TOP TOOLS
TOP 10 TOOLS 2008
Hans de Zwart

Hans de Zwart is an e-Learning Consultant at Stoas Learning in the Netherlands. He has a broad interest in how technological advances change the way we live our lives and is a member of the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Hans's Top 10 Tools as at 2 January 2008

1. Moodle - This open source course management system is my bread and butter and has led me into the free software world. Its community of teachers and its enlightened leadership is second to none.

2. Google Reader - The only way that I am able to keep up with the things that I want to read. Outsourcing my subscriptions and read/unread statusses to Google makes it possible for me to use my laptop, my cellphone or any random computer and see the same information. I just wish there was an open source project that would do the same and could run on my own server.

3. Ubuntu - My operating system of choice. Not only does it give me the freedom to use it how I want, it is also the source of much learning about how computers work. I see it as a critical enabler.

4. Google Search - Still the best search technology around. I have a couple of stock queries that I do all the time like "better than xxx" if I want to find an alternative to xxx and I can usually find what I need in one or two queries.

5. Wikipedia - More and more the easiest way to find a piece of factual information. I use a lot of materials from the Wikimedia Commons in most things that I create.

6. LAMP = Apache, MySQL, PHP - This technology makes it trivial for a non-programmer like me to create my own tools that do what I need them do. Using the APIs of the different web services I can create my own mashups.

7. Opera - The fastest, most secure and most standards compliant browser available. Opera has been the forerunner in creating innovative features for a long. Who doesn't use tabbed browsing nowadays? My favorite features are the search aliasses that I can create: "g xxx" does a Google search for xxx whereas "z xxx" and "w xxx" search in Amazon and Wikipedia respectively. The built-in Bittorrent client is easy to use and does the job. This is the only piece of software in this list that isn't free.

8. Firebug - Sometimes sites (like the one from my bank) will not work with Opera, then I use Firefox. Firebug is a great Firefox extension for anybody doing any web development. It is by far the easiest way to creates themes/skins for applications like Drupal, Moodle or Wordpress: just use the "Inspect this" button!

9. OpenOffice Writer - 50% of my job consists of writing. Although I like to use Kile for larger texts, I find Writer indispensable for letters and other short texts. Exporting to PDF is only one button away and it reads and writes most office formats.

10. OpenOffice Impress with KeyJnote - Impress is a bit crude, but it good enough to author a presentation and manage its slides. I then use Keynote for the presentation itself which uses stylish 3D effects and great thumbnail zooming.