Showing headlines posted by maryriley

You can capture video of all of the amazing things happening on your desktop with one of Linux’s many screencasting applications. These programs are perfect for creating demonstrations for blogs and tutorials, and for illustrating projects with more than just still images.

Backing up data can be difficult, especially when you only want to copy files that changed since the last backup. TimeVault is a backup utility for Ubuntu that addresses these problems.

Celtx is a media pre-production editor that allows you to easily create screenplays and storyboards for your next movie. You can use it to create a whole assortment of media, including theater, comics, advertising, and video games.

khtml2png is a helpful tool for capturing an image of a webpage with ease. It's nice to use because it will get the entire length of the site, no matter whether it is fully visible in the browser. And, it sure beats shell scripting Firefox to open on a different display and capturing an image with Imagemagick, which is a royal pain in the butt. I embed this application in PHP scripts to create web design roundups over at my other blog. I was able to capture 75 minimal web designs without much hassle.

Lately, I’ve had a tendency to make fun of the mainstream applications people use to develop websites, asserting my nerd supremacy my touting my love for superior applications. Nothing good comes out of applications like Dreamweaver and FrontPage, I say, except for buggy and ugly websites. I would post snide little comments on Reddit, making fun of bad design and telling people to use Textmate. Then, a more elite nerd than I came along and ruined it for me by suggesting I wasn’t good enough because I didn’t use Emacs.

Many designers who use Linux as their primary operating system tend to have a background in programming and development. Even though they are designers, they aren't as comfortable in GIMP or Inkscape as they are in Emacs or Nano. So, Cherrysave presents 5 CSS hacks to replace images and create things like rounded borders and tabs programmatically.

When Jenny Zhang needed a portfolio website to invigorate her job search, she turned to The Daily Ubuntu author Mary Riley to create the design. Mary built the entire website using completely free tools on Linux, including Bluefish, Kate, and frameworks like Prototype. Jenny is part of a whole slew of marketers and communicators who are turning to open-source applications to promote and build their sites.

Bluefish is a solid code editor for Linux, and it is a great way to develop websites for those who are new to markup and programming languages.

Basket allows you to organize and take notes through a clean, accessible interface. This program is a must-have for any Ubuntu user in college, and definitely beats shoving all of your notes into a text editor or word processor.

goplay is an interesting browser application that allows you to locate nifty packages for Debian-based distributions. It uses DebTags, the built-in descriptive categories used in the repositories, to locate new packages.

Frozen-Bubble has blissfully stolen hours and hours of my life with its addictive gameplay and flippin' awesome soundtrack. It's an easy game with a simple premise: shoot colors bubbles onto the game board in an attempt to match up three or more similarly colored bubbles. Doing so will cause them to fall from the board, taking connected bubbles with them. If you clear all of the bubbles, you move on to the next level. If the bubbles pile up and cover the entire screen, you lose the game and restart the entire level.

Agave is a color palette selection tool used to pick design layouts for desktop themes, web site designs, icon creation, and much more. It simplifies the process of choosing colors by generating a palette based on an initial color selection according to the selected rule and color set. Supported color sets include GNOME Icon, Tango Icon, Web-Safe, and Visibone.

SSHMenu is a panel applet for GNOME that allows users to connect to remote computers over SSH with a single click. The menu looks incredibly similar to the GNOME Applications menu, and it is fully customizable. The interface allows you to add seperators, submenus, and new entries really easy.

GnuCash is a personal finance and accounting application created to keep you crazy organized. It can do simple things like recording expenses and take care of register transactions, but it can also handle tracking bank accounts, income, and a slew of financial instruments and derivatives.

Ubuntu Tweak is a utility created to make it easier for users to configure and change a variety of system settings. You can use it to quickly adjust settings for GNOME Panel, Compiz, and Nautilus, along with some more advanced security settings.

VLC (VideoLan) is a cross-platform universial media player. It supports a variety of different inputs, including DVD, VCD, MPEG, AVI, WMV, MP4, and MOV. It has full subtitle support, as well as built-in video filters. There are skins for VLC available at the developer website.

Sunbird is a calendar application built by the people at the Mozilla Foundation. It s entirely standalone: it doesn't require the bulk of another application to manage all of your appointments and events.

Do, is an application to find things on your system and quickly perform actions, similar to Quicksilver for OSX and GNOME Launch Box. It works on a variety of different desktop environments, including GNOME and KDE. Basically, all you need to do is to press Super + Space on your keyboard, and the Do dialog will open.

This Ubuntu application adds actions to the corners of the screen in GNOME, such as switching virtual desktops and controlling the volume. You can even enable the screensaver and control the screen brightness on your laptop.

Enter Audacious, a fork of the similarly-fated Beep Media Player. It works with Winamp Classic skins, satisfying my inner Microsoft fanboy. It can play back MP3 plus a slew of other formats. It's got a little bit of effects processing, some Last.FM support, and a whole lot of visualization plugins (like Paranormal!).