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Described by some as the greatest media player ever, Amarok (not Amarak or Amorak but Amarok) itself professes to help you “rediscover” your music. These emotive platitudes are well-merited; Amarok is a versatile and intuitive music player. It successfully conveys loads of information at a glance without giving the feeling of a cluttered, cramped screen.
In a similar fashion to iTunes, Amarok’s list of available media includes sortable title, artist, album and personal rating columns. The track currently being played is clearly highlighted, along with an on-screen audio spectrum and play and volume controls.
Quite unlike iTunes, however, Amarok displays a context-sensitive pane with relevant information on the selected item. This includes integration with Wikipedia, which is possibly a first for a desktop application. Other nice touches are that Amarok will use your play history to recommend other tracks you may like, and will upload your statistics to social Web 2.0 site last.fm, allowing you to subscribe to music streams which should appeal to your tastes.
Amarok isn’t just rippling with features; it also looks great and is packed with eye candy. And, for many, best of all, it doesn’t just play music, it also helps maintain external, portable media players – most notably the Apple iPod. Apple doesn’t provide any official version of iTunes for Linux but happily thanks to open source software, users of the popular free operating system can still gain maximum enjoyment from their iPod. MP3 players from Creative and iRiver are also supported, as are generic USB-based MP3 devices. Recent blog entries show creative users also seeking innovative ways to control Amarok via Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones and PDAs.
Blender
Not the cantankerous robot of Futurama fame, but rather a powerful modelling and animation program, Blender was actually developed for in-house use by a Dutch animation company back in 1998.
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The initial Blender distributor went bankrupt but was able to satisfy creditors to release the software under the GNU public license for a certain sum of money – which was raised via generous donations from interested parties. Consequently, the source code was released and the once-proprietary app is now free, as in freedom.
Blender excels at 3D visualisations, stills and broadcast and cinema-quality video; it genuinely is a leading high-end bleeding-edge tool for media professionals and artists. Its features include modelling, uv-mapping, texturing, rigging, weighting, animation, particle and other simulation, scripting (in Python), rendering, compositing, post-production and game creation. It runs on all versions of Windows, Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Irix, Sun and other operating systems with OpenGL support.
A Wiki site provides up-to-date and detailed help and manuals. Additionally, a wide array of user-submitted Python scripts are available, grouped into broad categories like animation, exporting, meshes, rendering, system, themes and more.
The Wiki comes in handy: Blender has had a reputation of being difficult to learn, although the developer’s stress they have been working hard to alter this perception. Recent releases have enhanced the user interface with transparent floating widgets, colour themes, two distinct primary operating modes, comprehensive context menus, hotkeys and multiple workspace management. Up to version 2.3, it was actually only possible to issue commands via hotkeys but the GUI is now far more developed with hotkeys now being an ancillary feature for advanced users rather than the primary means of working.
As you might imagine, a program like Blender performs a great deal of number-crunching. Pleasantly, pre-compiled 64-bit binary distributions are available, although only for Linux at this time. For modelling and animation at a quality suitable for broadcast, Blender is unbeatable – especially at the price.
Xara Xtreme
Continuing with powerful and impressive graphics tools, Xara Xtreme is another powerful package, itself drawing from a commercial software heritage, but now released and maintained as open-source for Linux.
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By contrast, Xara Xtreme for Linux is free and has both binary distributions and source code available for download. This system is stable and receives rave feedback for its phenomenal performance, but is not yet feature-complete: the coders are still working on porting the package entirely from their flagship Windows release. A “What can Xara Xtreme for Linux do now” page keeps users up-to-date with the porting progress. Conversely, features still remaining to be implemented are also documented.
For existing users of the Windows’ version, perhaps the best news is that Xara Xtreme for Linux opens and renders all .XAR files, rendering 100% complete. This means that there is full file compatibility between the two platforms and any existing work created in the commercial Windows version can be loaded and used within the Linux release with full confidence.
Other features considered stable at this time are the bare essentials like selection, object delete/cut/copy/paste/duplicate/clone, zoom, group/ungroup, undo/redo and the like along with more advanced facilities such as profile editing, ImageMagick import/export, Adobe Illustrator import and profile editing.
Returning to performance, Xara Xtreme boasts a rendering speed of 7,690 polygons per second compares to Adobe Illustrator CS2’s 860 polygons per second on the same architecture. Xara state unapologetically they have the world’s fastest vector rendering engine and as a result Xara Xtreme is the world’s fastest vector drawing program by a huge margin. Given the massive amount of time rendering a multi-frame animation sequence can take, these performance gains can shave large blocks of time off any project.
Capping things off nicely, a series of downloadable movies cover the basics of using Xara Xtreme through to topics like photo editing, composition and web graphics and illustration. In short, there’s plenty of compelling reasons why you should take a good look at Xara Xtreme for serious hard-core graphics work.
Scribus
Scribus is a desktop publishing program which couples a straightforward and user-friendly interface with professional publishing facilities like CMYK colour, separations, ICC colour management and PDF creation. In this regard, whether you use it for making your Scout group sausage sizzle brochure, or producing a full-featured advertising catalogue, it will perform the task admirably.
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The Scribus team emphasise that anyone switching platforms would do well to consider Scribus over proprietary suites like Quark, PageMaker and InDesign, putting itself right into that category of product. However, unlike many other open-source packages that seek to replace commercial software, Scribus does not provide any significant import or export facility. The authors explain this is due in part to the absolute complexity of desktop publishing file formats, but also due to the legally-enforced intellectual property constraints over them. At one time, a keen coder began work on a Scribus module to import Quark documents but this was soon cancelled after a written warning from Quark themselves.
This is not ultimately significant; Scribus can read and write EPS, SVG and PDF formats which are standards among desktop publishing and so files can be transferred between packages and collaborated on by exercising some diligence with “Save As”.
Scribus comes with a litany of user-supplied templates and language translations, and plug-in modules to provide additional utility. Very nicely, the Scribus project team strongly support those wishing to add their own code and provide clear documentation describing their coding standards. This information goes into extra detail on gotchas the team have picked up over time that causes frustrations to translators or which stymie porting the code to other platforms than that on which it was originally developed. A plugin “How-To” relates further exposition on fitting your code in with the general Scribus architecture.
That's today's open-source banquet - and it was a true feast. Check these four apps out; they are all leading-edge and absolutely top-class.
