Free Software
Office Suites & Tools
LibreOffice - is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. Support and documentation is free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers. AbiWord - is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks. Apache OpenOffice - is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Scribus - brings professional page layout to Windows, Mac and Linux desktops with a combination of press-ready output and new approaches to page design. Underneath a modern and user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as colour separations, CMYK and Spot Colour support, ICC colour management, and versatile PDF creation. The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) - is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. This is mindmapping software taken to its logical conclusion. An excellent planning tool! Freemind - is a high productivity, high quality, mind-mapping tool, useful in schools for project planning and development. Firefox - is probably the best web-browser in the world. Tabs, extensions, pop-up blocking, themes and more. Thunderbird - is a powerful and versatile email client. Add the lightning extension to give you a powerful Calendar as well. |
Multimedia
Lightworks - is a professional video editing tool. It's been used by Oscar and Bafta winner, Tariq Anwar for his work on "The King's Speech".Previously a commercial package, the developers have taken it open-source. This is a serious industrial quality development. VLC Media Player - is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various ways of streaming audio and video. Audacity - is a powerful and versatile sound recording and effects application. Use it to record sounds, save them to help you revise, make your own ring tones, mp3’s etc. Songbird - is being developed as “a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music.” it promises to be the “Firefox of Media Players.” Hugin - with Hugin you can assemble a mosaic of photographs into a complete immersive panorama, stitch any series of overlapping pictures and much more. The results can be stunning! Mixxx - is free, open source DJ software that gives you everything you need to perform live mixes. Juice - If you want to listen to podcasts, this program is for you. Juice is a podcast receiver, allowing users to capture and listen to podcasts anytime, anywhere. Handbrake - is an open source DVD to MPEG-4 Convertor. InfraRecorder - is an open-source CD and DVD recording package. Use it to produce CD’s and DVD’s. Pencil - is a great application to produce a wide range of animations. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is straightforward and easy to use but can produce great results. |
Graphics
Inkscape - is an Open Source vector-graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X. 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. It as many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMPshop - is a modification of the free/open source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP. Paint.NET - is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. And it’s very good!! Blender - is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. Sweet Home 3D - is a free interior design application that helps you place your furniture on a house 2D plan, with a 3D preview. Use it to plan your dream house or rearrange your room without putting your back out! Art of Illusion - is a 3D modelling package. Its very easy to use and can be used to design objects for other packages like Sweet home 3D. |
Curriculum
Maths GeoGebra - is dynamic mathematics software for all levels of education that joins arithmetic, geometry, algebra and calculus. It offers multiple representations of objects in its graphics, algebra, and spreadsheet views that are all dynamically linked. Science and Geography Marble - is a geographical atlas and a virtual desktop globe which lets you quickly explore other places on our home planet. You can use Marble to look up places, to easily create maps, measure distances and to retrieve detail information about locations that you have just heard about in the news or on the Internet. The user interface is clean, simple and easy to use. OpenStreetMap - is a free editable map of the whole world. OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. |