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Shareware and Free Software
Web Tools
Graphics, animation and Image manipulation
Concept mapping
Programming
Typing Tutors
Sound and Music Editors
Utilities
Video & Multimedia
Other Software
Other software collections
Web tools
This is a fully functioning HTML editor that's easy to use and will give you many of the functions of commercial editors. The features include the ability to preview your work within the program or in a browser. There are also tools to help you along the way, such as a Body Tag Editor.
- HTML-Kit
- Helps the programmer enter code, edit code, and check the code for errors. Includes so many options, like spell check, PHP menus, CSS menus, color code picking, built-in FTP utility, code preview screen, Tidy code checker utility, syntax colorization, and tons more. If you create web pages by writing your own code this is an excellent tool.
This fantastic little program features a eyedrop color picker, where you can pick any color from your screen. You can convert RGB decimal values to HTML hexadecimal, convert hexadecimal to RGB decimal values. A magnifier control that will allow the user to magnify any part of the screen, average sampling instead of sampling just one pixel, a 3 by 3 or 5 by 5 area of pixels will be averaged to get a color. This is important when sampling colors from photographs because you can get closer to the color the human eye sees.
Buttonz and Tilez (2.7 Mb)
Buttonz & Tilez! includes 2 applications, "Buttonz!", which creates buttons of various shapes, and "Tilez!", which renders seamless textures. Buttonz! renders buttons with various bevel types and shapes from either an imported image, or using a procedural texture. Various text effects are included. Additionally, Buttonz! supports the batch rendering of multiple buttons from the same template, each having a different caption.
A great link checker for your (or any) website. Tell it the URL to start from and it will check all links from that page and work its way down. Simple reports that are useful as a web management tool.
Snitz is a complete ASP based bulletin board system (forum) that allows the user access to a friendly and intuitive interface.
Graphics, Animation and Image Manipulation
Gimp for Windows (free)
The GIMP is an Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. See the Fun Stuff page for links to a tutorial.
IrfanView - useful graphic viewer with extra features
Dia - free program for creating flow charts and diagramsby ByLight Technologies is an image viewer, screen capture and annotation application. It is also capable of creating slide shows, generating thumbnails, and creating muted backgrounds for web pages and stationery.
3D Blender is a free and fully functional 3D cross platform modelling, rendering and animation software package. It is used by many professionals and has similar features to 3D Studio Max.
Freeware character animation and 3D modeling software. An excellent introduction to 3D animation.
Free 3D modelling tool. Output in forms compatible with many other programs
Use any TrueType font on your system and instantly create a three-dimensional image, with a variety of effects. The wealth of options and direct manipulation interface allow you to create attractive logos quickly and easily.
OS : Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP
GIF Construction Set Professional (Shareware)
GIF Construction Set Professional is an application for creating animated and transparent GIF files for your web page. It features Animation Wizard to help you create animations in minutes, sophisticated special effects, text banners, LED signs, rotation, block management, AVI conversion, supercompression and a lot more.
Shareware evaluation copies of GIF Construction Set Professional are not crippled - you will be able to check out everything it does.
It comes with a manual that contains extensive information on graphic file formats.
XnView is a utility for viewing and converting graphic files. Import about 360 graphic file formats, export about 40 graphic file formats
Multipage TIFF, Animated GIF, Animated ICO support. Resize
Copy/Cut/Crop, adjust brightness, contrast...
WinMorph is a high performance morphing and warping software
Sqirlz Morph allows you to mark features on several images, and the program mixes the images so that each feature on one image moves smoothly to the corresponding feature on the other images - a technique widely used in the film industry.
Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you locate and organise all the photos on your computer, edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks, share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web.
Photo Freeware: A large collection of photo and image editing tools.
Concept Mapping
Concept mapping software - allows the saving of 30 or less objects or links.
The CmapTools program from the Institute for Human Machine Cognition, University of West Florida enables users to construct, navigate, share and critique knowledge models represented as concept maps. It allows users to construct their Cmaps in their personal computer, share them on servers (CmapServers) anywhere on the Internet, link their Cmaps to other Cmaps on servers, automatically create web pages of their concept maps on servers, edit their maps at the same time with other users on the network or internet, and search the web for information relevant to a concept map.
Programming
Klik and Play for Schools (free to education)
Klik & Play is an object orientated programming software that enables students to create their own computer games. Make sure you also download the comprehensive manual that can be found in the help section on the downloads page.
Game Maker is a free game creation program. You can program your own games using drag and drop facilities, or extend your games using Game Maker's built in programming language.
Scratch is a new programming language that lets you create your own interactive stories, games, music, and art.
Python® is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It offers strong support for integration with other languages.
Logo is an old, but still quite popular, programming environment.
The CSLU Toolkit (Centre for Spoken Language Unit of Oregon Health and Science University) is a comprehensive suite of tools to enable exploration, learning, and research into speech and human-computer interaction. It can be used by students from year 7 through to advanced university level.
Typing Tutors
Typing Tutor Software (free to education)
No bells or whistles, but an adequate (and free) touch typing program.
- Tux Typing
- Typing practice games built around a penguin. Most appropriate for younger children.
Sound and Music
AudacityACID XPress is the free version of ACID, loop-based music creation software. While it is free it does have limited features. You can download sample music from the libraries below.
Free MP3 Jukebox player and media library organiser
Anvil Studio ™ is a free Windows XP/2000/ME/98/95 program designed for people who want to record music with MIDI and Audio equipment, compose music for MIDI and Audio equipment, Sequence music with MIDI equipment, or play with music using a computer and sound card.
JAZZ++ is a full featured, audio capable midi sequencer for Linux and Windows. JAZZ++ offers a lot of functions normally only found in expensive sequencer software,
Wavepad is the free version of WavePad Master's Edition. It is audio editing software lets you make and edit voice and other audio recordings. When editing audio you can cut, copy and paste parts of recordings and, if required, add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction.
Free Royalty Free Music Loops
http://www.flashkit.com/loops/
http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/free-music-resources.html
Free Sound Effects
http://www.stonewashed.net/sfx.html
Utilities
Chainsaw 2.0 (99 KB) (free)
Split files into smaller ones. Very simple drag and drop interface. Creates .bat file to put parts together again. Important: CHAINSAW cannot process whole directories nor hard disks, just files!
Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP
PowerArchiver is a fast and easy to use unzipping utility. With PowerArchiver you can create or unzip archives. ZIP, TAR, RAR, CAB, LHA, BHRAR, ARJ, ARC, ACE, ZOO, GZ and some other formats are supported by PowerArchiver. Other features such as converting file formats (for example: changing a ZIP file to CAB file) are included. Tools are also provided to repair corrupted ZIP files. Versions prior to 7.0 are freeware.
Eraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
GB-PVR is a fully featured Personal Video Recorder (PVR), allowing you to schedule TV recordings and view and pause live TV. In additional to this PVR functionality, it also acts as a media center allowing you to watch movies, listen to music, view pictures and listen to FM radio
Video & Multimedia
Photostory is a free download from Microsoft. It is a great way to turn digital photos into a multimedia story with movement, narration and background music.
Bink:
Bink allows conversion of video files from one format to another, and allows compression.
KA Video is a motion analysis tool which can be used to analyse humans in dance, sport, industry etc using AVI files from a video or DV camera.
a video capture/processing utility. Not a full-featured editor but good for fast linear operations over video. Mainly useful for AVI file manipulation.
VirtualDubMod is a unification of several popular modifications of the famous video editing software VirtualDub
Tool for DivX / XviD backup utility. With support of DVDs, MPEG2 (such as DVB captures and transport streams), MPEG1 sources along with AVI/DV sources
Other Software
LDraw is a free (for personal or education use) software package that enables you to build 3D LEGO models, create sets of building instructions and render models on the computer.
is a free program for generating cross stitch patterns from photos or other images.
Hot Potatoes (free to education users)
The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Requires a free registration process.
Quandary is an application for creating Web-based Action Mazes. An Action Maze is a kind of interactive case-study; the user is presented with a situation, and a number of choices as to a course of action to deal with it. On choosing one of the options, the resulting situation is then presented, again with a set of options. Working through this branching tree is like negotiating a maze, hence the name "Action Maze". Quandary is shareware. You can only make small mazes with the free version. You need to buy a licence if you want to use all the features.
Serif Software has a range of free tools for photo-editing, desktop publishing, website design, funky art and 3D worlds.
Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
Other software collections
These collections may be of use to teachers seeking software that is not included above.
GNU Win - collection of open source software for Windows
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Attribution should include the statement: "This has been adapted from a
resource originally created by Margaret Meijers at http://www.mindtools.tased.edu.au"