Great FREE open source alternatives to help during the downturn

With everyone feeling the pinch at the moment many people want to do anything they can to help keep costs down.  Some might want to crop, resize, and alter images on their website, others want to design their adverts themselves and others might just want to tinker with code to become more involved

With this in mind we have created a list of 5 open source alternatives to software needed to tinker with images, code and documents

Aptana Studio instead of Dreamweaver
http://www.aptana.com/studio
Aptana Studio is a HTML and CSS design suite. It is also used by programmers who write in PHP, Ruby and others. It works very similarly to Dreamweaver in that it has both a design and code view, has syntax highlighting, comes with code snippets, and will also FTP files to your website for you. If you have used Dreamweaver in the past then Aptana would feel very familiar to you, with a few nice surprises (especially for those AJAX lovers out there).

GIMP instead of Photoshop
http://www.gimp.org/
GIMP is almost a ‘clone’ of Photoshop. It works in very similar way with its layers, selections, filters and painting tools. It can even read and write in Photoshop format, making it ultra compatible with your Photoshop using colleagues or clients. The software doesn’t feel quite as polished as Photoshop does, and its text manipulation is a little behind Photoshop’s. But, if you’re like the majority of people who use Photoshop to resize their images, reduce the colours, and maybe add the odd special effect to add a little extra to your websites, then the GIMP is definitely something you should try!

Inkscape instead of Illustrator
http://www.inkscape.org/
Inkscape is a vector drawing programs with features similar to that of Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. It has a very large feature set, including n-sided object creation, text effects, raster images, gradients, layers, opacity and paths. It can read and write in many formats, including XML, SVG and complies with W3C standards. It can also read AI and SVG files exported from Illustrator. A fine and free alternative.

OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office
http://www.openoffice.org/
Open Office.org (or OOo for short) is a direct replacement for Microsoft’s Office suite (excluding Outlook). It is a very mature project and they have very recently released version 3.1.0. You can use replacements for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. OOo can also read and write in any of the native file formats, as well as a few others (like PDF) which older versions of Office can’t. Being a Linux man myself in a predominantly Windows environment, I find OOo a life saver. This one comes highly recommended.

Mozilla Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express/Webmail
http://www.mozillamessaging.com
Mozilla Thunderbird is a feature packed mail program which allows you to organise, customise and secure your mails.  Each mail can be tagged, searched, secured and with so many personalisation options you can make it your own in now time.  And most importantly, its free.