Since my last post on essential applications was rather well-received, and I’ve found a few dozen requests in my mailbox inquiring about my choice for web-based applications, I thought I’d share a few of the programs that I’ve found very useful over the past few months. I say, the past few months because I’m constantly trying out new applications, and often implementing ones for friends and clients that I subsequently find invaluable.
The following applications serve many different purposes: some are entirely personal, some are for educational uses, some are for collaborative documents and workspace, and some are just for fun. All of them, I have found essential at one time or another, and each one has helped me solve certain problems that arise in my work and life. Note that every single one of my installed applications is Open Source, and thus completely free. They are UNIX-based, and should work on both Linux and OS X. (You Windows users might be able to run some of these, if you are accustomed to installing and using environments like PHP, Perl, MySQL, ImageMagick, etc. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re probably going to experience some major pain and frustration if you try to install them.)
