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NeoOffice and Innovation in Office Suites

Gabe wrote a post about his recent experiences with Office Suite software. I left a comment there, but thought I should expand on it here.

NeoOffice

Here’s the comment I left:

I am very close to being 100% happy with NeoOffice (which is an offshoot of OpenOffice, for Mac OS X.)

I do not compare it to MS Office the way you might. For me, it is free and open source. This means I can install it on the 10+ Macs that I manage for $0 (in reality, I donated money to NeoOffice because I do find it valuable, and want it to flourish. Still, $25 for unlimited copies?) Anyway, the only features I care about is that it can open all those damn MS Office file formats. That’s it. For all I know, it completely sucks in every other respect. I don’t care. To me, it’s pretty much a viewer/converter. I do use it for simple document creation, but I could use other tools for that as well. It even handles Microsoft formats the the Mac version of Office can’t handle!

Sometimes innovation is found in just being an alternative.

Honestly, I’m coming at it from an entirely different direction that Gabe, so I’m in no way trying to discount his opinion, I’m just pointing out that different people have different needs. For the last 10 years I’ve been building web sites for clients, and sometimes those clients send me Word documents, from which I need to wrestle out the text. Believe me, try as you might to ask people to send you plain text files, or even RTF files, they just don’t get it. That’s fine. Today you can send me a Microsoft Word document, and I can open it, and get that precious text out of it. And I can install the software that does it on as many machines as I want, and not have to worry about license keys working, or buying more copies, or having to pay for upgrades, or any of that crap.

Years ago I was really excited about open source software that came out that dealt with things I did every day, text editing, web serving, graphics work, etc. But an office suite? It sounded like a movie with a cruel twist: “You get to work on open source software! By the way, it’s an office suite!” So the real innovation to me is the disruption in the status quo, being the alternative, the “here, this is free, it’s not perfect but may fit your needs just fine” compared to the polished commercial product filled with restrictions and hoop-jumping.

Big thanks goes out to the NeoOffice guys, as well as the OpenOffice folks, and all that contribute to open source software.

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Nothing Happened

This song is titled “Nothing Happened” and it was done entirely in Logic, not at all in GarageBand. I still have a bit to learn when using Logic. (Most of the time I record in Logic and do everything else in GarageBand.) You should be able to hear it right on this page, using the embedded player below.

You can grab it from Ourmedia or the Internet Archive, and it’s got a Creative Commons Attribution License. (If you need something else, get in touch with me.)


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Bake Sale

This song is best describe as weird intro with a funky drumbeat and chop-chop guitar. I did not play bass on this one, just used a loop. (There were only full cakes at the bake sale.) You should be able to hear it right on this page, using the embedded player below.

You can grab it from Ourmedia or the Internet Archive, and it’s got a Creative Commons Attribution License. (If you need something else, get in touch with me.)


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My typo, I fixed it for you!

I am going to propose a new rule for IM communication. Ok, not so much a rule as a suggestion: Only correct typos that drastically change the meaning of the message, or that a reasonably logical person might misunderstand.

Supposedly your mind can recognize errors in text and correct for them. So let’s use that.

Here’s an example, if you are chatting with someone and they say: 

them [12:44]: OMG, I am so hungry, I'm gonna go grab luncg
them [12:44]: lunch
you: [12:45]: get a burrito!

Ok, you see how he (the “them” guy) corrected himself, and typed “lunch” after they typed the word “luncg”? I think it may be unnecessary to do so. I got enough context clues from the time (12:44) and the mention of being hungry to know they meant “lunch” and not “luncg” (Unless “Luncg” is someone they work with, which could be bad.)

So that’s my idea for today. I’m sure you’ve come across countless examples of this happening. Just think how much time you would save by not fixing a simple typo unless clarification was required.

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How to be Open on Flickr

I’ve learned a lot more about Flickr in the last month or so. This is due to two things, me pushing Creative Commons and Creative Commons at BarCampMilwaukee2.

Flickr Open 1

Here are my settings for Privacy & Permissions in Flickr. I’m pretty open. Others are not so much. There are various reasons people are not open on Flickr. For the professional photographer, or someone hoping to be a professional photographer, they sometimes think people will “steal” their photos. Welcome to the publishing world. People steal things all the time. I’ve chosen to deal with ths by trying to educate people about copyright issues. Anyway, I don’t have a solution for that, but what really bothers me is these great photographers who want to protect their work, and upload lo-res images. The photos are awesome, but I just can’t see them in their full glory. I hate that. Meanwhile my photos suck but you can view them large and do a dozen different things to them without even asking me.

Flickr Open 2

Here we see my settings for who can download, print, and blog my photos. Everyone can. That’s it. Full access. As long as you respect the license for each photo, and the Flickr ToS, you are good.

Flickr Open 3

Hiding? Why hide stuff? EXIF data is what your camera embeds in your photos: things like the date and time a photo was taken, but also technical details about your camera and it’s settings. I find this useful when I want to do research on a camera. Since I find it useful, I assume other do as well. (See an example.)

Flickr Open 4

Wanna see my photos? Cool! Everyone can. I post them on my blog, and elsewhere. I like to share. Want to comment on something? You need to have a Flickr account, they don’t allow outsiders to comment (but they can on your own blog hosted elsewhere.) If you want to add notes and tags to my photos, you at least need to be someone I consider a contact on Flickr. You can open that one up to ‘Any Flickr User’ though I haven’t yet.

Flickr Open 5

Ah, the license. You can choose from any of the Creative Common licenses, or the old ‘All Right Reserved’ if you don’t want to give out any rights without people chasing you down and asking you. Choosing a Creative Commons license does not mean you give up all your rights. It means you selectively allow certain uses without having to grant permission for each case. You still maintain copyright of your work. I usually choose the NonCommercial license for my stuff. I figure if someone wants to make money off of it, they should talk to me first. But if someone wants to use it for personal use, or to promote something that is not a money-making venture (BarCamp, Web414, etc.) I am cool with that. Since others use a CC license, it allows me to build things like this BarCampMilwaukee2 flyer.

Flickr Open 6

Since I am also a geo-nerd, I like to see and show where my photos were taken. I put most of them on a map using Flickr’s mapping tool. That last one, about EXIF location data, that’s for cameras that support GPS. While some people might say “Egad! My camera knows where I took the photo?” I know a ton of people who have been saying “Why the hell can’t my camera automagically geotag my photos!?” But then, maybe it’s just the crowd I run with. :)

Ultimately, only you can decide how open you want to be. I’m hoping some people who never thought about it before read this post and put some thought into opening up a bit.