Matt’s Cuppa

Featured Windows Download: Evolution Brings Linux Office Suite, Exchange Support to Windows

This is good to see. I’m always happy to hear of a great Linux app being ported to Windows instead of the other way around. Evolution is more like the MS Office you’d see in your office, rather than the Outlook + Word/Excel/Powerpoint you’d purchase (cough, cough) for your home PC.

Be sure to read the comments over at LifeHacker. Evolution for Windows is still, er, evolving.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Two Bits » About

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software, but also music, film, science, and education.

I came across Mr.Kelty’s book, Two Bits, via a this blog post while I was researching definitions of “free software” . The entire book is available to download for free in pdf or html. I have not had a chance to read any of it yet, but I’m very interested in what Mr.Kelty has to say.

Popularity: 14% [?]

I write about software and web applications at my blog, Matt’s Cuppa, and I’ve recently introduced a polling system to the blog. My last poll closed today and I found the results rather interesting.

The question that I asked was, “I prefer to use which word processing application?” The available responses were:

• Microsoft Word - a commercial application.
• OpenOffice.org Writer - an open source application.
• Google Docs - a web-based application
• Other - Users could write in their own choice.

Here are my initial thoughts from the results:

• No one wrote in their own application. Do the above three applications have such a dominance over the user base that others such as Zoho Office, Thinkfree Office, and Abiword have no significant following in comparison?
• Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org received an equal number of votes. To me, this points to a growing trust in the ability (and compatibility) of open source applications. Are we finally getting over the “If it’s free, it must not be very good” mentality? It could also be that people are beginning to tire of the constant upgrades and purchases required to have the latest Microsoft Office products?
• Google Docs recieved the fewest votes of the three. My speculation here is threefold. First, most users are still most comfortable (and have been trained to feel thus) using software that is installed on their machine. Second, many people have a distrust of putting their information out on the internet. Outages, viruses, and identity theft have all contributed to this distrust. And, third, current web-based applications are not as reliable and often require specific updates or plugins to funciton properly.

While the poll results show a trend towards open source, which I believe is very good, the adoption of web-based applications was not as deep as I anticipated. Also, I did not include hybrid applications such as Thinkfree Office, which I will cover more indepth in another post.

Popularity: 14% [?]

PortableApps.com Releases 1.1 Update to the PortableApps.com Platform and Suite | PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB drives

PortableApps.com is proud to announce the 1.1 release of the PortableApps.com Platform and the PortableApps.com Suite, making it easier than ever to carry your favorite software with you.

If you’re not familiar with The PortableApps Suite, it’s basically a package of software applications that you can put on a USB stick, iPod, memory card, etc. All your important files and the applications that run them are right there with you, no matter who’s computer you are using at the time.

Below is a list of applications that come bundled with the PortableApps Suite, but there are a many more applications available on the website, each of which can be installed into the Suite so they show up in your menu and are included in your PortableApps backup. For a full list of available apps, check out this page on the website. And did I mention that every program included is open source? This means that the entire PortableApps Suite is completely free!

• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition (web browser)
• Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition (email)
• Mozilla Sunbird, Portable Edition (calendar/tasks)
• ClamWin Portable (antivirus)
• Pidgin Portable (instant messaging)
• Sumatra PDF Portable (PDF reader
• KeePass Password Safe Portable (passwords)
• Sudoku Portable (game)
• Mines-Perfect Portable (game)
• CoolPlayer+ Portable (audio player)
• OpenOffice.org Portable* (office suite)
  - Writer (word processor)
  - Calc (spreadsheet)
  - Impress (presentations)
  - Base (database utility)
  - Draw (drawing)

Popularity: 9% [?]

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Firefox 3 Features

I’m catching up on my Lifehacker feed tonight and I came across this post on some of the new features found in Firefox 3. Features are nice, but performance is even better. According to the post, Firefox memory consumption plateaus at less than Opera 9.5 and IE7. This is a far different from the current version, where, over a period of hours, the memory usage will creep up to 300-400MB’s of RAM.

There was one instance last week that brought the Fox’s memory
consumption up to 744MB’s. After reading this post tonight, I’m pretty
excited about trying out the new Firefox!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Flipping the Linux switch: Penguin on a (USB) stick - Download Squad

The two little distributions — Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux Not — have been chosen for their flexibility and very different approaches to the same issues.If you’re not willing to devote an entire machine to Linux, you might want to take a look at the next two Flip the Switch posts from DLS. I’ve mentioned both Puppy and Damn Small Linux on the old blog, and I’m sort of partial to Puppy at this point.

Don’t forget that either of these can be installed as a desktop OS on an older machine. I can say from personal experience that my Puppy box runs faster than my XP machine, requires less RAM, and crashes less, even though the Puppy box was purchased off the store shelf in 1998 and hasn’t been modified since!

Popularity: 17% [?]

A first look at Mobile Firefox - Download Squad

Mozilla has just revealed a first look at its new Mobile Firefox interface.

I am truly looking forward to the release of Mobile Firefox. I wrote glowing reviews of the Opera mobile browser, but have since become disillusioned. Mainly because the feature I raved about, the ability to switch between a horizontal and vertical screen view, stopped working on my phone as soon as it went out of beta, In fact, the whole application has been behaving pretty crappily since I ditched the beta copy for the release version…

Now that I think about it, what would be really really exciting to me is if Sprint offered Mobile Firefox as a native browser on their phones instead of their current proprietary basically-functional-but-less-than-exciting mobile browser. But I’m sure that’s purely wishful thinking.

If you, like me, can’t wait any longer to play with Mobile Firefox, you can now download the emulator here. It feels a bit like sitting behind the wheel of your parents’ car when you were six and pretending you’re flying down the freeway when you are, in fact, still in the safety of the garage, but it means that running Firefox on your phone is one step closer to reality.

Popularity: 23% [?]