okay, for those of you who have graduated from blogorrea and actually build REAL web sites, with shit that actually does different stuff (like researchzilla!) and need to control what goes on - manipulating digital images, whacking out fancy graphics, controlling the css, custom layout both on screen and within the code …BUT have little to no interest separating from money, or in investing in macromedia’s dreamweaver product, or flash, or - gulp! - a really expensive copy of photoshop or illustrator, then i thought i’d throw out some open source alternatives that you can download for free and toy around with (yeah, that’s how i waste my time, downloading shit i might not use regularly….and you can thank elGoog for now making that download a regular part of your life with their crappy -ass toolbar)

please note that the user interfaces aren’t as slick as the commercial products, but these are all quite useful nonetheless. actually, i’ve used all of their commercial brethren for years, though i’m particularly impressed with gimp ;)

http://www.gimp.org/ - and it runs on both windows and mac! (and others) - basically, this is an opensource version of photoshop, you can use it - for example - if you’re really ugly and want to make yourself fuzzier or smaller…same goes for your friends and family, you can just remove the people you don’t like from photos! neat! “The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.”

http://www.inkscape.org/ - also runs on mac - this is like adobe illustrator - “Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. ”

http://www.nvu.com/ - this is like macromedia dreamweaver, except for that it’s completely free and isn’t now owned by adobe - oh, and it also runs on mac (i know there are many mac users on here, so just wanted to bring that up for you)

http://powerbullet.com/ this will let you crank out simple flash movies for use in crappy, flash laden web sites or shitty and boring presentations to half-dead corporate audiences…please, use it alone, at home, and then spare us the burden of watching crappy flash animations of your dog eating his own puke from the floor.

you know what - and better yet - just work with some of the open source flash files at the open source flash project … or, if you’re feeling really, really geeky, then try assembling your own free macromedia flash compliant movies with these instructions (note that there are others already working on open source flash type software)

enjoy! hopefully i just save a bunch of you about 1,500 bucks - or alternatively, you just spent like 1,500 bucks on this crap from adobe and macromedia and you’re kicking yourself in the ass wondering what else you own that’s also already free…

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