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This Week's Quote
In order to succeed, your
desire for success should be
greater than your fear of
failure.
- Bill Cosby
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This Week's Glossary Pick
GUI
(Graphical User Interface)
Front-end that provides a user-friendly
interface, graphical in nature, that allows
user to perform actions through direct
manipulation of the graphical elements.
Where DOS based programs provided text-only
menus, Windows based programs
present graphical icons, visual indicators
and special graphical elements. |
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 Sometimes
You Don't Get What You Don't Pay For!
Playing on the old adage, "You Get What You
Pay For", which of course sarcastically
describes the quality, worthiness and
functionality of a product or service,
today's title throws a double negative into
that equation, so to speak. In the world of
Open Source, General Public License and
Freeware, you can find some very trusted and
popular applications for many computer
related tasks. Last week we talked about the most basic and
yet most essential tools required to build
and publish a web site. This week we
promised to suggest some popular
applications available free of charge.
We first talked about the need for an HTML
Editor. We are confident in
recommending Nvu (pronounced N-View) which
stands for new view. It provides a WYSIWYG
(What You See is What you Get) editing
platform. With the use of tabs you can
jump between WYSIWYG and HTML source
editing. There is support for forms, tables, and
templates and has built in FTP for
publishing within the program. Nvu is
available for Desktop
Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh.
Nvu is released under
the Mozilla Public License (MPL).
You'll find it on line at
http://www.nvudev.com
We also talked about needing a basic digital
image editor. Google has available
Picasa and is completely free. This
too is very popular. It's easy to use
and lets you modify images in the way of
cropping, resizing, compressing, colour
correction, special effects and so on.
Go to
http://picasa.google.com.
As a footnote, Google also offers a free
version of Google SketchUp. This is software that
lets you create, export and present 3D
imagery. Go to
http://sketchup.google.com.
Finally, when a separate or standalone FTP
program is required to upload your files to
the web server there are several great
programs to choose from. The ideal FTP
program is user-friendly, offering a well
organized user graphical interface in the form of a
file manager that lets the user see at a
glance the web files that reside on the
user's computer's local directories and the
files that reside on the web server's
directories, also identified as remote
directories. Two well known FTP
programs worth checking out are CoffeeCup
Free FTP at
http://www.coffeecup.com/free-ftp and
FileZilla on line at
http://filezilla-project.org.
Although these are great applications, this
is but a mere glance at the tip of the
iceberg. You can find dozens of
choices available for each application by
searching the Internet. |
