"Free" software (properly named OpenSource) and other big name software replacement.
Sorry for being absent so long but you know how the life at the lab is. I am still working on that previously announced energy minimization post (I did mention that, didn't I?). In the meantime, I want to mention something else that has being going on in my mind...
Software, unavoidable now a days. Some is "free", some is cheap, some is expensive. In the old days when I was a misguided Windows user, I remember being thankful for websites such as CNET downloads for having a list of nice software products. I don't remember if the website was "better" then but certainly it was less cluttered. These days is easy to be lured by the "App Stores" and thing that anything is within reach costing a few bucks. Except the Big Name apps, of course.
In science we have to really on different software for a variety of reasons: instrument control, data acquisition and storage, databases, data visualization, etc. Sometimes Universities or Institutes themselves negotiate "bulk" licenses but more often than not is up to the lab personal to secure and manage licenses.
If you have followed my Molecular Visualization series you probably noticed that I didn't review any payed for software (except PyMol, I used to have a license). The reason is that, since I started using molecular visualized I have been restricted to what I (i.e. personally) could buy.
This is also the reason to move to *nix based OS. The scientific software options and availability for SGI and Linux were far more than for Windows. Back then I dabbled in the CLI because most home-brewed software for science was probably been developed with Fortran, sometimes C, and was distributed as compiled-it-yourself or Linux binaries. This, I think, has changed a lot. I have come across very few programs ONLY available for a single platform.
Office was always a thorn by my side since few people back them were moving to other document sharing format, although for non-editing needs PDFs were already more than enough. Other than that we had a single Microcal Origin 3 (not sure about the number but it ran on Windows 3.1) and a MSI Weblab license. That was it, to created PDFs we tracked down a free plugin for Windows, we used SPDBV viewer and Rasmol for most of our visualization.
Where I am heading with all this? Well, I got thinking about my hardware/software policies for when I establish my own laboratory. My first thought was to look into my Applications folder. Most of the software I used is free except for a few exceptions that can be divided in three categories:
Small utilities: Arrange, Cocktail, iProcrastinate, Knox and Little Snitch to name a few.
Science apps: Quantumsoft Profit, Papers and PyMol.
Design and Office apps: Word, Keynote, Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.
It should be obvious which apps are the most expensive here. Those are the ones I would like to find replacements. Their replacements don't have to be free but they have to be stable, very usable and able to do the same things I need them to do (that means they don't have to be a perfect exact replacement!).
I can go into details later but let me finish this post by pointing to a few apps that can replace Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.
Acorn, $50 bucks image editing, simple but powerful.
Inkscape, free vector graphics editor.
Picasa, free image organizer.
The latter two are Mac and PC so we have multi platform covered. Maybe for PC Photoshop Elements might be a good Windows alternative to Acorn ($70 after mail-in rebate as of this writing) and, a long long time ago, it used to include a plugin for PDF generation for Windows.
I haven't test these apps to the extent that I can recommend them to all but I'll be doing that for future posts.
Software, unavoidable now a days. Some is "free", some is cheap, some is expensive. In the old days when I was a misguided Windows user, I remember being thankful for websites such as CNET downloads for having a list of nice software products. I don't remember if the website was "better" then but certainly it was less cluttered. These days is easy to be lured by the "App Stores" and thing that anything is within reach costing a few bucks. Except the Big Name apps, of course.
In science we have to really on different software for a variety of reasons: instrument control, data acquisition and storage, databases, data visualization, etc. Sometimes Universities or Institutes themselves negotiate "bulk" licenses but more often than not is up to the lab personal to secure and manage licenses.
If you have followed my Molecular Visualization series you probably noticed that I didn't review any payed for software (except PyMol, I used to have a license). The reason is that, since I started using molecular visualized I have been restricted to what I (i.e. personally) could buy.
This is also the reason to move to *nix based OS. The scientific software options and availability for SGI and Linux were far more than for Windows. Back then I dabbled in the CLI because most home-brewed software for science was probably been developed with Fortran, sometimes C, and was distributed as compiled-it-yourself or Linux binaries. This, I think, has changed a lot. I have come across very few programs ONLY available for a single platform.
Office was always a thorn by my side since few people back them were moving to other document sharing format, although for non-editing needs PDFs were already more than enough. Other than that we had a single Microcal Origin 3 (not sure about the number but it ran on Windows 3.1) and a MSI Weblab license. That was it, to created PDFs we tracked down a free plugin for Windows, we used SPDBV viewer and Rasmol for most of our visualization.
Where I am heading with all this? Well, I got thinking about my hardware/software policies for when I establish my own laboratory. My first thought was to look into my Applications folder. Most of the software I used is free except for a few exceptions that can be divided in three categories:
Small utilities: Arrange, Cocktail, iProcrastinate, Knox and Little Snitch to name a few.
Science apps: Quantumsoft Profit, Papers and PyMol.
Design and Office apps: Word, Keynote, Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.
It should be obvious which apps are the most expensive here. Those are the ones I would like to find replacements. Their replacements don't have to be free but they have to be stable, very usable and able to do the same things I need them to do (that means they don't have to be a perfect exact replacement!).
I can go into details later but let me finish this post by pointing to a few apps that can replace Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.
Acorn, $50 bucks image editing, simple but powerful.
Inkscape, free vector graphics editor.
Picasa, free image organizer.
The latter two are Mac and PC so we have multi platform covered. Maybe for PC Photoshop Elements might be a good Windows alternative to Acorn ($70 after mail-in rebate as of this writing) and, a long long time ago, it used to include a plugin for PDF generation for Windows.
I haven't test these apps to the extent that I can recommend them to all but I'll be doing that for future posts.
Location:The lab
Comments
it's open source, quite well documented, and seems fairly powerful for most image tasks.
I think that in the medium to long term solutions similar to GIMP will work.
For now, there simple things (crop to specific dimentions and positions or convert to greyscale) that are better taken care by free software or "cheap" 5 dollar apps.
In my hands and setup, GIMP crashed frequently: -(
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