Nap

Okay there comes a time in every blogs life to fall asleep for a while. I think this is that time for me. I am really tired and there is nobody here to keep me awake. If I had just one person to keep me awake, one person to read me, one person to care, I might wake up. I plead you, if you are reading this send just one email to weeklyopensource@gmail.com
saying that you want me to stay awake, and that you promise to read me. Until that day I will be taking a nap.

Ajax Animator

Ajax animator is a web application made for creating animations. This project started out to try to be a web replacement for Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. Flash is a proprietary technology that is used for many web applications and games...i.e. Youtube, linerider, and annoying ads that say you have won a free apple ipod. It has continued to mature but now is only for creating animations. It is very sexy, and shows some promise. Check out the Homepage (Blog) here, and the application here.

Ajax Animator v 0.20



Another app that is closely related to Adobe Flash is Liveswif. Liveswif was released as shareware with a (free) lite version, and was later released as freeware. The most recent and final release was Liveswif 2.2. The developers were not profiting so they stopped developing and gave the source to the public. Now the community is working on the first open source version of Liveswif, now called Openswif. This software is not actively worked on, but there is huge potential for it. Please help keep this project going liveswifers.org.

Pidgin

Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messaging client. Pidgin used to go by the name Gaim, but due to copyright issues with AOL it was changed to Pidgin. With Pidgin you can connect to every major instant messaging service all within one program. For instance you can have a Yahoo messenger account, Aim account, Google-talk/Jabber account, and an IRC chatroom all running inside of this application at the same time. You can also have more than one account on the same protocol.

Check out pidgin at pidgin.im.



To request an open source application email weeklyopensource@gmail.com.

Firefox

Firefox is a web browser just like Internet Explorer (IE). You can go to webpages, you can check your email, you can book flights. It does everything internet explorer can do. Why would I use this, you might ask?

Firefox

• is much safer than IE
• is faster than IE
• its open source and gets updates much more often
• it is free
• it has thousands of addons and themes to download

Check out Firefox 3 at getfirefox.com.

Identi.ca

This is a new one, its a website. If you have ever heard of Twitter.com, it is modeled after it. It is essentially a micro-blogging service. What micro-blogging is basically updating what you are doing. For example you are hiking down by the local river, you can explain that in 140 characters or less.

"Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software Laconica tool." - from their website.

This means that the website is not really open source, but the software, laconica, is. It is built on PHP.

Check it out at identi.ca.

VLC

"VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network." Says the VLC website.

VLC is my favorite media player on both Windows and Linux. It plays any multimedia you can throw at it. It has an alright user interface. It has over 96 million downloads. If you are looking for a player that can do it all, VLC is definately worth a try. Check it out at videolan.org/vlc/.


Here it is running in Xp.

Open Office

Open Office is an office sweet the closely rivals Microsoft office. It can handle Microsoft office files and files can be output as Microsoft office files. It has most features that Microsoft office has, and more. It has Writer that resembles Word, Calc that resembles Excel, Impress that resembles PowerPoint, and many more applications. It uses Java so it is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Check it out at openoffice.org

Writer