Free Cinema & Theatre Tickets for Local Shoppers

In a time of uncertainty, local residents of Felixstowe are asked to shop local for great offers on cinema and theatre tickets at the Palace Cinema and the Spa Pavilion.

Wandering the streets of Felixstowe it’s nice to see such a diverse collection of businesses not only on the high street but all around the town.   This wealth of shops have meant that many of the residents can get what they want, when they want, without having to journey to the huge superstores or the larger towns.  However, with the current slow down everyone is feeling the pinch and so in a move to keep this wealth and diversity in Felixstowe residents and businesses have come together to create ‘Felixstowe Together’, a shop local campaign aiming to support the town’s businesses and give residents offers on cinema and theatre tickets.

Launching this July and spearheaded by The Flyer and Debug Design; residents will be able to gain vouchers for every £10 spent in participating shops.  These vouchers can then be exchanged for free child tickets, buy one get one free offers and even free mid week tickets (in conjunction with a website code).

To get it off to a flying start, local residents will be entitled to special discounts if they sign up on the website www.felixstowetogether.com which will enter them into a monthly prize draw, email them whenever there is any last minute deals, and inform, them of additional shops joining the campaign.

If the project is successful it is hoped that the vouchers will be extended giving residents percentage discounts on an increasing range of other products and services from haircuts to MOTs.

Keep an eye out on the Triangle on the 11th July where the public launch will have bags for life on offer and further details on the project.

Felixstowe Together couldn’t have been more true as the companies involved are giving their time and services for free and raising money for additional help with the project. The project has the full support of the Felixstowe chamber of trade and commerce with Chairman Peter Dawes saying “Felixstowe has an excellent range of small shops and businesses, but during this time they might finding it increasingly difficult to compete with supermarkets and other out-of-town shops.  We at the Felixstowe Chamber of Commerce want to support and encourage people to use the businesses and shops in Felixstowe not only to help the local economy but keep people in local employment ”

Councillor John Goodwin said “To live in Suffolk is to live in the best County in the whole country, to live in the

Felixstowe area has to be the icing on the cake. Felixstowe is still a real community where people know your name and speak you in the street, a place where we can get virtually everything we need from our local shops and businesses. This is why Angel and I are prepared to give this scheme our wholehearted support, any thing to keep

Felixstowe the vibrant and special place that it so clearly is. We all know the slogan, “use it or lose it”, now more than ever is the time to support our own, buy British if at all possible and buy it in the Felixstowe area.”

If you would like to be involved as a business or volunteer please contact Ian Garstang and Adrian Bradshaw by email at support@felixstowetogether.com and together we can support Felixstowe whilst enjoying its range of amenities.

With this in mind we have created a list of 5 open source alternatives to software needed to tinker with images, code and documents.

Aptana Studio instead of Dreamweaver
http://www.aptana.com/studio
Aptana Studio is a HTML and CSS design suite. It is also used by programmers who write in PHP, Ruby and others. It works very similarly to Dreamweaver in that it has both a design and code view, has syntax highlighting, comes with code snippets, and will also FTP files to your website for you. If you have used Dreamweaver in the past then Aptana would feel very familiar to you, with a few nice surprises (especially for those AJAX lovers out there).

GIMP instead of Photoshop
http://www.gimp.org/
GIMP is almost a ‘clone’ of Photoshop. It works in very similar way with its layers, selections, filters and painting tools. It can even read and write in Photoshop format, making it ultra compatible with your Photoshop using colleagues or clients. The software doesn’t feel quite as polished as Photoshop does, and its text manipulation is a little behind Photoshop’s. But, if you’re like the majority of people who use Photoshop to resize their images, reduce the colours, and maybe add the odd special effect to add a little extra to your websites, then the GIMP is definitely something you should try!

Inkscape instead of Illustrator
http://www.inkscape.org/
Inkscape is a vector drawing programs with features similar to that of Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. It has a very large feature set, including n-sided object creation, text effects, raster images, gradients, layers, opacity and paths. It can read and write in many formats, including XML, SVG and complies with W3C standards. It can also read AI and SVG files exported from Illustrator. A fine and free alternative.

OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office
http://www.openoffice.org/
Open Office.org (or OOo for short) is a direct replacement for Microsoft’s Office suite (excluding Outlook). It is a very mature project and they have very recently released version 3.1.0. You can use replacements for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. OOo can also read and write in any of the native file formats, as well as a few others (like PDF) which older versions of Office can’t. Being a Linux man myself in a predominantly Windows environment, I find OOo a life saver. This one comes highly recommended.

Mozilla Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express/Webmail
http://www.mozillamessaging.com
Mozilla Thunderbird is a feature packed mail program which allows you to organise, customise and secure your mails.  Each mail can be tagged, searched, secured and with so many personalisation options you can make it your own in now time.  And most importantly, its free.