Home Business IT Open Source Five cool open-source sleeper apps
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For a computer, software content is king. Programmable computers began the home computer revolution over 20 years ago. The modern revolution is Open Source software, giving immeasurable utility with no cost or risk. Sadly a lot goes under the radar but here are five sleeper apps really worth checking out.

Dia

While not new to the world, the GTK+ based diagram creation program called Dia will be new to many people.

In corporations, Microsoft’s Visio application is regalling many. This produces terrific network diagrams, business flow charts, mindmaps and all sorts of other diagrams which can be reduced to the interconnection of graphical blocks. As a presentation tool it’s up there with PowerPoint.

However, Visio costs – which makes sense; it’s a commercial app. But even those who shell out for the full Office 2007 Professional only get a Visio viewer bundled; you have to pay more for the Visio content creator itself.

By contrast, Dia – which openly admits to being inspired by Visio – is free to use, free to modify and free to distribute. Further, as well as Windows, it runs under Linux. Although the latest version is still presented as sub version 1 – namely 0.96.1 – this is a mature and stable product.

Dia’s built-in shape libraries are mostly technology oriented, with E-R and UML diagrams, flowcharts, network hierarchies and related object collections. Additional digital logic and CMOS shapes are also available elsewhere. Although the standard library is less-replete than Visio, this is not a significant burden for two reasons.

Firstly, the package has a well-defined method for importing new shapes, which are defined as XML files using a subset of SVG (a standard for scalable vector graphics), and secondly, the latest version can import VDX files from Visio. (The default Visio file format is .vsd, however Visio allows diagrams to be saved as XML, which creates .vdx files.) All this means that additional shape collections are easily created with a bit of creativity and in time I’d expect to see a larger library available as people submit their own contributions.

Downloads and documentation are all available on a Wiki site which includes the developer’s envisioned roadmap toward version 1.0.

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David M Williams

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David has been computing since 1984 where he instantly gravitated to the family Commodore 64. He completed a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from 1990 to 1992, commencing full-time employment as a systems analyst at the end of that year. Within two years, he returned to his alma mater, the University of Newcastle, as a UNIX systems manager. This was a crucial time for UNIX at the University with the advent of the World-Wide-Web and the decline of VMS. David moved on to a brief stint in consulting, before returning to the University as IT Manager in 1998. In 2001, he joined an international software company as Asia-Pacific troubleshooter, specialising in AIX, HP/UX, Solaris and database systems. Settling down in Newcastle, David then found niche roles delivering hard-core tech to the recruitment industry and presently is the Chief Information Officer for a national resources company where he particularly specialises in mergers and acquisitions and enterprise applications.

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