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Celestia

March 18, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Analysis & ModelingDesign & Visualization
Availability: Free Download
celestiaComparable: Google Earth, Starry Night Pro, Stellarium

Celestia is a free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.  All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.  Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that’s not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

yEd Graph Editor

March 18, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Productivity & Utility

yworks logo

Availability: Free Download
Comparable: Dia, FreeMind, Inspiration, Visio

yEd is a free of charge general-purpose diagramming program with a multi-document interface.  It is a cross-platform application written in Java that runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and other platforms that support the JVM.

yEd can be used to draw many different types of diagrams, including flowcharts, network diagrams, UML diagrams,BPMN diagrams, mind maps, organization charts, and Entity Relationship diagrams. yEd also allows the use of custom vector and raster graphics as diagram elements.

yEd loads and saves diagrams from/to GraphML, an XML-based format. The application can print diagrams including very large diagrams that span multiple pages.

FreeMind

March 18, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Productivity & Utility

128px-Free_Mind

Availability: Free Download
Comparable: Inspiration, yEd Graph Editor

FreeMind is a free, open source mind mapping application written in Java.  It provides extensive export capabilities. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X via the Java Runtime Environment.

As with other mind mapping software packages, FreeMind allows the user to edit a hierarchical set of ideas around a central concept. The non-linear approach assists in brainstorming new outlines and projects as ideas are added around the mind map. As a Java application, FreeMind is portable across multiple platforms and retains the same user interface, causing some amount of variation from the common interface on each platform. Mac users may notice the most difference from their traditional user interface, but  the software’s features should still appeal to the segment of users who accept function over form.