Newly Released Open Source Apps & Tools for Developers

Open source applications are applications that are available in source code form, such open source software are reserved for copyright holders and provided under an open source license that enables users to study, change and improve that particular application.

Here we are listing 10 useful and recently released open source tools and applications that will help you to accomplish your designing and development related tasks in certain time of period. From Bugkick to Sprintapp project management app, the following apps are capable of resolving all your development and designing related issues. We hope you will find the following list handy and useful; if you are aware of few more effective open source tools and applications, do let us know by commenting below . Enjoy !

1. BugKick : Open Source Bug Tracking App

BugKick is an open source bug tracking and task management application (source is hosted on GitHub) that is “light” in means of features (which i sometimes nice). It is built with PHP-MySQL and allows teams to define projects, add tasks to them (which can be tagged with anything like “bug” or “feature request”) and assign to teammates. Discussions under each task are possible, status updates about each of them are delivered via e-mail and closed ones are not deleted but kept. There is an API for integrating it into our own apps and a JavaScript snippet + a contact form helps users to submit bugs too.
 
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2. FnordMetric : Real Time Dashboards for Any Data

FnordMetric is an open source web application for creating real-time dashboards that can visualize the data you want. It uses Redis as the datastore (if you have the date in another db, it should be pushed there) and allows defining our own plotting + counting functions as Ruby blocks. The application has a UI for visualizing the data and, also, it offers an HTML5/JavaScript API for inserting charts/data into web pages as widgets. FonrdMetric has a detailed documentation from its installation steps to API usage.
 
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3. Discourse : Modern and Ruby on Rails Discussion Platform

Discourse is a discussion platform (built with Ruby on Rails) that is not complicated for end-users, eases reaching to the content easy and has various social tools. First of all, there are no pages to navigate, just scrolling is enough. It is possible to mention users like Twitter and has support for real-time updates.
It remembers where you last left reading, reply to the entries quickly, send a quick-reply-invite to friends so that they can reply without registering and login/register with any social network accounts. Discourse makes categories optional; they can be created or not, has an admin for controlling everything and an API for expanding it further.
 
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4. SprintApp : Project Management App with Ruby on Rails

SprintApp is a professional project management service that also shares its full code as open source. The application is built with Ruby on Rails, has a modern interface and comes with lots of features. Tickets/issues are the core of the system. A group of tickets form milestones and milestones are bound to projects. These tickets can be assigned to users or teammates can follow their statuses, the time spent on each can be measured and reported. Multiple views exist for getting a snapshot of the project(s) including calendar and sprint view.
SprintApp has a built-in client and contact management system so that they can be integrated into projects with ease.
 
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5. Kandan : Open Source & Modern Chat App

Kandan is a free and open source chat application that is built with Ruby on Rails and works with various databases. The application allows conversations on multiple rooms/channels with a tabbed and slick interface. It is possible to view the active users, invite people via e-mail and have private chats. There is a per-channel media library where users can choose what to listen or a channel-wide music can be streamed. Kandan can be extended with plugins and can be deployed to multiple cloud hosting providers with ease.
 
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6. Squash : Open Source Tool for Exception Reporting & Buy Analysis

Squash is an open source application, that is built by Square (with Ruby), for finding and killing bugs. The application is multi-user, has client libraries for different systems (Ruby on Rails, Objective-C, etc.) and can catch + record errors when they happen. Once they are caught, it sends them to the API, logs them and triggers any defined actions like sending e-mails.
Squash has a web interface that displays bug information and guides developers to locate + fix them. It is possible to collaborate through it, comment to bugs or assign them to teammates.
 
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7. Docverter : Free Document Conversion API

Docverter is an open source application that combines multiple tools inside a jRuby app and works as a document conversion server. It can be installed to Heroku (the easiest option) or locally and be used with the help of an HTTP API. The application can be used for converting multiple types of documents including HTML, reStructured Text, Markdown and more as the input and lots of popular formats as the output (PDF, HTML, Docx, EPUB..).
 
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8. Grappeli : Slick Admin Interface for Django Projects

Grappelli is a free and open source project, built with Django that can empower any website with an admin interface. It is a skin to the Django’s default admin interface which has a plain, grid-based and good-looking design (uses Compass for styling) and offers some extras. There is a built-in WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE), search with auto-completes, several jQuery plugins and sorting data with drag ‘n’ drops. Also, its dashboard can be customized with ease and works well with the django-filebrowser extension. There is a built-in WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE), search with auto-completes several jQuery plugins and sorting data with drag ‘n’ drops.
 
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9. Foauth : App That Converts oAuth to “HTTP Basic Authentication”

oAuth is the industry standard today for authenticating users or 3rd party apps to reach their data via APIs. However, specially for anyone that didn’t ever deal with it, it is not the most developer friendly mechanism to deal with. foauth, a free and open source service, removes the need of oAuth usage for ~40 popular web services and converts that auth process to HTML Basic authentication. It already has the oAuth integrations with the services (like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, GitHub, etc.) and developers can simply use foauth as an authentication pro.
 
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10. Forward : Open Source PHP E-Commerce Platform

Forward is a fresh e-commerce application (that is in the alpha stage) built with PHP and using MongoDB for storing data. The application is free, open source and built with developers in mind makes with easy custom coding, powerful templates and expressive syntax. It has a REST-like API for interacting with every feature from orders to customers or products.
 
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