Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

If you’re looking for a free graphics manipulation software to download, try Gimp. It’s an excellent retouching program lets you fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt and eliminate lens’ barrel distortion and vignetting; it offers a clone and healing tool for retouching photos as well as a perspective clone tool and a orthogonal clone tool. But it can also be used as a simple paint program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP also offers various input devices out of the box, like pressure and tilt sensitive tablets, but also a wide range of USB or MIDI controllers. The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend GIMP’s format capabilities with a plug-in.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

Features are:

* Painting
o Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
o Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
o Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
o Supports custom brushes and patterns
* System
o Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
o Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
* Advanced Manipulation
o Full alpha channel support
o Layers and channels
o Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
o Editable text layers
o Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
o Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
o Foreground extraction tool
o Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
o Transformable paths, transformable selections.
o Quickmask to paint a selection.
* Extensible
o A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
o Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
o Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
o Over 100 plug-ins already available
* Animation
o Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
o MNG support
o Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
* File Handling
o File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
o Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
o SVG path import/export

If you’re a professional, run a small business or you’re simply looking for free accounting software, you might want to give GnuCash a try.

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Download GnuCash here.

The interface is simple, but the software offers everything you’d expect from financial accounting software, like the ability to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. The site itself has in-depth tutorials and also glossaries for software and financial terms.

Features include:

* QIF/OFX/HBCI Import, Transaction Matching
* Reports, Graphs
* Scheduled Transactions
* Financial Calculations

* Double-Entry Accounting
* Stock/Bond/Mutual Fund Accounts
* Small-Business Accounting
* Customers, Vendors, Jobs,
Invoices, A/P, A/R

If it’s time to once again upgrade your latest word processor, spreadsheet or other office software, and you’re reluctant to spend hefty fees to do so, you may want to consider OpenOffice, the free and open office productivity suite. If you’re already using another office software package, OpenOffice will most likely be able to read these files. OpenOffice can be downloaded and used entirely free of any licence fees. It is released under the LGPL licence which means you may use it for any purpose – domestic, commercial, educational, public administration and install it on as many computers as you like.

If you have large documents on your site (incl. books), and you don’t want to make them available as a separate download, you could have them displayed in a browser instead. FlexPaper is an open source web based document viewer that uses Flash. It is delivered both as a stand alone flash application and as a Flex (SWC) library, so it can be integrated it into your application in different ways. Examples and use of FlexPaper.

Most of us don’t mind giving up a small part of our privacy for our personal protection (airport scanners), or a good deal (loyalty shopping programs). We even voluntarily sign up for social networking sites that track every move we make and then sell aggregate information to marketers. But what about all the times we’re on the web and are not really sure about what search and browsing activities our ISP, or other company or agency is tracking? (In repressed countries this becomes even more of an issue as one compromised e-mail can mean torture or death to the sender.)

Let’s be realistic: the only way to not be tracked in any way online is to not go on online at all. Actually, you’d better leave your computer turned off, because many applications and programs on your computer automatically check for software updates and also track and record meta data.

Tor is free software and an open network that claims to help you defend against a form of network surveillance that “threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships. It prevents your traffic from being analyzed by distributing your transactions over several places on the internet, so no single point can link you to your destination.” One of the ways Tor works is by sending your e-mails through several relays, so it’s impossible to find out where the e-mail originated and where it was meant to end up. Maybe not every ISP uses traffic monitoring services – do you know if yours does? Even if you think it doesn’t, it’s a good idea to never search for your social security number and name, or passwords with any personal info. And if you’re a Tor user, please let us know how the service is working for you and what you had to give up to use it. In other words, what are the pros and cons of using Tor?

More free security resources…

SimpleMachines’ SMF is a “free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes. Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board and with our unique SSI – or Server Side Includes – function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other.”

If you’d like to give a visual XML editor a try, you may like the free Vex editor. Vex provides a wordprocessor-like interface and is best suited for “document-style” XML documents such as XHTML and DocBook rather than “data-style” XML documents.

OK, the products on this site aren’t free, but many are available at a substantial discount, or for only a small administration fee. Choose from over 600 tech products that might be useful for your non-profit.

Techsoup.org offers all kinds of hardware, software, security products, hosted applications, credit card processing etc. Products on Techsoup are donated, or refurbished and are ‘provided by corporate and nonprofit technology partners.’ For example, we’ve recently spotted Norton Internet Security 2009 (CD) for $15, or Office Professional Plus 2007 (Includes Software Assurance) for $20. Not free, but a great deal!

NVU is an open source WYSIWYG HTML editor. This web authoring system is not as powerful as Dreamweaver, but it does a pretty good job. NVU also keeps your code neatly organized, unlike some other free web authoring programs.

Nobody denies that Adobe Photoshop is a great program but it’s pretty expensive. There are other graphics editing programs and one of them, the open source GIMP is sometimes called “Photoshop killer” because it is a real alternative to Photoshop.