Free or Low Cost Quality Software
Software can be really expensive! Now that many software companies are moving towards a subscription model you could easily pay many hundreds of dollars a year to get what you need for basic computing tasks. So here is a list of free or low-cost pieces of software that are at least as good as the popular commercial products, and in some cases might be even better! I’ve included each of these because they are what I use to get my work done. I hope you find them useful too.
tjg
Graphics
Originally written by the NIH as a science oriented image editor, but it’s plug-in architecture has expanded its tool set markedly. It emphasizes function over form giving it a somewhat spartan interface, but it is very powerful!
Free
A free graphics editor. It offers a rich set of features and is widely used for both artistic and technical illustrations such as cartoons, clip art, logos, typography, diagramming and flowcharting. It uses vector graphics to allow for sharp printouts and renderings at unlimited resolution and is not bound to a fixed number of pixels like raster graphics. Similar to Adobe Illustrator.
Free
GIMP is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, converting between different image formats, and more specialized tasks.
Free to download, donations accepted
Seashore features advanced tools like multiple layers and alpha channel editing, alongside basic tools like gradients, textures, text (with subpixel rendering) and brushes. Based on GIMP, but it has a completely re-worked interface.
Free
Writing
Scrivener is a word-processing program and outliner designed for authors. Scrivener provides a management system for documents, notes and metadata. This allows the user to organize notes, concepts, research, and whole documents for easy access and reference.
Commercial
More than just a writing tool, this is a full office suite. The The writing and spreadsheet functions are very similar to Microsoft’s Office. If your use to Powerpoint the presentation tools might take some getting use to, but they work well once you get the hang of them.
All
Free
Audio/Video Utilities
Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder.
Free, accepts donations
VLC is an open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols
Free, accepts donations
Relatively simple, for a video editor, with lots of features and good help videos.
Mac/Windows
Free and commercial versions
Research
A note taking app, also great for web clippings, keeping track of PDF’s and capturing spur of the moment ideas.
Free and commercial versions
Web or desktop based application for organizing and sharing research papers and generating bibliographies with 2GB of free online storage to automatically back up and synchronize your library across desktop, web and mobile. Paid option increases storage limit. To be honest I haven’t found a single bibliography solution I like, but this is the best of a poor lot :(.
Also has web based version
Free and commercial versions
You may be able to use paid version for free with an educational e-mail
Publishing
Premier web publishing framework, can be used to create website, blog or app
Free
