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Useful Software

Here is a bit of useful information about some of the software resources available to UW students or for free on the web. There is a lot of useful software available to you free of charge. This is a list of free software which you may find helpful both generally and for your research, along with just a little bit about it.

 

Praat

http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/

Basic phonetic analysis software for linguists. Used in both the UW Phonetics and Sociolinguistics labs. Often paired with Akustyk:

http://bartus.org/akustyk/

Both will run on Windows or Mac.

 

R

http://www.r-project.org/

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, etc.) and graphical techniques. CSDE periodically offers training in R for the uninitiated.

 

Microsoft Products

http://www.washington.edu/uware/stupg.html

Thanks to the STF, UW students can now get Office 2010, 2008 for Mac, and even upgrade from a previous version of the Windows OS to Windows 7 Ultimate. There are no guarantees that the STF committee will continue this site license into next year. However, this license is perpetual -- i.e., you can keep this software even after this year, and even if you are no longer a student.

 

Open Office

http://www.openoffice.org/

In times past, Open Office has been the recommended substitute for Microsoft Office for those students who could not or did not want to pay for it. It remains a good program, and an excellent cross platform alternative to MS Office, especially for those moving between Linux and other platforms.

 

Text Editors

Notepad++ (Windows)

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

This is a handy source code editor if you're doing any programming, scripting, etc., in a windows environment.

 

TextWrangler

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

This is a plain text editor for Mac. Mac OS X has an editor, but this one is more basic.

 

Aptana

http://www.aptana.com/

Aptana is a free web development environment. It is cross platform, so you can use a very similar environment with pretty much any system you install it on. It is not a poor man's Dreamweaver, though (in fact, they sell Dreamweaver on their site).

 

GIMP

http://www.gimp.org/

For those of you who need to edit image files but cannot afford Photoshop, Gimp provides an excellent alternative. If you're an expert with Photoshop, the interface is different enough that it will cause frustration (it lacks some of the most advanced functionality as well). But if you're concerned with making good power point slides, resizing or running filters on digital photographs, etc., Gimp is a good program. Especially for the price.

 

PuTTy tray

http://haanstra.eu/putty/

PuTTy is a lightweight (i.e., not a resource hog) SSH client for Windows. This is less useful than it was back when everyone used Pine (later Alpine) for email. But it is still useful for connecting to shell accounts on various machines. Mac OSX has a built in SSH client. To access it, open Terminal (in Applications under Utilities) and use the ssh command.

 

Security Tools

http://www.washington.edu/itconnect/security/tools/

This page contains links to all of the software recommended by UW IT. In particular, for Windows users: Win SCP (for SFTP -- that's SSH File Transfer Protocol for moving files securely) and Sophos (for anti-virus) are recommended. (The UW provides Sophos for free; see below for two other anti-virus suggestions). For Mac users: Fugu (or SFTP -- that's SSH File Transfer Protocol for moving files securely) and Sophos (for anti-virus). Note that you are supposed to have anti-virus software on machines you use to connect to the UW network, which is why Sophos is provided for free. However, any modern, up-to-date anti-virus program fulfills this requirement (so if you love Norton, keep on using it).

 

Anti-virus Programs

Microsoft Security Essentials (Windows)

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

AVG Free (Windows)

http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage

avast! Free (Windows)

http://www.avast.com/index

ClamXav (Mac)

http://www.clamxav.com/