Third Party Tools

Tool Page
For every serious software development you need tools. Here is a list of tools we use to develop FreeCAD:

Qt-Toolkit
The Qt-toolkit is a state of the art, plattform independend user interface design tool. It is contained in the LibPack of FreeCAD, but can also be downloaded at Qt project.

InkScape
Great vector drawing programm. Adhers to the SVG standard and is used to draw Icons and Pictures. Get it at www.inkscape.org.

Doxygen
A very good and stable tool to generate source documentation from the .h and .cpp files.

The Gimp
Not much to say about the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. Besides it can handle .xpm files which is a very convenient way to handle Icons in QT Programms. XPM is basicly C-Code which can be compiled into a programme.

Get the GIMP here: www.gimp.org

Visual Studio 8 Express
Although VC8 is for C++ development not really a step forward since VisualStudio 6 (IMO a big step back), its a free development system on Windows. For native Win32 applications you need to download the PlatformSDK from M$.

So the Express edition is hard to find. But you might try this link

CamStudio
Is a Open Source tool to record Screencasts (Webcasts). Its a very good tool to create tutorials by recording them. Its far not so boring as writing documentation.

See camstudio.org for details.

Tortoise SVN
This is a very great tool. It makes using Subversion (our version control system on sf.net) a real pleasure. You can throught out the explorer integration, easily manage Revisions, check on Diffs, resolve Confilcts, make branches, and so on.... The commit dialog itself is a piece of art. It gives you an overview over your changed files and allows you to put them in the commit or not. That makes it easy to bundle the changes to logical units and give them an clear commit message.

You find ToroiseSVN on tortoisesvn.tigris.org.

StarUML
A full featured Open Source UML programm. It has a lot of features of the big ones, including reverse engeniering C++ source code....

Download here: staruml.sourceforge.net

Tools on Linux
TODO