I Have No Money and I Must Code
How many times have you been in this situation: you’re flat-ass broke after a gambling bender at the off-shore casino and you’ve already sold your children to the medical research lab at McGill, but you need to make a game. How are you going to produce all of the art assets, backgrounds musics, and fountains of gratuitous gore that modern video games demand with zero dollars in your software budget?
Once answer is to pirate the software. But i’ve long held the opinion that if you are a software developer who pirates other people’s software, Satan’s got a special circle of Hell reserved just for you.
Uh … no. i said “Satan.”
Enter AlternativeTo, a site that lists the software you want to buy but can’t afford, next to the software you’ve never heard of at a cost of “free”. Here are the options the site lists that i can personally vouch for:
- OpenOffice – a completely free answer to Microsoft Office, it includes a sort-of Word clone, kind of a Powerpoint thingy, an ersatz Excel spreadsheety thing, an ugly cliparty whatsit, and some kind of database-a-majig. i don’t know enough about databases to know what it replaces (MSSQL?) OpenOffice Write can even crank out Microsoft .doc files, which is a party – until someone sends you a .docx file, the format that i swear Microsoft cooked up just to mess with all of us OpenOffice users.
We run MS Office here at the UE Office, so we don’t lean on OpenOffice very heavily. But if i ever need to place inline images in my documents, i reach for Open Office Write, because unlike Word, it works properly.
- Dia – an alternative to Microsoft Visio, which i actually don’t recommend because it’s ugly as funk and doesn’t have the lovely sticky arrows that make Visio such a joy. But it also doesn’t have the ninety-three million dollar price tag that Visio carries. Mark was using LovelyCharts about a month ago. It’s an online flowcharter that looks very pretty – he gave it the thumbs-up.
- Audacity – an alternative to Adobe Soundbooth. There are a lot of free-ish sound tools out there, and they mostly stink. Sound technicians are usually very meticulous, technically-minded people, and their software interfaces reflect that: a million tiny dials all over the screen pepperd with scientific terminology like mhz, ohms and GYPO. Audacity was one of the few stand-outs for ease of use and sense-making. Though i still rue the day i lost my precious, beloved copy of CoolEdit Pro, the software Adobe bought and morphed into its bastard audio child Soundbooth.
Which is more dense: this interface, or the guy who designed it?
Is there anything on the AlternativeTo list that you can recommend from experience, or tell us to stay away from? Let us know!
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Great post. I’m with you man – lost my copy of CoolEdit Pro, used Audition for a long time, and then Adobe just ripped it out of the Production Studio Bundle (but put Flash in, so I can’t complain too much). Just starting to use SoundBooth in CS4 – but the first version of it was pretty lame. I use Audacity for audio, I have used Gimp for image editing – it’s really good. Open Workbench is a free alternative to MsProject. Celtx is an excellent free screenwriting program. And of course Blender is just awesome as a free alternative to Maya, though it does have a very steep learning curve, even for someone who knows 3D modeling. SwishMax is a $100 clone of Flash – and it was OK – though I doubt it compares well with Flash CS4. ImageMagick is a free command-line toolkit for batch manipulation of imagery. And Adobe Flex is free, for building Flash-based apps, though I have not started using it yet.
i’m AMAZED to find someone who digs Blender, because that thing boggled my MIND when i opened it up. i had no idea how to even create a cube primitive in Blender. So i hit the documentation, and found this bazillion-page pdf manual, and i was turned right off. i come from a 3DSMax (version 1!) background, so i’m no stranger to 3D apps … but it don’t get stranger than Blender.
Re: “Adobe Flex is free” … well, sorta. The framework is free, but you have to find an IDE to write for it. i *think* you can do that with FlashDevelop. Adobe Flex Builder is the IDE that Adobe offers for about $500 last count. It’s an add-on to a code-writing tool called Eclipse, which at least one developer friend of mine has snubbed because it’s “too heavy”. He’s one of these snobs who only runs software under 12kb :)
Hey!
I like the design of your site. And i like that you link to alternativeto in this kind of context and show how the site is meant to be used! Thanks and continue to link to us :)
/Ola
Hola, Ola! Thanks for putting all that effort into such a great site!
I’m getting ready to try FlashDevelop. As for Eclipse being “too heavy”, I haven’t used it yet, but it’s GOT to be better than what I have to use at my day job- Microsoft Visual Studio Team System – the very expensive and very slow 900lb gorilla of IDEs. Flex Builder is free right now, if you are unemployed. Fortunately, that’s not the case for me yet – but I hope to try it out eventually.
Ah yes! i forgot all about Adobe’s offer of free Flex Builder for laid-off developers. What a smart move!
FlashDevelop is an absolute dream. i don’t have much experience with the Microsoft tool, but i used the light version to code some C#. It was my first exposure to a proper coding IDE (Flash just … doesn’t count), and i was all “Intellisense?? Wow!!”
i guess i just didn’t know what i was missing … but now that i’ve coded for different platforms, i can see why all of the world’s comp sci folks revile Flash.
Just to be clear on Adobe Flex… Flex Builder is free for educational use and for those not currently working as developers: https://freeriatools.adobe.com. The Flex SDK is totally free, I’ve developed using it for awhile, see: http://blog.anselmbradford.com/2008/12/17/what-is-flex/. You don’t HAVE to have a specialized IDE to use it, I use a text editor and an Apache Ant script via Terminal: http://blog.anselmbradford.com/2009/01/06/curious-about-adobe-open-source-get-started-with-the-flex-sdk-on-mac-os-x/
i’m not familiar with Apache Ant – does it just handle all of your code hinting?
No, Apache Ant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Ant) is for automating software build processes, in the case of Flex it helps run the compiler, the doc tool, unit testing, etc.
p.s. I accidentally put my email in the website field in my last comment, would you be able to fix that? I’d like to avoid the spam spiders… thanks much.
Fix it? Nnno!! WHERE IS YOUR “APACHE ANT” NOW? Mwa ha ha ha ha haaaa!
…. kidding. It’s fixed.
Eclipse is a great IDE, as far as it being too heavy? Good for you, use notepad. Eclipse is free, it works with multiple languages and there are tons of addons/help/documentation for it. I have used it to code AS, Java and Python with no issues. Good post Ryan.
(thanks, Jean-Guy)
Eclipse is free, but the add-ons aren’t. Flex Builder is – what? $500? Have you used both Eclipse and FlashDevelop? How do they compare with each other?
I have used both and I found FlashDevelop to be buggy. I believe that the Flex addon for Eclipse is actually free but I could be wrong about that. One nice feature about Flex Pro is the ability to monitor your objects in Flex. We found this useful to quickly deal with objects that were bloating some projects.
Eclipse is a great IDE, and it’s free. I’ve coded in Java, C and AS 3 with it.
Flex Builder is the Eclipse add-on for the Flex SDK, and it’s pretty good. It costs money (in most cases), as Ryan pointed out, but it’s not necessary to buy…it just makes things much simpler. I haven’t really used FlashDevelop, but I wager it’s decent enough to do the job.
I agree with Jean; the ability to monitor your objects (design-mode) is pretty useful, but as you grow experienced with Flex you realize you can live without it =)