Tag: osx

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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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Virtualization via Parallels

I’m now running Windows XP on my new Intel-based iMac thanks to Parallels.

Previous to this I was using Virtual PC on my pre-Intel Mac, and it worked… slowly… but it worked. I was able to test web sites in IE5, IE6, and IE7 in Windows. It wasn’t fun, but it was pretty much required. Virtual PC for Mac was killed off by Microsoft, which meant I had these virtual machines laying around which were useless, until now.

I wasn’t paying attention to virtualization on the Mac until I got the new iMac and my days of using Virtual PC were over. I ended up taking a quick look at VMWare’s Fusion, which is in beta now and available for pre-ordering at a reduced price. It looked interesting, but as I did more research, it became clear that Parallels was exactly what I wanted. Why? Because of Transporter.

Transporter allows you to put to use those old Virtual PC machines you created. It migrates them over to the format required by Parallels. It’s not a quick process, but it works. I did hit a few issues along the way, the first being that I had no networking, which means the first virtual machine I had was completely useless. I searched through forums, tried a few things, and rebooted the virtual Windows machine, only to be told I had to activate Windows before I could log in. Since there was no network, I had to activate via phone. This is the nightmare that is Windows. After talking to a robot, where I read the robot a string of 50+ characters and then the robot read me a string of 50+ characters, Windows was activated, and I could log in. (Is Microsoft serious? This is how they do things? In all my years of using the Mac, I can’t remember anything as frustrating as this process to just use the system. Anyway…)

Adding a Network Adapter

Ok, so I finally figured out that in Parallels I had to go under Edit to Virtual Machine… and add a Network Adapter. I guess the original Virtual PC machine did not have a network adapter or something? I don’t know, but I did this to all the machines I migrated and they were all good after that.

So now I am running Windows. On my Mac. Again. Let the IE testing and swearing begin!




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No Joost for me!

Phil Gerbyshak (the Make It Great! guy) sent me an invite to Joost.

Thanks Phil!

Sadly, Joost only runs on Intel-based Macs right now, so I couldn’t check it out.

That’s not great at all!

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Mac OS X, GD, Authen::Captcha

I needed to add some captcha foo to a Perl CGI I was writing, so I took a look at the Authen::Captcha module, which looked pretty simple, but, wait… requires GD, which requires the GD Library, which requires… you get the picture.

Luckily I found a guide titled: Compiling GD on Mac OS X HOWTO, which I followed, and which failed for me. (I did get newer versions of zlib and FreeType, but the rest matched up.) Once again, GD got me. After repeated attempts and failures (it was a long day) I finally realized that libtool was tripping me up. See, there is this bit: 

% cd ../gd-2.0.33
% ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
% ./configure

But after running the ./configure my symlink to libtool had been replaced by a file named libtool. This was easily fixed by running ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool again after running ./configure like so: 

% cd ../gd-2.0.33
% ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
% ./configure
% ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool

I am running Mac OS X 10.3.9, and I’m not sure what else is different, I’m just documenting what I had to do. Anyway, I’ve now got GD installed, as well as Authen::Captcha and I can now attempt to determine if someome is a robot or a real human being. (Or at the least, discriminate against those with accessibility issues. Apologies to Bender…)

(Thanks to Matías Giovannini for writing the guide.)

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Beep! Beep! Beep! Backing Up!

People, really… A public service announcement.

Make some backups!

My own backup strategy consists largely of something like this: 

ditto -V -rsrcFork /Users/pete /Volumes/Backup/Users/pete

Which, besides making a whole bunch of text appear on the screen, backs up your home directory, saving the resource fork, just in case!

That /Volumes/Backup is actually a drive on another machine, so now we’ve got a copy. Well, a few hours later we have a copy…

(See Also: man ditto)

(Non-Mac OS X users, you’re on your own here!)