Design tools that you need on a daily basis can be very expensive. If you just started your own business is not easy to set aside enough money to pay for all software licenses. But there are alternatives that are free and most people do not know them.
Explore
A lot of designers without any research buy most popular tools such as Photoshop and other Adobe tools, although never use all their capabilities. It is important to know that there are free applications that can be used for web design and which do not fall behind for expensive professional tools. Before you spend your money on a set of applications that never fully exploited, determine your requirements and search the Internet for available solutions.
My choice
Here I will mention only those applications that I use in my work, it does not mean that there are other alternatives that you can find a simple internet search. In my work I have tried many solutions but the following applications have proven to be the best.
OS
Ubuntu : Super-fast and great-looking, Ubuntu is a secure, intuitive operating system that powers desktops, servers, netbooks and laptops. Ubuntu is, and always will be, absolutely free.
Image Manipulation
GIMP : 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 has 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. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted. GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X.
IDE for coding
Geany : Geany is a small and lightweight Integrated Development Environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. Geany is known to run under Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS X, AIX v5.3, Solaris Express and Windows. More generally, it should run on every platform, which is supported by the GTK libraries. Only the Windows port of Geany is missing some features.
FTP client and server
Filezilla : FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.
Testing your site on local PC ( Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl … )
XAMPP : XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start. At the moment there are four XAMPP distributions: XAMPP for Linux, XAMPP for Windows, XAMPP for Mac OS X and XAMPP for Solaris.
Video editor
OpenShot : OpenShot is free non-linear video editor for Linux. OpenShot’s Features include: Support for many video, audio, and image formats (based on FFmpeg), gnome integration (drag and drop support), multiple tracks, clip resizing, trimming, snapping, and cutting, video transitions with real-time previews, compositing, image overlays, watermarks, title templates, title creation, SVG friendly, to create and include titles and credits … and more.
Conclusion
Hope this article was helpfull and that you found some new interesting app which is free and usefull for your work.
