Tea and Toast

Open Office.org Beta 3 VS Word 2007

2008-06-20T13:35:56+09:30

Let me start off by saying I’ve had a lot more experience with Word'07 then I have Open Office (OOo), and I do agree with those who thinks it's unfair to compare a free product to a fee product, but the reality is that's the first thing someone thinks when they open a writing program; “what is this like to Word?”.

So as you may, or may not know, my boss Nick has decided to rid himself of the Microsoft chains (replacing them with the chains of Apple ). This means we are attempting to move our documents out of the Word .doc format to a format that is better supported across platforms without Microsoft products.

So here we are, looking at Open Office Beta 3, up against Word 2007.

What about Word 03? Its 5 years old, and even universities and school are updating to the new Office, so really, what about it? It's dying software, and people have a huge learning curve ahead of them no matter what product they choose to move on to.

If you don't want to read the in-depth, jump down to the conclusion!

Word '07

I've got to say when I first opened up the new word the first thing that came to my mind was 'wtf?'. Gone are the menus in menus in menus, and the infinite toolbars, instead we have a 'ribbon' using tabs.

Learning the new word sure was a pain, cause first needed to unlearn the old word. Stuff like 'word count' I spent ages looking for only to be embarrassed to find that word count is now live and always showing in the bottom information bar of word. Great decision, no need to do mouse word to quickly check your word count anymore!

The menu re-arrangements are much nicer than they used to be, granted it's confusing finding things for the first time, as their no longer in weird places like 03. However it can be a bit confusing with the ribbon constantly changing itself, you need to keep an eye on the new option available to you, however this is much proffered to being shown very option at once, or having to turn on and off tool bars to find it.

Formatting

Yes I do graphics, and formatting is the first thing I am interested in most applications. Sometimes I am utterly disappointed by the lack of option programs provide you, but Word 07 has gone leaps and bounds from 03 when it comes to branding, not just formatting.

Now you can set up a colour scheme for your document. This means when you hand it on, the suggested colours are appropriate to the documents current design. But it doesn't stop there, we still have our heading style etc, which was present in 03, but we also have styles for tables, and objects.

When you draw a box, word 07 now takes your colour palettes and suggests some nice tasteful auto formatting based on these colours, including soft drop shadows, gradients, thick lines, and more. You can draw a table, and in 3 clicks have all the alternate lines formatted in colours from the document, with the headings differentiated, just by selecting the 'format' tab and clicking the suggested design that looks best.

There is also a floating box that appears above select items with the basic menu options of that element – such as format and position on images, which really saves time.

So Word '07 I give a huge thumbs up, well worth the learning curve, especially for design elements to help get your companies documents back to a consistent and pleasant look.

Open Office Beta 3

Oh no, you think I’m not going to like it cause I like word 07? You'd be wrong. The first thing I have to say about Open Office is that I love it's price – nothing!

Opening up OOo for the first time is reminiscent of opening up word'03, the layout is very similar and so is the overall look and feel. Most of Word 03's functionality seems to be accounted for, and some of the tool bars are laid out exactly the same, so as a general user the learning curve will be minimal in comparison to learning Word'07, which is a huge bonus if you decide not to go down the upgrade.

Saving directly to PDF is definitely a huge plus! No worries if the machine has word 03, 07, iWorks, or another version of open office, you can guarantee that they can at minimum read the document.

Formatting

But as with all Open source programs things start to get a little fuzzy when we look at the more advanced features. Headers and Footer can be made to suit the sections they are in, the same as word'03, but you can actually name your sections, and section management seems to be much more powerful in OOo... however as such it's a bit harder to figure it out as it's using new concepts, and the first thing I did to get me through was to open up the help.

Hopefully the help is not really applicable because it's beta 3 – if it is... try finding the feature yourself first and when entirely exhausted try the help. Many cases I went to use the help, and found it was just wrong, telling you to go to the wrong menus, or about areas that no longer existed. This means you not only spend time searching the help, but then trying to follow instructions that are wrong, taking up more of your time. Fingers crossed this is fixed when it is released as a full build.

OOo doesn't have all of the functions of word'03, and I think this serves to work against the product when it is so familiar to it. Features like selecting a paragraph and pressing tab to indent it, will replace your selection with a tab. Likewise which using shift+tab to unindent. Likewise there's no easy way to see on the fly if you have spelling mistakes.

OOo does have a colour palette option, so you can change the suggested colours, which is great to see. You can save and load them, however there is no easy way to load a palette, requiring you to actually draw and object, so you can get into the Area Menu, and then the Colours tab to be able to open your saved palette. This option should be available on all drop out palettes, and should be much easier to access than that, especially as it doesn't seem to save the like between the document and the colour palette it is using, requiring the user to load this each time. The feature is under-developed, but very welcome for when it is made.

OOo does seem to have some powerful formatting options, allowing you to select how an object is position, whether it is to a paragraph, page, or its location in flowing text, which Word'03 just doesn't have. So there are cases where OOo is actually more powerful then the fee product, good work!

The Show Down

I love the new word, they really brought new life to a bloated, over-featured product that was just getting to a stage where it was hard to see any advantage in upgrading, and the new formatting features, if used, should be helping businesses keep their corporate image up.

OOo is a great product, and much easier to learn from Word'03, than the new Word'07. However as it is so similar, it becomes more apparent when features of Word'03 aren't in OOo, which will always be a let down for it. The menus are better than Word'03 but not as intuitive as Word'07. The product is also bland to look at, so some serious thought into adding some graphical interest, or skins would definitely help to boost the product away from being a Word'03 clone and reduce the disappointment in missing features. Most of all, I hope they continue to develop new features no seen in Word, and take in some of the new word features, I would love to see more soft dropdown shadows!

So if you are upgrading from Word'03, look at OOo, it costs you nothing, supports .doc format, saves to pdfs, and uses open document formats. If OOo doesn't tickle your fancy, be prepared, the new word is a totally new beast, but very rewarding if you learn it correctly.

Second Life, invading your first.

2008-04-21T11:06:20+09:30

Second Life (SL), a Web 2.0, coined by some as Web 3.0 (because it's 3D), technology. Rather pointless really, you go on... you learn to walk, talk and create... then you walk, talk and create.

So how does SL invade into your first life? Well, really it's not a game, nor an ideal way to communicate as it's not different in fucntionality to any other IM program. So walk and talk isn't that exciting and are functions we've seen on World of Warcraft, and various Sim games. I think it's the ability to create - and thus by implication - consume (buy and view creations).

The programming language Linden Scripting Language (the Lindens are much like McDonald's - rather than come up with a new name, they name everything Linden something), or LSL for short, is a relatively simple language, using similar coding style to JavaScript, making it quite accessible to many people, especially as we are dealing with 3 dimensions.

Creating 3d object is all done with the environment itself, you can then apply your scripts to create doors, chat bots, letterboxes to leave someone notes, and even games; whatever you want to have a go at. Due to this lots of popular culture has been developed into it's own in-SL game, such as Harry Potter, variations of Dungeon and Dragons, and smaller title like Leisure Suit Larry, and Pong.

All of a sudden walk, talk and create become interesting; finding new weird things people have made, or interactive forms of nostolgia, and then the inspiration to create your own... then your Second Life, sudden starts settling into your first.

So if you haven't tried it out, or did and couldn't see the point, have another go at it, and make sure to search around, cause it's just like the web, only in 3D.

Email Jail Bail

2008-04-14T17:16:02+09:30

Recently Toast Technology has been conducting some advertising and research, and one of the topic of interest seems to be an overgrown inbox, or Email Jail (as coined by Luis Suarez).

I've definitely worked in some large companies, and sorting through emails is a daunting and boring task, especialyl when Mr White Commodore has left his head lights on again! So i can definitely sympathise feeling trapped in Email Jail. As such i wrote a short wiki article on it, how to identify it and why it's a problem;

http://wiki.toasttechnology.com.au/Email

I am also proposing that people get up and be active about the Email Jail problem, be active and see to unlock you inbox! As such i have started a wiki entry on solutions, that i have coined as 'Email Jail Bail', on the same wiki;

http://wiki.toasttechnology.com.au/EmailJailBail

So if you have any suggestions, or need help making that bail, leave me a comment, .

Lotus Sametime in a virtual workspace

2008-02-26T11:19:38+10:30

Time to review Lotus Sametime working with Vista i think.

I work in a non-standard enviroment - we have no physical work space, and are almost entirely void of paperwork. Yes it's quite hard to believe a company without an office, let alone with very little paper.

Most of this is achieved using Lotus Sametime. While Sametime isn't overly different to MSN Messenger and the like, it does include a few simple features which makes working in a virtual office a lot easier.

The common features of chat programs are present;

custom emoticons

text chat, with names and time stamps, and logging

audio chat

online status settings

client side nicknames

whiteboard

These features are rather unimaginative, except the custom emitcons have 'palletes' (collections), however there doesn't seem to be a simple way to switch between palletes, or identify which "" from the palletes you wanted to show - a bit disappointing as it was possibly a clever feature. Another disappointment is a recent update which forces a window to top of the pile when you receive a message, which can really get in the way - would be nice if they changed it to the standard flashing on the task bar.

On Vista, Sametime seems to be quite stable during run time... the only problems i have are when i try to turn it off! It quite often crashes while closing, leaving you with a nice long error, that fills out right off of the screen. Doesn't seem to affect chat logs or anything, so is just a nuisance. Likewise... starting Sametime up takes quite awhile.... a lot longer than any other chat program, though i'm not sure if this is a Vista or general issue. I've notice a few quirks in Vista... occasionally a log will be made that cannot scroll - not quite sure why, and my log-in password will not be remembered, which again these problems aren't major, just annoying.

The features that work well for business are around meetings and alerts, You can schedule online meetings which is definitely a plus in terms of transitioning real life habits into virtual ones. And alerts are particully useful, allowing you to recieve an alert telling you a user has come off away status etc, if you have been needing to talk to them.

Other than the usual quite basic tools of white board, which are useful for exampling very rough design concepts, there is a feature which saves me lots of time and effort. A screenshot tool allows you to select a portion of your screen, then paste it directly into your chat. The quality of the image sent may not always be that great, but for work like "Do you want more margin here?" i can quickly screenshot the area, so my boss knows exactly what i am talking about. I can provide up to date screens of what i am working on in just a few seconds, rather than saving an image, resizing it, compressing it and attaching it to an email.

So i would have to say... Sametime is not particully exciting, it has all the standard features, visually could do with some work, and has it's quirks but the screenshot feature really does make online graphic work a lot simpler, and provides a more formal environment than MSN or Skype to work in, which is encouraging, and a tool well worth considering for speeding up visual communication in virtual environments.

So go on, give it a go.

Alex

Adobe Updater... or should i call it Hi-Jacker?

2008-02-19T10:10:09+10:30

Before i start having a stab at Adobe, let me start by saying i love Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash, frankly i would be lost without them. I know i am not alone in this feeling!

Today is yet another day, where my work flow was interrupted by Adobe, and their frustrating updater. But today, was even more special than any other day. Generally Adobe Updater, sits in the background, downloading ridiculous amounts of bandwidth to do various updates on the software, which i, as an end user, couldn't say i've ever noticed a difference. Not like these hundreds of megabytes i've downloaded have given me any new pretty brushes or anything - nope they have just been securing and stabilising software, which seemed fine to me.

I have no problem with this, the more security the better. So i let little Adobe Updater go crazy, i put up with the annoying "i'm sorry, but Adobe Updater can't install because... *shock* you are actually using a piece of the Adobe software", *sigh* - save all my work again, stop what i'm doing so i can avoid getting bugged by it again... of course then it complains that you have Firefox and Internet Explorer... now it's really starting to get annoying. So finally, you've close almost every single program down... and are somewhat expecting Adobe Updater to tell you to close MSN Messenger, Notepad, Antivirus, and for the sake of it explorer.exe - but not this time, it's going to be kind enough to let you have *a* program running while it's takes 5-10mins installing.

You think that's annoying, then it restarts your computer - "oh well" you say.... "i saved everything, and might as well have restarted my computer". Then finally the fortnightly/monthly frustration is over.

That's if Adobe are being nice.

Today, i get the annoying usual rigmarole - however this time Adobe Updater didn't feel as social, and instead of telling me to close my programs and so forth, instead it goes right ahead - "At last it's fixed!” i think - i return to my work only to have Windows Vista give me a lovely little message;

"Your computer will restart in less than a minute."

Oh... wait, what?! Cancel? CANCEL?! THERE'S NO CANCEL! My windows start dropping off like flies in a mist of moreteen; anything somewhat important, gone...

* swearing *

And just to put the cherry on the icing, once my computer has restarted, Adobe Updater announces;

"Adobe Updater has finished installing the updates."

Thanks Adobe... Thanks.

So my question to anyone else - Do you also endure the frustration that is Adobe Updater?

And the most important question of all - we pay out a few thousand dollars to get the Adobe Suite, unlike people who download it for nothing - what are the advantages? Adobe Updater? You've got to be kidding me - seriously... they can't afford to give an intern some money to make a user interface that isn't reminiscent of Windows 95? Or just warn us that we *should* close IE and FF, but install anyway - even a "Would you like to restart now, or later?" dialogue would be nice.

Come on Adobe, give the people legally using your software a little something - it seems those who have illegitimate versions have the bonus of avoiding the pain of the updater... and if i turn it off... then what was the point in paying those thousands?

I'm interested to hear other people's experience and thoughts on Adobe Updater, also, other than supporting Adobe, paying out all this money, do you feel it is justified?

Alex
Technorati Profile

Theme developement in MoinMoin

2008-01-09T16:57:58+10:30

Well this week's topic is MoinMoin's free wiki service. Nick has set up 2 wiki servers http://wiki.toasttechnology.com.au and http://wiki.soasuccessplus.com and as a new technology on board for our company, i'm at the forefront to get it looking like a part of us.

My first theme was the Toast Wiki... and i found developement difficult. Using the default html that is generated i was able to adjust the design somewhat, add our own background and with some CSS absolute positioning i was able to re-arrange the elements to something a little more friendly, however as with lots of css positioning it was fraught with dangers, especially resizing.

So I had no choice but to learn how MoinMoin theme work, and learn a little python. Scary stuff, especially when there is very little documentation, and when i say little it's like the internet of the 90's, where you learn by cracking open notepad and looking and fiddling with what other people have done. Yes, a painful process, and somewhat short sighted on MoinMoin's team considering the very basic help for creating themes, I myself would add to it, but am afraid i know quite little after my experience.

MoinMoin's theme set-up isn't too bad, it has a basic default theme it'll output you can see at http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MoinMoinWiki , the design is rather dull with pastel blues and greys, so it's easy to brighten it up with css, but when it comes to putting the search in a less awkward place than top right, or changing the menu from a dropdown list to small icons... it's not so easy! You need to jump into a python file and override the methods.

Now i actually think overriding the methods is a great idea, basically there's a method for each portion of the theme, such as header, footer, editbar, iconbar etc. The problem is, you don't know what it calls already, and i couldn't seem to find any documents to let me know what methods a method would call to create itself, so i ended up studying other themes.

I think out of all the simple things you might want to change, it would be the header and footer, so you can add one or two extra divs, images, or change where elements appear so you don't have to push css so far.

So here's the exciting little bits i found when rearranging the header and footer. You'll need to grab someone else's python file to start you off or follow the instructions, then it's just a matter of moving this code around;

    def header(self, d, **kw):

        html = [
            # Pre header custom html
            self.emit_custom_html(self.cfg.page_header1),
            
            # Header

            self.logo(), #logo defined in the configure setings

            self.title(d), #title defined in the configure settings
            self.trail(d), #breadcrumbs of where the user has visited

            self.navibar(d), #the tabs, or permanent links the user had put on,
                             #or that have been set up in the config

            self.username(d), #user options such as login, their name, and preferences
            self.searchform(d), #search box with titles and text buttons
            self.editbar(d), #the seciont people can use to edit the page,
                             #the default includes a dropdown with more actions

            self.msg(d), #where notifications that you edits have been saved are shown
            
            # Post header custom html (not recommended)
            self.emit_custom_html(self.cfg.page_header2),
            
            # Start of page
            self.startPage(),
        ]
        return u'\n'.join(html)

So we have a bit of code there, but not to be concerned, really we're mostly interested in the code in the middle, i've put comments next to each line to try to explain what each method is. Now it's as simple as arranging the lines of code, from self.logo() to self.msg(d) . If you want to leave anything it, just cut it, such as the annoying breadcrumbs - they are useful but may not fit in with everyone's needs.

That's pretty simple, but i need a tag around the whole head so i can control it a bit more, well thankfully this is pretty simple too! All you have to do is add a line with u' at the beginning and ', at the end. So if we want a new div tag we'd add u'<div id="footer">', before self.logo(), and probably want the header to finish before our message so just above we'd add u'</div>', to close off our tag.

Hey that was easy! Yeah it is, infact you can re-arrange any part of the output, or remove parts or move them into other sections, and won't have to really learn any python. But if you decide you don't like the contents of any of the methods, such as you don't like the editbar, and want to change the dropdown into something else, well that's a lot harder, and i suggest grabbing some of the original source - i managed to find it for the modern theme, it wasn't the most recent version so the code was helpful in some cases but not all. Most importantly it contained the names of the methods i needed for sections i wanted to change.

You want a little more help? Oh well i guess i can help, - here's the footer method;

    def footer(self, d, **keywords):
        html = [
            self.endPage(),
             self.emit_custom_html(self.cfg.page_footer1),

            self.editbar(d), #edit bar including drop down, same as the one in header

            self.credits(d), #credits as defined in the config
                             #the default links are "moinmoin powered" and "python powered"
                             #and are at the very bottom of the page

            self.emit_custom_html(self.cfg.page_footer2),
        ]
        return u''.join(html)

Yeap only 2 methods to play with in the footer, but you could move the searchform from the header to the footer like i did, get rid of the credits if you don't find them appropriate, or close a tag you opened in the header so you could affect the content of the page. Quite useful isn't it?

In most cases, unless you are drastically changing how the moin moin works, these 2 sections of the theme are what you will be changing, and really just re-arranging the code, or adding a few lines to put out more formatting.

I hope someone else working in the world of moinmoin find this little bit of information helpful in making moinmoin themes! If you are interested in how i did the icon menu, well you can call iconbar(), but unfortunately you will have to override the iconbar method and code in your own output, it took me awhile, so if you're interested drop me a comment and i'll post some help or code!

Alex - now a MoinMoin themer

Mootools and a centered Fly-in

2007-11-20T10:31:56+10:30

Well mootools provides some great functionality with their transitions, and in such a small file size... it saves us from making annoying code that merely moves a window, and it nice and smooth. Saves me from a lot of difficult cross-browser testing for simple things, and lets me focus on what i'm making.

And today, it's a fly in window!

Ok i'm not going to suggest this is the end all of solutions, or that it's complete; it's easy enough to copy and paste into your own site if you only need one fly in, if you want otherwise i've not made it a class... so that might be a little difficult. For this example all you need do is format your fly-in window with position absolute, a width, and the id "myFlyIn".

For the javascript: include the mootools.js file with core (download it from their site), transitions and window, then add a link with href="javascript: showFly()" and your done!

The window will position itself in the middle when the window is resize, and will stay in it's position when you scroll, however if the pop up ends up larger than the browser window, it'll let you scroll over the popup so you can see all of it regardless of how big your browser window is. The button is a toggle so will put the window in an out.

Let me know what you think, or if you improve on the code!

What? you want the code... oh well i guess i could put in some pretty code for you to read!

And that's it! Have fun!

P.S. Roller owned me... alas i've resulted in having to resort to an Iframe to show my code, as roller makes pre formatted mash, by adding usless paragraph tags and breaks that destroy your preformtted glory... I tried a few 'solutions' from hiding br's and reducing p's to nothing with css and removing the tags with Javascript, but this results in the code losing all it's formatting or changing slightly, so sorry about the iframe!

Blog theme up and running!

2007-08-09T15:50:35+09:30

In the background I can hear Nick jumping up and down for joy. :D .

Well I've finished the template and believe I have everything formatted. There are a few interesting things to note about this theme;

It works in IE6 but looks best in FF and IE7 due to png support.
It is most likely xhtml, but is currently on html, this is because I've yet had time to test it all.
Positioning is done with CSS
IE7 still has some bugs IE6 has... so there is conditional statement for IE6 and IE7 to fix errors
There is a little javascript to add more and less links to the main page (as ric suggested he'd like all the information on the frontpage, however you still need to click to get it all, sorry ric, but I prefer a tidy startpage! )

So I've had fun with roller to get this one all working, and i think my knowledge is probably still a bit shallow, as I have no control over how "comments", and the "calender" is generated, leaving my css to adher to the classes roller chooses to use.

I'll explain the annoying IE6/7 bug - it's to do with floating divs (what a surprise I hear you all say) basically my toolbox is a floating div to the right, so that I don't have to have loads of wasted vertical space after my toolbox, then to ensure the page is flush, I have a footer with "clear:right" - which will force it below the floating div... in FF... in IE it'll go below, but this will also destory the left margins leaving the content box that keep everything in and spread the box from the left, rather than having a nice candy cane stripped gutter. So how did I fix it? Added an extra div with width set to 100% - thankfully IE box model meant this will drop to the bottom without killing my left margins.

Ah gotta love CSS across the browser/platforms!

Well I hope all those who see this blog enjoy its appearance! I'll be trying to update this blog as often as required to explain my discoveries around my job and web developement, so keep a RSS open for me!

Alex

First Blog Entry

2007-08-07T15:56:29+09:30

Well after much time i've finally got my blog up and am working on the theme for it. So far i am attempting to use pure css for positioning and have used a combination of blender3d and photoshop to make the simple, yet nice graphics.

Implementing it all into roller takes awhile - mostly referencing images, and figuring out what function actually does what takes the longest! The design is pretty full however may require some additional bits here and there as i find the gaps in my design (forms for example).

This isn't a very long blog - in all honesty this is basically so i can test the theme!