15 free and open source tools for web designers / developers » Honeytech Blog

Who is web designer? Someone who specializes in graphic design?.What tools they all are found of ?

I’m  talking about the windows and mac users who generally use the Adobe products or illegally use the cracked software’s and never look in the free and open source world.If we talked ethically then we should discuss about the open source evangelisms.Might be you are interested to know about the scope of web designing and development in the arena of free and open source.Their are very vast amount of free and open source tools for designers.Here are the 15 best open source and professional tools of the web savvy designer:

1. Agave – Agave is one of the best solution for designers to feel the color scheme, contradicts colors, soft colors & all with a fabulous outlook.
   
2. NVU -  The open source replacement for Dreamweaver.You can Design, develop, and maintain professional websites and applications and yes its absolutely free.
   
   How to beginning A Project in NVU
   
3. Quanta – Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment.You can access the FAQ for further details.
   
4. Inkscape: The vector graphics application which may spell the end for Adobe Illustrator.
   
5. Blender -Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems.Do you know that Elephants Dream is the world’s first open movie, made solely with open source graphics software such as Blender.
   
6. GIMP: Gimp the open source replacement for Photoshop. (Mac, Linux, and Windows)
   
   Cnet.com also had some good reviews on the Gimp , one of them is as follows

   Pros: Defiently good for beginners and you create some very awesome looking images. Also very easy to use and enough effects tools to keep anyone happy. It’s like a baby version of Photoshop . A billion formats to choose from to save your image.

   Cons: No line/path making feature! Hard to get toolbars to stay in places. If you put the layers toolbar somewhere for instance, when you reopen it’s not there.

   Summary: Absorlutly brilliant. Fun, easy to use, simple (not as simple as ‘Paint’ ) , a brilliant peice of freeware!! Also comes in a portable version for your flashdrive. by tom_hack_i

7. Skencil – Skencil is a vector drawing application for illustrations and diagrams.It an open source artwork application that helps in making something clear or attractive.
   
8. Karbon14 – It is another scalable vector-based drawing application that’s part of the open source KOffice project.
   
9. Krita – Krita is another awesome painting and image-editing open source  software application for KOffice
   
10. Mozilla Composer : Composer is a free WYSIWYG editor provided by the Mozilla Organization.Please note that you need not to have any HTML coding knowledge for creating a website with Composer.
    
    Note:

    The Mozilla Suite is no longer supported by the Mozilla project

11. GraphicsMagick – GraphicsMagick may be used to resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image and save the result in the same or differing image format. Image processing operations are available from the command line, as well as through C, C++, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, or Windows COM programming interfaces
12. Bluefish: An HTML editor for programmers written using GTK, designed to save the experienced webmaster some keystrokes. (C) (GNU/Linux, Unix)
    
13. Amaya :Its an open source based W3C’s complete web browsing and authoring environment.Its basically  a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web
    
14. Cssed: A CSS editor featuring auto completion, syntax highlighting and validation. (C, C++) (Linux)
    
15. Pico -  from wikipedia
    

    Pico is a text editor for Unix and Unix-based computer systems. It is integrated with the Pine e-mail client, which was designed by the Office of Computing and Communications at the University of Washington

Note:Few alternatives to use the windows tools on the linux:

1. You can use VMWare with a virtual machine for Linux.
2. Wine is an open source software for running Windows applications on other operating systems.
3. Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows.Its basically different collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel in windows box.