[Transcription of the above video]
Hi and welcome to this quick CPD session. In this one we’re going to cover some open source software. So open source software is a way of developing and distributing software. Unlike commercial software that’s created by companies and cost money to obtain, such as Microsoft Office, open source software is created by volunteers and made available to people at no cost. This works because the code for the software is available to anyone with the required skills. They can cheque it, they can add to it and make changes and contribute those back on that. Commercial software that can only be updated by the company’s employees.
There’s a huge range of open source software available, ranging from extremely niche tools that are intended for maybe just one or two people, through to software that competes with and sometimes beats expensive commercial software. In fact, much of the Internet is built on open source software and wouldn’t exist without it. Open source software often also works on different operating systems, so if you’re using Windows and Mac OS then you can use familiar software when you’re moving between those.
Now, while Hallam provides a lot of software to staff and students, some open source software is really worth a look at because it’s of such high quality that it might offer new ways of working and alternative methods to do things that better suit the way that you and your students want to work. It might also solve a problem that isn’t commercially viable, so know the tools exist. So let’s have a look at some highlights.
Now when it comes to image editing, we’ve got a few tools. So critter is for digital painting essentially. So given the that kind of paint effect.
Whereas Inkscape is much more graphic designing and as you can see from that image, much more kind of line and vector art and paint Net is available on Windows.
It’s not technically open source because the code isn’t available for people, but it is free to use and is a very powerful though simple paint tool. So working with photos, photo manipulation, a bit like Photoshop, that kind of thing. So moving on to documents, we’ve got LibreOffice which is an alternative to Microsoft Office and it has all of the same tools.
So you’ve got a word processor which you can see here on screen. There’s also spreadsheet presentation tool, all that kind of stuff.
And we’ve also got Notepad++, which is available, and that’s it’s more for plain text files, but it’s really useful for people who do programming because it can highlight all of the the special syntax and a lot of different languages and make it much easier to actually programming. And finally, we’ve got here Scribus, and Scribus is a desktop publishing tool, so it’s useful for creating things like magazine layouts, posters, and things of that nature, Flyers.
Moving on to 3D tools now. First U we’ve got Freecad. So as the name suggests, this is a free computer aided design tool. So you can see here we’ve got a 3D model that’s being produced in here. It can also produce complex things that are really useful in areas like engineering, but it can also do 2D stuff. So you can use it for floor plans and things like that if you are say in architecture or something. And then we’ve got Blender. Blender is a very powerful tool used by commercial Hollywood 3D animation studios. It’s very complex, very powerful. So if you are kind of working in that area then Blender might be something that you’d want to look at, but it’s not a casual tool that most people will just want to pick up and use.
Moving on to video and audio production. First up, we’ve got Audacity. Audacity is a simple audio editor. It’s available on apps anywhere at Hallam, but you can also download it and make use of it on your own computers and things just by downloading. Because it is fully open source, it’s a very simple audio recorder and editor. So you can see there we’ve got the audio and we can then just make some tweaks so we can chop bits out, remove background noise, all that kind of stuff very easily in Audacity.
And we’ve got Musescore here. So this is a musical score system and you can put the notation in and it will play it back for you. It will produce the notation, so if you want to, if you need to produce Musical notation to say, give to an orchestra or choir or something, then Musescore can do that. But as I said, it can also actually play it back for you.
And we’ve got OBS Studio. OBS Studio stands for open Broadcast Software Studio, and it’s used by a lot of YouTube as professional Youtubers and professional streamers because it is essentially a studio in some fairly simple software. So it gives you a lot of the power that you would see in a lot of the tools and effects that you’d see in, say, news broadcast where you have station identity kind of things popping up chyrons with people’s names at the bottom, transitioning between different cameras. All that kind of stuff can be done through OBS Studio.
And finally, for video editing, we’ll have a look at KdenLive. So KdenLive, if you’re familiar with something like Adobe Premiere, is essentially the same thing. So it’s a video editor. You can see it works with multiple audio and video streams and is a very powerful tool if you need to do some high level video editing.
Operating systems now and The most famous open source operating system is Linux. A lot of the Internet runs on it. You can also download it and use it on your own hardware. And the good thing about Linux is that it generally works a lot better on older systems than the latest versions of Windows. So if you’ve got a laptop, for instance, or a computer that’s feeling a little bit tired and slow, then putting Linux on it can give it a new lease of life. And there’s a lot of open source software that is available for Linux as well.
Web browser. We’ve got Firefox. Firefox is an alternative to say, Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. And if you are uncomfortable with all of your data getting slurped up by say, Google or by Microsoft, then Firefox is an alternative because it’s a separate company. The things that you’re searching for all of that won’t get passed on to Google and won’t end up in your search results and things like that. So a useful tool to have around. And finally we’ll have a look at a few utilities.
So Keepass is a password manager. With this you can generate really strong passwords and have them auto filled in websites and you only have to remember one extremely strong password, so you could just have a full sentence as your password.
Just a key pass and then once you’ve opened up Keepass, all of your passwords are in there and you can easily get them into whichever websites you need. It will also generate pass really strong passwords for those sites as well. And you can get keepass for mobile devices like Android and iOS, so you can also access all of your websites from those devices as well with strong passwords.
VLC, the Videolan client, is an excellent media player, Very simple to look at, very simple functionality, but it will play just about anything. So if you’ve ever struggled to open a video file that you’ve found or been sent, then VLC probably come to help you out. So well worth looking at. And finally, Calibre. Calibre is a library tool for ebooks, so you can put thousands and thousands of ebooks into Calibre and manage them, search for it, put metadata in, all of that kind of stuff. But one of its most powerful features is that it will convert between different formats. So you could put, say, a PDF in here and have it converted into a file format to work on your Kindle, for instance.
So the good thing about these open source tools is that because they are available and the code is available, people can do a lot of things with them. And one of the things that’s happened is that people have taken them and packaged them up as portable apps for Windows. So if you’re a Windows user, you can download these portable apps and you can just run them essentially off a USB stick. So the advantage there is that you will have a USB stick with your files on it, but it’s also got all the software on it to work with those files as well. So everything is self-contained. You could take that USB drive, put it into another computer, and all of your files and all of your software to work in on those files is available and all the software set up in the way that you actually want it.
Up as well. So really powerful way of working if you move between a lot of different computers.
So that was a quick look at open source software and it’s definitely worth a look to see what’s available and see what could help you out. But we will be taking a deeper look at some of these software tools in future quick CPD sessions.
