EDge21 Freeware Festival - Jing

The last selection in the EDge21 Freeware Festival is the screen capture utility, Jing


Jing is free software that allows you to capture a picture of your screen or record video of screen activity then share that content by linking to or embedding it. You can also save the content to your desktop or copy/paste the screenshot.

Screen grabs can be annotated with text, highlighting, boxes, and arrows. You can capture onscreen action of any size up to full screen and with audio. Jing allows you to size and set the aspect ratio for your captures and screencasts.

Screen Capture Annotated with Jing

Your captures and screencasts can be uploaded to Jing's own sharing service, screencast.com, to Flickr, or to an FTP server for linking or embedding. You can also save to your computer as an image or video file, or copy captures to the clipboard for pasting.

30DC - Using Jing from eddale



Jing is available for both Mac OS X and Windows (MS .netFramework required). There is a Pro version of Jing that allows direct uploading to YouTube for $14.95/yr.

Jing comes from TechSmith, the same people who created SnagIt and Camtasia.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Jing's Latest Upgrade Finally Integrates Webcam (readwriteweb.com)
• Jing 2.1 adds Web cam, capturing heft (thaibrother.com)
• Camtasia screen recording app comes to the Mac (macworld.com)

EDge21 Freeware Festival - Audacity

Today's feature freeware is the cross-platform audio editor Audacity

Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Audacity was started ten years ago as part of a research project. Over time it developed into a general audio editor. More recently, other people began to contribute to the development. Today, Audacity is being developed by a team of volunteers under the open-source model.

Audacity Screenshot

You can use Audacity to:

• Record live audio
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs
• Edit MP3, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, or AIFF sound files
• Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording
• And more

Audacity Overview: Open Source Audio Editing Program by mikebogle

See a complete list of Audacity's features.

EDge21 Freeware Festival - Inkscape

Today's fabulous Freeware Festival selection is the vector graphics editor Inkscape

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Inkscape development began in late 2003 and, though still a work in progress, supports many advanced SVG features such as markers, clones, alpha blending, etc. Great care has been taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Inkscape screenshot

Users report successfully implementing Inkscape in a variety of very different projects such as web graphics, technical diagrams, icons, creative art, logos, and maps.

All transformations (including scaling and rotating) have keyboard shortcuts with consistent modifiers. The most common operations (such as transformations, zooming, z-order) have convenient one-key shortcuts.

Capabilities:

• Object creation
• Object manipulation
• Object styling
• Paths operations
• Text support
• Rendering
• Collaborative whiteboarding
• Extensibility

Inkscape in Action: Drawing with Inkscape

See an Inkscape basics tutorial - Introduction to Inkscape Graphics Editor - Part 2 by HotButteredIT

Link to Inkscape's Frequently Asked Questions

Inkscape is cross-platform and runs on Windows 2000+, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 35 Tutorials to create amazing Vector Graphics using Inkscape (web2list.com)
• Create Project Wiki: SVG Filter Effects in Inkscape (create.freedesktop.org)

EDge21 Freeware Festival - GIMP

Today's highlighted freeware is GIMP, a totally free alternative to Adobe Photoshop®


GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for tasks such as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.

Windows Screenshot

GIMP has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, a high quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, and more.

Mac OS X Screenshot

GIMP is extensible. It is designed to be supplemented with plug-ins and extensions to do almost anything. The scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Linux Screenshot

GIMP Features:

• Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
• powerful gradient editor and blend tool
• Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
• Editable text layers
• Layers and channels
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
• Foreground extraction tool
• Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections
• Transformable paths, transformable selections
• Quickmask to paint a selection
• Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
• Support for numerous file formats: bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
• Highly customizable interface
  

GIMP: Free Alternative to Photoshop, a video from Pollyticks.com



GIMP Frequently Asked Questions

Related articles by Zemanta

• Looking For a Good Photoshop Alternative? (computer-realm.net)

EDge21 Freeware Festival - Open/Neo Office

I'm know among my colleagues as the King of Freeware. The only commercial software I have installed on any of my computers is iWork on my Macs because I love Keynote so much.

I thought this week I'd share several of the best freeware applications available to encourage those of you who are still slaves to the man!

Today's featured applications are the free alternatives to Microsoft Office: OpenOffice and NeoOffice.

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers and is available in many languages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

By default, all your data is saved in an international open standard format, but it can also read and write files in other common office software formats including MS Office and MS Office 2007. A great feature is one-button PDF generation.

OpenOffice Writer Screenshot

OpenOffice Impress screenshot

Because OpenOffice is one piece of software, everything works consistently between applications. Even the help system is the same. Many people already have documents which have been created using other common office software. OpenOffice can open most of these files with a high degree of accuracy, making implementing OpenOffice very straightforward.

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications for Mac OS X built on the OpenOffice.org office suite. NeoOffice has integrated dozens of specific Mac features and sports a Mac-like UI. It can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office. NeoOffice offers better stability and more speed in the OS X environment than OpenOffice.

NeoOffice Calc screenshotSee a NeoOffice video demo

Like OpenOffice, NeoOffice is free to download and use.