The time has come to continue with the list of the 24 essential applications of the year. Of course It is a personal selection and that the comment form is still open so you can tell us yours.
As I explained in previous articles My goal for this year is to maximize my productivity, protect my productivity as best as possible and reduce expenses.
The 24 essential applications of the year
I am a user of services like Canva, Microsoft 365 (Office online) Notion and I was a user of WordPress (web hosting service and CMS) for a long time. This year I am going to focus on replacing them with open source alternatives.
It is true that WordPress (The CMS) is open source (Especially if you host it on your own hosting. But, in my opinion, it is becoming more and more like vaporware. Many themes require the installation of additional plugins, which in many cases They fulfill the same functions as others that you already had. And, the best features are in the paid versions that are sold at absurd prices.
Regarding the other products I mentioned, In addition to being paid, to use them I am providing important information about myself and my clients. I also have no guarantees that they will continue to work over time.
Let's see the alternatives:
The sixth application
Social networks love images. All experts agree that a post with images achieves more interactions than one without them.
That is partly due to the great success of cloud services like Canva which offer countless templates that you just have to modify. In some cases they can publish them directly on the network of your choice.
However, sometimes you end up wasting more time adapting a template or posting something that people have already seen in thousands of other posts.
What better than create your own images for free with open source tools?
Chalk
This is A program de digital drawing and painting from the KDE project. You can find it in the repositories of the main Linux distributions or on FlatHub.
Its use It is quite intuitive, but it also has a complete manual and tutorials (In English). Its main features are:
- Brush stabilizer: If like me you don't have a good mouse grip, you will undoubtedly appreciate this feature that allows you to compensate for instabilities. With the dynamic brush you can add drag and mass, achieving finer and cleaner lines
- Brush labels: Makes it easier to find the brushes we need and exchange them.
- Color picker: Allows quick access to recently added items.
- brush motors: There are 9 engines that help configure the brushes. They are used, among other things, to blur, create particles, draw shapes and add filters.
- Wrapping mode: It allows you to create patterns from images that are automatically arranged on a coordinate axis.
- Import and export of resources: You can import brushes created by other artists in the community and share those created by yourself.
- Drawing assistants: They help create perfect lines and shapes.
- Mirror effect: Automatically draws the opposite image with respect to the axis of the one we are drawing.
- Fast Canvas Mirroring: Reverse the canvas to view the drawing from the opposite angle.
- layer manager: Krita works with paint and vector layers that can be viewed individually. It also manages filter layers and allows different viewing modes.
- Selection tool: With this tool we can choose to work with a drawing part.
- PSD Support: PSD is a proprietary Adobe Photoshop format that allows you to store images built from multiple layers. In addition to opening these types of files, you can save in other formats for use with other programs.
- Color palette: Allows you to generate new ones by entering the code or mixing.
- HDR support: This format allows images to be more realistic and detailed since they have greater color depth and contrast.
Chalk It is ideal if you want to create completely original content or the first program to use if you want to use a PSD template (The most common format in which these templates are shared. But if you are looking for something that requires less skills, the applications that we will discuss in the next article will undoubtedly be useful to you.