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Thursday, May 26, 2011

Saving Pennies

One of my favourite Educational Technology Writers, Doug Johnson, wrote in his blog today:


"The following small sample of free computer-based software is useful and reliable for the average Joe or Josephine computer user. All programs run both on Macs and PCs and have good track records of reliability. For more tools, see the School Computing Wikis Best Free or Open Source Software.
  • Audacity allows the user to edit sound files.
  • Inkscape is a drawing program comparable to Illustrator.
  • OpenOffice has many of the same tools as Microsoft Office, and is compatible with Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
  • Scribus is desktop publishing software similar to Publisher.
  • TuxPaint works much like the childrens drawing program KidPix.
  • Moodle is an open source course management system.
  • Apache is the venerable webserver software."
Many genealogists are average Joes and Josphines who do not have buckets of cash to splash out on expensive computer applications.

In addition to Doug's suggestions I use the suite of Google products, Delicious for bookmarking, Picasa for organising my photos and Blogger and Wordpress for blogging. Although I use paid apps for for managing my genealogy data one can use the free Legacy Family Tree Genealogy Software 7.5 or  PAF 5.2.

Thanks, Doug, for reminding us that "Free is good".


3 comments:

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  2. FREE software that I like: PrintKey (screen capture), PDF995 (PDF generator that works nicely with Word), ParLoc2 (UK parish locator), Treepad (great little programme with multiple uses, as per Jan GOW's talk in March), PowerDesk (file manager) and Diskeeper Lite (free defragmenter - much better than the one that comes with Windows).

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  3. Brilliant work - I really love the designs and enjoyed reading your process. Thanks for sharing this. It's a great insight to what I am starting on at the moment too.
    All the best.


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