Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design. Open-source code is typically a collaborative effort where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes within the community so that other members can help improve it further. open source as a development model promotes a universal access via a free license to a product’s design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint, including subsequent improvements to it by anyone.
For this article we have chosen some of the best open source tools for 2014 that will help developers to create useful and productive applications without much endeavors and time. So without much further ado, lets check out these following open source tools must suitable for development tasks. Enjoy !!
1. Hood.ie
Hood.ie is a free and Open Source Software for building applications for the web and iOS. It is a complete backend for your apps, ready for you to get creative. It works immediately out-of-the-box: develop your frontend code, plug it into Hoodie’s frontend-friendly API and your app is ready.
2. Brimir
Brimir is an open source ticket manager that can be used to handle support requests via incoming email. You can declutter your support inbox. Provide support with a team of different agents and a perfect overview of all your communication. All using an open souce product. Brimir allows you to send and receive support emails through a friendly web interface. Received emails are converted to tickets, which can be assigned to agents.
3. Charted
Charted is a tool for automatically visualizing data, created by the Product Science team at Medium. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable chart of the data. Charted does not store any data. It only fetches and visualizes what the link provides. It also refetches the data every 30 minutes, so the chart is always up-to-date. Charted is open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co. The publicly-hosted charted.co works with files that are already publicly accessible to anyone with the link (e.g., Dropbox share links).
4. Packer.io
Packer is a tool for building identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer is easy to use and automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.
5. ShareX
ShareX is an open source program that lets you take screenshots or screencasts of any selected area with a single key, save them in your clipboard, hard disk or instantly upload them to over 30 different file hosting services. In addition to taking screenshots, it can upload images, text files and all other different file types.
Upload files via Windows Explorer context menu or drag & drop. Upload clipboard content. You can also customizable after-capture-tasks such as annotating, adding effects, watermarking, uploading and other actions.
6. Converse.js
Converse.js is a free and open source chat client that runs in your browser. It can be integrated into any website. Similar to Facebook chat but it also supports multi-user chatrooms.
Converse.js can connect to any accessible XMPP/Jabber server, either from a public provider such as jabber.org, or one you have set up yourself. It’s possible to enable single-site-login, whereby users already authenticated in your website will also automatically be logged in on the chat server.
7. HumHub
HumHub is a free social network software and framework built to give you the tools to make teamwork easy and successful. It’s lightweight, powerful and comes with an user-friendly interface. With HumHub you can create your own customized social network, social intranet or huge social enterprise application that really fits your needs.
8. Gravit
Gravit is the cutting-edge design app that will take your creativity to new heights. Gravit offers the creative possibilities of a full-scale design suite – but in a snug app-sized package. Powerful yet easy-to-handle, Gravit has been custom designed from the ground up with an emphasis on versatility, fluidity and elegance – complex design tasks are made simple through its robust suite of tools and highly responsive smart work environment.
9. roBrowser
roBrowser is an open source project based on the game Ragnarök Online. It’s not afficiliate by anyway with Gravity. The concept is to reproduce the game using awesome new web technologies (HTML5, Javascript, WebGL) to bring it to Web Browsers.
10. Monit
Monit is a small Open Source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.
You can use Monit to monitor daemon processes or similar programs running on localhost. Monit is particular useful for monitoring daemon processes, such as those started at system boot time from /etc/init/ For instance sendmail, sshd, apache and mysql.
11. Dimensions
Dimensions is a browser extension for coders to measure screen dimensions. Currently only available for Chrome. You can measure between the following elements: images, input-fields, buttons, videos, gifs, text, icons. For the best experience set a keyboard shortcut in the chrome setting at the end of the extensions list to quickly enable and disable Dimensions.
Your designer handed you mockups as PNGs or JPEGs? Just drop them into Chrome, activate Dimensions and start measuring. Best of all, Dimensions is Open Source and hosted on Github.
12. Cinematico
Cinematico is a free (open source), simple, elegant, customizable and automatic website solution for your YouTube or Vimeo account, channel or playlist. To get started, download Cinematico, upload to any PHP compatible server and run the setup with no database required. Cinematico will automatically update your site whenever you publish new videos.
13. Crate Data
Crate Data is a shared-nothing, fully searchable, document-oriented cluster data store. It is also 100 % open source. They built it so developers with a data intensive back-end won’t need to “glue” several technologies together to store documents, blobs and support real-time search.
14. Raneto
Raneto is a free, open source Knowledgebase platform for Node.js that uses static Markdown files to power the knowledgebase. Raneto can be called a “static site generator” of sorts as it doesn’t require a database. All of your content is stored in the content folder in Markdown (.md) files and the entire knowledgebase structure and content is generated by Raneto.
15. Quill
Quill was built to address the problem that existing WYSIWYG editors are themselves WYSIWYG. If the editor was not exactly the way you want it, it was difficult or impossible to customize it to fit your needs.
16. Dat
Dat is an open source tool that enables the sharing of large datasets, the goal being a collaboration flow similar to what git offers for source code. The dat project is officially a project of the US Open Data Institute, a not-for-profit organization based in the United States, but they work towards sharing data across the galaxy.
17. Bucky
Bucky is a client and server for sending performance data from the client into statsd + graphite, OpenTSDB, or any other stats aggregator of your choice.
It can automatically measure how long your pages take to load, how long AJAX requests take and how long various functions take to run. Most importantly, it’s taking the measurements on actual page loads, so the data has the potential to be much more valuable than in vitro measurements.
18. Croppic
Croppic is an image cropping jquery plugin that will satisfy your needs and much more. Simply upload an image, and then you are able to crop the image as you like with the zooming in and out functionality. It works in IE 10+, chrome, and firefox. It uses FormData so there is no IE9 and prev versions support at the moment.
