nasarik.com – one man's journey through life and design

As the array of applications every designer needs increases it is naturally becoming an expensive task to set yourself up ready for business or those home projects.  Fortunately in this day and age you don’t always have to pay, open source alternatives are poping up all over the place.

Below is my top five open source apps you may want to check out!

1. Gimp is an image manipulation program this is a good free alternative to the all powerful Adobe photoshop.
2. If you receive a large number of files from external sources you may find that the majority arrive in a Microsoft Office format, if you don’t want to fork out then try Open Office the power of Office for free.
3. FTP applications are everywhere but I am still waiting to find a free app to rival Filezilla, it’s lightweight and extremely simple to use.
4. Obviously with downloading, uploading and general filesharing the virus risk to your machine is a worry.  I have used a few recommended brand name apps in the past but none have performed as well as AVG free.
5. Finally, converting your video and audio files from those random filetypes is a pain but Super seems to tackle a wide variety of formats with few problems, the interface could be a little more pleasing but it does the job.

So that’s images, virus protection, file transfer, video/audio conversion and Office covered you may not like my suggested alternatives but just a few of these could dramatically reduce your software costs regardless of whether you are home or business PC user.