Okay, I re-found some things I should have been using for a long while. The first of which is a nice image manipulation program, The Gimp. I haven’t messed with it much, but Ian always raved about it, and I think in time I will grow to love it. I don’t know how much more powerful Photoshop is, but I don’t know if it would ever be worth the price they ask for it. The Gimp seems to be pretty powerful, so I can do some basics at first, and maybe be all spiffy and eventually learn to create interesting things and make my blog look truly my own.
The second program(s) would be OpenOffice. I have had versions of Microsoft Office on my computer for most of my life since college began… and I always hated how I had to have “student” editions or something, because the “real” Office cost 600 bucks or something. OpenOffice seems to be really nice, and it has (from what I can tell) most of the features that Microsoft Office has. It has it’s own versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, among others. One cool thing I noticed, is most of the programs in OOo have the ability to export files to PDF so you can have perfect renditions of your documents. Quite neat, imo.
The point of this post would simply be, if you are looking for nice alternatives to the insanely expensive programs out there, and are not Ian (who already knew of them long ago), then try out these free ones. It is amazing what open source can do. ^_^
2 comments:
You know, it is funny you felt like pointing me out in this one, since I am planning on buying Adobe's graphics suite this sememster. I have always loved the GIMP, but the farther I go in school, I see why people need a 'standard' in the industry. Just being part of the way through a class covering Photoshop, I can simply fly doing some things while it would take me a lot longer in the GIMP. Of course, I am learning things most home users would never do and therefore not care about. That being said, I can't wait for the 2.4 version to come out. Supposedly, the menu heirarchy will be more intuitive.
One of these days I need to give OpenOffice.org a serious try, I just don't really do any 'office' things on my computer.
Well you always were the one touting gimp back in the day... so I assumed you still loved it in some way. :)
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