appearance. Free Mp3 Wma Converter, is a sound tool that can convert between all these formats: Mp3, Wma, Ogg, Aac, M4a, Ac3, Ape, Flac, Wav. From any of them to the others. Editors Cream, this is a version of a very famous text and code editor called Vim. Cream is an improved version of Vim, that has all the features of Vim but is easy to use. Kompozer, is another improved editor. In this case, it betters the NVU editor, that was for editing HTML and making web pages visually. It can also edit CSS styles. PSPad, very famous multi-language code editor. It has lots of plugins and add-ons. The most original feature is the text comparing showed in this screen: Netbeans IDE, a powerful Java editor that you can use for developing applications and websites. AbiWord, is like an easy version of Word. It's an opensource text editor that you just run and use. Notetab Light, a code editor which main feature is to have support for many computer languages, and a window where you can save pieces of code that you use very often. When you need them, you just click and they are pasted in the text window. Productivity Tools FreeMind, helps you to draw schemes of your ideas, ordering them so you can plan your designs, a web site structure, or anything. This is done through arrows, shapes and text, in a visual way. JR Directory Printer, prints a directory contents (names of files,etc) in a text file. RSSOwl, is a news feed reader, to subscribe to your favorite pages and be noticed when a new post or news is published. It also has a built-in browser, or can open the post in your favorite one. TaskCoach, a task manager. It is quite easy and more colorful than others. QuickRun, sometimes you use several programs that you open at once every day. For example, Freehand, Photoshop, and the web browser. Quickrun allows you to make list of programs. It creates a shortcut that you can place on your desktop, and it will open them all that for you when clicked. System Tools JKDefrag, JKDefragGUI, The first is a defragment utility for your hard drive in Windows 2000,2003,XP,Vista or X64. Although this program may look basic, it is the quickest and more reliable one. The second link is for having a graphical interface for your defragmenter. GAG, is a graphical boot manager. It's widely used and the easiest one to install and use, and it's much more safe to install than any other. 7-Zip, if you need a compressor this can compress to: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR. It can also decompress from: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS. Xplorer2 Lite, when you work with many files, you could work faster if Windows Explorer could have 2 windows instead of one, have "bookmarks" for your favorite folders, or customize all the buttons and leave only the most needed... All this and more is possible with Xplorer2 Lite. File Transfer FileZila, is for FTP,SFTP,and FTPS. This is: normal and secure file transfer between computers. This opensource program has become very famous and is widely used. JFtp, supports SMB, SFTP, NFS, HTTP. Its a Java program. Has a much simplified interface than FileZila. FreeSSHd Server, if you want to share files between computers in your home, and make it in a secure way so no one can spy your data. FreeSSHd is the easiest program you can use for this in Windows XP/Vista. WinSCP, is a Windows program for secure FTP. Again, has a very ease of use. Organizers DataCrow, is opensource. You can organize your data in different categories: programs, images, books, music. It has a visually appealing interface. TreeDBNotes Free, You will learn to use it in minutes. It's a note organizer that lists your data in tabbed tree views. You can give colors and icons to their names, and the text editor for your notes can have tables, images, colors, rich text... NeoMem, another opensource organizer. You can learn to use it very quickly. You can create your own categories and fields to fill, and give them an icon. It has no installer (just place in a folder) and it's very small, so you can take it on a USB drive to another PC easily. eSoftSerial Organizer, it's thought for these categories: demo software, multimedia, freeware, security (passwords). But you can add your own categories. Easy and appealing interface. You can also add images to the articles. SEONote, organizes notes and files. A very powerful application with many options. It may take a long time to learn to use it but allows a high customization. Calendars Sunbird, a calendar and events application build by Mozilla. It has a very easy interface and a clean appereance. Rainlendar, not only calendar, it is also an event reminder with alarms, and a "To Do" task list. It can be higly customized too with dozens of skins. -Emma Alvarez- © 2008 by Emma Alvarez. 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