This is the second installment of my open-ended quest for great software. The previous (and inaugural) article is here.
The excitement is that the current version of LibreOffice has removed a good deal of the startup sluggishness. While still not as fast as MS Office 2003, remember with LibreOffice, you are starting the whole suite essentially. There is an option to load it at startup, which I do not use.
The LibreOffice word processor application won’t let you search on paragraph marks specifically, but does have an option for removing empty paragraph marks, so you can achieve the same end for when I search for ^p^p and replace with ^p in Word. The LibreOffice spreadsheet is very competent, as far as I have seen.
I have used Dia a bit for drawing and am thinking that it might just work for doing many of the drawings I do. There is also a scalable vector graphics (SVG) program called Inkscape that might do some of the things one might do in Adobe Illustrator. It also serves as a viable sketch pad for miscellaneous ideas. For some basic idea capture, it seems faster than Dia.
While on the subject of SVG graphics formats, Freemind is mind-mapping software written in Java. The boys have to do mind maps at school from time to time and none of us are all that good at it. Perhaps this software will help. It can export both SVG and PDF.
While I have current versions of Adobe Photoshop (CS5) and Lightroom (3), I cannot help myself from evaluating free alternatives as the number of computers here is growing and with both boys headed off to university (we hope) within 2.5 years, it would be good to select applications and allow them to become familiar with them. While Photoshop CS5 is a remarkable program, for quick adjustments and some very sophisticated lasso options (at least), Paint.NET is a great option. There seems to be a controversy between which is better, The GIMP or Paint.NET. Both applications have vocal adherents. I found The GIMP obtuse and difficult to learn. It was not intuitive to a PhotoShop user. On the other hand, I found Paint.NET extremely easy to adapt to. I haven’t yet done full-scale work in it, but it has real possibilities.
Paint.NET is an interesting story. It started as a thesis project in university. The initial goal was to use Microsoft’s .NET framework to create an improved version of the Paint program which comes with Windows. Paint.NET has gone way beyond the original Paint program (which I find generally useless) and while it is not Photoshop, it is small and fast and can do at least some of the things I used to start Photoshop for–and I can have it on every machine.
Paint.NET is one of the few programs discussed here that is Windows-specific. It requires the Microsoft .NET framework to function. Almost all of the other open source applications are available for Mac and Unix platforms as well as Windows. I am certainly not one to say Windows is the only operating system. Since my primary money-making application, Samplitude, is Windows-only, that keeps me locked into Windows, as does almost 20 years of working in it.
While on the subject of Samplitude, I must say that after just receiving Version 11 (you can imagine the Spinal Tap humour that surrounds this version), I am impressed. The CD burning routines seem snappier, the high-quality MP3 generation is now much faster, and the new 6-band EQ is a joy to use. Samplitude has generous cross-grade and student pricing if you contact the U.S. rep, Tim Dolbear.
I cannot believe I have gone this far without mentioning two and a half really, really cool open source applications. These are the ones that made me believe that open source software could be just as good as the commercial product–maybe better. I’m talking about The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, Thunderbird, and Lightning.
Firefox has been my primary browser for probably four years now. It is wonderful. Internet Explorer 9 is also quite excellent, but I really like Firefox.
I had used Eudora since 1993 with my first Windows 3.1 computer, a 486 processor running at 66 MHz. Eudora was put out to pasture in about 2006, so by 2010 the lack of updates was annoying me and a few friends. I finally bit the bullet and transferred 17 years of email messages to Thunderbird. Mary Beth, our friend Marie-Lynn, and I are all using it. Marie-Lynn has not enjoyed the transition, but Mary Beth took to it immediately after using Outlook Express for several years. I love it. It’s not perfect, and I still think Eudora handled some things better, but, all-in-all, it’s an excellent program.
One of the more exciting features of Thunderbird is the ability to use the Lightning plug-in (the half-program mentioned above). This, along with the Provider for Google Calendar creates a competent and robust shared calendaring system. Mary Beth and I both share a single calendar and have it pop up right in Thunderbird. Multiple calendars are supported, but they complicate things a bit, so we’re leaving it as a single calendar that Mary Beth and I jointly maintain. The backup to Google Calendar is automatic and Google Calendar acts as the calendar server for both of our instances of Lightning within Thunderbird. The calendar is also accessible directly via Google Calendar from any web browser.
Finally, in the same vein, my son Robert and I are experimenting with Evernote. This is a note-taking application which backs up everything to the Evernote servers where it is accessible on the web. It will also synchronize multiple computers as I understand it. We are not too far into it, but in looking at OneNote in Office 2010 and Evernote, while Evernote is less richly featured, the built-in Web backup is powerful. Welcome to The Cloud!
Please email me any comments that you have about this series and unless you say “do not post” I will add them to the post, even though comments are generally disabled on this blog. I would also be interested in any thoughts on MD5 applications that can check a file on a regular basis against its hash file.
COMMENTS RECEIVED:
2011-03-01 I was contacted by Dave Myers dmyers (at) filegenius (dot) net about a product he is involved with called File Genius that is aimed at the professional architecture and engineering community as a collaborative tool and backup service. It is not precisely in the class of what I’m talking about here, but for a larger, or enterprise, high-value environment it appears to be a choice to consider. I have never used it. Thanks, Dave, for the heads up.