The Audracity of it All!

Graphic Design

For logos and other designs, it's often better to have your work in vector graphic form. Vector graphics are created by mathematical functions which join one node to another, making the design scalable. They don't lose clarity when they're stretched and shrunk. Adobe Illustrator is a well-known program for creating vector graphics. But there is an open source tool that's similar: Inkscape.

Also, Adobe's Photoshop has an open source alternative called GIMP.

These two open source programs are not identical to the Adobe products, but you can do some fun vector graphic tasks and image editing with them. Below are links to some tips.

   

   

   

   

   

   

Git and Github for Noobs

Git is open source (free!) version control software which anybody can download and install on their computer. Have you ever downloaded something on your PC which f’d it all up, and then done a system restore to a time in the past that you knew your PC was working? That’s sort of what git can do for development projects. Each time you save a version of the project by performing a commit, a new version of the files is compressed and saved. Old versions are not written over.

You can use git on your computer without internet. When used locally, you control git using the command line. In iWorld, this is called the terminal. Using the command line can seem intimidating because most of us are accustomed to friendlier interfaces.

Besides version control, git also allows people to work on branches of code, which can be added to the main branch, or trunk, if approved.

GitHub is a code repository service which is also free. A repository, or repo, is a fancy word for ... read more