Bean

As you may have read in some previous post, the native version of Open Office for mac is not quite ready. However, if you're looking for an open source word processor then you might want to give Bean a go.

Bean has some really nice features which make it worth using over TextEdit. The main one which most users of TextEdit are annoyed by is word count. What is even nicer is that the word count is live at the bottom of the document, meaning you don't have to go routing through menus like in Word. Another nice feature set is the complete word and define word items. Define word will open up dictionary.app and complete word will try and guess the word you are typing, which can be very helpful if you're not sure how a word is spelled.

Another bonus over TextEdit is that it can open .doc files. This makes it useful even in an office environment where others may be using Word. Also, unlike Open Office at this point, it is in the native cocoa styling with all the features you might expect from a cocoa app.

Find out more and download it from the Bean site here.

Aquamacs

As I've said before in previous posts, I've been learning the programming language Python recently. Up until a couple of weeks ago I was using Smultron as the editor for the code and then using the interpreter in the command line for the exercises I was doing. Recently though I have started using one of the original free software tools, emacs. There is a native mac build called Aquamacs which I have found very easy to pick up for anyone who has not used emacs before. All the usual OS X keyboard shortcuts still work like apple-s for save as emacs has many, many of it's own shortcuts and 'meta' keys which I won't go into here. One of the main features that I found useful is that Aquamacs comes with its own Python interpreter built in so that I don't have to leave the app to run a test program (there are obviously limitations to this). I don't want to say this is better than Smultron as they both have different features but I think it's worth trying out both if you are looking for an open source editor for the mac.

Adium 1.0.2 released

"This bugfix release fixes several "favorite" crashes, improves AIM file transfer (again!), speeds up the Chat Transcript Viewer, improves interactions with iTunes and the OS X keychain, and more - a total of 25 significant improvements."
Get the update here.

Smultron

From the website:
"Smultron is a text editor...designed to be easy and intuitive to start off with and to become more and more able as and when the user wants it."
I decided to give Smultron a try as I've been wanting to move away from Dreamweaver as my HTML editor because it's fine when my work pays for it, but for home use I can't justify the price. Smultron on the other hand is free, open source and very easy to use. Like the developer says it can become more and more able as the user wants. The advanced features I have only read about at the moment as I'm just using it for HTML and CSS editing mainly but also I've just started to learn the open source programming language Python, so I'm only really using it as a text editor with syntax highlighting.



As you can see from the screen shot, it is a very simple user interface and I found that I could get going with it almost immediately. It has a split view, which is really useful if you are doing some CSS adjustments and need to be constantly referencing the HTML file. Also I know that it can integrate with Cyberduck very easily although I haven't yet delved into that feature. It has a 'Live Find' very similar to the search in finder of 'Filter by Name' in Path Finder, which makes it easy to locate a specific div for example.
The overall look and feel of the application is quite nice with some intuitive features e.g. you can drag and drop files into the side bar to open them. I would recommend this app for sure if you do a lot of HTML editing in the Dreamweaver code view and are looking for an alternative.

For more information and to download the software go to the Smultron website.

OSS Business Case

Info World has a good article on the benefits of Open Source software for businesses. There are some good points made here and also some interesting information on the BSA offering rewards to people who report licence violations to them. I'm not sure if there is a similar scheme in the UK but I would be interested to know.

Still waiting for Aqua version of Open Office

I'm sorry to report that I had to revert back to using excel for viewing spreadsheets as using Open Office in X11 was just not good enough. Many keyboard shortcuts didn't work and it slowed things right down. I'm eagerly awaiting the aqua version though and I'm checking the site regularly. As soon as the alpha is released I'm going to jump on it.

Cyberduck

Cyberduck is an Open Source FTP browser with some excellent features. It is extremely fast and has an easy-to-use bookmarking tab. It also intergrates very well with Smultron (which I will be talking about in a future posting) for the editing of files straight on the server.

There is also a widget available which is great for uploading quickly to test a working html file. The widget is very easy to set up and then works by dragging and dropping.
Find out more on the Cyberduck website.