Some people choose to channel their
creative skills into programming. Of course, some software applications are
developed by large teams of programmers working for many months or even years.
You may be happy to join one of these teams and become part of a team working
towards a common goal, but many freeware and shareware programs are written by
individuals working on their own. With nothing more than a computer and a
programming language they create useful and sometimes amazing programs.
It is not everyone’s cup of tea, but
programming computer software can be fun in an odd sort of way. It is quite
mentally challenging, but with a bit of effort you might make some money
selling your software. The Windows 8 Store hasn’t been open long, but there are
already thousands of apps for it and it is quite likely to mirror the success
of the Google Play store and Apple’s iOS store. Some people are going to get
rich from apps in the Windows Store and as the number of Windows 8 users grows,
so does the size of the potential market for your software.
Microsoft
Visual Studio Express Edition, another free programming package and there is an
Express for Windows 8 and versions for older Windows systems.
From a hardware perspective you don’t need
anything special to be a programmer. A fairly ordinary PC will do fine unless
you are creating a fast action game that stretches the capabilities of the
processor and video card to the limit. One of the downsides of trying to become
a programmer is that you need to know a lot before you can create a program
that someone might actually want and find useful. A good place to start if you
have never done any programming is with Microsoft’s free Small Basic, a very
simple development system that is designed to teach rather than create top
selling software. There are just 20 commands, online and downloadable guides,
tutorials, lots of examples and discussion forums. You could master it in a
week or two and then move on to something more powerful.
The next step up is Microsoft Visual Studio
Express Edition. This is another free programming package and there is an
Express for Windows 8 and versions for older Windows systems. It is a cut down
edition of the full Visual Studio, which is a $1550 development system for
professional programmers. You don’t need that, though, and Express for Windows
8 lets you create Windows 8 apps for the Store and it is a great way to get
into programming.
Who knows, you could be the next app
millionaire An alternative that is worth considering is Real Studio. It comes
in several different versions and Real Studio Personal is a reasonable $99.2
and the Pro version is $313.1. An interesting feature of the Pro version is
that you can run it on Windows and create a program, but when it is compiled
you can choose whether it is to run on Windows, Apple Mac OS X or Linux. It is
probably the easiest way to create Linux software.
If you are interested in developing 3D
games you should take a look at BlitzBasic. It is cheap compared to other
programming languages, at $72.85, and there is lots of online information and
forums.
Web Design
There are several options if you want a
website. While getting a professional to design it would be the choice of some
people, you may fancy getting creative and designing your own. There are
website makers, editors and services for every ability level, and sites can be
created with no knowledge of HTML, JavaScript and the other technologies
involved - or you can get dirty and hand code it all yourself.
WordPress is a popular website and blogging
platform, and if you are a complete web design novice you can get a free
account at wordpress.com and have a site up and running in minutes. Even though
it is very simple and the facilities are basic, some creative skills are still
required to produce a great site - and you must design logos and headings,
select colour schemes, decide on and build the site structure and so on.
WordPress
is a popular website and blogging platform, and if you are a complete web
design novice you can get a free account at wordpress.com and have a site up
and running in minutes.
If you want to take WordPress to a whole
new level, go to bitnami.org and download the WordPress Stack. This installs it
on your PC as a local web server. The advantage is that you can modify the
WordPress code, configure it, extend it and become a WordPress expert. You can
then design sites for others.
Also at the Bitnami site are other popular
content management systems like Drupal and Joomla. There’s money to be made
from designing and maintaining websites using these.
WebEasy
Professional enables you to create and publish a website with no technical
knowledge
Creating websites need not be difficult and
there are some great software packages that make the process really easy, like
Avanquest WebEasy Professional. It is template-driven and mostly point and
click, but you can still be creative and add or delete pages, change links,
fonts, images, text and background colours. Among the new features in the
latest version are an extra 120 templates, YouTube videos can be embedded,
there’s support for Facebook and Google Maps can be placed on pages. There are
ecommerce facilities for creating online stores and an eBay Page Wizard that
generates eBay-compatible pages. A great page design could boost your eBay
sales.
There are many web design packages that
will let your creative juices flow and Artisteer is a good one for
non-technical designers. It is menu driven, so it is straightforward to use,
but the interesting bonus is that you can export your designs as Blogger,
Joomla and WordPress templates. It allows you to concentrate on design and not
code. If you do want to hand code a site, though, then a good free open source
editor is Komodo Edit. It supports PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl, Tcl,
XML, HTML 5, and CSS 3, automatically colour coding and suggesting tags and
parameters as you type.
Microsoft’s free Visual Studio Express For
Web is another option for hand coding websites and it supports the latest HTML5
and CSS3 standards. It also has tools that enable you to optimize your site for
mobile devices, which are increasingly being used for accessing the web.
Alternatively, try Microsoft’s WebMatrix 2, which is a free and lightweight web
development tool optimized for open source apps, mobile browsing and more.
Samplitude
Music Studio 2013 offers professional quality audio tools
Creative Writing
It has never been easier to get yourself
published and if you have a story to tell then using your computer, a word
processor and an online service you can share it with the world. eBook readers
and tablets have really taken off in the last couple of years and creating an
ebook is fairly straightforward; it need not cost anything, either. There are
even services that can print individual copies your book as and when there is a
sale.
Lulu.com for example, is able to print
paperbacks and hardbacks with various bindings and a choice of sizes and you
receive 80% of the cover price. The site helps you to distribute print books
through Amazon and others, or as ebooks through popular online stores. Lulu
accepts books and ebooks in popular file formats like PDF and doc files, and
covers can be jpg, png and so on. Microsoft Word is a popular choice for
writing the text of course, but there are free alternatives like LibreOffice.
It can save your book in the file formats needed and it is pretty good for
large jobs like a book.
Blurb.co.uk is a service worth considering
and it is able to produce books in small quantities. Prices vary with the size,
cover type and so on, but a 100-page soft cover 6” x 9” book for example, costs
just $7.67 and there are discounts for larger quantities that bring the price
down further. Download the free BookSmart book-making software and you can
create photo books, novels, diaries, portfolios, notebooks and more. You can
print and sell your books yourself or sell through Blurb, and your work can be
placed in the online store.
Amazon is one of the biggest sellers of
ebooks and it has massive sales. The company provides a Kindle publishing
service (kdp.amazon.com) that enables you to create your own ebooks and to sell
them in the store for all Kindles and computers, tablets and smartphones with
the Kindle app
