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...

After a long silence I'm back. Since I've landed my new lecturer role I have been busy creating Schemes of Work, Lesson Plans and researching ways to increase resources for students so they may have a better learning experience. In fact, it is the former of the items that this article relates to. The first obvious question is why? Well, the college that I am in provides tuition for international students, who have given up a lot to come here and study. Many of these students are struggling to find work to support themselves during their studies, so if they require resources "free" is a keyword. These type of resources, that I refer to here, are mostly concerned with software. So let's get started. OpenOffice.org Students will be using Writer for all their courses, Calc for subjects relating to maths, economics, accounting, etc, Impress for subjects that require students to present. There are a number of reasons for selecting this application: It is open sourc...

OK. It does sound like a bit of a spoiler, but there I was trying to design my kitchen as I'm completely renovating my home. The problem: my mum's idea of a plan. The solution: Sweet Home 3D. Yes, this free program (which is similar to Google Sketchup) allows you to draw plans of your house or individual rooms on a two-dimensional plan and virtualise it on a three-dimensional plan. You can place various items on the 2D plan and move them around. So you can redesign your living room many times without breaking a sweat!! Check it out at www.sweethome3d.eu

You may remember, I previously mentioned Blender in reference to making 3D images and stuff. Well, the institute has released (around December last year, I think) an open source game to demonstrate their (and the software's) capabilities. This game is called Yo Frankie! as is released under the Creative Common license. Any budding game developer can freely download all the code and sprites, to see how a game is put together. A great way to learn and if you would like to support Blender (or just the game), you can purchase a DVD of the game from here . Not only that, they've only gone and made some quality cartoons to enjoy - Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny . They are really Pixar quality and can be downloaded in HD format. Or you can just watch Big Buck Bunny on YouTube . Who says you need expensive software to contend against the big boys in the industry.

As everyone would have gathered by now is that I am an open source freak. By the way I'm proud of it. Given this, I have been keenly following an app called Songbird for a while now. It is a cross-platform music player and library, which can handle playback of most music formats (think iTunes). Conveniently enough it is based on the technology that Firefox utilises (Mozilla-based software), giving it the ability of supporting plugins. These plugins range from supporting music from the iTunes store and syncing with your iPod as well as other mainstream portable media players. While I mentioned that it is like iTunes, it actually goes further than being a simple music player and library. Being a Mozilla-based app it comes with a built in web browser allowing you to roam the online music world. As you visit websites the app automatically lists available tunes giving the choice to listen to it (streaming) or to download it. Last but not least it can integrate with Last.fm, you c...

The open source image editor GIMP has reached a milestone release of version 2.6, with the Windows installer now available. This major release includes improvements on the user interface, tools and plugins. There are also some under the hood changes. Some of the new features are: The toolbox menubar has been removed and merged with the image window menubar. It is now possible to pan beyond the image border, making image window navigation much less constrained Improved free select tool Brush dynamics and more ... The Windows installer is available from here

Ever since Sun MicroSystems released the code to StarOffice, it kicked up a storm in the open source world and we saw the birth of OpenOffice (OOo). It is not about being open source, but this broke down the barriers of sharing documents and collaboration. Microsoft upped the ante with the recognition of collaboration for business and release a free service - Microsoft Office Live Workspace - which is currently in Beta. However, open source has given us a reason to shun the offerings from Microsoft and seek alternatives. In this article I intend on presenting this to you. Office Alternatives First off, what are the alternatives to Microsoft Office? The first choice is (obviously) OpenOffice (OOo). This application is a complete office suite to compete with Microsoft Office: Microsoft Word = OpenOffice Writer Microsoft Excel = OpenOffice Calc Microsoft Access = OpenOffice Base Microsoft PowerPoint = OpenOffice Impress Microsoft Visio = OpenOffice Draw (kind of, but is a welcome a...

So, it's getting close to midnight and I have 8 DVD's to duplicate for the next day. My arsenal comprised of a Mac equipped with a superdrive, a PC with a multi-format DVD burner and a PC with a DVD+RW drive. The blank discs were DVD-R and so beads of sweat were streaming down like a waterfall and I was didn't want to touch the Discs for fear of wiping out the data with my acids. Making things worse was that the version of Mac OS X that I had did not have any CD/DVD Burning software. No internet connection existed for the necessary update: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/may/1macosx.html Why did Apple leave out this ability in the first release? An answer has not been given but they did release an update for this (above link). Even so, with the update you are not provided with an effective solution. This works when you insert a blank disc and asked by the Operating System what you want to do with it. Selecting "Launch Finder" will present you with a new ...

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. Yes, 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 open source was the keyword (especially Windows). Here's a list of notable ones that I found: Achievo ( www.achievo.org ) BORG Calender ( 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 consultancy firms OpenWorkbench ( openworkbench.org ) Projectory ( projectory.sourceforge.net ...

Many people think that Open Source software is only for the home user. How wrong can they be? Very. I remember many years ago of how many charities and companies started to migrate to the Linux platform, in order to use open source software. The fundamental reason for this was that the software is free and the second reason was that there was not much open source software on the Windows operating system. Being free software, companies can reduce their overheads and not worry about the licensing restrictions that big companies impose. The big problem with commercial software is that there are so many features making them require higher spec machines. So you're stuck with your existing software or forced to upgrade your PC. By reading my previous posts you can tell that I am an Open Source advocate. But I really believe (among others) that Open Source software has left the bedroom a long time ago and you can really run a business using Open Source. Just don't forget to make a con...

In a previous Blog, I looked at freeware and open source software alternatives so that you can roll out your own version of Adobe Creative Suite 3. But did you think that was it for open source? Surely not!?! 3D Carrying on the theme of design, I have been asked by many for 3D modelling software. One way is subscribing to a magazine and wait for a cover edition of the high end apps like Alias Wavefront. The other is to get Blender . Available on Windows and Mac OS, this has been used in some commercial movies and is by far the most popular application. Did I mention that I really like it? Other alternatives are Art of Illusion (Win/Mac) and POV-Ray (Win/Mac). There is a fairly new application called Wings 3D (Win/Mac), which is in development but is already attracting a lot of attention. Video Editing This could have gone with the Adobe Creative Suite round up, but there is nothing to pit against Premiere. As promised I found some applications but have not had a chance to test them....

Oh yes, an update to an earlier post about getting hold of free or Open Source alternatives to Adobe Creative Suite. I actually forgot to mention about Adobe ImageReady, which gets bundled with Photoshop. There are a number of basic animation tools, but none provide flexibility similar to ImageReady. Fortunately, Open Source lovers are in for a surprise in the form of GIMP Animation Package . This link will take you to the Windows download site as I cannot find any references to this for the Mac OS. Chances are that it could be part of the Gimp.app download, but I haven't had time to inspect this. The Creative Suite package includes Adobe Bridge, which is a thumbnail viewer to convert images and open them up in any Adobe application for editing. No matter how they would try to trump up its name, it is still a thumbnail viewer. The best free application out there for this is IrfanView . Need I say more? Are there any pixel pushers out there, who prefer to simply draw their own pics?...

With the take over of Macromedia by Adobe, they have increased their arsenal of design packages, as well as the price. No-one can do pretty much without the popular package of Photoshop for their images, and Dreamweaver for websites, especially aspiring design students who do not have much money. Nevertheless, open source software has come to save the day. What is open source software? In a nutshell it is free software with its source-code freely available to those who would like to expand or improve on the software. To expand further, anyone who’s tinkered with the source code such as optimisation or additional functionality can resubmit it back to the holders and let others enjoy the fruits of your labour. I have trawled through the World Wide Web to find out how everyone can benefit from Open Source to build up their own studio and compete against Adobe Creative Suite. All this for free, apart from the cost of the Internet. I am planning to have a facility where you can purchase...