Editor/Player/Viewer:
- Open Office: I used to only exploit Writer as a replacement for Word, now I even see myself doing presentation stuff using Impress (although I rarely used powerpoint at all), Math, and next target will be Calc as an Excel replacement!
- jEdit: although originally meant for developer with syntax color highlighting... this is a great and lean txt editor written in Java and a very good notepad replacement.
- freeMind: a great mind-mapping tool. Warning, its multi-purposes usage can become addictive!
- yEd: I'm often using this Graph Editor at work to create some hierarchical-based or tree-based graphing. It has a few glitches but well compensated by its simplicity of use.
- Gimp: I don't have the patience and talent to do any photo/picture edition, however this one came in handy a few times...
- VLC: simply the best media player around. With its independence of systems codecs, it supports merely all video & audio encoding format. It now finally reached release 1.0, so to be downloaded before it gets acquired!
Misc tools:
- KeePass: a password manager, with this you will only need to remember a unique password: the Master Password!
- Avg: a free anti-virus...although this one does not come from open source.
- WinSCP: a ftp/sftp client.
- jZip: alternative to winzip or winrar.
Internet:
- Firefox and all its add-ins: been a while since this needed introduction!
- Rssowl: supports RSS, RDF and Atom newsfeed
- Twiki: a nice and easy to install stand-alone Wiki.
- Plucker: a great tool for my palm to read Web content and e-book offline on the train (not open source)!
- Miro: I hooked up my old PC into my TV with HDMI at home. My kids can now enjoy exciting, interesting and fun content from Internet (yes obviously this needs some form of supervision)
- Thunderbird: another good Mozilla application !
Development and database:
- Eclipse: don't use it more directly since I don't code much anymore, however its pervasiveness is such that you end-up using it indirectly elsewhere (e.g. Talend, Pentaho, Websphere studio, BIRT, SAS...)
- StarUML: Without going overboard with reverse-engineering and code generation, I like this one to create some UML-type diagram ... can even be used to get quick ERD!
- SQuirreL SQL: a good alternative to the too famous TOAD... which is limited only to Oracle. Also has a nice Tabbing capacity for your query result (a parallel with what distinguished for a long time Firefox from IE). You just need to avoid trying to cache all DB schema objects from a big Oracle datawarehouse!
- Apache Derby or any of its reincarnation... very useful when you need a small footprint DB for some SQL prototyping.
BI and Data mining tools:
- Pentaho: these guys have looked around and bundle the best open source projects to offer a full BI platform. Their original concept is that the platform is more geared toward Process and Workflow concept than other traditional BI solution.
- Weka: the Java-based data mining originating from the University of Waikato and now integrated into the Pentaho platform.
- Yale (now known as RapidMiner): A more commercial approach has now been adopted as suggested by its new Rapid-I branding, however a community offer is still offered.
- Talend: The ETL/ELT open source offer now associated with JasperSoft.
Martin
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