Design Pitstop

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In my last Linux Command of the Day article, I covered how to install any software package in Linux. Shortly after, I found this post over at darxr.net. What a perfect chance to put your new skills to the test! (Yes, I know The GIMP is mentioned, and I previously said that it wasn’t enough for my needs. However, it is still a very powerful image editing tool that I use when I don’t need all the features of Photoshop)

F-Spot

F-Spot is a photo management tool that lets you import, touch-up, organize and share your digital photos. F-Spot supports a wide array of file types, including RAW support, so you can import your photos from just about any device. When importing your photos or images, you can tag each batch of images for easy searching and sorting later on.

It’s easy to edit your photos in F-Spot, you can rotate, crop, resize, and adjust red eye and adjust other color settings. You can easily roll back your changes with versioning support and your original photos are left intact.

Once you are ready to share your photos, F-Spot allows you to easily export to a wide range of places, including Flickr, PicasaWeb, Gallery, CD and there is also also a static HTML export option.

The GIMP

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP) can be used for everything from simple paint program to photo retouching, image composition and image authoring to batch image processing and conversion. The power of The GIMP lies in its extensible plug-in and extension system which allow you to script everything from the most basic task to highly complex image manipulations.

The GIMP comes with the usual full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush and Clone along with custom brushes and patterns. It also supports layers, a large range of filters for applying effects such as engrave, emboss, scratches, ripples and many more, animation tools and you can even run Photoshop plug-in filters.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. It supports shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping of objects. It can import from formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, SVG, Adobe Illustrator and others and exports SVG as well as other vector-based formats including DXF and of course PDF.

Some of the tools available include pencil, pen and calligraphy tools for drawing. Rectangle, ellipse, polygon and spiral shape tools and a text tool.
Inkscape is still a young project and is under active development, with new features being added often.

Gaim

Gaim is an instant messaging client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, and Zephyr messaging networks. With Gaim you can log into multiple accounts across different networks all from within the one client. Gaim has all the usual features of native clients including file transfer, away messages, and typing notification.

Gaim also has a plug-in system witch allows you to extend the application and add features such as encryption and graphical notifications and there are also a large range of themes available.

Songbird

Songbird is a digital jukebox built on the Mozilla XULRunner platform, the same platform that Firefox and Thunderbird are built upon and supports MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA. However Songbird is more than just a simple audio player it provides an alternitave to iTune and Windows Media including support for services like Odeo, SHOUTcast, Amazon and last.fm.

Similar to Firefox, there is an extension system which will allow people to develop their own extensions to plug-in to Songbird one of the most interesting of which is the iTunes importer.
Although Songbird is still in the early stages of developemnt, it promises to shake up the media player world in the just same way Firefox has the browser world.
That’s five great applications for the Linux desktop. What other great Linux applications can you think of?

[source: darxr.net]

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Tags: applications, linux, open source

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