hands n PHP IDEs for Developers, Popular Distros, Office Productivity Tools, Exciting Games and More This month’s PCQuest DVD brings to you 5 most popular Linux Distros of 2014, 5 PHP IDEs for Developers, 6 exciting full free games, 10 office tools to increase productivity and much more - Raj Kumar Maurya

6 Exciting Full Free Games 6. Toy Defense: Test your courage and skills as a military 1. Namariel Legends: Iron Lord: Escape prison, reach the leader at the level of World War I. Don’t let the ene- base of the Iron Lord’s fortress and solve the mystery mies get to your base. Help toy soldiers survive through and destroy the source of the Iron Lord’s power. It’s a attacks, protect your base from enemy airplanes, tanks, power packed action and adventure game. airships and overcome unexpected traps with the help of different kinds of weapons.

5 Most Popular Linux Distros of 2014 1. Arch Linux: The bleeding-edge is lightweight and easy to install. You will find no pre-installed soft- ware on this distribution. The installer offers custom- ized installation, enabling you to customize it perfectly to your own liking. You also have the option to make the distribution light and fast or a feature-heavy mon- ster. It’s also on a rolling-release cycle, which means that to update, you simply need to sudo pacman -Syu (the update command), and you are good-to-go. This 2. Robo Racing: Robo Racing is the unique mix of racing also means that whenever a new company releases an and fighting. Beat your enemies on the track or defeat update to the software, it is almost immediately avail- them on the ring. The powerful RoboCar brings all this able in Arch community repositories and ready to in- and much more. stall. This distribution is not recommend for those who 3. Jewel Quest II: An ultimate jewel matching adventure need stability for work purposes, as it most definitely across the world’s richest continent. The dangers of will break at one point or another. the , the history of the Zimbabwe ruins and the 2. Mint: Mint is a more traditional distribution meant for majesty of Victoria Falls await your discovery, filled with beginners and those who want a simple light-weight exciting puzzles, twists and turns, and surrounded by solution. Ever since Ubuntu created their Unity Desktop gorgeous dynamic backdrops and animation. Get swept Manager, Mint has existed as an alternative to the new away by the heart pounding soundtrack as you’re im- and overly-complex manager that Ubuntu imple- mersed in realistic and authentic African settings. mented, instead instigating the creation of ‘Cinnamon’, 4. Big Air War: It is the next-generation air combat shoot- a more simple and traditional Desktop-Manager. Mint ing game with stunning graphics alongside great audio, is simple and lightweight and also available in other effects and awesome gameplay. Beautiful levels with flavors. It’s perfect for old laptops, and to put life into immersive missions to accomplish. Multiple extreme slow computers, but it is too simple. boss battles for beginners, as well as hardcore shooter 3. Ubuntu: Very similar to Mint, except that it offers the addicts. Unity desktop manager. A more eccentric manager 5. HotZomb: Zombie Survival: A group of young rockers than Cinnamon or other flavors of Mint, Unity is for have to drive through the ominous state of Nevada. those who like ‘different’. Ubuntu is arguably the most After 16 hours of travelling, the group of friends is well-known Linux distribution. It is easy, simple to use pretty tired, and look for a place to sleep, a market to and stable, though definitely not as lightweight as Mint, buy some food, and a gas station, but something wrong but it can still run quickly and snappy on a great variety happens. Shoot the zombies and escape through the of computers, making a great first Linux distribution, as adventure. If you like games like Zombie Shooter, Alien well as your default desktop. Unlike any other window Shooter, Alien Shooter 2, Fallout Tactics, then this one manager, Unity can be a bit of a hassle to use and is will surely interest you. arguably not very Windows or Mac-like, instead it is

62 PCQuest DECEMBER 2014 pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] something new and innovative. 2. Adobe Reader: It is the most popular program for 4. ElementaryOS: Easy to use, sleek, intuitive, and an viewing, creating, managing and manipulating PDF eye-pleasing design, ElementaryOS is pretty much all (Portable Document Format) files. Adobe Reader’s UI is anyone could want for their desktop. Based on Debian simple and intuitive. Classic tools (text selection, zoom, and packages of Ubuntu, it is quite stable. It comes pre- snapshots, find, etc.) can be accessed from the top loaded with many great applications, such as it’s own navigation menu and buttons. The latest version also photo manager, file manager, calendar, and email. Be- includes advanced Tools (create, export, send and store ing very easy to use and beginner friendly, it is a must options), Sign and Comment features. You can share for anyone who’s starting with Linux. If you are looking iterations, comments and signatures by email or using for something similar to MacOSX for your distribution, the Adobe SendNow service. go no further than Elementary. Many criticize Elemen- 3. Scribus: It is a powerful software that helps you tary for being too simple and this is true. Some features create great looking documents of all kinds. It also are locked-down and require extra-circumventing if you comes with a lot of support options to help you want to modify them. This distribution is definitely not achieve the best result. There is an enthusiastic recommended for the Linux user looking for a totally and friendly community around Scribus that assists unlocked distro where they are able to get anything beginners and pro alike through the mailing list, IRC they want with ease. channel, wiki, contracted support, and the bugtracker. Scribus supports professional features, such as CMYK color, spot color, separations, ICC color and robust commercial grade PDF. 4. AbiWord: AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks. AbiWord is able to read and write all industry standard document types, such as OpenOffice.org documents, Microsoft Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Rich Text Format documents, HTML web pages and many more. 5. GIMP: The GIMP is a multi platform photo manipulation tool. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The GIMP is suitable for a variety of image 5. Fedora: Bleeding edge, easy-to-install, and moderate to manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image use, Fedora can only be described as a cross between composition, and image construction. Filled with lot of Ubuntu and Arch. If you are a moderately experienced capabilities, it can be used as a simple paint program, Linux user looking for something new, look no further an expert quality photo retouching program, an online than Fedora. Based on a fixed-release cycle, you can batch processing system, a mass production image still expect to see software updated very regularly. renderer, an image format converter, and much more. Fedora is used as a testing ground for Red-Hat Linux 6. Paint.NET: Paint.NET is an image and photo manipula- systems, so if you want to see possible new implemen- tion application. Every feature and user interface ele- tations that may be brought to other Linux distros, use ment is designed to be intuitive and easy to learn, with- Fedora, but it is difficult to use. You can expect to do out any assistance. In order to handle multiple images some tinkering after updates to fix some broken parts easily, Paint.NET uses a tabbed document interface. of the system. Since this is a testing ground for Red-Hat The tabs display a live thumbnail of the image instead Linux, many beta may cause problems. of a text description. This makes navigation very simple and fast. 10 Office Productivity Tools 7. Inkscape: It is a vector graphics editor similar to Adobe 1. Office Compatibility Pack: Microsoft Office Compatibil- Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. In contrast ity Pack is an add-on for Microsoft Office 2000, Office to raster (bitmap) graphics editors such as Photoshop XP and Office 2003 to open, edit and save Microsoft’s or Gimp, Inkscape stores its graphics in a vector format. newer Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats that were Vector graphics is a resolution-independent descrip- introduced with Office 2007. The tool also adds support tion of the actual shapes and objects that you see in to the 2003 versions of Word Viewer, Excel Viewer and the image. A rasterization engine uses this information PowerPoint Viewer to open DOCX, DOCM, XSLX and to determine how to plot each line and curve at any PPTX files. resolution or zoom level. pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] DECEMBER 2014 PCQuest 63 hands n

8. Dia Diagram Editor: Dia supports more than 30 differ- Platform includes wide range of plug-ins, tools, ent types of diagram like flowcharts, network diagrams, and examples. Eclipse is a program that makes avail- models. More than a thousand ready made able to construct, integrate, and use software tools. objects help you to draw professional diagrams. Dia can Installation includes all necessary tools to elaborate on read and write a number of different raster and vector PHP. It also involves Data Tools Platform to control the image formats. Software developers and database databank, plug-ins for interaction with JavaScript, / specialists can use Dia as a CASE tool to generate code C++, XML editor, and other different tools. You can use skeletons from their drawings. It can be scripted and Zend or for Debugging PHP applica- extended using Python. tions on Eclipse PDT. 9. Apache OpenOffice: OpenOffice.org is the leading 3. PhpStorm: PhpStorm provides qualitative and rich open-source office software suite for word processing, facilities for PHP code editing including highlighting, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and conformation of code formatting, fast error check- more. It is available in many languages and works on all ing, intensive code . PhpStorm editor is common computers. OpenOffice.org is easy to learn, compatible with PHPDoc in your code and provides and if you’re already using another office software appropriate code ending based on proprietary, device package, you’ll take to OpenOffice.org straight away. and var annotations. PHP also reviews 10. LibreOffice: It is a powerful office suite. Its clean inter- PHPDocs to keep them up-to-date. PhpStorm is an IDE face and powerful tools let you unleash your creativity for HTML, JavaScript and PHP. PhpStorm code ending and grow your productivity. LibreOffice embeds several functionality (Ctrl+Space) completes classes, functions, applications that make it a powerful, free & open variable names, PHP keywords, and often used names source office suite in the market - Writer, the word for fields and variables depending on their types. processor, Calc, the spreadsheet application, Impress, 4. Studio 3: Aptana Studio, Developed by Aptana the presentation engine, Draw, the drawing and flow- Inc. is a leading open-source HTML editor and many charting application, Base, our database and database people are not aware that it also comes with a PHP frontend, and Math for editing mathematics. support. Aptana Studio is developed on Eclipse plat- form. It has in-built support for Smarty and the recent 10 Windows Transformation Packs versions for Aptana also include a Debugger for PHP 1. Ubuntu Skin Pack developers. Aptana Studio is built on top of Eclipse 2. iOS8 SkinPack platform and is very stable and powerful. 3. ColorOSX Skin Pack 4. Gnome Skin Pack 5. GoldOSX Skin Pack 6. Jarvis SkinPack 7. Mac OS X Dark SkinPack 8. Xbox Skin Pack 9. Windows 10 Skin Pack 10. KDE Skin Pack

5 Popular PHP IDEs for Developers 1. PHP Edition:CodeLobster PHP maintains Windows platform. The Plug-ins are not free but the 5. NetBeans IDE: This program allows you to edit several registration is absolutely free. CodeLobster makes it files at once by dividing the screen into several parts. possible to install the debugger automatically. To get In order to do it, you need to open two files and drag help on how to configure the debugger, please visit a marker of any file to the bottom of the screen. the official site. You have an ability to deploy projects Then you can see a red framework in the text box in on your local web server or remote server by FTP. By the lower part of the screen. All the tools necessary downloading free version of the mentioned software, for construction of professional desktop, web, and you get PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code highlight- mobile applications with the platform, C/C++, PHP, ing; JavaScript, HTML, PHP, and CSS code collapsing; JavaScript and Groovy are accessible. A library of free HTML and CSS autocomplete; PHP and JavaScript source codes is integrated for software developers. Advanced autocomplete etc. NetBeans IDE 7.0 is produced with language support to 2. Eclipse PDT: Eclipse is designed to allow developers to elaborate on Java SE 7, supports GlassFish 3.1, Oracle choose language, platform, and vendor environment. Database, Maven 3, Oracle WebLogic, HTML 5.

64 PCQuest DECEMBER 2014 pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected]