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Sep 5, 2013 

Top 6 Open Source Back-to-School Apps: A SourceForge Downloader’s Guide

When I think school, I think homework. While homework may make some students want to scream or even wish they had a pool of workers like in Rodney Dangerfield’s classic “Back to School,” I assure you that the right software tools can make all the difference.  And here at SourceForge, there are some pieces of outstanding homework-helping software under the Open Source license — free to download, free to use, and the source code is available too.

Here are my picks to help you get through the school year:

2013-08-22 15_18_45-StatisticsBest flash card pick:

Mnemosyne Project

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Flashcards are a tried and true tool to help you learn everything from math facts to science and language definitions to foreign languages. And Mnemosyne helps you learn faster and retain longer by optimizing how frequently cards are shown from the deck.

You can easily create your own flashcard decks and share with your teacher for distribution to the whole class.

Screen Shot 2013-08-22 at 3.22.16 PMBest offline reference pick:

Kiwix – Wikipedia offline 

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   Wikipedia is great. It can be used for Social Studies homework, when you need to find the longest river in North America, and for science research. Kiwix extends access to that greatness offline, letting you use Wikipedia data when you’re in the car, working places that have no Internet access, or even using your laptop to finish homework when the power is out. As Wikipedia continues its march toward complete world knowledge, Kiwix gives you powerful options to pare down which pieces of information you want to carry portably and offline. Budget some time to try this out and download data before you need it.

Screen Shot 2013-08-22 at 3.25.59 PMBest unit conversion pick:

JConvert

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Whether you’re converting imperial to metric to avoid space vessel calamities, or just bantering about nibbles and yottabytes, a dedicated unit conversion tool can be handy when accuracy counts (like when doing homework). JConvert fits the bill, covering units including acceleration, mass, angles, areas, and data size. Also, it’s Java-based, so you can just download the .jar and double-click to start it up.

Screen Shot 2013-08-22 at 3.29.44 PMBest office suite pick:

Apache OpenOffice 

tux win mac

If you need a Word processor, spreadsheet, presentation slides and more in one easy package (and who doesn’t?), then you have to check out Apache OpenOffice. Compatible with data formats from other popular office suites, you can work in .odt and export to .doc or PDF. The PDF Import Extension allows you to import and modify PDF documents too! This is truly must-have software for everyone.

Screen Shot 2013-08-22 at 3.40.38 PMBest drawing tool pick:

Inkscape 

tux win mac

Channel your inner artist or engineer with Inkscape, a vector graphics editor. Inkscape uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format and allows for export to many formats, including PDF and AutoCAD.

Screen Shot 2013-08-22 at 3.54.55 PMBest e-reader pick:

CoolReader 

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You want an e-reader that is easy on the eyes, and Cool Reader fits the bill perfectly. Font, font size, page layout and background are easily tunable. With a great e-reader, you can tap into the wealth of e-books available freely from the likes of Project Gutenberg.

I hope you have a great semester and that these apps help you succeed!  Your feedback is always welcome. I’d love to hear from you.

I also want to give a shout out to the folks helping all of us life-long learners — TED, Khan Academy, and local ham radio operators.  Keep up the great work.

Daniel Hinojosa

SourceForge Community Manager

May 23, 2013 

Google Code Projects Downloads Are Welcome!

As you might have heard a couple of days ago Google announced their intention to deprecate binary downloads, a decision that is effective already for new projects and it will be extended to all projects by early next year. Similarly to what we did for helping Github users, we confirm that SourceForge as a trusted partner for open source welcomes you to distribute your releases via SourceForge even if your code is developed elsewhere. By distributing your releases at SourceForge, you’ll get the following advantages.

Free Unlimited Bandwidth

Reduce overhead and provide a better experience by using the largest free managed global mirror network. We serve 4.8 million downloads per day, and we move over 2 PB data monthly.

Analytics

Follow the trends that enable you to create better software. Learn more about where your project is popular, and what operating system your users use.

Premier Visibility

Reach more users and gain market share in the open source landscape. 41.8 Million unique visitors come to us every month, your chance to improve your project outreach.

A Trusted Name in Open Source

Since 1999, thousands of projects have chosen SourceForge to host not just their source code, but also their project communities. You’ll be in great company.

Get Started

If you want to provide downloads for your Google Code project, you’ll need to follow these steps:

1) If you don’t already have one, create a SourceForge account.

2) Create a project. You’ll want to uncheck the Git tool, since you’ve already got that, but you can add whatever tools you don’t already have elsewhere.

3) On your new project page, click the Files link and upload your release.

4) Link to your files page from your Google Code wiki, so that folks know where to go to get releases.

Feel free to contact us if you have any new release in the pipe, we are here to help you through our blog and our newsletter. Drop us an email at communityteam@sourceforge.net

Apr 26, 2013 

What we can do to help promote your project

One of our featured projects this week – DavMail – sent us a very kind comment about their time at SourceForge:

Without the public visibility and reputation of SourceForge and the reliablility of your services, DavMail would probably still be an unknown piece of code used by a single user (well, maybe a few users) to access company Exchange server…

And in addition to sharing that with you, we wanted to take a moment to tell you some of the things we can do to help you promote your SourceForge project.

Project of the Month – The Project of the Month is listed at the top of the SourceForge front page for an entire month, and is chosen by popular vote. The candidates for that ballot are selected from projects that were weekly featured projects in the previous month.

Weekly featured projects – Every week we feature 9 projects on the front page of the website (in addition to the Project of the Month). These projects are chosen from projects that have made a release within the last week. So, the more often you make releases, the greater chance you have of making that list. You should know, however, that a LOT of projects make releases every day, so the competition is pretty stiff there.

Enterprise Directory – If your project is backed by a for-profit vendor, or if your project is specifically geared to the Enterprise, the Enterprise Directory might be for you. If you want your project to be listed, tell us what project, and we’ll evaluate it to see if it meets the criteria, and get back in touch regarding next steps.

Guest blog posts – Speaking of blog posts, we’re always looking for guest content for the main SourceForge blog. If you want to write something about your project, we would be glad to post it to our blog. Guest blog posts should be community-centric, not a pitch for your company or non-open-source project.

Monthly Mailing – Every month we send out a community newsletter which gets delivered to about 1.5 million subscribers. In it we cover site news, community news, and various projects. If you’d like to get something about your project into the newsletter – a help wanted item, perhaps, or a brief profile of what you’re doing – contact us at the communityteam email address. The same caveats apply here as for guest blog posts.

Twitter/Facebook/Google+ – Every day we tweet/facebook/G+ a few dozen of your release notices. We get these from your SourceForge blog entries, so making a quick mention of your releases on your SourceForge blog is a great way to get some extra publicity. However, if you made a blog post somewhere else, please feel free to send email to communityteam@sourceforge.net with a URL, and we’d be glad to put it in our regular social media schedule.

Help Wanted – The Help Wanted forum is a great place to get the word out about specific needs that your project has – whether for testers, designers, or developers. Be as specific as possible about what you’re looking for, so that potential contributors know what they’re getting into. And be sure to mention exactly how you want them to get in touch with you.

If there’s anything else that we can do for your project, please get in touch. We’re here to make your SourceForge experience better in any way that we can.

Apr 5, 2013 

Linking to resources hosted elsewhere

If you have different components of your project located at different places, you might want to provide simple navigation to those components. That’s why we provide an “External Link” tool to let you easily add a link to your main project navigation menu.

Go to Admin → Tools, and you’ll see the ‘External Link’ tool there.

Screen Shot 2013-04-04 at 12.46.07 PM

Click that, and you’ll get a dialog for configuring the link.

Screen Shot 2013-04-04 at 12.46.58 PM

This dialog uses the standard terminology we use for all of our tools. The ‘Label’ is what will appear in the navigation menu, and the ‘Mount Point’ is an identifier for your personal reference. After clicking save, click ‘Options’ in the tool badge, and add the URL of the site to which you wish to link.

Screen Shot 2013-04-05 at 10.16.07 AM

In this way, you can provide a convenient link to your main website, an off-site Mercurial repository, a discussion forum, or whatever else you like.

Feb 8, 2013 

Searching for tickets

Note: This article refers to projects on the new SourceForge platform. You should upgrade if you haven’t already.

If you’re searching your project’s tracker for a ticket, you have a single text field in which to enter your search, and you may be unaware of the rich syntax that’s available for crafting searches.

For the full details, click the “Help” button on any search results page:

Screen Shot 2013-02-08 at 3.25.47 PM

But the purpose of this blog post is to show you a few simple examples so that you’re aware of what’s possible.

First, if you just enter a keyword, you’re searching for that word in the title or description of a ticket. While that may be sufficient if you only have a few tickets, it quickly becomes unmanageable.

The next thing you need to know is what fields you can investigate. Here’s the complete list:

User who owns the ticket – assigned_to
Labels assigned to the ticket – labels
Milestone the ticket is assigned to – _milestone
Last modified date – mod_date_dt
Body of the ticket – text
Number of ticket – ticket_num
User who created the ticket – reported_by
Status of the ticket – status
Title of the ticket – summary
Votes up/down of the ticket – votes_up/votes_down (if enabled in tool options)
Votes total of the ticket – votes_total
Imported legacy id – import_id
Custom field – the field name with an underscore in front, like _custom

Any field can be included in a search query. So if you wanted to search for tickets about ‘fishing’ that aren’t closed, you can do:

summary:fishing AND !status:closed

You can combine more complex searches by using parentheses:

summary:export AND !(status:closed OR status:wont-fix)

If you use labels (aka tags) on all of your tickets, this can also be a great way to find the tickets that you want:

labels:community AND (status:open OR status:in-progress)

If you want to know what your project worked on in a particular week, you can use a mod_date_dt search to look for tickets that were modified in that time range:

mod_date_dt:[2013-02-04T00:00:00Z TO 2013-02-08T23:59:59Z]

Finally, if you use a particular search a lot, you can save it for later use. Click on “Edit Searches” in the left sidebar, and then “Add Bin” at the bottom of that page. Give it a name, and put your search terms into the ‘Terms’ field.

There’s more you can do with searches. As I mentioned above, click the ‘Help’ button for the docs. For the exhaustive docs, see the Lucene query syntax tutorial on SolrTutorial.com.

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