Free Software Part Two: Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat & Photoshop
Last time we talked about Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office. Following on from that we’re now going to take a look at two more productivity suites, Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Photoshop.
Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat
I’ve never much liked Acrobat Reader. I’ve found it slows systems to a crawl, especially on startup, nags you for endless updates and is constantly crashing browsers, printers and causing systems to freeze.
Imagine my delight when a friend of mine – who had previously been having a seemingly endless nightmare involving 20-odd XP machines running Acrobat 7 printing to a Canon copier and crashing on print each time – introduced me to the answer to all his, and my, prayers.
Foxit Reader is free to download and use, it’s as light as a feather and does exactly what it says on the tin, opens PDF files – no more, no less.
Maybe it’s just me, because I love this product so much, but it also seems to me that Foxit actually renders PDFs better and sharper than Acrobat does.
Cute PDF Writer, meanwhile, is a free PDF printer, very handy for if you want to convert files or documents of any sort to PDF.
Free Alternatives to Adobe Photoshop
The Gimp is a free, open source program for editing photos and images. Whilst being called “The Gimp” isn’t exactly a compliment where I come from, this program is actually quite cool. It might not be a Photoshop beater, but it certainly comes quite close. The inbuilt GIF animation function is also ideal for those seeking to create banners and animations in GIF format rather than Flash.
Aviary is free, web-based creative suite. The suite is an offshoot project of Worth 1000, a popular Photoshop contest website (with some amazing graphic work on show). Each of the different applications all have (somewhat Mozilla-like) bird-themed names, such as Phoenix, its own graphic editor, Raven, the online vector graphic editor and Myna, for editing audio tracks. Other projects include an upcoming Word Processor (could this be another Microsoft Office competitor?) and a video editor called Starling. The latter, in particular, intrigues me.
Coming next, some great free antivirus and anti-spyware programs.