Shahid Online - Tech Corner

A while back I mentioned about The GIMP being a worth open source alternative to Photoshop. Yes, it is very good and I have used it even for video production. There will be doubters who will still sing praises of Photoshop and not understand that they are encouraging software piracy. So on with the show of encouraging users to pick up free/open source alternatives. The one issue I have (which I consider a limitation) is native Mac OS support, or rather the lack of it. In order to use it you are required to install X11 to utilise this app. However, I did not find it stable and often it crashed out for me on my MacBook Pro quite regularly - a problem which I never faced when using on Linux or Windows. However, it has come to my attention that some Samaritans have saved the day for me and published McGIMP 2.8, which is GIMP 2.8 ported natively for Mac OS X. I have had the pleasure of playing around with it and using it in single window mode. Head over to Partha's Place ( www.pa...

Alright. Here's the deal. Who needs a feature bloated application when you know that you will not need it all and that it's possibly confusing? All hands shot up in my work place when it comes to project management. Some swear by using spreadsheets for everything including PM. Yet, there's the frustration with Microsoft Project. MS Project is an excellent tool but far too complicated for my liking. So I had to search around for project management tools and, as usual, open source was the keyword (especially Windows). Here's a list of notable ones that I found: Achievo ( www.achievo.org ) BORG Calende r ( borg-calendar.sourceforge.net ) - More of a PIM but it's got some nice project management features dotProject ( dotproject.net ) - While being ugly it uses a server backend for enterprise delivery making it a selling point for this package eHour ( www.ehour.nl ) - time management and project management with a slick interface, especially handy for consu...