It was important for me to find a good bit map tool to work with photos, especially to compress, crop and scale them. I tried both gimp and gimp shop. I have never used photoshop but I read that gimpshop was supposed to be simular to it. I did not like it and quickly gave up on it. After reading more I found a nice tutorial that explained how you can make gimp more user friendly. After doing that I felt a huge improvement and really started to like the program.

I was not impresd by gimpshop

The way you activate the single mode view

in edit >> preferences you can change the theme

I had already been working with inkscape and felt comfortable working in it. I had already drawn a quick photo of the final project from last week. Other options out there are Illustraitor and Coreldraw as well as some very basic online tools.

I have never worked in 3D programs before so I had a lot of things to explore.

Blender: I first tried blender, from what I understand you have to look at some tutorials to begin with and it has a really steep learning curve. I made a decision not to go for blender for now.

Antimony: Is a very interesting option, what I like is the two window interface, a graphic one and a drag and drop box. To use it I first had to make a virtual machine with Linux to use it. It works on Mac to. From what I understand it is very hard to run on Windows.

Rhino: very impressive and I totally fell for the the program. It has a nice command line, with drag and drop. It has a plug in called grasshopper and can be used paramedicly. Standard setup has four viewes that I really like. Rhino will be in my tool box. Rhino is still in development for Mac users and is currently for free.

O-scad: Very interesting program were you use code to make the object. I followed a good instruction defenately worth looking into but at this stage I don't have the skill to work fast in it.

123d design and make: 123d has a lot of interesting and good beginner programs I tried 123d design and made a chair. Then I moved to 123make and took that chair and put it in to 2d layers

Audacity: I have already been working with this tool. It has some very nice features. One thing that I like about it is that you can import all sort of data in to it and get cool sounds.

Reaper: multitrack program. I really like this one and it fits well for personal use as well

I am still looking for a good video tools. I have not been able to find one that I like and I am not very skilled in that field