68
I personally use and recommend LICEcap.
Great interface: select a region of the screen and set the frame rate and destination for the gif.
No time limit on length of gif.
OS X and Windows (can use Wine for Linux).
LICEcap also allows some further gif customisation, including adding title frame with custom duration to the gif, setting a pause hotkey and ...
29
The best Markdown editor for any operating system that features a modern browser is StackEdit1.
StackEdit features:
Works offline - documents are saved in your browser's local storage, and can be opened from and saved to your local filesystem. Once loaded, the app's code is cached by your browser, and will open and work just fine with zero Internet ...
27
Use Mou!
Mou has everything you've asked for.
If you have the preview pane open, it will update in close to real-time, though it's a little delayed if you type very quickly.
It speaks Markdown.
It lets you customize the editor theme and the preview pane.
It lets you choose the default file extension for saving (and .txt is included on its list).
26
I recommend Mozilla Thunderbird + Markdown Here add-on.
Mozilla Thunderbird is an open-source, cross platform e-mail client that is extendable with add-ons (plugins).
When you install the Markdown Here add-on, you will get a new toolbar button labeled "MD Toggle" on your message composition window. (Note: after you install, you may have to right-click ...
22
Team viewer is a great remote desktop tool that works on mac windows and linux, it is also free for non-commercial use it is also very easy to set up just install it on both PCs and enter id and password of the PC you want to connect to. it also has a feature to connect to your pc that you are not near. you can also connect to a different platform then what ...
22
There are multiple companies that rent out access to a Mac in the cloud. I used one of them for a few months when I had to port an Android app to iOS, which needs a Mac to compile. If you only need your Mac for a few hours per year, this is probably the cheapest option. Resetting "your" mac is just a question of a few minutes to get a new, freshly ...
21
Is it possible (and legal) to buy a macOS license to have it as a VM on my Linux machine?
No - at least not according to Apple's software license agreement for MacOS. The license agreement for MacOS Big Sur (others are similar) explicitly says (emphasis mine):
you are granted a limited, non-transferable, non-exclusive license:
[...]
(iii) to install, use ...
20
For a Mac (and Windows) solution, you can try LICEcap
LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to .GIF (for viewing in web browsers, etc).
Features:
Move the screen capture frame while recording.
Pause and restart recording, with optional inserted text messages.
Global hotkey (shift+space) to toggle pausing while recording
...
19
I started using AIDE:
AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) is a file and directory integrity checker.
It tracks changed, added and modified files, and file attributes. Supports variety of checksum algorithms, including sha256/sha512.
On Ubuntu, aide package is available from base repository (apt-get install aide). On OS X, compiling failed ...
19
I have successfully used Tesseract for Optical Character Recognition, on Ubuntu.
It is free, open source and maintained by Google.
While not bad with Latin characters and numbers, it struggles with Japanese characters for instance. You might have to first feed it training data depending on what you want to get recognized.
It can read from a lot of ...
18
I would suggest Texworks. I use it under Ubuntu, but it's available for OSX and Windows as well. Cross-platform compatibility is always a plus.
When you press the green 'Typeset' button it refreshes the PDF, which is shown alongside the code (in a separate window you can position yourself). (You may need to run it twice, since the BibTeX file is (re)...
18
There are few alternatives:
digiKam (GPLv3) [Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD]
An open source image viewer that allows you to directly zoom into large collections of tens of thousand of images from tiny thumbnails down to the images' original size fluently with short load times and no loss of interactivity.
Face detection and recognition support.
...
18
As others have said, the only way to legally virtualize Mac OS X (according toApple's EULA) is on Apple hardware. So the purchase you need to make isn't a software purchase, it's a hardware purchase: you need to buy a Mac.
With Intel (x86) Apple hardware, there's three ways you can do this:
1. Use VMWare ESXi as the host OS
ESXi is VMware's professional ...
17
The most effective cross platform solution I have found for this in the past is Synergy. I haven't used it with Windows 8, but the site seems it indicate current releases are supported. Windows 7 and Mavericks definitely work.
Seamlessly share your mouse and keyboard with two or more computers.
Supported on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Drag and ...
17
DiffPDF nowadays is an paid software for Windows only, but it was previously free and also available for OS X. You can still download such a previous version.
It allows both visual and textual comparison.
16
compare (command from ImageMagick)
If you want to compare the visual appearance of page 4 of a.pdf with page 6 of b.pdf, you can use ImageMagick's command line tool compare. Here is a variation of commands to try:
compare a.pdf[3] b.pdf[5] delta1.pdf
compare -density 300 a.pdf[3] b.pdf[5] delta2.pdf
compare ...
15
I love Sublime Text for this:
Objective-C isn't its best language for syntax highlighting, but that was what I had open at the moment. It supports a whole list of languages:
It's not free, it's $70. You can use it as long as you want before buying, though.
It has quite a nice syntax highlighting
Adding this line to the preferences file disables ...
15
I love Sequel Pro:
It supports just about everything I would ever need in a MySQL client - and I much prefer it to the command line.
It supports connecting in just about every way, here's the login screen:
A great GUI is presented for each table on the schema tab:
Full command line access to the DB is available:
One can even manage users (if one has ...
15
Most Microsoft Windows operating systems since Windows XP have included Remote Desktop functionality utilising the Remote Desktop Protocol. Depending on the version you have depends on how it is configured, but in general you will need to do the following in order to be able to connect to a computer running Windows in this way:
Enable remote desktop in ...
15
GIMP is a strong alternative.
GIMP is available on OS X, Windows, and Linux. GIMP is free and licensed under the GNU General Public License.
As for your feature list:
layers: ✓
all layer effects: ✓
patterns: ✓
gradients: ✓
smart objects: ☓ Gimp does not have smart objects to my knowledge.
history: ✓
PNG export: ✓
rescaling: ✓
text (and font properties)- ...
14
The built-in Disk Utility does everything you want.
To wipe a drive:
Open Disk Utility (It's in ~/Applications/Utilities)
Find the drive you want to be wiped in the sidebar, and select the root drive (not the partition):
Go to the erase tab:
(optional) If you're paranoid about your data, there's a button Security Options. Clicking it brings up a dialog ...
13
There is a new kid on the block.
Github has recently open-sourced their internally developed editor — introducing Atom! As a full featured code editor and lightweight IDE, Atom may seem like a lot of application for writing a few markdown files, but I still think it's worth a shake. Atom may be full featured but it feels super light weight. It is loosely ...
13
For paranoid shredding, install GNU coreutils and use its shred program.
Disclaimer: any solid-state drives, USB sticks, and memory cards that use wear levelling can't be guaranteed to be fully shredded. This applies to pretty much any disk-wiping software unless they can get beyond the wear-levelling layer.
13
I've been using iConify for quite a while now. It:
Is free. Yay!
Outputs all the correct files
Takes in arbitrarily huge images
Supports drag & drop
Works for generating @2x and normal versions of other images too
When you start the app it looks like this:
You drag in your ginormous file to the big well:
All the resized icon files are placed in ~/...
13
You can install Android in a virtual box environment on your local machine. This is usually done in order to allow the emulation of for example Google Maps-based applications which does not run in the emulato for licening reasons. The other advantage of this installment is that you only have to boot Android once and then hot-deploy your app after each change....
13
Inkscape is an open source vector graphics program available for Linux, Mac and Windows.
It supports raster to vector conversion using the Potrace bitmap tracing engine as documented in this tutorial.
It supports at a minimum png input and SVG output.
Here is sample output:
Top row left to right: Photo Original (Credit Flower's.Lover, Licence CC BY 2.0), ...
13
I was actually trying to solve this problem for myself today and found this nice little Github gist:
https://gist.github.com/dergachev/4627207
Uses Quicktime to save a video, ffmpeg to convert the video, and gifsicle to compress/clean the final gif.
It uses the command line, so it might not be great for your use case, but I suspect this could easily be ...
13
When comparing PDF files, you have the choice between:
comparing the contents (i.e. the actual text)
comparing the pages as a whole (visual comparison).
While you might be looking for the first type of comparison, I wanted to offer a way to compare two PDF files page-by-page.
As I've had this requirement regularly in the past, and couldn't find the ...
12
Airmail.app supports Markdown editing with side-by-side preview.
Markdown can be activated per-account as the default, or per-email through a single click in the composer. As far as I know, it's a relatively vanilla Markdown -- no support for things like formulas or footnotes that would come from a Markdown variant, however since I use it pretty much ...
12
A good text editor you could use is Sublime Text. It's technically free (since the only non-benefit from using the trial version is you get occasionally nagged about buying the full product), and it can do all of the things you'd want from a text editor:
simple, free and fast text editor
Sublime Text can be customized as much as you want using the Plugin ...
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