There are some incredibly useful applications that don’t ship with Ubuntu one for reason or another.

Below I list my 5 of the best applications you might be missing out on!

Pitivi – Simple Video Editor

Like: iMovie, Windows Movie Maker

Pitivi is a clean, user-friendly video editor along the lines of Microsoft’s Movie Maker.

Although Pitivi is still very much in active development (and thus a few things haven’t been implemented yet) it does already have a stable release that covers basic video editing needs.

Hopefully at some point Pitivi will be bundled with Gnome as many end users now expect some form of basic video application to ship with their OS, and pitivi does fulfill this requirement.

Find it in Add/Remove by searching for ‘Pitivi

Cheese Webcam Booth – Take Photos Using Your Webcam

Like: iBooth

I will happily admit this one isn’t quite an essential, but it is fun!

Cheese Webcam Booth lets you take photos with your webcam, apply effects to them and upload them direct to Flickr.

Handy for taking an IM avatar or just plain old showing off.

Find it in Add/Remove by searching for ‘Cheese’ or ‘Webcam’.

Google Earth and Google Picasa

Useful (yet fun) applications

These two Google products are both so different, yet both so great.

Google Earth “..lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean.”

It’s one of those application that you’ll end up engrossed in. The animations are just as smooth as on the Windows and Mac versions, and boasts every single feature you’d find in those also.

(Be sure to follow my tip for getting Google Earth to user your desktop theme!)

Google Picasa is an excellent free photo manager and photo editor that is very, very similar to OS X’s ‘iPhoto’. It allows you organize, tag and sort your photos, as well as edit them (Auto-Contrast, Auto-Balance, red eye, brightness, auto-tone, etc, etc) and apply all sorts of effects (Black and White, sepia, saturate, crop, straighten, etc).

Google Earth: http://earth.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/download-earth.html
Google Picasa: http://picasa.google.co.uk/linux/

Jokosher – Easy, User-Friendly Podcast maker

Like: Garagband

For a capable multi-track recording application, look no further than Jokosher.

Jokosher is not only a complete application for recording, editing, mixing and exporting audio – it’s UI has been designed with total usability in mind. As such you’d be forgiving for thinking it was designed by Apple!

“The developers behind Jokosher have re-thought audio production at every level, and created something devilishly simple to use.”

Install it now via Add/Remove.

Almost Made The List: –