Although popular Adobe Creative Suite software or paid software as such are essential tools for web designers, not everyone can afford them or nor they need to buy it. Some of the free applications are really powerful, time-saving and gets the job done. In this article we have complied 40 best freeware and open source software for web designers.
This is first part of the freeware and open source software complication. The second part will have essential free windows software for web designers. Please note that GIMP, Pixelmator, Transmit or Cyberduck and popular software are excluded intentionally because there have been numerous post about them.
Image Editors and Utilities
1. ArtRage 2
The ArtRage 2 starter edition is free, it is a easy to use, stylish painting software. You can also access some tutorials on how to how use an create artwork with ArtRage.
2. Image Tricks
Image Tricks is a free application for editing and generating images. It uses Mac OS X Core Image filters that transform pictures to unimaginable extent and apply advanced visual effects.
3. ImageMagick
Although the name sounds like Image Magic, this is a totally different application. ImageMagick is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images.
4. Picasa for Mac
Picasa for windows was available for while. Now the mac user can also enjoy Picasa. Manage your photos in one place, and find photos you forgot you had,Eliminate scratches & blemishes, fix red-eye, crop and more.
5. Free Ruler
Free Ruler is a free screen ruler for Mac OS X. Very useful if you measuring the width of height of something such a logo or anything in your webpage. A horizontal and vertical ruler which can be used independently or simultaneously.Independent resizing of rulers, from 200 pixels to 5000 pixels in length.
6. OSX Image Resizer
Performs one simple task in a fast and easy to use way; resizing many of images quickly on your computer. The software allows you to resize a collection of images from 10 to 10,000+.
7. LiveQuartz
A simple and powerful photo editor for Leopard. LiveQuartz has all the essential tools: The drawing tools (brush, lines, rectangles, ovals), the duplication tool, the eraser tool, the new background eraser, the gradients, the layer moving arrow, the text tool, the CoreImage tool, the rectangle and lasso selections, the hand, and the magnifying glass.
8. ExifRenamer
ExifRenamer allows you to interactively control the renaming process. You can have a file preview and can add a prefix, suffix, change the name or can add a time difference:
9. Paintbrush
Open source free paint and Bitmap Image Editor for Mac OS X . It is a replacement for windows Paint application.
10. DrawBerry
With DrawBerry, you have all the possibilities the vectorial drawing offers you in a free, easy to use and powerful application. If you don’t need applications such Illustrator or Inkscape and you want to create some simple (or less simple) illustrations, DrawBerry is for you.
11. Pencil
Pencil is an animation/drawing software . It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source
12. blueMarin
An open source application for the digital photo workflow, the blueMarine project will provide you an all-in-one tool for managing your photos, from the shoot up to the archiving and beyond.
13. Seashore
Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing.
14. Colorate
Colorate is a utility for creation of harmonized color palettes and color schemes, aimed from hobbyist to professional designers.
15. Pixen
Pixen is an innovative graphics editor for the Mac. Pixen is like a very powerful MSPaint or a simpler, more agile Photoshop. And best of all.
16. Goldberg
Goldberg is a freeware image and movie viewer with image editing capabilities and support for applying QuickTime and other effects In my opinion there is not too many features to work with beside the QuickTIme effects.
17. Chocoflop
ChocoFlop allows you to edit your photos or design stuff using Apple’s CoreImage technology. It takes advantage of the power of your graphics card (GPU).
Text Editor and WYSIWYG Editors
18. Scribus
Scribus is an open-source program which has user-friendly interface. Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
19. CreaText
CreaText has got many functions which make creating websites easier, e.g. Tag Coloring, easy access to the Mac browsers, the change of special characters into HTML entities in realtime, an Insert menu with rapid access to all usual HTML commands, an HTML color chooser, drag & drop, and the possibility to setup HTML parameters when creating a new document.
20. Smultron
Previously Mentioned Smultron is on best open source text editor for Mac OSX. It works perfectly for a whole variety of needs – like web programming, script editing, making a to do list and so on.
21. Plain Text Editor
You miss a text editor able to open, edit and save plain text files? You want special features such as foreground and background colors? Text wrapping and unwrapping? Unlimited number of undo? Then Plain Text Editor is what you need!
22. NovoEdit
Very Simple plain text editor for many file formats including HTML, CSS, PHP and many more formats
22. TextForge
TextForge is a text editor for Mac OS X, written using the Cocoa API. Some features includes Spell checker, Customizable “Preview-in-Browser” system, Shows line count and position.
23. MonsterText
MonsterText is a donationware text editor/word processor for Mac OS X.
24.uEdit
uEdit is a simple plain text editor, with useful features.Debug HTML, PHP , Perl and Python code,
25. WPWriter
WPWriter is a simple HTML editor that is designed to assist you to write WordPress articles easily.Many of web designers run blogs where they publish post daily. This could come in really handy. WordPress has a built-in visual HTML editor, whose editing area is quite small and cannot be changed.
26.WebTide
WebTide text editor is a free text editor, designed to help web developers in creating fast and professional websites. It is also a programmer text editor. It supports HTML, PHP, CSS and many other scripting languages
27. WebCode
WebCode is a html source editor that assists the developer writing code. WebCode’s inserts system is fully customizeable, the built in inserts will place things like … around the selection. With the Command-B keyboard equivalent. You can add your own inserts, or modify the existing ones as you like.
28. Komodo Edit
Komodo Edit is a free, open source editor for Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, plus JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and XML, and template language.
29. XYLE Scope
This a must have software for web designers. Xyle scope is an elegant analysis tool for everyone interested in web standards. It’s like surfing the web with an X-ray view. Using Xyle scope you will deepen your understanding of XHTML and CSS, find out how your peers did it, and see your own work with fresh eyes.
30. HunAgurk
If you can get over the name HunAgruk is actually a free and easy to use html editor.
32. Aquamacs
An Editor for Text, HTML, LaTeX, C++, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, and more.
33. Tart
You can use the CSS Validator, Markup Validator and Feed Validator to validate your CSS, HTML and feeds, or you can test them all with Tart. Also Tart can validate local files, even when you’re offline, since it is a standalone application!!
34. Markup
Markup is a general purpose HTML utility. It replaces <, >, and & in text so that html markup characters will show up correctly in a web browser (without breaking the page). The color chooser allows users to get hex values for RGB colors, colors from the color picker, or to choose from one of the many named HTML colors in the color list.
34. Simple CSS
Simple CSS allows you to easily create Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) from scratch, and/or modify existing ones, using a familiar point-and-click interface.
FTP Softwares
35. CrossFTP
36. Classic FTP
37. XCaramba
38. Pure-FTPd
39. Glub Tech Secure FTP
40. OneButton FTP
Did we miss any of your favorite free software? Share it with everyone in comment.
Related posts:
- 7 Useful Tools for Web Designers on the Web
- All the Icons You will Ever Need Mac/PC/ Web Design
- Make the Best of Open Source: Web Designers and Everyone else- Part 1
- Make the Best of Open Source: Web Designers and Everyone else- Part 2
- 10+ Web Resources to Make Web Designers Life Easy
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