While not as polished as Office 2007 on Windows or Office 2008 on the Mac, OpenOffice does have the whole free thing going for it. It can also open all of the documents that MS Office creates so you don't need to have Word to open and edit a Word document. It also has some features that are unique, such as the full blown Math application and Database on the Mac side. I wasn't wowed by OpenOffice, but for free, you could do a lot worse for office applications.
Archive for October, 2008
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Smashing Magazine
Another late pick, but I am going a little unique this time. I havn't chosen just a standard web site or blog, but Smashing Magazine is just fantastic. For a web pro, you will get all sorts of articles about design, free items and general web discussion. I have never been disappointed by one of their articles as they are each well written and often are about things I am not very familiar with. And if great articles are not enough, they have a great freebies section that collects all sorts of free things for designers.
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WordPress Plugin Question
For those of you out there that use WordPress, do you use many plugins? I have a few on my site, but have been looking at a few more potentially. If you have a lot of plugins (more than 5) do you notice a performance hit? Do you find them valuable? Do you run into problems when upgrading WordPress? Related to that, are there any plugins that you have to have installed? The AJAXed WordPress plugin is that way for me, although some of the features of it will be part of 2.7. Feel free to comment about your plugin experiences.
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ScribeFire
Sorry about the delay on the Pick for last week, there was a transition of web hosts that caused DNS delays. That being said, the site is back and ready to go and therefore, ready for a new pick. This week I finally get to pick ScribeFire, something I had hoped to pick someday. ScribeFire is a Firefox extension that allows you to post to your blog without going to your blog. The biggest thing holding me back from picking it was support for both categories and tags in WordPress, but now both are supported and work great.
ScribeFire also supports working offline with drafts saved locally, posting to a page instead and all the expected blog editor features, but the plus side is that ScribeFire is free. There are a number of other features that I am not using, but might be of interest if you are a hardcore blogger, such as the Monetize feature.
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Missing Music
A few posts ago, I mentioned that I might have a new favorite band. This got me thinking about all the music that I have missed. When I started really getting into Death Cab, it was partially because there was a back catalog of albums I could dive into. They were one of those bands that I had heard of, but not checked out until recently. It was definitely one of those "Where the heck was I?" moments. I am curious to hear if other people have that happen to them too. This can include bands you finally you finally checked out after people harping on about them or that you found out about yourself, only to find that they have a cult following. If you have had this same experience, feel free to post them in the comments below.