In Part I of this series I downgraded Microsoft’s Expression Media to the virtually identical iView Media Pro. If you didn’t know, Expression Media comes bundled with a special version of Office 2008 for the Mac — and if you want an M$-free Mac you’re gonna need a replacement for Office, so…

“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy.” – The Matrix, 1999.

I was so irked when MacWorld magazine made barely a mention of NeoOffice in a recent iWork/Office smackdown that I cancelled my subscription the same day that particular issue arrived. I’ve been testing the Mac-specific port of OpenOffice for almost a month now, and it’s not just every bit as good as MacOffice 2004… It’s better!

Have a look at this blow-by-blow comparison, or consider the nasty bug in Excel that I’ve yet to find a fix for — every time I copy a group of expenses from one worksheet to another the dates somehow and inexplicably get changed to a different day and year. How useless is that?

Except for the inconvenience of a few missing keyboard shortcuts NeoOffice Calc (their stand-in for Excel) looks, feels and performs exactly the same as the monolithic Microsoft app that inspired it. Ditto for Writer (Word)… And Impress (PowerPoint)? If you’re a true Mac fanatic, you already know there’s something better. More on that in a bit.

So, end of story, right? Time to toss Office into the Trash and hunker down for some free open-source productivity goodness? Unfortunately, no…

One more thing…

… Namely the small matter of the smartphone I carry with me every day and use to read scripts, track expenses and take notes on the go. Like all S60 handsets from Nokia it comes bundled with a mobile Office app called Quickoffice. Lucky Eseries users like me even get the upgraded version that can compose and edit new documents on the go, instead of the cheaper view-only app that Nseries devices ship with.

The problem is that OpenOffice files cannot be read using Quickoffice, as tersely stated on their own web site. This goes not only for .odt text files and .ods spreadsheets, but even the supposedly Microsoft-compatible .doc and .xls files saved by NeoOffice! It seems that despite the full support of Google’s online office replacement, OpenOffice filetypes are not standard, but the ones with the M$ juju are.

There is an alternative S60 office suite from Mobile Systems called — appropriately enough — OfficeSuite. It can’t read or write .odt or .ods files either, but can at least make do with .doc and .xls files saved from Open/NeoOffice. It’s comparable in price to a paid upgrade to the latest fully-featured Quickoffice but lacks the ubiquity of it. And given that I may be in the market for an Nseries handset in the near future, I don’t really want to pay for the same software twice.

The only other alternative is to go with the mobile version of Google Docs, but until the arrival of worldwide unlimited data plans that’s a pretty expensive proposition!

i(t)Work(s!)

We all knew where this was going, right? You smug Mac zealots can wipe that smirk off your faces, though… I haven’t yet fully committed to Apple’s supposed Office-killer; I’m merely testing the waters with the thirty-day free trial.

But so far so good. I haven’t even touched the word processor yet (I’m sure it’s fine) but I’ve round-tripped a few sample spreadsheets from Excel to NeoOffice Calc to Numbers (Apple’s Excel) to Quickoffice on my Nokia, and everything seems to stick. One nice touch — or annoyance, depending on your point of view — is that Numbers adds a “table of contents” worksheet to exported .xls files, with clickable links to the other sheets in the document. It’s not at all necessary, but it’s thoughtful at least.

I’m a theatre director and teacher by trade, and up to now I’ve used Excel as much for cue sheets and running orders as I have to track my finances and such. I think I’m going to like the advanced layout options that Numbers has versus the kludgey feel of using Excel for anything other than hardcore number crunching. Like any other Apple product, Numbers has a very active community of users who, among other things, share their templates with each other, and given that we MacHeads are largely creative types anyway, that’s another huge plus.

So there it is. I’ll keeping NeoOffice on my two Macs for now (it is free after all) but after I make my monthly backups today I’ll be unceremoniously dumping M$ Office into the Trash.

To slightly misquote Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior:

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, I’m free at last!

]]> http://acurrie.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/towards-a-microsoft-free-mac-part-ii-the-doc-dilemma/feed/ 8 AC NeoOffice Logo Quickoffice Screen OfficeSuite Screens iWork box http://acurrie.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/towards-a-microsoft-free-mac-part-i/ http://acurrie.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/towards-a-microsoft-free-mac-part-i/#comments Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:29:26 +0000 Andrew Currie http://acurrie.wordpress.com/?p=274 ]]>

Having freed my phone line from the monopolistic clutches of Bell Canada a few years back I’ve set my sights on my next technological feat, to rid my computers of anything bearing the Microsoft logo.

The big hurdle has been finding a replacement for Office, which I’ll detail in part two of this series. But a surprising hiccup in my plan came when iView Multimedia, my favourite media cataloguing software, was purchased by Steve Ballmer and co. in 2006.

Microsoft immediately re-badged its acquisition as Expression Media and gave it quite possibly the worst start-up logo EVAR!!1! Ordinarily I’m quite happy to stare at a woman’s behind, but this thing is hideous and makes no sense!

Fortunately Microsoft has done little if anything to the actual app, so downgrading to last official release of iView Multimedia Pro — version 3.1.3 if you’re interested — was a relatively painless affair. It’s a Universal Binary, so it will run natively on any Intel Mac. And it works nicely with PhotoSync, a nifty bulk uploader for Flickr and the like.

It’s true that Adobe Bridge or even iPhoto will do much of what iView does for me, but if you don’t want photos loading up in RAM every time you open a folder (Bridge) or your RAW automatically converted to JPGs (iPhoto) then you’ll be interested in giving iView a try.

Expression Media is okay too, I guess… If you can stand that horrible splash screen!

(Relax, it’s only a mock-up…)

I guess you could call this Part II in a continuing series of how wireless NKOTB (oops, that’s certainly dating myself!) Apple and Google are already making other mobile manufacturers crap their pants — even though Apple’s iPhone is only (officially) available in the US&A on AT&T , and the Google Phone… Well, it hasn’t even officially been announced yet!

Consider the following timeline of recent events:

I. In an August 29th webcast Nokia suddenly decided that touchscreens weren’t such a bad idea after all, and demoed an interface familiar to anyone who’s seen an iPhone in action:

II. On August 30th shares in BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion, Ltd. spiked due to speculation that Microsoft was considering gobbling them up to broaden its line of defense against the rumoured Google Phone. This isn’t the first time such a rumour has been entertained, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense — Windows Mobile already has a strong following in North America and a significant beachhead in Chinese markets, whereas the BlackBerry is only now starting to be sold through carriers there.

Still, the fact that their somewhat fanatical CEO isn’t categorically denying these rumours is kind of odd when you consider that the two companies are arch-rivals in the mobile enterprise email space.

III. This very morning Sony Ericsson President Miles Flint, credited as the man who single-handedly doubled both the company’s shipments and profits, announced his resignation as of November 1st. Perhaps he doesn’t want his stellar track record tarnished by the battles looming on the horizon?

IV. And towards the end of the afternoon (Eastern Time) CEO Ed Colligan personally announced that Palm, Inc. was abandoning its plans for the Foleo “smartphone companion”, at least for the time being.

Late last month Palm was publicly humiliated in a brutal but entirely accurate “Dear Palm” letter on Engadget.com — and with good reason; the Foleo was a stupid idea from the get-go — why would anyone settle for a dumb terminal when they could buy a fully-featured mini laptop for the same price or less? And all the while their Treo line of smartphones have been languishing with a feature set that looks great for 2003. Sure, they’re still popular in North America, but that’s more to do with Palm kowtowing to the carriers here than anything else.

And that’s where we’re at. It’s pretty amazing that the impact of the Google Phone can already be seen, despite the fact that no one even knows exactly what the thing is yet!

More to come…

So Robert Scoble, the go-to tech blogger on WordPress.com, has just released two hours of video documenting an expert debate of Windows Vista vs. Mac OS X. I’ll save you the two hours and get right to the point.

I should point out that I’ve been a Windows user since last summer, a Linux user since the spring and a Mac user since, well… About 1995. But I’m not as biased as you might think. Read on for proof…

As a Windows user, the single most irritating thing about OS X is that the ‘maximize window’ button doesn’t maximize on-screen windows.

When I hit that little green button in the top left corner of a window in OS X it’s because I want whatever I’m working on to fill the entire screen and get any other distractions out of the way. Instead I get a window that, depending on the app I’m using, is slightly to sizably bigger, but still doesn’t fill the damn screen like I want it to. And this is productive how?

As a Mac user, the single most annoying thing about Windows is that I can’t use the ‘up’ cursor key to get back to the beginning of a line.

If you’ve never used this feature you simply don’t know what you’re missing. Even the best of us touch-typists make the occasional boo-boo, and there’s no better or more intuitive time-saver than jumping back to the top of a line with a single press of the ‘up’ key.

Yes, I know I can use the ‘function’ and ‘PgUp’ combo on my Lenovo laptop, but that’s one key too many, and I’ve important blogging to do, dagnabbit!

… And honestly, that’s pretty much it. Both Windows and OS X are otherwise identical, in what they accomplish anyway. Both allow you to use email, the web, and a plethora of other document and multimedia filetypes found therein. If Windows would just fix their obviously broken cursor key, and Mac their obviously broken maximize button then there’d be nothing left to argue about, and we could all move on to some other pointless debate…

Here’s an odd thing: A couple of times since I got my Lenovo laptop last summer the screen has suddenly gone blank on me, displaying a random colour — in this case, purple.

Fixing it is easy enough; I just close the lid, wait for the machine to hibernate, then open it up and log back in to Windows. My thinking is that the onboard video card just gets overwhelmed every once in a while, but maybe this is the first documented case of the dreaded Metrosexual Virus, where the user’s computer is taken over by a pastel colour, thereby forcing a rethink of the interior paint scheme in their home or apartment.

In any case it’s easier to deal with than my G5 tower’s latest affliction — it’s decided to ignore the video signal from any camcorder plugged into it… Yippee!

The graphic above is linked to a much more in-depth comparison of the two; I’m writing today to report my own real-world observations after four weeks of immersion in Windows XP (and a decade of using Macs). Here’s what I’ve found:

1. Looking into a Mac display is undeniably a beautiful thing. Even with ClearType enabled in Windows XP, Mac OS X does a better job at making dots on a screen look like ink on paper.
2. Web surfing on Windows is faster. A lot faster. I don’t currently have the means to measure this, but I would say from visiting the same pages on Mac and Windows that Windows is at least twice as fast at loading up a page in any browser than a Mac.
3. There’s a ton of fantastic software available for both platforms, some commercial, a lot of it free. The best free apps, namely Firefox and Thunderbird, are available for Mac, Windows and Linux.
4. Stupid people can break a Mac just as easily as a Windows computer. I have personally witnessed someone on a Mac surrender their browser to a screenful of pop-up ads, even with the pop-up blocker turned on! As for me on Windows, so far so good—four weeks in and no malware on my Lenovo laptop… Yet.
5. Apple Computer does make nice-looking machines, but as I’ve written before on the subject I can’t exactly call them reliable.
6. (The tipping point for me) Windows computers and accessories are cheaper, as in orders of magnitude cheaper. Case in point: Apple’s WiFi Base Station currently sells for $249 CAD. By comparison there’s a LinkSys wireless router on sale right now at CompuSmart for forty bucks!
7. The whole Mac vs. PC argument is ultimately for naught, as the web has all but replaced the desktop operating system, especially with this web 2.0 stuff. But if you really want to be a computer zealot you should know that all the cool kids are using Linux—I would be too if only Ubuntu would recognize my damn wireless card!

Anyway, desktop computers are sooo late twentieth-century… Smartphones are where it’s really at!

A funny thing happened on my way to Linux…

When I opened up my new Lenovo laptop I was surprised to find that there was no backup software included. It’s apparently a common practice with these budget machines to put that stuff on a hidden hard drive partition instead of on optical media. But that wouldn’t do for me, as I was all set to wipe the drive clean and start anew with Ubuntu. I thought it prudent though, to hold off until I had the necessary recovery software in hand, so while waiting for my backup discs from Lenovo I made do with Windows.

And it almost pains me to say this, but honestly… It’s not that bad.

I’ll be reporting more on this in the days and weeks to come, but so far I can sum things up by saying that the general clunkiness of Windows is offset by the simple fact that more apps work better with it. For example, I can now say with some certainty that web surfing with Windows is significantly faster, even when compared to a faster, more powerful Mac. I’d never have believed it, but the truth is right there in front of me every time I open a new page!

In regards to viruses, spyware and the like I’ve installed some free tools that run in the background—that, combined with some good common sense, like not clicking on an attachment in an email promising free Viagra from a Nigerian banker, seems to be working for me so far.

Now to be perfectly clear here I am not switching entirely to Windows; I still have my desktop Mac for media editing and viewing, and if Ubuntu was able recognize my new laptop’s built-in Wi-Fi card I would most certainly be running Linux instead.

Thankfully, most of the good open source software is also available for Windows, making it a little easier for me to resist the siren call of cracked commercial apps. I think the lesson here is that so long as you’ve got a good web browser and office suite your desktop OS really doesn’t ultimately matter all that much.

So with that in mind let’s consider this little foray into Windows as an opportunity to go slumming…

So I’m back from Bermuda and have already started my mystery blogging job. Unfortunately you won’t be able to see any of my fine work until the site goes live—possibly April 1st but more likely some time after that.

Most of these past two days have been a bust, anyway. Yesterday I went in to sign my contract and found out that the site is only accessible through the office network, or via VPN. So I came home and spent most of the evening trying to get the VPN connection working on my Apple AirPort network. Then today I had to physically walk my laptop down to the office and load up my first post from there, but could only do so once I figured out that the latest version of WordPress doesn’t work with my Safari browser.

Finally this evening I got the VPN connection up and running, but the whole experience has left me feeling like I’m at the kids’ table when it comes to computers. And I don’t like it one bit!

(Read this Wikipedia entry or load up this very long FARK.com page if you are confused by the above…)

Just like last December I’ve had to get a new hard drive for my PowerBook, and its battery—which currently holds about a 7-minute charge—is probably due for a replacement as well. Anybody who knows me has had to endure my Macintosh zealotry on at least one occasion, yet if you peruse the Mac-related posts on this humble site you’ll see that I’ve had more than my share of issues with the platform.

In my decade of Mac experience the software has gotten better and better, but the hardware has gotten steadily worse.

Consider my recent history with Mac computers:

• October, 1999 – iMac DVSE: FireWire not working out of the box.
• January, 2001 – Power Mac G4: Unable to sleep out of the box.
• May, 2001 – iBook: Built-in speakers busted out of the box.
• December, 2003 – Powerbook: Dead pixels out of the box.
• April, 2004 – Power Mac G5: Logic board not working out of the box.

Not a great track record if you ask me…

And yet, my few shares of Apple stock are still skyrocketing while folks everywhere are touting the touting the superiority of the Mac platform.

My dream come true would be a release of Mac OS X that I could run on any machine I want. Sadly, even though Apple is switching to the Intel chip-set, we’ll likely not see a generic OS release until Steve Jobs finally decides to retire on a big bed of money from faithful fan-boys like myself.

I’m waiting to see what gets announced at the MacWorld keynote in January. If it’s not a generic release of OS X for Intel or at least an iBook that can run Windows, I’m buying me a notebook with XP Pro. Give me some time with it, and I’ll be able to say with at least some certainty which platform, if any, is ultimately better, and for what. Oh, and if I have enough hard drive space left over I may even install Linux on a separate partition, just for kicks!

Now, batshit insane isn’t a term I throw around lightly, but I’m fairly confident that it applies here. Click on the photo above for some video of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the podium. I’m not entirely sure what the message is here, but it may have something to do with developers…