25 Free Portable Programs For Designers and Web Developers

• May 17th, 2010
• Freebies

Being a designer or may be even being a web designer it can be very expensive in order to purchase the best design application . This article is a short but sweet compilation of 25 Free Portable Programs For Designers and Developers working on a shoe string budget as well as working on the fly.

1. X-Inkscape

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

2. Gimp

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

3. X-Blender

Blender is an integrated 3D creation software suite.It lets users create high quality 3D graphics, movies and replay real-time, interactive 3D content.

4. IcoFX

With a wealth of tools and more than 40 effects at your fingertips, there’s virtually no limit to the icons you can create. You can easily convert your favorite images into icons, or icons into images. IcoFX gives you the possibility to create icon libraries or change icons inside exe files. Create a favicon for your website or blog.

5. Active Pixels

Activepixels is a neat full-featured photo editor. Interesting auto enhance options (including shadow/hilight recovery), many filters, correction and denoise settings.

6. Anim8or

Anim8or is a 3D modeling and character animation program that I have written over the past couple of years, not as a commercial endeavor, but because I love 3D graphics, animation, and programming.  While it is far from a complete professional level application like 3DStudio MAX or Lightwave, I believe that it has enough capability to be of use to others.

7. PicPick

PicPick is user friendly and full of features for creating your image, suitable for software developers, graphic designers and home user.

8. Riot

Radical Image Optimization Tool (RIOT for short) is a free image optimizer that will let you to visually adjust compression parameters while keeping minimum filesize.

9. SmillaEnlarger

SmillaEnlarger is a small graphical tool ( based on Qt ) to resize, especially magnify bitmaps in high quality. ( The used algorithm is an invention of my own )

10. Font Viewer

This program is an easy to use but powerful font manager, which allows getting a quick overview of both installed and non installed fonts. It can install and uninstall fonts, and organize them in categories.

11. FastStone Photo Resizer

FastStone Photo Resizer is an image converter and renaming tool that intends to enable users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode. Drag and Drop mouse operation is well supported.

12. Greenfish Icon Editor Pro

This program is a professional, yet easy to use tool for designing and retouching icons, cursors, animations and static images, and assembling icon libraries.

13. Font Matcher

Just get a bitmap of the letter, select your fonts directory and FontMatcher will compare each TTF with the given bitmap, giving you an exact percent of how much each font matches the given bitmap. Font Matcher is completely Freeware and is available for free downloading in any of the links below. It’s made under VB 6.0, so you’ll need the VB 6.0 runtimes in order to get it working (surely you already have them installed).

14. SiteShoter

SiteShoter is a free tool that can be used to take a screenshot of any webpage. It does so by automatically creating a hidden window of Internet Explorer, proceeds to load the desired Web page, and than saves the entire content of the Web page into a .png, .jpg, .tiff, .bmp or .gif image file.

15. Artweaver

Artweaver is an image editor that tries to simulate natural brush tools e.g.. chalk, charcoal, pencils. It supports common image formats such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG and PSD, in addition to its own format (AWD). Image editing functions includes selection, gradient, crop, fill, transparency, layers, effects (sharpen, blur, emboss, mosaic etc.).

16. PhotoFiltre

PhotoFiltre is a complete image retouching program. It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it. It is simple and intuitive to use, and has an easy learning curve. The toolbar, giving you access to the standard filters with just a few clicks, gives PhotoFiltre a robust look.

17. Diagram Designer

Diagram Designer is a simple vector graphics editor that allows you to create quick flowcharts, UML class diagrams, illustrations and more. Designers can find this app useful for creating quick wireframes or mock-ups.

18. Fotografix

An image editor that provides powerful tools for designers and photographers alike.

19. PngOptimizer

Clean your PNG files of useless or wrong information.

20. RealWorld Paint.COM

RealWorld Paint.COM can display images using any zoom factor and always shows 100% accurate preview of the drawn shape. Tooltips are displayed throughout the user interface to explain meaning of controls.

Web Designers

A V-card website design which is an web design trend which has really became a really popular design trend since late 2009. So what is a V-Card? A V-card is an online business card which serves the same purpose as a business card offering a small about section, ways to get in touch and how to learn more about that person, company or service.

21. Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

22. Bluefish Editor

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open source development project, released under the GNU GPL licence.

23. gedit

While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.
Currently it features.

24. Jedit

jEdit is a mature programmer’s text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it. To download, install, and set up jEdit as quickly and painlessly as possible, go to the Quick Start page.

25. Crimson Editor

While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for programming languages such as HTML, C/C++, Perl and Java.