Linux Community Magazine

Open source applications and tools are a great alternative for web designers on a budget. There are plenty of open source applications that can help you tremendously as a web designer. Open source projects are great not only because of their price tag (free), but also because of the passionate community that typically forms around them.

Here is list of open source applications that can improve your task management and production processes.

Source Code and WYSIWYG Editors

Kompozer

KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYGweb page editing. KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

Amaya

Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.

Bluefish Editor

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites.

Quanta Plus

Quanta Plus is a robust web development IDE. It's highly-extensible and is able to run custom scripts. It has an excellent visual CSS editor that has code hints and auto-completion of syntax.

CSSED

Cssed is a GTK2 application for creating and maintainingCSS style sheet. It is a small editor that tries to ease the CSS editing. It features autocompletion, CSS syntax validation, selector wizard for complex rules, color wizard, box wizard and other useful features to help web developers to create and maintain CSS style sheets.

jEdit

jEdit is a programmer's text editor written in Java. It uses the Swing toolkit for the GUI and can be configured as a rather powerful IDE through the use of its plugin architecture. It can run on Mac, Windows and Linux and has syntax highlighting for HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript and many other languages.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Open Bexi HTML Builder

Open Bexi HTML Editor is a WYSIWYG HTML editor which allows you to create Web pages and generate HTML code from your browser without any HTML knowledge. It lets you create, update and remove HTML components. It is suitable for beginners and experts.

Aptana

Aptana is the leader in web application development, deployment and management solutions. RadRails is a complete web development environment for Ruby, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ERB, and more.

Selida

Selida is an HTML editor, a program that you make web pages with. There are thousands of HTML editors on the web, some are free and some are shareware. Selida packs high end features in a very intuitive interface, and has the bestprice of them all: It's free!

Graphics/Image Editors

GIMP

GIMP an impressively powerful and freely-distributable Adobe Photoshop-alternative open-source application for digital image composition, authoring, retouching and processing.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a vector graphics editor application. with capabilities similar to Adobe Illustrator.

krita

Krita is a painting and image-editing software application for KOffice. Krita is a creative sketching and painting application based on KOffice technology. Whether you want to create art paintings, cartoons, concept art or textures, Krita supports most graphics tablets out of the box.Dia

Dia is a GTK+ based diagram creation and flowcharts tool for GNU/Linux, Unix and Windows.

Kivio

Kivio is an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other KOffice applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more.

Skencil

Skencil is a vector drawing application that's great for illustrations and diagrams. You can save your compositions in EPS format - a format recognized by most vector-editing applications.

OpenOffice DrawOpenoffice Draw is powerful graphics package. DRAW - from a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams. With a maximum page size of 300cm by 300cm, DRAW is powerful tool for technical or general posters, etc

mtPaint

mtPaint is a painting program which Mark Tyler developed from scratch so he could easily create pixel art and manipulate digital photos.

FontForge

With the help of fontforge you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf, FON, NFNT) fonts, or edit existing ones. Also lets you convert one format to another. FontForge has support for many macintosh font formats.

ImageMagick

ImageMagick can read, convert and write images in a variety of formet. From it you can create, edit, and compose bitmap images.

Audio Editors

Ardour

Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound.

Audacity

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems.

Grip

Grip is a cd-player and cd-ripper for the Gnome desktop. It has the ripping capabilities of cdparanoia builtin, but can also use external rippers (such as cdda2wav).

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It's main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming.

Jokosher

Jokosher is a simple yet powerful multi-track studio. With it you can create and record music, podcasts and more, all from an integrated simple environment.

MusE

MusE is a MIDI/Audio sequencer with recording and editing capabilities written by Werner Schweer. MusE aims to be a complete multitrack virtual studio for Linux.

Rosegarden

Rosegarden is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment.

soundKonverter

soundKonverter is a frontend to various audio converters. The key features are Audio conversion, Replay Gain calculation, CD ripping.

Streamripper

Streamripper allows you to download an entire station of music. Many of these mp3 radio stations only play certain genres, so you can now download an entire collection of goa/trance music, an entire collection of jazz, punk rock, whatever you want.

Video Editors

AvideMUX

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEGfiles, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs.

Cinelerra

Cinelerra does primarily 3 main things: capturing, compositing, and editing audio and video with sample level accuracy. It's a seamless integration of audio, video, and still photos rarely experienced on a web server.

CinePaint

CinePaint is used to retouch feature films and in pro photography. CinePaint opens high fidelity image file formats such as DPX, 16-bit TIFF, and OpenEXR, and conventional formats like JPEG and PNG.

Jahshaka

Jahshaka is a video and film compositing, editing and special fx system that uses OpenGL & OpenML hardware rendering to give operators real time interactivity.

Kino

Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera.

LiVES

LiVES mixes realtime video performance and non-linear editing in one application. It will let you start editing and making video right away, without having to worry about formats, frame sizes, or framerates.

RecordMyDesktop

recordMyDesktop is a program that captures audio-video data of a linux desktop session, producing an ogg-encapsulated theora-vorbis file. recordMyDesktop tries to be as unobstrusive as possible by proccessing only regions of the screen that have changed.

Slideshow Creator

With Slideshow Creator and dvd-slideshow you can transform your pictures in a beautiful dvd-quality slide show rich of fashinating effects like ken burns, pan and animated transitions.

Ingex

Ingex is a suite of software applications designed to enable low-cost flexible tapeless television production.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is an intuitive and powerful multi-track video editor, including most recent video technologies. Our software is completely free, in all sences of the expression, as defined by the GNU foundation.

Helpful Utilities

HTML TIDY

HTML TIDY is a free, open source utility for fixing and optimizing HTML syntax.

Cyberduck

Cyberduck is an excellent open source FTP client for the Mac OS. It features an easy to use interface with quickly accessible bookmarks. Its built-in support for Mosso Cloud files and its built-in Amazon S3 browser makes it a top-notch app for web designers and web application developers.

FillZillaFileZilla is a fast FTP and SFTP client. It is cross-platform compatible (available for Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems) and has the ability to transfer files through numerous protocols.

winSCP

WinSCP is a Windows-only (S)FTP client for local to remote file transfers. It has a simple file manager to help you navigate and organize your files.

CamStudio

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs) .

Greenshort

GreenShot is a screenshot capture program that lets you make on-the-fly text and image edits immediately after you grab the image.

ZScreen

ZScreen is an open-source screen capture program for Microsoft Windows. It can upload screenshots, pictures, text & files and put the URL in your clipboard in a single keystroke.

Xournal

Xournal is an application for notetaking, sketching, keeping a journal using a stylus. It is free software (GNU GPL) and runs on Linux (recent distributions) and other GTK+/Gnome platforms.

Firebug

Firebug is an extremely useful and versatile web page debugging tool. You can use it to learn and explore your HTML and CSS markup.

GalleryGalleryyou can take greater command of your image repository. Gallery is a web-based image gallery that you can use to store, organize, and access image assets online.

iAutoblog the premier autoblogger software