Web Worker Daily

Over on the OStatic blog we’ve rounded up 25 resources for free, open source applications, tutorials, and more.  Some of the citations are previous roundups themselves, so there are quite a lot of free tools to be found there. In these economic times, open source software applications are faring well, and some tools may especially appeal to web workers.

From the collection posted, here are six resources that may appeal to you, and you can find out more on them in the original post.

Video playback and encoding are increasingly being used on cutting-edge sites and blogs, and there are a lot of good open source tools in this area, as discussed here.  For Mac users, Simple Theora Encoder is a particularly easy-to-use video encoding tool–a favorite among several of the OStatic writers.

Two of the shortcomings that open source applications often have are minimal documentation and support. Especially when it comes to popular applications, though, the open source community does a good job of posting free tutorials for useful applications. You can find 16 of them here for GIMP (graphics), OpenOffice, virtually every Linux distribution, and more.

For Mac users, Mac Libre remains an unparalleled way to get a bushel of free, open source applications in one download. The download is fast and light enough that you can even store all the applications on a USB thumb drive. Editors choose the applications, which include Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Mozilla Sunbird–Portable Edition (calendars and tasks).

Most web developers are already pretty savvy about the many free tools–many of them open source–that are available to them. There are some lesser-used tools, though. Kompozer is a huge favorite with developers who are into CSS (cascading style sheets). Kompozer’s rendering engine uses Gecko, the same layout engine in Mozilla’s Firefox. It stands out for its very easy-to-use CSS editor, and strong WYSIWYG features.

Mozilla has recently updated its Thunderbird e-mail engine, which is a good adjunct to webmail. One of the strengths of Thunderbird is the galaxy of useful add-ons that are available for it (similar to Firefox extensions). Here you’ll find many top-notch add-on examples.

Are you looking to buy a netbook? These inexpensive, lightweight portable computers aren’t for everybody, but they’re currently outselling the iPhone. Here are some thoughts and a collection of links that you may find useful.

You can find much more of these resources, and lots of free, useful software, in the OStatic roundup.