Bruce Byfield has interesting article in Linux.com featuring hands-on comparison of four on-line wordprocessors: specifically ajaxWrite, ThinkFree Online, Writely, and Zoho Writer. I do not 100% agree with all his conclusions, but it's interesting and worth reading if you are exploring these tools. I am certainly staying with Writely, right now I am using it on daily basis. Combination of WriteRoom for off-line concepts and "thinking phase" of writing and Writely for on-line editing, adding links, etc fits ideally my needs.
It is hard to imagine - on September 13th it will be 50 years since IBM introduced the very first hard drive.
Since that time technology made quite a progress. Compare for yourself:
1956 - RAMAC drive
capacity: 5 Megabytes, built from fifty 24" spinning disks weight: about one ton price: $250'000 / year (lease) price per gigabyte: about fifty million dollars 2006 - typical harddrive
capacity: 500 GB weight: < 1kg price: ~ $300 price per gigabyte: about 60 cents Amazing, isn't it ?
Again, I need to make some space on a shelf and I simply cannot throw away a book ... This time I have decided to reduce my Java bookshelf to allow new (mostly .NET books) come in. No, I am not abandoning Java - but for next 8-12 months I am very likely fully booked in .NET projects, and after that, it will be time to upgrage to new sets of books for Java 1.6 anyway ...
Continuing in Working On-Line Series - see previous post on word processors Spreadsheet is after editing text probably second most important business application. Let's explore what is out there for those of us, who do not want to install Microsoft Office or commit yourself to one particular platform. Most of the spreadsheet try to copy or emulate subset of the features of "de-facto" spreadsheet standard Microsoft Excel
Good starting points for search is (obviously) Google search for "on-line spreadsheet" and Wikipedia. The offer of Web based spreadsheet programs is surprisingly large. They differ in capabilities, but typically allow import and export of Excel spreadsheets and CSV files, entering formulas (with subset of Excel functions), text formating, some form of graph creation and most importantly - colaboration and shared viewing/editing of the spreadsheet. I tried accomplish two task with some of them: import my timesheet from XLS and edit it online and do shared editing of a spreadsheet. Here is quick summary of the features and personal experience working with them.
See also Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V
This Mac thing seems to be quite contagious. Gabo started to seriously considering buying the MacBook, after listening to my happy stories about Great Mac Discoveries. Even Vlad, right now living trough his latest love-affair with Ubuntu Linux was deeply impressed with OS-X after we seeing Expose, Spotlight, PhotoBooth and iPhoto in action.
Next day, after I arrived to the office in the morning, Gabo was already there. Which is not unusual. Since his little son and wife are back, they get up quite early in the morning and Gabo usually beats me to arrive first to work. He lives only 5 minutes away anyway ...
See also part I, part II and part III and Part IV
August 13th # I have discovered wonderful thing today. I was experimenting with my PocketPC (Toshiba e830) and switched on Bluetooth. Mac discovered the device OK - all I had to do was to follow the wizard Setup Bluetooth device, under Bluetooth menulet (the strange B icon upper right). I have entered the code Mac suggested on PPC and they new about each other. What was really cool was that I found out how to access files on that device ... but let's step back a moment.
See also part I, part II and part III
August 10th # That Spotlight thing is just freaking fantastic :-). After few days of work, accumulating some files, emails etc, just for fun I typed Gabo’s last name to Command-Space search box. I did not even finish typing and first results were coming in the result list: all emails exchanged with Gabo, saved chats, text documents and as “best hit” Gabo’s contact card. Which was exactly right.
See also part I and part II
August 3rd # This is my second day with Mac, writing in TextEdit as I have not installed any other editor (yet). Still learning, do not want to install lot of junk before I find out proper ways how to do things. Time to learn how things are in the Brave New World ….
See part I
July 25th - August 2nd # After ordering, I received two emails from Apple, confirming the order. It took 3 days until the order finally got shipped from China (where else, of course) on Friday, July 28th and the estimate for delivery was 5-8 business days. I have received the tracking number and was able to track how my Macbook was moving around the globe: starting from Shizou, China on 28th, arriving to USA, Anchorage, Alaska one day later. One more day and it showed up in Memphis, Tennessee. That was on July 30th. It seemed to stuck there for over 2 days and then, without any interim stops it showed up on August 2nd in Ottawa Fedex location. I have just arrived to customer place in the morning and saw the news on Fedex Tracking page (dutifully bookmarked and checked every few hours )…
Just stumbled upon this blog and noted at least three things of interest:
he has got a new a Mac Pro (I am green with envy :-) ) uses as a nick nice wordplay on MacGyver (this name has special meaning for all us, ex-Montage folks) he started to learn Objective C and Cocoa and blogs about it, I am curious - (not that I plan to give up Java, C# and Python ..) Also see his list of recommended (mostly) free Mac applications. Going to try out some of them for sure !