Open Source Living is a great place to find some of the web’s best open source software. There is a lot of really high quality open source (aka free) software on the web these days. If there is a software package you’ve been thinking of purchasing, I’m sure you will find a great free replacement at this site.
If you’ve ever had to install PHP from source on Mac OSX, two of the dependencies you’ve likely come across are libpng and libjpg. Ethan Tira-Thompson has created a universal binary installer for both of these libraries to make them easier to install. You could also grab these from Darwin Ports or Fink, but the installer is easier!
It looks like the Aptana: project is now offering their Aptana IDE with Adobe AIR support. It provides an integrated development environment for creating Adobe AIR (nee Apollo) applications. Flex developers should not get too excited as it looks like this project is targeted towards HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, and CSS developers, enabling them to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIA’s) to the desktop. From what I can see this is not a replacement for Flex Builder - rather a way to make it easier to deploy classic web applications to the desktop.
One of the most popular posts on this blog is my instructions on how to upload to Flickr from Picassa, Google’s excellent image management application. Looks like my hack is no longer relevant (thank goodness) as a Flickr upload plugin for Picasa is now available!
Simon Willison offers a list of Six cool things you can build with OpenID. There sure is a lot of real positive buzz with regards to OpenID. I am really looking forward to being able to use my OpenID account with more and more services. I currently have way to many proprietary accounts and way to many web sites. Having a unified identity that I can use at multiple sites is very appealing.
VideoLAN Player has just been updated to version 0.8.6. A couple of very cool features have been added like codec support for Windows Media Video 9 and Flash Video, a Fullscreen controller and if your a Mac user, it now supports the Apple Remote. VLC is the only video player I use. It pretty much plays anything I can throw at it and it is free and open source!
activeCollab is a free open source project management and collaboration tool. This web-based application is very similar to 37 Signal’s Basecamp project management tool, but instead of a hosted service, activeCollab is an application you download and install on your web server. The tool requires PHP and MySQL, so should be easy to install on most hosting packages.
EasyEclipse is your one stop shop for many distributions of the popular open-source development IDE. The distributions are custom packaged with plugins that will allow you to work on a variety of programming projects.
This one is a bit old, but in the event that you missed it, you should really check out Measure Map’s open-source Date Slider. The slider is a Flash component that allows you to select a range of dates and present nice summary data based on the date range. Measure Map is a slick web-based analyitics application that is easy to install on virtually any blog.
Suso Technology Services is offering this great SSH Tutorial for any operating system that supports OpenSSH. SSH (or Secure Shell) allows you to securely connect to your computer over a TCP/IP connection and run commands on the remote computer using a command prompt or terminal window. You can even use SSH to transfer files from one computer to the other. SSH is truely a powerful and interesting technology to learn.
