Free Download A Day

It's been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes we can explain something in words until we're blue in the face–or blue in the fingers, if we're typing it–and still you see that blank stare coming back from your audience, meaning that they just didn't get it. Sometimes a simple diagram is all it takes to show the relationships between entities, or the flow of a process. You can try to draw that diagram on a paper napkin, or maybe you can take advantage of slightly more robust technology.

Dia is a free diagramming tool released under the GPL license. Reminiscent of Microsoft's Visio, Dia is aimed toward slightly less formal uses. Using the included objects, it's fairly straightforward to create flowcharts, network diagrams, and relationship maps. Users can add their own shapes as well. Dragging objects around the screen, adding connecting lines and arrows, aligning shapes, and formatting text will help you wipe that blank look off everyone's faces. You have taken them from confusion to comprehension in short order.

While documents are saved natively to a custom XML file, they can be exported to EPS, WMF, and PNG formats, as well as others, allowing for compatibility with other productivity tools.

Dia is available for Windows and Linux platforms.

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A polar bear is a Cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.

Not too many graphing jokes out there, but we've always liked that one. And speaking of graphing, we've found a great place to download almost every graphing format imaginable. Free Online Graph Paper has a huge collection of customizable graph and grid paper downloads, all available in PDF format. Ranging from plain vanilla graph paper to paper with only dots instead of lines, five-line music staves to accountant's ledger paper, to calligraphy and Chinese character guides. Many of the grids are customizable, allowing you to select colors, and even decide whether the heavier index lines should be every five lines or ten lines and so on.

All you need to do is to find the type of grid you're interested in, enter your specific details, and download the resulting PDF file. The author even says that if you need a type of grid that isn't already featured on the site, send him an email and he may give it a try.

Since all these grids are in PDF format, they're compatible with any system that supports an app to read the files, meaning that just about anybody can take advantage of them.

Download Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs

freeCAD is a basic 3-D CAD application, that allows you to try your hand at computer aided design without having to pay a fortune for the privilege. If you're planning to take on General Motors or Boeing, this is probably not the tool for you, but if you want a basic introduction to the electronic version of the drafting board and T-square, you can't beat this price.

freeCAD allows you to execute mechanical drawings, as you would expect a CAD app to do. In addition, you can also animate your work. If you design a cam shaft, you can make it rotate, and actuate a cam follower or rocker arm. With a bunch of example assemblies included, you should be able to get started quickly in creating and animating your own inventions. The publisher's website has an extensive set of video tutorials that walk you through the process of creating, fine-tuning, and animating your drawings.

freeCAD is available for Linux, MacOS, OS X, Windows, and several flavors of UNIX.

Download freeCAD

The next time you need clip art, turn to DailyClipArt.net: the site serves up free clip art for your personal and business projects. As the site's name implies, the collection grows daily: more beautiful, new clip art is added to the site each and every day. Categories include animal clip art, birthday and wedding clip art, images of sports, flowers, music, and more.

Users who want regular updates about additions to Daily Clip Art can keep up-to-date in two ways: with the site's newsletter or RSS feed. You can sign up for either here.

Get Free Clip Art at DailyClipArt.net

Computers are such a visual medium that your experience can be severely limited if you can't see what's on the screen. Whether because of limitations in your vision, or design choices made by a site’s webmaster, if you can’t see it, you can’t fully understand it.

Virtual Magnifying Glass does exactly what it sounds like: you can magnify sections of your screen to see just what is going on there. The magnifying lens follows your mouse around the display, so to zoom in on an area, you just point with your mouse and you’re there.

Users can adjust Virtual Magnifying Glass to work the way then need it to: the lens height and width can be adjusted, zoom can be set anywhere from 1x up to 20x, and the mouse scroll wheel can be used to zoom. Multiple displays are supported on several versions of Windows.

Virtual Magnifying Glass is available for Windows, Linux, and even FreeBSD.

Download Virtual Magnifying Glass

Wink is a screen capture application with a difference: you can save not just static screens, but movement onscreen as well. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words do you suppose a movie is worth?

Use Wink to to automate presentations, or to build tutorials that show your viewers what is actually happening on their screens. Mouse movements, mouse clicks, dropdowns–they’re all there. You can save your sessions as Flash movies, which makes it easy to use them for the web, or you can save them as standalone executables (.exe files) for local use on PCs. In addition, Wink also allows you to save your sessions as a series of .pdf files, making it easy to incorporate their content into printable documents as well. You can also record audio, and use your voiceovers to fully explain the action on-screen.

Wink is available for Windows and popular Linux distros as well.

Download Wink

Inkscape is a free, open-source vector graphics editor. Unlike with raster or “bitmapped” graphics, vector image elements can be resized with no loss in quality–no jagged edges. While apps like Photoshop are great with photos and bitmap images, tools like Inkscape or the commercially-available Illustrator or Corel Draw work better for more precise work, like technical drawings, especially where text is incorporated into images, and are vital in applications where images may be resized, as with logos.

Inkscape imports most bitmapped format files. It stores its images in files that conform to the W3C’s SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format, which is directly readable by many newer web browsers. Along with this native format, you can also save your work to .png files, guaranteeing access by all.

Along with the obvious price advantage, Inkscape has a much shallower learning curve than its shrink-wrapped peers. This means that you will be up and running, creating real work much sooner.

Inkscape is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, as complied packages, as well as source code for the adventurous.

Download Inkscape

Xara Xtreme is a graphics package that has been around for a long time. It has been running on Windows for at least ten years but was in existence even before that. In that time, it has established its reputation as being among the fastest graphics tools available. Under the hood, it's an object-oriented vector drawing program, but it handles photos and drawings with elegance and ease. The product literature claims that the package has pioneered many industry standards, such as vector anti-aliasing, first vector transparency, including graduated transparency. The latest versions contain such innovations as "real-time vector feathering and embedded JPEG". And, lest modesty should be imputed to the package's writers, it also has "the world's most efficient file storage and unrivalled performance" and is very easy to use. Marketing enthusiasm aside, the reviews available indicate that Xara Xtreme lives up to most of its hype and is a very solid value for the money.

Recognizing that there are worlds apart from Windows to conquer, the company is moving into the Linux and Mac platforms. At the end of 2005, it was announced that the program would be made available for Open Source development on those systems. The news "'went down a storm", says the site, and between March and May of 2006 there have been four successive downloads for Linux available. That indicates a lot of developer activity! The company has all the infrastructure in place for open-source development, from forums, mailing lists, and newsletters, right up to a complete development environment for those who don't have the appropriate system. (Information about Mac progress is available on the site).

This looks like a very exciting opportunity for software engineers and graphics users to have a hand in developing and improving an already excellent product, not to mention further freeing graphics users from the Windows universe.

Get Xara Xtreme

Children should be encouraged to experiment with computers and Tux Paint gives them just such an opportunity. This simple paint program allows little ones to experiment with colors and textures alongside a cute animated Linux penguin. Tux Paint supports more than 50 languages, and is perfect for schools and day care centers. The teacher tools prevent kids from printing 50 copies of their artwork. Your little one will have access to the program and nothing else — putting you at ease. Windows, Mac, and Linux users can enjoy this gem for free. If you are looking for a fun way to encourage creativity in your children, look no further than Tux Paint.

Get Tux Paint

If you’re serious about graphics modeling and animation — or just want to explore them without spending a fortune on software — then you need to take a look at Blender. This open-source program is packed full of features that will impress even graphic-lovin’ tech-gurus. The heart and soul of this application deals with 3D rendering — including meshes, textures, vectors, curves, and metaballs. If animation is more your thing, you can take advantage of the "IPO" system which allows you to work with motion tweening and traditional key frame methods. You can export files to TGA, JPG, PNG, and several other popular graphics file formats. At less than 10MB, Blender is a little graphics modeling program with a big heart.

Get Blender