Publishing

audacity

Audacity

Audacity is an user-friendly, free & open source audio editor. It is currently available for almost all operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and others. The software gets great reviews and ranks up there with some of the best in it's genre because of it's "clean interface, excellent features, and support for 32-bit floating-point audio" (and a great price - FREE! - if I may add). With Audacity, you can easily record/import audio, edit the files, add effects, and export to your desired file format.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a great free & open source alternative to expensive Adobe & Corel programs. It has similar capabilities to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. If you’ve ever thought about learning graphic design on your own, Inkscape is the program to have. It not only has a full range professional features, but it’s extensive user documentation & multitude of tutorials available online will never let you get lost.

ImageSizer

ImageSizer is one of the easiest photo tools I've used in a long time. It serves a simple purpose of batch resizing your pictures and then either saving them in a folder or compressing to a .zip file. So simple, yet so useful.

Pencil

Ever feel like creating a great animation or drawing, but don't have Adobe Flash or Illustrator? Enter Pencil, the free open source animation tool.

Gimp

GIMP means GNU Image Manipulation Program. It was first released in 1996 by two students from Berkeley University and it has been getting better and more widely used ever since. It offers all the basic and many of the advanced features of applications like Adobe Photoshop: layers, channels, paths, different painting tools, etc. Download the free application from www.gimp.org.