In all fairness, I was never a big MicroSoft fan, and much of the reason behind that was their Office Suite. When I started using word processors, it was sooo obvious that the WordPerfect suite was far superior to the Word program, and this was in 1992-1994 something. Of course, a more sucessful advertising campaign brought more money in for development of the product, and in the end Word Perfect seemed to just slowly disappear from the scene. Sad really.
Now, there is a whole generation of people that thinks word processing is equivalent to the usage of Word. This is very bad since generally, if something is not well desined from the beginning, adding bells and whistlesto it will not make it much better. Word is a prime example of that. No matter how much they work on digital assistants (you know the window you kill as soon as you open a newly installed Word) and Word art (who ever thought this was a good idea??), the effectiveness of basic editing of documents is fantasticaly bad. The wrong things are too easy to do, and the tools that support proper editing of documents for professional use are ver bad or not working.
And by this I mean structured formating and templates (and handling of them) vs. the marking and putting in bold, italics sillyness, the default jumping around of images in the document while editing the text, captions not nescessarilly ending up on the same page as the image or table they belong to, and so on. Many of these examples around, and for anyone with a LaTeX background like me, it is just soo stupid. (And yes, I switched to LaTeX when I had to put 6 images under one image caption on one page for my Masters dissertation, and this on 8 pages. Imagine what happened when I started editing the text above those pages in Word...)
Of course, most of what is lacking in Word is also lacking in OpenOffice ans similar suits. I fail to see how making a free version of a bad idea would be a good idea. Like making a free and community created version of the MacDonald's product line, all equally unhealthy and lacking of vitamins. Just a bad idea when it comes to basic document editing. The proper setting up of style sheets should be enduced as a mode of editing, rather than "put in bold, italics" behaviour".
Of course, when comparing MS Office and OpenOffice, OpenOffice wins hands down by the inclusion of a very capable database engine, and a database frontend and reporting engine that is good enough for most basic applications. Also, the ability to make dynamically created ODF documents using OpenOffice and R (through the odfWeave package) makes the whole system even more attractive. At least for me.
onsdag 22 april 2009
lördag 4 april 2009
I love TrekBuddy!
It is not often that you find a really useful and solid tool, but this time I think I have. The background to this story is that I had some problems getting InFlight to work the way I wanted it to work. First of all, it is a program designed for amateur aviators, which implies a somewhat different feature set in the program compared to what I would actually need:
1) Starting and stoping of logging involed too many button presses. I guess when you are in an airplane, you really just set it to log once, and then leave it like that until you are on the ground and have lots of time to fiddle around with stoping the logging.
2) Getting the log included conneted to the web server and getting the KML track from there. Not really convenient if you are on a trip and just want to geo tag you images in the evening.
3) The log file worked great in Google Earth, but the time information did not suit HoudahGeo: it could not find any time information, which made the whole excercise a bit less useful.
Now, when searching for programs, I had actually stumbled across TrekBuddy and tried it, but it is a midlet, and in my browsing, I just got to the point where I was greated by a seemingly endless stream of questions for permission to acessing the file system. Very off-putting. Also, I did not get a map installed so nothing was moving, I got an older version, so my GPS device was not supported, so.. it was all a mess really.
But, in my failure to make proper use of InFlight, I seached for programs again, and decided to give TrekBuddy another try, since it really seemed to have all the features I needed according to the feature specification. So, this time, I actually read the installation instructions and found that:
1) You should really use the jad file they supply the program with. Then you will be able to grant permissions for tasks once and for all, or deny them (as in my case for network access).
2) You should really create a set of atlases / maps for the regions you are interested in. There is a Java application for this that is really simple to use and just gets the maps, to the zoom levels you want, from Google Maps (https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=238075&package_id=289357). Fantastically easy! Just set a default map /atlas and then you are off. For my trip to germany, I just created a set for Franfurt and Würzburg, and now I will be able to see my position and direction directly in the map (without having to have network access). Brilliant!
3) You should really download a CMS (sort of a custom set of panels). Very handy.
4) You should discover that, atleast on the P1i, most of the handling is done through pressing regions on the screen. Extremely simple to use, once you notice this :-)
In the flood of useless applications, especially for mobile phones I think, it is sooo nice to find one that is really great. Ok, there are a couple of things that should be taken care of (like more graceful handling of missing maps, maps in an erroneous format or accessing of the GPS when permission was NOT given) but that is separate issue. On the whole TrekBuddy is a brilliant example that mobile phone applications can be useful and well designed. So, now there are two of them TrekBuddy and HandySafe :-)
1) Starting and stoping of logging involed too many button presses. I guess when you are in an airplane, you really just set it to log once, and then leave it like that until you are on the ground and have lots of time to fiddle around with stoping the logging.
2) Getting the log included conneted to the web server and getting the KML track from there. Not really convenient if you are on a trip and just want to geo tag you images in the evening.
3) The log file worked great in Google Earth, but the time information did not suit HoudahGeo: it could not find any time information, which made the whole excercise a bit less useful.
Now, when searching for programs, I had actually stumbled across TrekBuddy and tried it, but it is a midlet, and in my browsing, I just got to the point where I was greated by a seemingly endless stream of questions for permission to acessing the file system. Very off-putting. Also, I did not get a map installed so nothing was moving, I got an older version, so my GPS device was not supported, so.. it was all a mess really.
But, in my failure to make proper use of InFlight, I seached for programs again, and decided to give TrekBuddy another try, since it really seemed to have all the features I needed according to the feature specification. So, this time, I actually read the installation instructions and found that:
1) You should really use the jad file they supply the program with. Then you will be able to grant permissions for tasks once and for all, or deny them (as in my case for network access).
2) You should really create a set of atlases / maps for the regions you are interested in. There is a Java application for this that is really simple to use and just gets the maps, to the zoom levels you want, from Google Maps (https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=238075&package_id=289357). Fantastically easy! Just set a default map /atlas and then you are off. For my trip to germany, I just created a set for Franfurt and Würzburg, and now I will be able to see my position and direction directly in the map (without having to have network access). Brilliant!
3) You should really download a CMS (sort of a custom set of panels). Very handy.
4) You should discover that, atleast on the P1i, most of the handling is done through pressing regions on the screen. Extremely simple to use, once you notice this :-)
In the flood of useless applications, especially for mobile phones I think, it is sooo nice to find one that is really great. Ok, there are a couple of things that should be taken care of (like more graceful handling of missing maps, maps in an erroneous format or accessing of the GPS when permission was NOT given) but that is separate issue. On the whole TrekBuddy is a brilliant example that mobile phone applications can be useful and well designed. So, now there are two of them TrekBuddy and HandySafe :-)
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