Alternative Softwares

As my graduation from college happened, my license on using Microsoft softwares were expired. Currently, my college signed a MoU about licensing Microsoft softwares used by its students, lecturers, and staffs. Since I’m already graduated, so my license was automatically gone. After then, because I had no money (yet), I was thinking on finding alternatives for the softwares expired. I also wanna change the habit of using pirated software. So I was searching for some alternatives.

First of all, the most used softwares were Microsoft Office series. It includes documents writer, spreadsheet, and presentation tools. Luckily, some nice developer already develop an open source OpenOffice.org and AbiWord. OpenOffice.org already has documents writer, spreadsheet, and presentation tools included. But AbiWord was just documents writer (CMIIW).

Second of all, maybe not really important, Microsoft OneNote. It’s an organizer software. With it, you could write some notes, to-do list, arrange your schedule, and many things. In fact, this tool was awesome. The feature was outstanding and fun-to-use. Although couldn’t overcome the OneNote, EverNote was one of the alternatives I used. It has clipping features, to-do list, notes searching, and could be accessed using web, phone, or standard PC. Best of all, It provide free license with some limitations. But it’s worth to try.

Third of all, the image processing software called Adobe Photoshop. I admitted that I couldn’t use this software, but I still need a software to manipulate images. Talking about the alternatives, I could mention GIMP and Paint.NET. You could get both of them for free. Both of them were comparable to Adobe Photoshop.

Fourth of all, the vector drawing software. Most of the people were using CorelDRAW. Did it has alternative? Yes of course. I would mentioned Inkscape as the alternative. It has unique features that made it comparable and different from CorelDRAW. And the best thing, it’s an open source software (and lower requirement also).

Fifth of all, maybe not everybody use it, Macromedia Dreamweaver. This is an IDE for developing web application using (mainly) PHP. The alternative? Aptana Studio was one of them. This IDE based on Eclipse and provided features to develop web application easily. It already support PHP, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, Jaxer, and even Phyton. It also provided free license with limitation.

I think that’s all for me (for right now). What next? Maybe you have some alternatives to share? Why didn’t you tell me?

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