Digital Life by Chin Wong

No more Ubuntu black screen!

2010-09-07T16:26:00Z

Now showing on my PC desktop: Maverick Meerkat

Ever since Lucid Lynx (10.4), I’ve been unable to install Ubuntu Linux on my desktop PC because newer versions of the operating system did not play nice with my old Nvidia GeForce 7100 graphics card. Booting from the LiveCD would give me a black screen and hang, and none of the work-arounds that I found online would work. So for quite some time, I’ve been frozen at Karmic Koala (9.10), which wasn’t so bad, except that this kept me from trying out the newer stuff.

Today, I’m happy to report that I’ve broken the black screen jinx by the simple expedient of replacing my old graphics card. With a bit of help from Google, I found a forum post that said the Nvidia GT220 worked without a problem with Ubuntu so I decided to give it a try. After all, I figured, even if it didn’t work with the newer versions of Ubuntu, I’d still have a better card with more memory (1GB). And the new card wasn’t expensive at all.

After I swapped cards and re-attached all the cords, I popped in the Lucid Lynx LiveCD and waited with bated breath to see if it would boot. It did. So did the LiveCD of the Maverick Meerkat (10.10) Beta. Now I’m in business again.

Postscript: Thanks to all the visitors who posted suggestions on how to beat the black screen. Your comments were greatly appreciated.

Presenting with pizazz

2010-09-06T16:01:00Z

DEATH by PowerPoint can be slow and cruel.
Sitting through 100 slides annotated by a droning voice is agonizing and can almost make you swear off presentation software altogether. But even though technology won’t help dull speakers, the right tools can at least give sleepy audiences something interesting to look at.
For years, my favorite presentation software has been Keynote on the Mac, which I use extensively in my Journalism classes. Its elegant templates make it easy to produce slick presentations, and its 3D transitions add a lot of visual punch to even the dullest presentation. Although I have not used MS PowerPoint 2010, its new 3D transitions seem just as impressive. Between the two programs, I thought, you wouldn’t need much else.
So I was surprised when some of my students began presenting information in a way I had never seen before. These presentations felt like movies—with the camera zooming in and out and panning smoothly to and from various elements scattered over a huge canvas. It was free-form presentation that still maintained some order and structure. The tool they used was Prezi, which bills itself as “The Zooming Presentation Editor.”
To try out Prezi, simply point your browser to http://prezi.com and sign up for a free account. The interface, with a round zebra controller, may take some getting used to, but tutorial videos on the site will get you started very quickly.
While most presentation programs give you slides to fill up and arrange in sequence, Prezi starts you out with a completely blank page, which can be disorienting at first. On this tabula rasa you can place all the elements of your presentation—text, images, sound and videos (in Flash format)—and arrange them as you would with a mind map, in any way that makes sense to you. You can use frames to group elements that logically belong together. You can also scale objects and use size as an organizational tool.
When you’re ready to present, draw a path through your elements to tell Prezi which item to show first, and the sequence you want the others to be displayed. You can interrupt this sequence anytime during your presentation and zoom into other areas, which comes in handy when you want to answer questions about information you have already shown.
You can make your presentations online using a browser, or export your presentation as a portable prezi that can be run offline, even if your computer doesn’t have a Flash player. Portable prezis run on Windows and Mac OS X, and I was able to run it as well on Linux using Wine. Going full-screen in this way crashed the program, but maximizing the window worked fine.
You can also embed a prezi in a Web site or blog by adding a line of generated HTML code.
Prezi is available as an online service with three types of accounts: Free, Enjoy and Pro.
A Free account lets you create presentations (prezis) at no cost and download them as Flash files that can be presented offline, and comes with 100 megabytes of storage. All prezis created with a Free account are accessible to the public.
An Enjoy account costs $59 a year, enables you to make prezis private, enables you to remove the Prezi watermark from your presentations. It comes with 500MB of storage.
A Pro account for $159 a year has all the advantages of the Enjoy account plus 2 gigabytes of storage and Prezi Desktop, a program that enables you to create and edit prezis offline and upload them to the Prezi server later. Prezi Desktop can run on Windows and Mac OS X.
Active students and teachers can sign up for educational accounts and get an Enjoy license for free or a Pro license for only $59 a year.
Prezi was the brainchild of Adam Somlai-Fischer, a new media artist, architect and technology designer, and Peter Halacsy, an assistant professor at the New Media department of the Budapest University of Technology. They started working on Prezi in 2007 because they felt slides limited their ability to develop and explain ideas.
Denna Jones, a London-based writer, designer and consultant, agrees. “Prezi recognizes that ideas and concepts are a dialogue, not a linear narrative,” she writes in a piece entitled “Why I am switching from PowerPoint to Prezi.”
“What would you do if you had no choice but to draw your concept for your audience? You’d sketch a mind map. A single sheet mind map allows you to move back and forth, up, down, and zoom in and out of detail,” she continues. “Prezi is a dynamic mind map.”
Of course, poor presentations are like the undead, she says, adding: “No software, hardware or program exists that can resuscitate a rubbish presenter, breathe life into poor ideas or prevent the audience from entering an involuntary state of whole body paralysis brought on by presentation failure.”
On the other hand, she concludes, if you have decent content and are a competent presenter, Prezi can provide that extra “oomph” to turn a good presentation into a great one.

Suite alternative

2010-08-31T09:53:01Z

SOON after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, doubts began to surface about the future of OpenOffice.org, the free and open source office productivity suite.

“Don’t count on Oracle to keep OpenOffice.org alive,” Katherine Noyes of PC World warned, saying that the database giant would likely axe support for the free productivity suite and focus development efforts instead on its commercial version, StarOffice.

“Is Oracle quietly killing OpenOffice?” asked Chris Pirillo, who runs the Lockergnome Web site.

Such concerns must have been a factor in January, when an IT consulting company in the Netherlands warned large companies and governments not to deploy the OpenOffice.org until Oracle Corp. proved that it would invest as heavily in its development as Sun did.

The Software Improvement Group said the main risk was that OpenOffice, the most popular open source alternative to Microsoft Office, might get buggier if Oracle pulls personnel and resources from the open source project.

Oracle’s patent suit this month against Google over its use of Java in the Android operating system and its decision to shut down OpenSolaris did little to inspire confidence in open source projects that the database giant inherited when it bought Sun for $7.4 billion.

So are there free alternatives to OpenOffice?

Thanks to the nature of open source, the answer is “yes” – and most of these are built on top of the open source OpenOffice code.

As I explored this issue, I jotted down my findings using Documents, the word processing module of IBM Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4, the latest release of its freeware productivity suite, which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (http://symphony.lotus.com).

Three years ago, I was disappointed when I tried out an early beta version on an Ubuntu Linux system. The installation process was crude and the software itself was unstable and prone to crashing. I’m happy to report that Symphony 3 Beta 4, which was released this month, is much better.

Although based on OpenOffice 3.0, Symphony 3 looks and works differently. Instead of launching individual applications separately, Symphony starts with a home page with one-click access to creating a new document, spreadsheet or presentation. You can also click on the big “New” button at the top left corner of the screen and choose from there.

Unlike OpenOffice, Symphony opens documents in tabs in the same application window, much like modern browsers do. This enables you to keep the workspace neat, without too many open windows on the desktop. There is a way to open a tab as a new window (right click on it and choose “Open in New Window” but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to reintegrate the window into a tab.

If you have a lot of tabs open and want to jump quickly to the right one, you can click on the “Show Thumbnails” button next to the “New” button and point and click to the document you need.

A handy sidebar on the right side of the application window gives you quick, context-sensitive access to formatting and other controls. If you want to see more of your document while you work, you can tuck the sidebar away until you need it.

Symphony 3 comes with its own embedded browser, which means you can view Web pages in tabs in the same application window. This can be helpful when you need to refer to a Web site or access your e-mail while working on a document, as it saves you the trouble of popping from one application to another.
Beta 4 is supposed to be the last test version before the final release, and it feels like a finished product. In terms of performance and stability, it is a vast improvement over the 1.x version I tested sometime ago. The program is responsive, even with multiple tabs open.

If you’re considering Symphony as an alternative to MS Office, take note that it comes with only the basic subset of applications: word processing, spreadsheet and presentation. Unlike OpenOffice, it does not have a drawing or database module.

There are other variants of OpenOffice, too.

Long-time Mac users will be familiar with NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org), a version focused on optimizing the productivity suite to run on Mac OS X.
If you are on Windows, another alternative to OpenOffice is Go-oo (http://go-oo.org/), which has been described as a community-developed OpenOffice on steroids— it loads much faster, runs more efficiently and includes extra features not found in the original suite.

Curiously, I’ve been a Go-oo user for awhile without realizing it. It turns out that this is the version of OpenOffice that comes with many Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.

Oracle and open source

2010-08-24T12:44:00Z

I NEVER thought I would one day be running software from Oracle on my personal computer.

Until recently, the database giant just made products aimed at large corporate customers, not individual PC users. In fact, Oracle’s chief executive, Larry Ellison, had once made a big to-do about how personal computers would one day be replaced by glorified terminals that would get their applications from huge servers connected over a network. He even coined a new term, the NC or network computer, and created another company to promote and sell it.

As it turned out, Ellison’s version of what we call cloud computing today was a little ahead of its time – and so was his prediction of the PC’s demise.

So I was a little amused to see the Oracle logo pop up when I ran the latest updates of two programs that I use quite a bit, OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox, on my Linux-based PC at home.

The two open source programs, of course, went to Oracle as part of its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems last year, along with Java, Solaris and MySQL. At the time the deal was announced, questions swirled around the fate of these projects, given that Oracle’s open source credentials were somewhat less benevolent than Sun’s.
At a conference earlier this year, Oracle sought to reassure MySQL users that it remained committed to the open source database. On its own Web site, the company also said development would continue on its office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org, and that Oracle would offer enterprise-level support as a paid commercial service. In August, the company also released an update to VirtualBox, a sign that development, at least, was continuing.

On the other hand, there were clear signals that the company would no longer support OpenSolaris, an open-source version of Sun’s Unix-based operating system.
Then earlier this month, Oracle riled up the open source community with a patent infringement suit against Google over the use of Java in its Android operating system for mobile phones.

In its complaint filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Oracle said Google’s Android operating system infringed on one or more parts of seven different patents.

Oracle also said Android infringed on Oracle’s copyrights in Java, and asked the court to stop Google from further developing and distributing the operating system and grant it monetary damages for “willful and deliberate” infringement.

Hours after the suit was filed, Google denounced the suit and stood its ground.

“We are disappointed Oracle has chosen to attack both Google and the open-source Java community with this baseless lawsuit,” the company said in a statement. “The open-source Java community goes beyond any one corporation and works every day to make the web a better place. We will strongly defend open-source standards and will continue to work with the industry to develop the Android platform.”

Others outside Google agreed.

“It’s an extremely unsophisticated move by someone at Oracle to launch a patent-based lawsuit, and it’s clearly going to be a significant setback for their relationship with the broader open source community, which is a significant part of many of their products,” said Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth in an interview with InternetNews.com.
“This will complicate the relationships Oracle has with a very important audience, which is the broader open source community,” Shuttleworth said. “It will significantly undermine their efforts to establish many of their major products like Java, Solaris and Oracle Unbreakable Linux, and in due course, I’ll imagine that they’ll quietly wish they hadn’t taken this approach.”

Those who argue against software patents―the bases for Oracle’s latest suit--say they hinder open source development.

“There are now more than 200,000 software patents, and those patents cannot be efficiently searched,” said Rob Tiller, vice president at Red Hat. “Software patents are difficult to interpret, even for experts in computer science and software engineering. Experts often disagree as to whether a particular patent claim covers a particular program. Thus, a risk of litigation exists for every open-source project, and the potential cost of patent litigation runs into millions of dollars for a single case.”

Eben Moglen, chairman at the Software Freedom Law Center, said he expects patent threats against open source companies to continue on a regular basis.
One of the most high-profile threats was Microsoft’s claim in 2007 that Linux infringed on hundreds of patents, an argument it makes to get open source vendors to pay for license to avoid lawsuits.

Despite the rhetoric, some kind of settlement is the likely outcome of Oracle’s suit against Google. With 200,000 Android-powered phones being sold every day, it’s simply bad business to get bogged down in a long court battle. I expect there will be more patent settlements, too, with other open source vendors who use Sun technologies.
As a newly minted Oracle user, however, I have to wonder if the company is burning its bridges with the open source community, and what that will eventually mean to users who have come to depend on the software that springs from it.

Linux applications galore

2010-08-16T16:11:00Z

THE baloney detector on my computer went crazy this week when a reader wrote: “When it comes down to it, I still have to go to Windows to get work done because so many apps are just either not available under Linux or the choices and maturity of the apps are far, far inferior.”

The comment left me puzzled. What kind of “work” did this guy do that he just had to run Windows?

To put this nonsense to rest, I compiled a list of common applications that you might need at work and specific Linux programs that will do the job. And none of the programs I mention here are by any stretch of the imagination “far, far inferior” to their Windows counterparts. In fact, a number of them are not only open source and free, but are cross-platform to boot. On Ubuntu, most of these programs are available through the Synaptic Package Manager. Others, like OpenOffice.org, are already installed.

Audio editing. Need to edit a sound or music file? The free and open source Audacity will do the job.

Backups. Use Unison to automatically back up folders and files to local and remote locations. You can also use TimeVault to take a snapshot of your system that can be restored later.

Communications. Pidgin is an excellent instant messaging client that supports multiple networks, including Yahoo, Google Talk and MSN. Empathy, which is installed with Ubuntu, is another alternative. If you want video and voice communication over the Internet, there’s Ekiga. There is also a Linux version of Skype which works just as well as the Windows or Mac versions.

Desktop publishing. No, you don’t need Adobe InDesign to do desktop publishing. In Linux, you can use the free and open source Scribus, which can do layering, opacity, ICC color management, CMYK color separations, and PDF creation.

Diagrams. Dia enables you to create and edit precise technical diagrams and plans.

Disk burning. There are many options if you need to burn audio or data CDs and DVDs. My weapon of choice is K3B, but there are also Brasero and GnomeBaker.

E-mail and calendar. Evolution is to Linux what Outlook is to Windows. The program incorporates e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, advanced searching, spam filters, encryption, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and iCal support. Evolution will also connect to MS Exchange server. Another alternative is Thunderbird from Mozilla.

FTP. If you need to transfer files remotely via File Transport Protocol, gFTP is extremely easy to use. You can also use Filezilla.

Graphic design. If Gimp is not enough and you need vector-based software, use Inkscape, which is free and open source. The free Linux version of Xara is also very good – and fast!

Image editing. Like OpenOffice, every new release of Gimp, a powerful image editing program, keeps getting better. Gimp has had a bad rap for being somehow inferior to Adobe Photoshop. It isn’t. It just has a different interface that can befuddle longtime Photoshop users. I’ve used both extensively but I tend to use Gimp a lot more because I’ve grown accustomed to the way it works.

Optical character recognition. OCR used to be a challenge on Linux, but gscan2pdf does an excellent job of scanning in printed documents and converting them to text. The ability to send scanned documents straight into PDF format is a nice bonus.

Media playback. Download VLC. It will play practically any audio or video file.

Personal finance. Gnucash features double-entry accounting, stock/bond/mutual fund accounts, small-business accounting, customer/vendor/job invoicing, QIF/OFX/HBCI Import/Transaction matching, reports/graphs, scheduled transactions, and financial calculations. It can also handle multiple accounts. Other alternatives are Grisbi and KmyMoney.

Presentation. Impress in OpenOffice.org, is a capable presentation package that can read and write PowerPoint files. A little on the staid side, Impress can be dressed up with extra templates and add-in 3D transitions. If you want something different, check out Slideshow Creator and DVD-Slideshow.

Project management. Although I have never found the need for this kind of software, Planner is a Linux project management application that supports Gantt charts and resource allocation. Simply install “Planner” from the Synaptic Package Manager and it will appear with other Office programs in the Applications menu. Another option is OpenProj, which looks and feels like and is interoperable with MS Project.

Spreadsheets. Again, most Linux users will simply run Calc, the spreadsheet that comes with the OpenOffice.org suite. Another alternative is Gnumeric. Both will read and write Excel file formats.

Video editing. I hardly do any of this, as it isn’t important to me, but there are many choices in Linux, including Kino, Cinelerra, AvideMUX, LiVES and CinePaint.

Virtual machine. If you really miss Windows, you can run it on a virtual machine like VirtualBox, which enables you to run an operating system within an operating system. How cool is that?

Word processing. The free and open source OpenOffice.org productivity suite keeps getting better with every release. As someone who writes for a living, I’m perfectly happy with the suite’s Writer application. In fact, I use it everywhere – on my Ubuntu Linux PC, Macbook and Windows 7 PC. Another good alternative is AbiWord, which is also free and open source and runs on all three operating systems.

I’m sure I’ve missed something because there’s a lot of Linux-based applications out there, but this isn’t a bad list to start. “Many apps are just not available?” Maybe someone just didn’t look hard enough.

Linux is safer than Windows

2010-08-09T17:20:00Z

SOME time ago, the Financial Times reported that Google was phasing out the internal use of Microsoft Windows because of security concerns after the company’s operations in China were hacked.

Quoting unnamed employees at the search giant, the Financial Times said newly hired workers were now given the option of using Linux or Mac OS X. Employees who wanted to stay on Windows needed clearance from a fairly high-level executive.

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” the Financial Times quoted one Google employee as saying.

“Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval,” said another employee.

Still, others said the move dovetailed with Google’s launch of its Linux-based Chrome operating system later this year.

“A lot of it is an effort to run things on Google product,” another employee told the Financial Times. “They want to run things on Chrome.”
As far as I can tell, Google never confirmed the story, while Microsoft dismissed it as the actions of a major competitor wanting to promote its own operating system.

Here’s another story about the security debate.

Early last month, Dell, which sells millions of Windows PCs, said on its Web site that Ubuntu Linux is safer than Windows.

As the No. 6 item in its “Top 10” list of “things you should know about Ubuntu,” the company said unequivocally: “Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft Windows The vast majority of viruses and spyware written by hackers are not designed to target and attack Linux.”

Don’t bother looking for that item on its Top 10 list, however.

After just a few days, Dell took the entry down and replaced it with something less controversial, saying: “Ubuntu is secure. According to industry reports, Ubuntu is unaffected by the vast majority of viruses and spyware.”

Again, there has been no explanation for the sudden change of heart. Was Dell caving in to Microsoft? We can’t tell, but shortly afterward, Dell stopped selling PCs preloaded with Ubuntu through its Web site.

None of this really helps us answer the question: Is Linux more secure than Windows?

The quick and easy answer is yes.

Despite its flip-flopping, Dell got it right the first time. Most viruses and malicious software today are written to target Windows systems and will not affect Linux or Mac computers. This probably has a lot to do with the predominance of Windows, which still accounts for about 90 percent of the world’s operating systems. Malicious developers of computer viruses who want to do the greatest damage will no doubt favor Windows over any other operating system.

Microsoft and its supporters will trot this point out now and again to emphasize that this, rather than any design flaw in Windows, is the reason there are millions of viruses on Windows, and only a handful that affect other operating systems. If Linux or the Mac became as popular, so the argument goes, there would be more virus attacks on them, too.

To a large extent, however, the argument is irrelevant because it makes no practical difference to the user today. Neither Linux or Mac OS X are going to jump to 50 percent of the market any time soon, so for all practical purposes, they are the safer choices. If you’re going to work – and play – in a Windows world, you better get protection.

Of course, there are other reasons that Linux and Mac OS X, both of which trace their roots to Unix, are said to be more secure by design. The system of privileges that makes it harder for ordinary users to accidentally screw up system files also makes it more difficult for them to unwittingly install a virus or other malicious software.

Another argument says that because Linux is open source, more people can spot bugs and potential security holes – a point that the US Defense Department uses to explain its preference for Linux.

Still another explanation is that Windows procedures for moving information from one application to another were not designed with security in mind. Scripts, too, such as Word or Excel macros, can be saved in data files and can alter the way Windows works, with disastrous results.

Others will say that the operating system doesn’t matter, as long as users follow the right security protocols, especially on the Internet.
Experts on both sides of the fence will argue these points back and forth, but ironically, the most relevant argument is the one that Windows supporters themselves offer. There are simply more threats in Windows, and that alone should give a new user pause.

Checklist for new Windows 7 PCs

2010-08-02T23:43:00Z

FOR Linux users, running a new Windows 7 PC feels a bit like getting all dressed up with nowhere to go. The operating system itself is attractive, but there aren’t that many built-in applications to get you started.

A recent upgrade of our office computers gave me the opportunity to compile a checklist of things to do to get a new Windows 7 PC ready for prime time.

1. Install Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome and make one of them your default browser. This should be the first thing you do because any of these will blow away Microsoft’s built-in browser, Internet Explorer 8. If you use Firefox, you might want to install the DownThemAll extension to speed up the downloads that you’ll need to make. Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows 7 will let you remove IE 8, but it’s a good idea to use it once, first, to download its replacement.

2. Junk any trial-ware that comes installed. I use the polite term to refer to software that lets you use it on a trial basis for a number of days, then stops working unless you pay for it. Anti-virus software from McAfee or Symantec spring to mind but your Windows installation may have other programs as well that can get really annoying. To junk a program, go to Control Panel > Programs and Features, then choose the programs you want removed.

3. Get some protection. Remember you are now in the Windows world, the playground of hundreds of thousands of computer viruses. Unless you want to buy a commercial program, find a good free alternative and make sure it doesn’t use too many resources and slow you down while it’s scanning your hard drive. I’ve run AVG Free (http://free.avg.com) on Windows XP machines with no problem, and it works just as well on a Windows 7 PC. Or you could download Microsoft Security Essentials for free from Microsoft’s Web site.

4. Install OpenOffice.org. Microsoft will be happy to take your money for MS Office, but you don’t need to pay $280 – or use pirated software – to get a professional productivity suite. OpenOffice from Oracle is free and open source, and will do most of the things you would do on MS Office. What’s more, it will work with and write files typically associated with MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint, so you can continue to share documents with people who use MS Office. The Windows version is 148MB, so a download accelerator in your browser (see No. 1) will help.

5. Install Gimp or Paint.net. If you have more than a rudimentary requirement for image editing and MS Paint just won’t do, install Gimp or Paint.net, both of which can be downloaded free. Both will give you most of Photoshop’s functionality without burning a hole in your wallet. If you are accustomed to Photoshop, you might feel more at home with Paint.net, which is a Windows-only program.

6. Get the right picture. To manage your photos and image files, you’ll probably want some kind of a picture viewer. You can download Windows Live Photo Gallery from Microsoft, or choose from a number of free alternatives, including Picasa (http://picasa.google.com) or Infranview. (http://www.irfanview.com/)

7. Install some useful utilities. No operating system will do everything you want. For that extra functionality, you can find many free utilities online. Here are a few suggestions:

* Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com) is a cool application that synchronizes the contents of a designated folder in your hard disk with your online drive and other PCs on which you install the program.

* Switcher (http://insentient.net/) will show you thumbnails of all running applications at the click of a key or a mouse gesture, much like Expose does on the Mac. In fact, Switcher has features that make it even more useful than Expose.

* 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) is a free and open source compression utility.

* Auslogics defrag tool (http://www.auslogics.com) will bring order to your fragmented files, making your hard drive more efficient.

* C-Cleaner (http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner) will purge your system of unused files will keep your all-important Windows Registry in order.

8. Enhance your multimedia capabilities. Install VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) and use it instead of Windows Media Player. VLC will play almost any video format you can throw at it. Install the old favorite, Winamp (http://www.winamp.com/), to play back music. For sound recording and editing, install the free and open source Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/).

9. Communicate better. Windows Messenger lets you send messages to other Messenger users but why not choose an instant messaging client that supports multiple platforms like Yahoo, Google Talk and MSN? Pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im) is a free universal chat client that will connect you to multiple networks all in one window. Then of course, for free video and voice calls over the Internet, there’s Skype (http://www.skype.com).

10. Get serious software for large downloads. Install uTorrent (http://www.utorrent.com/), a lightweight but very capable BitTorrent client in Windows, but make sure to say no to all the special offers that add other junk programs to your system and annoying toolbars on your browser.

Openoffice tips

2010-07-27T12:58:00Z

COMPANIES that want to save on software licensing costs can get an excellent office productivity suite by using OpenOffice.org, a free and open source alternative to MS Office.

Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, OpenOffice comes with a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc) and presentation program (Impress) that can read and write files used by MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

As a writer, the program I use most is OpenOffice Writer, which looks and feels a lot like MS Word before 2007. This is a plus for me since this was the menu system I had grown accustomed to, and I do not care much for the new ribbon interface that Microsoft now uses on all its MS Office applications.

In any case, with the use of the help system and some trial and error, people making the shift from MS Office to OpenOffice.org should have very little trouble getting work done. Here are a few tips that might help.

Be aware of the file format. The default file formats of OpenOffice are ODT (Open Text Document), ODS (Open Spreadsheet) and ODP (Open Presentation). It’s all right to save your work in these formats if you are going to share them with other OpenOffice users, but remember that MS Office cannot read these files. If you regularly share your files with MS Office users, simply change the file format in the File > Save As dialog box.
You might also want to use OpenOffice’s ability to export a document to a PDF file. To do this, go to File > Export as PDF.

Turn on automatic spell checker. OpenOffice can spot spelling errors as you type. To enable this feature, go to Format > AutoCorrect and check the While Typing box. Keep in mind that AutoCorrect will not work in some languages. For example, I find that the feature isn’t available when the language is English (Philippines). To enable AutoCorrect, set the language instead to English (US) or English (UK), if you need to use the British standard. To do this, go to Tools > Options, Language Settings > Language and set the language in the Default languages for documents section.

Let OpenOffice do the typing for you. OpenOffice can complete your words based on what you have typed before, which can be a real time saver. By default, it remembers up to 500 words (10 letters or more) and will give you the option to use them when you type the first few letters of the words. To accept the suggested word, simply hit Enter; to ignore it, just keep typing. To turn this feature on or off, go to Tools > AutoCorrect Options and go to the Word Completion tab. If OpenOffice remembers some words that you misspelled, you can delete them from its list through the same dialog box.

Get more by using extensions. Like Firefox, OpenOffice uses third-party extensions to add functionality. To install an extension, go to Tools > Extension Manager and click on the link that says “Get more extensions online.” This will open the OpenOffice Extensions page in your default browser. Choose the ones you like and save it to a directory. Then, from the Extension Manager, click the “Add” button and point OpenOffice to the directory in which the extension was saved. Extension files have the OXT suffix.
My favorite extension is Pagination, which greatly simplifies the way OpenOffice adds a page number to the top or bottom of the page.
Another extension I find very useful is Accentuate, which makes it easy for me to type the Spanish “ñ” or the accented “é” in the word “café.”
Use templates to give your documents the professional look. OpenOffice comes with two business templates (for Writer), one for creating a resumé and another for a project proposal. But you can get more templates by installing extensions. Professional Template Pack and Professional Template Pack II will probably give you more than you’ll ever need. Or, you can try OxygenOffice Extra – English Templates for more.

Antennagate

2010-07-19T23:28:00Z

HOW do you make amends without admitting you’re wrong? How do you offer millions of your customers a solution to a problem you say hardly matters?

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs gave it a good shot at a press conference Friday (http://bit.ly/jobs_antennagate) aimed at addressing user complaints that gripping the new iPhone 4 in a certain way would dramatically reduce signal strength.

The problem, dubbed “Antennagate,” has been widely attributed to the new antenna that is wrapped around the iPhone 4, and can be solved with the use of a case that keeps the lower left corner of the phone from coming into contact with bare skin.

Apple’s solution, in fact, was to offer free bumpers or cases to all iPhone 4 buyers up to Sept. 30, and a refund to users who had already bought the cases. The company would also give full refunds for undamaged iPhones returned within 30 days of their purchase.

On the balance, the offer seems pretty fair. Users accustomed to Apple’s usually excellent after-sales service could expect no less. If I were an iPhone 4 buyer, I would certainly welcome a free and quick fix to what people were describing as a design defect.

But of course, Apple can’t admit it was a defect at all, as this could hurt sales of its best-selling phone (3 million units in three weeks) in the days and weeks to come.

This probably explains the dissonance I felt while watching Jobs tell journalists how much Apple loves its users.

Setting the tone for the day’s event, Apple started the press conference by showing a user-created video on YouTube (http://bit.ly/antennasong) that poked fun at critics of the iPhone 4 and dismissed the antenna problem as just “so much hoopla.” The bottom line of “The iPhone Antenna Song” was: “If you don’t want an iPhone 4, don’t buy it. If you bought one and don’t like it, bring it back.” The tune was funny and clever, and the message was fair enough, but the unshaven singer looked snarky and a bit sleazy.

“We’re not perfect. Phones aren’t perfect,” Jobs said after the video. “We know that, you know that. But we want to make all our users happy. If you don’t know that, you don’t know Apple.”

Despite the reported problem, Jobs said, the iPhone 4 was “probably the best product” Apple has ever made.

The problem, he continued with some visible irritation, was that the press and some Web sites hyped the issue and blew it all out of proportion. “It’s fun to have a story, but it’s not fun on the other side,” he told journalists at the press conference.

As it turns out, the loss of signal when a phone is gripped a certain way is not unique to the iPhone 4, but can be replicated on other smart phones, too, Jobs said. He showed a video that replicated the phenomenon on a Blackberry Bold 9700, an HTC Droid Eris and a Samsung Omnia II. In doing so, Jobs spread the blame and sought to turn Apple’s difficult situation into an industrywide problem. He also shifted the onus on the media for singling out the Apple iPhone 4, when other smart phones, too, exhibited the same symptoms.

Jobs also reiterated Apple’s contention that part of the problem was related to how the software, used since the very first iPhone, displayed more bars than it should in low-signal areas, and said the problem would be fixed through an operating system update that is already shipping.

Will the software upgrade and free bumpers spell the end of Antennagate? It could be, but the whole episode is not without its costs, probably the least of which is the estimated $170 million to $180 million the company will spend on free cases.

Apple has always positioned the iPhone as the best smart phone in the market. Jobs’ admission that it suffered from the same signal “weakness” as other phones took some of that polish off. It also let its competitors such as Research in Motion come back with a rejoinder that its “customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smart phone to maintain proper connectivity.”

Finally, in dismissing Antennagate as a product of media hype, Jobs forgets that most of the time, Apple has benefited from the inordinate amount of attention that the press pays to its products. In fact, in smaller markets such as the Philippines where the company hardly spends a centavo on advertising, it might be argued that sales are driven precisely by the same journalists that Jobs now derides.

The truth is, members of the press are among the biggest fans of Apple products. I still remember with some embarrassment how the journalists at one local press conference clapped like trained seals at the presentation given by a visiting fireman from the company’s Singapore office. Is this the critical press?

Any hype over Antennagate pales in comparison to the way the press goes gaga over every new Apple product launch. If Apple benefits from this kind of hype, I think it’s only fair that it takes a few lumps, too.

Me? I believe in the Antenna Song. I’m not buying an Apple iPhone.

Firefox 4 Beta 1

2010-07-13T06:03:01Z

THE beta 1 version of Firefox 4 released last week has a distinctly unfinished feel to it. I suppose this was to be expected, given the browser’s beta status, but after the dramatic improvements that Firefox went through going from Version 3.0 to 3.5 and 3.6, the jump to 4.0 seems almost anti-climactic.

This is particularly true if you download the Linux or Mac versions, which still don’t have the single most noticeable feature of the new Firefox – a redesigned user interface reminiscent of Opera or Google Chrome. Mozilla, which makes the browser, says this feature is “coming soon” to Linux and Mac users, but doesn’t say what “soon” means. The skeptic in me remembers that I had to wait more than a year before Google Chrome became available on Linux and the Mac.

To try out the new interface right away, I ran Firefox 4 Beta 1 inside a virtual Windows machine, only to find that the new look appears by default only on Windows Vista and Windows 7 PCs. On my virtual Windows XP machine, Firefox 4 still looked a lot like Firefox 3.6. To get the new interface, I had go to View > Toolbars and un-check the Menu Bar.

To my surprise, I liked Firefox 4’s new interface, which hides the menu bar and puts tabs on top of browser control buttons. A large orange “Firefox” button on the top left of the window (much like Opera’s red “Menu” button) gives you quick access to the menu commands. To reinstate your menu bar, simply go to Firefox > Customize and check the Menu Bar, and you’re back on familiar ground.

Although there is a tendency to dismiss the new look as being a copy of Chrome or Opera, Alex Faaborg, the principal designer of Firefox, explains that putting the tabs at the top of the browser window was neither an arbitrary decision nor a concession to fashion. Instead, it was an acknowledgement that the Web is quickly becoming a platform on its own for applications.

Faaborg cites four advantages to putting tabs on top: 1) this more logically groups controls that affect the browser and those that affect the tab; 2) the layout is better suited to Web applications; 3) the setup makes it easier for Firefox to move windows-based options into tabs; and 4) it makes new notification panels that are easy to notice and easy to dismiss.
These arguments make sense, but you don’t have to agree. The good thing about Firefox 4 is that it remains fully customizable. If you don’t like the default look that the designers have chosen, you can always switch back to the old familiar menu bar and put the tabs where they were before, below the navigation bar.

Another disappointment in the first Firefox 4 beta was speed. It just doesn’t seem dramatically faster than Firefox 3.6, and is certainly not on par with Opera 10.6 or Google Chrome 5.

Early tests seem to confirm this. Ryan Whitwam of Maximum PC reports that the Dromaeo and Peacekeeper benchmarks show only a modest improvement over Firefox 3.6, which means it can’t touch Chrome, Opera or Safari. Computerworld tests using the SunSpider Javascript benchmark showed similar results.

The Mozilla team promises faster browsing, presumably with later versions of Firefox 4. As a longtime Firefox fan, I hope they can deliver—but I also know the competition isn’t standing still. The final release of Firefox 4 needs to knock the socks off Chrome, Safari and Opera if it doesn’t want to lose market share.

Finally, Firefox 4 boasts of a better add-on manager, and says that in the future, users will no longer need to restart the browser to start using the extensions. Unfortunately, at this stage of development, there are very few add-ons that are compatible. In fact, none of the add-ons I use extensively with Firefox 3.6 will work with Firefox 4, so the new add-on manager, while pretty to look at, isn’t very useful at this stage.

At this point, there are only two reasons I can think of to use Firefox 4 Beta 1. First, you can satisfy your curiosity. Second, you can contribute your time and effort by joining Mozilla’s beta test program and providing developers with feedback that will make Firefox 4 better. My own feedback: Mozilla needs to focus on industry-leading speed and help third-party developers quickly migrate the most popular add-ons to Firefox 4. Until then, I feel a bit like the copwho tells curious bystanders: “Move along folks, nothing to see here.”

Apple’s death grip

2010-07-05T16:34:00Z

THE recent kerfuffle over the iPhone 4 “death grip” highlights how a simple problem can be blown out of proportion, not only by media hype but by a woefully inadequate response, in this case, from Apple.

Shortly after the iPhone 4 was released in June to throngs of eager buyers, complaints began to appear about how signal strength could drop from five bars to one if users held the unit in a certain way. The problem was quickly documented in hundreds of blogs and user-created videos on YouTube and even replicated by PCMag.com.

The first explanation for what quickly became known as the “death grip” was fairly straightforward. The iPhone’s new design wrapped the 3G and Wi-Fi antennas in a metal band around the device. Holding the i-Phone 4 in a particular way (apparently with the left hand) would dramatically reduce signal strength and even prevent the phone from making a connection.

Using a protective case, or the $29 “bumper” that Apple sells separately, would solve the problem, but some buyers wanted a more permanent fix.

“Question - What’s going to be done about the signal dropping issue. Is it software or hardware?” one user asked in an e-mail to Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs.

Jobs, as he has been known to do, replied: “Non issue. Just avoid holding it in that way.”

In a follow-up e-mail, Jobs added: “Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.”

The Web site MacRumors said Apple confirmed the authenticity of the e-mail exchange.

Apple’s initial response must have seemed too dismissive, at least to two Maryland residents who accused Apple and AT&T of negligence, fraud, and deceptive trade practices, in a class-action suit.

The suit pointed to advertisements promising improved reception and service as examples of deceptive trade practices by both Apple and AT&T.

The two buyers also complained that they could not get a full refund because Apple charges buyers a 10 percent “re-stocking” fee for returning opened hardware or accessories.

Apple has since waived the 10 percent re-stocking fee, but this did not stop the weirdness.

The Boy Genius Report (BGR) site posted a separate e-mail exchange between Jobs and another disgruntled buyer, in which the Apple CEO says: “No, you are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down.”

Apple quickly denied that Jobs had written the e-mail. At the same time, the Web site AppleInsider said the iPhone user, Jason Burford, had been shopping his story around to several other sites.

But BGR, which didn’t say if it had paid actually Burford “a few hundred dollars” for copies of the exchange, insisted that the e-mail messages definitely came from Jobs’ mailbox and reproduced the headers to prove it. It also pointed out that Apple never denied that the messages had come from Jobs’ mailbox, and only said he had not written them.

“I personally couldn’t give a damn if this e-mail [exchange] was with Steve Jobs himself or not. What I care about is whether this was with Steve Jobs’ e-mail box, one that is obviously monitored by a bunch of employees at Apple, either in customer service or PR, or both,” BGR wrote.

“Is it possible that Steve Jobs himself did not write those e-mails to Jason Burford? Without a doubt. Is it possible that these replies were fabricated, and didn’t come from someone at Apple sending e-mails to Jason Burford from Steve Jobs’ e-mail address sjobs@apple.com? No. I believe 100% these e-mails are real, as I have been given access to Jason’s Google Apps e-mail client and verified those headers to be legitimate, undoctored, and kosher. The replies were all real, the timestamps were all matched up, and the thread was consistent. This was not faked in any way whatsoever.”

In the meantime, Apple had again changed its tune.

The problem, the company said, wasn’t a defective antenna, it was software that inflated signal strength and masked poor reception starting with the original iPhone that was launched three years ago.

“Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,” Apple said in an open letter to iPhone users (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/07/02appleletter.html) Friday.

In many cases, the phones displayed two more bars than they should have, so those whose handsets showed a large drop in bars actually had a weak signal to begin with, Apple said.

The company promised to release a software update that would fix the inflated signal readings on all iPhone models within a few weeks.
Will this solve Apple’s iPhone 4 problems? Frankly, the explanation seems a bit dodgy because it is difficult to imagine that a faulty signal reading would have any impact on the actual ability to make a call or maintain a connection. The explanation also seems to be an attempt to draw attention away from the iPhone 4’s antenna, the center of the class action suit against Apple.

Commented one user on the MacRumors forum: “I love how Apple thinks its customers are idiots. So we are to believe that Apple has not figured this out after four years of making a handset?”

“Cool,” added another forum member. “So now the signal strength indicators will more accurately display the hardware error!”

The i-Fun continues.

Cool designer tool

2010-06-28T16:31:00Z

A YEAR ago, I wrote about Xara Xtreme 5, the fastest graphics design program I’d ever used. This week, I tried the latest update and found that the program, now renamed Xara Photo and Graphic Designer 6, has lost none of its snap, even as it gained a new look and a number of features.

The new name emphasizes more clearly what the program does and for whom it was designed.

Unlike other programs in the market, Xara Designer is a jack of all trades, enabling you to combine drawings, photos and text in one remarkably fast application. Whether you are working with a vector graphic, a bitmap image or a text element, there is hardly any delay as the program redraws the screen after an edit. This means you can design detailed illustrations, posters, brochures, photo compositions and Web graphics with none of the usual waiting for the screen to refresh.

As with Xtreme 5, Designer 6 takes a completely object-oriented approach that makes it easy to learn and use. Any graphic element is treated as an object that can be manipulated in a number of ways – moved, resized, reshaped or rotated. Images can be dragged and dropped into a document.

Imported photos can be manipulated within Designer 6, too, without having to load a separate bitmap editing program.

As with Xtreme 5, Designer 6 is capable of zooming in to 25,000 percent of an image, allowing for extremely detailed work.

A photo enhance tool enables you to correct brightness, color, contrast, and sharpness of imported images, and even fix red-eye problems. Designer 6 also introduces a clone tool that is a staple for sophisticated bitmap editing programs, but unusual in a vector-based image editor. Like the clone tool in Photoshop or Gimp, Designer 6’s clone tool lets you select an area of a photo then stamp over it with a portion copied from the same image.

Designer 6 features two unusual photo tools: content-aware photo scaling and perspective correction.

Content-aware image scaling allows images to be stretched or squashed while retaining the proportions of important parts of the picture. This means you can stretch and change the aspect ratio of photos without apparently distorting the content of the photo.

Perspective correction, on the other hand, allows you to straighten out photos that were taken from an extreme angle.

Because of the way Designer 6 handles photos, on-screen manipulation is fast, with no loss of image quality. The original image file is untouched, and file sizes that incorporate even large bitmaps—say, a 20-megabyte image from a digital camera—are much smaller than they would be in Photoshop.

Users of the previous Xara Xtreme will notice a slicker interface, reminiscent of Adobe Air applications. Fly-out tools and buttons offer one-click access to a wider range of related, common functions. Designer 6 now saves all open documents automatically, and opens them when you run it again.

Other additions since Xtreme 5 are an improved straight line tool that makes it easy to create arrow-head pointers; an opacity mask that gives you greater control over the transparency of image elements; and improvements in text handling.

Notwithstanding its new features, Designer 6 doesn’t suffer from the kind of bloat that often afflicts software suites.

For all its power, Xara Designer has pretty modest system requirements. It runs on any Windows XP, Vista or 7 PC with 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM and 200MB of available hard disk space. For this review, I ran Xara Designer Pro 6, the higher-end version of the program, inside a virtual Windows XP machine hosted on an Ubuntu Linux PC. Even in a virtual machine, Designer Pro was fast.

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6 sells for $89, while Xara Designer Pro, which includes additional features most likely to be important to professional designers, such as color separation and Pantone support, costs $299. You can download a trial version from the company’s Web site (http://www.xara.com) that will let you try it out for seven days, then buy an unlock code if you like what you see. If you’re serious about graphics work, chances are, you will.

Real title case for OpenOffice users

2010-06-25T03:23:01Z

I love OpenOffice, the free and open source productivity suite that does pretty much what I used to do with MS Office. But one feature I sorely miss is a real title case command that will capitalize every first letter in a group of highlighted words. Now I know OpenOffice wonks will point to the obscure “font effect” secretly tucked away in the bowels of the Style window, but I have two problems with that: 1) It’s unnecessarily complicated and 2) it doesn’t always work!

Fortunately, there is online relief at hand. Simply point your browser to http://titlecase.com. Cut and paste the text you want in title case into the appropriate window. hit the “Convert” button, and paste the processed text back into your document. Voila! No muss, no fuss. And no nested menus.

I know, this is still a bit of a kludge, but as far as kludges go, it’s far better than the “font effect” nonsense that OpenOffice offers.

Video grabbag

2010-06-21T23:13:00Z

I RECENTLY received two hilarious videos that my nephew Thomas created using Photo Booth on the Mac. Unfortunately, the files were in Apple’s .mov format, and I wanted to burn them onto a CD as .avi files that my DVD player could play.

Normally, I would simply run my video converter, WinFF, and convert the files locally on my hard disk, but lately, the program has been temperamental, spitting out “unknown encoder” errors on my PC, which is running on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

Sick and tired of mucking around with video codecs, I decided to let someone else do the heavy lifting and uploaded my files to Zamzar (http://www.zamzar.com), which offers free online file conversion.

Using Zamzar is pretty straightforward. Upload the file (up to 100 megabytes in size), choose the format to convert to, enter your e-mail address, and click the “Convert” button. When Zamzar is done, it will e-mail you a link to your converted video so you can download it onto your PC.

Zamzar can actually handle a whole lot more than video files. It also converts a variety of document, image, music, e-book, compressed and CAD file formats. On its free service, you’re limited to five conversions a day and a maximum file size of 100MB. Converted files stay on Zamzar’s servers for a day and are then erased.

Paid accounts ($7 to $49 a month) give you a bigger maximum file size (200MB to 1 gigabyte) and storage space (5 GB to 100 GB) for your converted files.

Media Converter (http://www.mediaconverter.org) offers basically the same service, claiming to be the fastest free online audio and video converter. It seems to live up to that claim. I tried converting a four-minute clip from YouTube by entering its URL into the site and watched the progress bar move quickly toward completion. Unlike Zamzar, Media Converter won’t even ask for your e-mail, and gives you the download link on the same page, once the conversion is complete. Like Zamzar, you can also opt for paid accounts that increase the maximum size and online storage.

Other Web sites such as OnlineVideoConverter.com (http://www.onlinevideoconverter.com) and Vixy.net (http://vixy.net) work only with video content that is already online, enabling you to download the files from sites such as YouTube and convert them into a variety of formats.

File conversion isn’t the only thing you can do with videos online these days.

With a webcam and a microphone, you can also create your own video content and stream it live to viewers on the Internet.

Livestream (http://www.livestream.com) makes it very easy to create your own broadcast channel, and comes with tools to mix a live feed with recorded content. Other similar sites are BlogTV (http://www.blogtv.com) and Ustream (http://www.ustream.tv).

Another cool site is Shwup (http://www.shwup.com), which lets you create an album of videos and images from an event, say, a conference or a party. Invite others who were at the same event to upload their photos and videos then edit them together into your own slideshow (called a “muvee").

For sharing videos, nobody can touch YouTube, but it isn’t the only game in town.

A popular alternative is DailyMotion (http://www.dailymotion.com), which actually seems better organized and less cluttered than YouTube.

Revver (http://www.revver.com) offers video sharing with a twist, giving uploaders an opportunity to earn by sharing revenues from targeted ads.

Blip.TV (http://blip.tv) is a free service aimed at people who want to produce and share their own Web shows, while Ourmedia (http://www.ourmedia.org) is aimed at cause-oriented users who want to promote their advocacies.

Clearly, there’s a lot more that you can do today than simply watch or download videos. A wide range of online tools give you the ability to manipulate them. Add a simple webcam and some creativity, and you can create and share your own video content with the world.

Elegant speed demon

2010-06-14T22:40:00Z

WHAT’S the fastest browser?

If you guessed Google Chrome 6 or Safari 5.0, you’re in for a surprise. The current speed demon is Opera 10.6, the alpha test version from the Norwegian company, Opera Software (http://www.opera.com).

The Download Squad Web site reports that Opera 10.6 scored 25 percent better than Google Chrome 6 (development build), using the Peacekeeper browser benchmark. In fact, Opera’s developers say 10.6 users can expect a 50 percent improvement in JavaScript performance and page loading.

Curious to see if actual experience would reflect these numbers, I downloaded the Linux version and was impressed by how quickly it loads Web pages and how snappily it runs Javascript-heavy sites like Gmail.

Clearly, Opera 10.6 is the fastest browser on my Ubuntu Linux PC, trumping my current favorite, Mozilla Firefox 3.6 and even Google Chrome.

Of course, performance records are ephemeral and there’s more to a browser than raw speed.

A browser that people choose to use everyday must also have good functionality and an interface that not only looks good, but also makes sense. In all these departments, Opera 10.6 in Linux excels.

Like Google Chrome, Opera has a minimalist feel to it, throwing out the traditional menu bar at the top of the screen. Unlike Chrome, however, Opera makes it easy to find menu items, thanks to an eye-catching red button at the top left of the browser window with the word “Menu” on it, in lieu of a cryptic “O” in previous versions. This may seem like a trivial detail, but it makes it so much easier for new users to discover Opera’s other features. (Strangely, I did not get a Menu button on the Mac version of Opera 10.6.)

Opera’s menu button is also much easier to spot than Chrome’s Tools menu, which is tucked away on the right side of the browser under an icon of a wrench.

Even in its alpha version, Opera 10.6 looks more refined and aesthetically pleasing than Google Chrome, which is spartan to the point of being ugly.

There are other nice touches, too, that make the browser easier to use.

Hovering over a tab opens up a thumbnail preview, giving you a visual reminder of what pages you had open. Interestingly, this feature is turned off by default in the Windows 7 version because it slows down the PC when too many tabs are open. This doesn’t seem to be an issue on Linux or Mac OS X.

Dragging down on the space between the tab and address bars expands the tab bar to display thumbnails of all open tabs. Dragging up on the same area tucks the thumbnails away.

A “closed tabs” icon on the right of the tab bar lists all closed tabs and makes it easy to reopen the ones you want.

Opera 10.6 also improves on Speed Dial, a feature that was introduced in Version 9.2 in 2007, and that other browsers such as Google Chrome and Safari have since imitated. Instead of a blank page when you opened a new tab, the original Speed Dial gave you a grid of thumbnails of nine of your favorite or most-visited Web sites that you could quickly jump to with the tap of a key or the click of a mouse. Speed Dial in Opera 10.6 has become more configurable, enabling you to choose the size of grid you want, from a small 2 x 2 grid with only four thumbnails, to an extra-large 5 x 5 grid that gives you a total of 25 favorite Web sites.

You can also choose to use Opera Link to synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial settings, and other browser data among several devices running Opera, so that the settings follow you wherever you go online—at home, in the office or on the road.
But for me, one of the most compelling reasons to use Opera 10.6 is that it makes sharing large files easy though Opera Unite, the company’s framework for Web services.

Unlike other file-sharing programs, Opera’s file-sharing application turns your computer into a Web server, enabling you to easily share any large file on your hard disk through a Web link or Internet address, without having to upload it first to a remote server. Shared files can be either public or private and can be password-protected.

Since 2003, I have dabbled with various versions of Opera. If the alpha version is any indication, Opera 10.6 looks like a winner--and one that just might replace Firefox as my browser of choice.