It’s official, Yahoo are out of the search engine business.
Anyone now searching on Yahoo won’t really know the difference, but essentially all they’re using is a rebranded version of Bing.
As many of you may recall, Microsoft have been trying to get their mits on the web portal giant for years, five, by my count, with Microsoft once offering a whopping $46.6 billion US for the company, only to be rebuffed.
Then, last summer, Yahoo announced that it was getting out of search completely and turning over control of the search engine side of their business to Microsofts then-new Bing search engine. The deal would leave Yahoo as a completely independent entity albiet one which essentially oursources its search engine operation to Microsoft.
Yesterday it went live.
This is nothing new for Yahoo, who’ve had similar deals in the past, including a search alliance with Google. Traditionally Yahoo were always more interested in web directories and didn’t understand all the fuss about search engines. When one recalls the early days of search engines it’s easy to understand why. They were still a relatively new phenomenon and, until Google came on the scene, nobody had really cracked it.
Unlike so many others, Yahoo emerged from the Dotcom Crash intact, its market share bolstered by several aquisitions including search provider Inktomi, but by that time it was too late, Google were already leaps and bounds ahead of Yahoo in terms of search engine technology. Yahoo instead began to concentrate more on pay per click advertising and emerging social technologies, once again through aquisitions, such as photo sharing site Flickr and the social bookmarking site Delicious.
The Microsoft deal marks the end of an era for one of the search engine industry’s biggest players and leaves Microsoft now the second largest search engine though still far behind Google which presently enjoys over 70% market share. [source: search engine market share statistics]
Whether or not Bing can ever catch up with Google is unlikely. Though with new social rivals such as Facebook stealing Google’s thunder both in terms of traffic and ppc revenue they may want to rethink all those millions of little side projects they keep announcing and start to concentrating more on their bread and butter; pay per click advertising and search.
Pixlr is a free, online image editor that allows you to upload files for editing directly through your browser, make edits, apply filters and other Photoshop-type tasks before saving the file back down to your computer.
Though not quite as powerful as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, it’s well worth bookmarking, especially for emergencies, like when on the road and away from one’s computer, it’s the ideal app for quick edits.
Internet Explorer 6 was the default browser bundled with Windows XP and has been around for nine years now. Since then there have been two new iterations of IE; IE7 in 2006 copying Opera and Firefox with the introduction of tabbed browsing, and IE8, released last year.
As more and more people upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 7 is beginning to loose ground and Internet Explorer 6 has begun its slow slip into obscurity.
I am writing this on behalf of all the designers and developers out there who wish to speed up the process.
Back at the beginning of IE6’s life cycle rival browsers like Firefox and Opera didn’t have a fraction of the amount of users they have today. As IE6’s rate of adoption increased, however, so too did the adoption rate of these new rival browsers, as many people jumped ship and never returned – much to Microsoft’s annoyance.
(In fact the company often went to some rather sneaky lengths to protect its market share.)
In addition to its long history of security flaws which didn’t provide a back door, so much as a wide open front door, to hackers, IE6 was also a web designers nightmare. For one it had issues displaying .png files correctly plus a whole host of CSS styling issues, such as its own unique interpretation of positioning rules.
In short, the browser didn’t always display pages the way it was supposed to. So whenever somebody designed a website and wrote the code to proper international web standards, the result, when viewed in the Microsoft browser, often looked terrible. This meant that web designers (including yours truly) often had little choice but to design separate stylesheets just so the design would look “correct” in the broken browser.
As for web developers… the poor people, they have suffered so much for too long.
The good news for those in the industry, now that Google has officially dropped support for IE6, is that the rest of the world is bound to follow suit. Apple are halfway there already and ongoing issues with Flash also mean that Adobe would undoubtedly be more than happy to dump the browser too. In other words, Internet Explorer 6 has become the new floppy disc drive. Read the rest of this entry »
It has been tried before. And it has failed miserably. Still, with more TV sets out there than computers and smart phones combined, and with lots of new markets emerging in developing or BRIC countries (though in Google’s case not China), the rewards, for whoever can crack it, are enormous.
So no marks for originality this time, Google, but full marks for aggressive assertiveness.
For the last quarter Google have reported revenues of $6.77 billion – hardly a figure to be sneezed at. Despite this the web advertising behemoth is hungry for more and have clearly been watching a lot of TV, just not in the way you might think.
Television has, thus far, been perhaps the only traditional medium not to have been directly impacted by the web. Whilst publishers of books and newspapers, the music industry and Hollywood have all seen their market share, and to some point, their entire business models, decimated by the ascendancy of the Worldwide Web, more eyes are glued on the telly than any other media format, as this article by The Economist explains. So, logically, for a company that makes its money from providing access to content and services provided on the back of selling ad space, such a move was predictable and, one might even say, inevitable.
As I said the vision of combining the TV and the Web is hardly new one. There have been plenty of attempts so far, all unsuccessful, with one such product from 1995, called WebTV, listed as a runner up [scroll down to see entry] on PC World’s worst products of all time.
WebTV was later snapped up by Microsoft becoming MSN TV. Though even with the massive resources of Microsoft behind it, and through partnerships with Sony, Phillips, Samsung, RCA and Mitsubishi, the product never really took off. What it did do, however, was lay bare the hunger that the big corporations all have to merge the world’s two most dynamic and influential mediums.
All things considered, WebTV and its progeny were, in essence, an idea whose time had come but the technology had not come along with it. In the mid-nineties websites were often designed quite badly and browsers were fickle, to say the least. CSS support was often poor or non-existent. Cast your mind back to the first websites you saw, with all those awful gaudy, low-resolution graphics and insipid animations – now imagine how those websites would look, not on an old VGA monitor, but on a big screen TV. The result would be blockier than Legoland. As for watching online videos, forget it. Flash had only just arrived on the scene when WebTV did, and the idea of using Flash for YouTube-style streaming video was ten years away. Using the web for streaming video back then was sort of ridiculous anyway, as everyone was still crawling along on dial-up modems. Though it is humorous to imagine an entire family sitting in the living room reading the words “buffering…” off the big screen impatiently awaiting a low-resolution, minute long Real Player video.
Things have moved on since those days, and rapidly too. We now live in an age of high speed broadband and high definition TV, with 3DTV just around the corner, spurred on by the success by films such as Avatar. Google, like Microsoft and WebTV before it, have already wooed the electronics industry. Sony have signed up and are building Google TV-enabled HDTVs and Bluray players, peripheral manufacturer Logitech has also signed up to make special Google TV set top boxes, Intel has also been announced as a partner and invariably more will be announced soon.
The idea is that these devices will come with an integrated browser/system (Android/Chrome-based) which can access online content direct through your TV. Such a system also makes it easier for people, young and old, to access content. For the older generation in particular, the ability to use the familiar remote control, rather than the alien mouse and keyboard, could make the Web more accessible for millions. (That is presuming they are not the sort who believe that flipping channels too quickly will break the TV.)
Laziness, in the end, is the name of the game. This is television, after all, and so the easier the technology makes it to do things the better. Personally I don’t watch much TV but I do love to watch movies. I’m what you’d call a film buff, actually, and what happens me often (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) is I’ll be watching a movie and see an actor and go, “oh, it’s that guy” and will not be able to enjoy the movie as I’ll be sitting there racking my brains trying to figure out what other film I’ve seen him in lately. With Google TV a quick flip of the remote and I could be on IMDB getting the answer in a matter of seconds all without missing a second of my movie – wonderful. So basically what this offers, amongst many other things, is the ability to access information without having to get off one’s ass to turn on the laptop or pick up the phone. In other words, this is the holy grail for couch potatoes everywhere.
It’s a dream come true for the younger, more net-savvy generation, too. For example, you could be lying back in your living room watching TV and, when your favourite show is over, jump direct onto your Facebook or Twitter account to discuss it with friends during the commercial. This might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is a rapidly growing trend. The hit TV show Lost, for example, boasted a massive fanbase who would jump online straight after each show to discuss the episode they just watched. Along with other shows such as American Idol, it was one of Twitter’s top trending topics of last year.
Clearly Google are clearly taking the “children are our future” maxim to heart. In this case the device-hungry multitasking children who, although they’re constantly flipping between their phone, their laptop and their games console, are, for the most part, whilst not glued, at the very least passively consuming TV more than any other medium.
What Google are trying to do, in essence, is to provide all these distractions on one single device and keep people there and presumably, to wean a whole generation of new customers within the Google umbrella. Considering Google’s broad spectrum of services on offer; Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, Picassa, YouTube, Buzz, Google Talk, to name a few, and most importantly of all, Google Search, one need never turn on their computer again. Making all these available from one’s armchair at the flick of a remote is a brilliant, if somewhat unoriginal, strategy.
Google really aren’t doing anything new here. They’re simply porting their business model from one media platform to another, something which they’ve already done quite successfully by taking their services from the web to the mobile phone. Now they’re going after TV with the same concept; access to content offset by advertising – plain and simple. Who creates the content is irrelevant.
The reaction from TV networks to this announcement is bound to be mixed. Rupert Murdoch, for example, has no love for Google, and has never missed an opportunity to express his ire at a company he considers to be content thieves. Google also faced an enormous backlash from the major networks when it purchased YouTube in 1996, most notably from Viacom. Whilst Google does police the site regularly to remove copyrighted content the sheer scale of videos and users on the site means it’s people can’t be everywhere at once and such content almost always slips through. Add to this the ease of online piracy and you can see why the majors are clearly worried by any or all threats emanating from the Internet. Thus far they have had little to any success in providing alternatives.
Providing customers the ability to view TV shows online has resulted in various different approaches from paid to completely free. One such example is the TV streaming site Hulu, a collaboration of US broadcasters Fox, ABC and NBC. Although Hulu is highly popular it has not exactly proved to be the revenue generating monster they had hoped for. Not least of which because, in an impatient, attention-deficit afflicted medium like the Web, even 30 seconds of advertising is considered way too much. In North America commercial breaks of an average of 2 minutes occur three times during a 30 minute show, first after the main credits, then halfway through the show and then again before the end credits, shaving what was once a half hour show format down to around 20. People have come to accept this with TV but on the Web it’s unacceptable. The reason is simple, because the Web is an active medium whilst the television is, neurologically-speaking and otherwise, the most passive medium we’ve got.
Still, the major dilemma the networks face is that, whilst more and more people are tuning in, advertising revenues are dropping. What Google offers them is an ideal way to tap into countless unseen methods of generating new revenue through new forms of advertising, by becoming resellers of said advertising platforms and also by keeping the spotlight on themselves by offering increased interactivity with their audience. If you ever watch CNN you’ll see they’re always asking you to join in on the discussion on the Twitter or Facebook pages. But who’s really going to do that? You have to get up off your ass, walk over to your computer, switch it on, wait for it to boot up… ahh forget it! Whereas now you can just flip the remote and open the page direct. With this technology the possibilities for connecting with one’s audience are endless. For example the kids they could watch their favourite cartoon and then, when the show’s over, play an interactive video game starring that cartoon character. Or imagine the possibilities of a fully interactive Who Wants To Be A Millionaire type show where you can be a nationally televised contestant but playing from home.
When it comes to mobilising the masses and providing extra revenue through interactivity nothing beats reality TV, the most successful of all being Simon Cowell’s fleet of interactive talent show franchises and its infinite stream of imitators. Love him or hate him one cannot deny that Simon Cowell has stumbled upon one of the smartest business models in the history of television. Not only does he have this enormous TV juggernaut with all its advertising revenue, there’s also the interactive side of it, the weekly SMS text-in, resultant tours and record sales, etc. You can take American Idol or X-Factor as an assembly line where every part of the process generates revenue, in hundreds of countries simultaneously. Factor in Google TV into that and you can take it even further.
Now imagine that you are afforded even more ways with which to involve your audience, such as through social media. Imagine that instead of having regular TV advertising spots between shows for recording artists and tour dates, you can actually flip your remote and download the music (for a fee or for free, the choice is yours) direct to your set top box or pay to watch additional behind-the-scenes footage on Hulu. Later, when videos go viral on YouTube, like Susan Boyle last year, you can generate even more revenue by specially tailoring your YouTube channel for Google TV. Imagine that the TV networks can also get a cut of the enormous pay per click advertising revenue served up directly to customers. No doubt the network heads, even Rupert, are beginning to see the enormous potential for additional (and in many cases much-needed) revenue.
Now the channel, network or provider (cable company/satellite broadcaster) can sell even more advertising and localise it far more than was ever previously possible. Not just by country or region, but by actual address. Such a service would also be a huge boon for small businesses making TV advertising far more affordable and also far more effective by targeting specific regions only.
How this would work is similar to how the web targets advertising today; by detecting your IP address and using it to determine where you are located based on your local exchange/provider. So, let’s say, for example, you own a local auto dealership or restaurant. There’s really no point in having a national or even regional advertising market campaign carpet bombing the airwaves when your target area is much smaller. With this technology, however, you can create TV advertisements for broadcast but pay far less and only serve those ads to people in your particular catchment area during relevant shows. So the auto dealership could advertise during the Top Gear, the restaurant during Jamie Oliver and the local town sports bar can now advertise directly during the World Cup, only just to a very small audience. You could also, in theory, have live links that then allow people to view the company’s website, read company reviews, see its location in Google Maps and even download those maps to their Android phone’s satnav software. Throw a microphone and some VOIP capability in there and you don’t even need a phone, you can just press a button on your remote control and you can make voice calls or send SMS text messages .
In other words, if this technology takes off, it’s going to turn conventional broadcasting and TV advertising on its head and forever blur the edges between electronic media of all forms. And if anyone has the leverage, the know-how and the ambition to do achieve this, Google has.
And even if Google don’t manage it, and I can’t imagine why they couldn’t, Web-enabled TV, like 3DTV, is bound to hit the market sooner or later, it’s simply a question of when. In the meantime it’s a good idea for business owners to start thinking about how best to prepare for it so they can take advantage of it when it finally arrives.
Broadcasters are going to have to think really hard about how they retain their audiences. This is difficult enough right now, with hundreds, if not thousands, of channels to choose from. But soon they’ll not only have to contend with fickle audiences flipping from one channel to the next, in linear form, from channel one through to channel 999 and beyond, but also with hyperlinks which warp them right out of the telly dimension completely and onto the worldwide web. That’s a ratings war you cannot hope to win without being able to provide compelling, interactive diversions with which to keep them in your orbit. Oh yeah, and anyone working in the field of Teletext, it’s time to start looking for a new line of work, so start sending out your CVs – now.
As for the Web itself, that’s arguably going to have even bigger changes ahead. One obvious point, which I touched on earlier, is how to optimise one’s website for television. In essence, you simply need to think of it as a really big monitor (which, is basically, what it is). So in design terms that means accessibility becomes more important than ever. The last thing you want is to have your web content display as a small box in the centre of a huge blank space of a wide screen, or have graphics that aren’t optimised for the format and look gritty. Other considerations include fonts and colour settings. Colour is of particular importance as televisions are more prone to colour saturation. Google also reiterates that you must always keep in mind that you are now designing not for the web as you know it, rather web for the “living room environment”. You can read Google’s hints for designers and developers here.
One thought I also had is that .tv domains might well become more important now, just as .mobi domains have for mobile devices. This could well be important because, since people will now also be using a remote control, rather just than a mouse or touchpad for navigation, menus will have to be greatly simplified, and, depending on your existing website’s design, or content, it might be a good idea for you to have a specially designed TV-friendly site, once again, for the living room.
Having said that, the living room is not the only place in the house you’ll find a TV set. Indeed the TV set has become like the fireplace of old; always on in the background, often in several rooms at once. In Britain the average number of TVs per household is between 2-3 sets, according to the BBC. Many British households also have more than one Sky Box (or similar set-top box). A large amount of people have a second TV room for children, a TV in the kitchen and/or in the bedroom. So whatever about Google’s advice on designing a webpage for the living room environment, you might also want to consider the other rooms the TV is in.
As for marketing for the bedroom environment? Well, to borrow a phrase from Billy Connolly, we’ll draw a discrete veil over that one shall we?
Not too long ago instant messenging (IM) programs, also known as chat clients, where text is typed and shared in real time (along with emoticons) were ubiquitous and all the big web companies had one.
Microsoft’s MSN Messenger, later renamed Live Messenger, was perhaps the most popular, with Yahoo Messenger (YIM) a close second. These services were linked to Hotmail and Yahoo Mail respectively, however with the advent of Gmail, which offered far more in the way of storage and options, Hotmail and Yahoo both lost a lot of market share. Google later integrated its own Google Talk instant messenger program into the Gmail interface so that one could chat with contacts direct from their browser.
Another one-time big player in the IM market (and indeed the web as a whole) was AOL. AOL’s instant messenger, AIM, whilst also quite popular, suffered from a lot of controversy regarding its installation of a component called Viewpoint Media Player which many considered to be spyware.
Other popular instant messenger programs included ICQ, which was also once the property of AOL, and IRC, one of the oldest and also most popular messenging systems, albeit more so with the “geeky” end of the spectrum than with regular users. It was (and still is) highly popular with members of online communities such as the online gaming community.
Over the last ten years, however, use of instant messengers has diminished with the advent of social networks like Facebook and microblogging sites like Twitter, which allow for real time status updates, as well as other Web 2.0 collaborative platforms such as the excellent Google Wave.
With the advent of VOIP programs like Skype IM programs are nowadays more like hybrids allowing old-style instant messenging in conjunction with free, or low cost, Skype-style calls.
Whilst some companies actively discourage staff from using IM programs, because they don’t want their employees chatting when they should be working, many more are unable to function without them. Obvious examples of such businesses include web design and graphic design firms such as ourselves as well as project managers, writers, transcribers or translation service providers where being able to type to a person or persons in real time without having to pick up the phone provides massive time and money savings. Other applications include inbuilt web applets on company websites which allow customers to chat directly with company representatives, for example, to provide real-time technical support.
So, depending on the company type, instant messenging can provide many advantages to one’s company, and that’s not even including the advantages provided by cheap or free calls with inbuilt VOIP telephony. The only real issue is that with so many different platforms from various different, competing companies, it’s all too possible that the person you want to talk to is using a different program than you are. Installing and running seven different IM platforms is not only impractical it would also slow down your computer, and your productivity, dramatically. Thankfully there are programs out there that allow you to use the one program to access all major chat networks simultaneously and best of all, these programs are also completely free.
(Note: to use these you will still need to set up accounts with the various companies, i.e. you will still need to set up an MSN account, a Yahoo account, a Google account and so forth. You just won’t need to download and install all their IM programs.)
Trillian is a lovely little program for Windows, Mac and mobiles, including the iPhone and Blackberry. It allows you to chat with all major clients, such as MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo and AIM, and, depending on your system, is also compatible with Skype as well as Twitter and the instant messenging features of Facebook and Myspace. This is a great all-rounder program, especially because it’s mobile. Plus, what other instant messenger out lets you send an animated octopus as an emoticon?
Pidgin, formerly known as GAIM, is an open source multi-platform instant messenging system available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is compatible with all major IM platforms including MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, IRC and other programs such as the popular Polish chat client Gadu-Gadu. Because GAIM is open source it means that it’s constantly being developed and so a number of GAIM plugins exist that add compatibility with Skype, Facebook IM, Twitter and pretty much any other platform you can think of.
Free Alternative to Winzip and Winrar
Yes, technically, Winzip and Winrar are not free. They are what is often referred to as nagware. Software that nags you to upgrade to the pro version every time you use it, in the expectation that you will eventually do as you’re told – expect away, because…
7 Zip is an open source archiver program that’s free to download and use, with great superior compression and compatibility with other formats such as .zip and .rar files. Highly recommended.
Download older versions of software
Finally, to wrap this up, I thought I’d mention a favourite website of mine called Old Version.com.
This site, as it name suggests, allows you to download older versions of a large variety of different software programs, such media players, instant messengers, security programs, utilities, etc. This is a good idea for a number of reasons, perhaps because you upgraded to the latest software version before the bugs were sorted out and need to go back. (I find this tends to happen a lot when the makers of one of my favourite programs gets bought out by a larger company.)
Maybe there is some other compatibility issue, for example you are running an older operating system with which the latest version of the software is not compatible. Often, new software also means an increase in its footprint whereas older versions won’t use up so much system resources. Or perhaps, like me, you often don’t like the direction your favourite program has taken over the years and you don’t like all the extra options and superfluous capabilities. Instead you yearn for a simpler time before the bells and whistles and shiny new interface, when the program just done one thing and done it well and just shut up about it and let you get on with it. And I’m sure we’ve all come across a program which made us feel like that.
So, anyway, that’s it for now and that’s the end of this series, though I will, of course, continue to add new free software posts as time continues. If anyone would like to suggest any other free software programs or make suggestions for future post ideas feel free to comment below.
I got this email this morning, it looks almost identical to Twitter emails except for the fact that the account I received it on does not have a Twitter account connected to it. Bit of a dead giveaway that, but still, it’s quite convincing.
The email says:
Hello, Twitter-er!
You have 2 (or more) unread message(s) from Twitter System.
With a URL underneath, which, in the body of a HTML email, appears to be directed to Twitter, but is in fact directing someplace else. This isn’t new, obviously, there have been emails like this around for years, for Facebook, for online banks, for Paypal and eBay – for every service you can imagine, the idea being to either:
A: Get your Username & Password – especially for financial services like Paypal.
B: Get your Credit Card number & related details.
C: Get you to click on a link that will download malware to infect your computer.
D: All of the above.
Whether it’s a phishing attack or a malware attack the results can be equally devastating so always take precautions. In many email clients all it takes is to hover over any hyperlinks to see where they point to. Worst case scenario you can always right click and copy the URL to the clipboard and then paste it into notepad. This way you’ll know for certain whether the hyperlink in the email is really pointing where it says it is.
Even this can be misleading however. Depending on the font used it can be difficult to distinguish from the real URL and a spoofed one, observe:
www.paypal.com – Paypal.com as normal.
Paypa1.com – Paypa1 (number one) in Times New Roman
PaypaI.com – PaypaI (capital i) in Arial
There’s a million other variants one can do with any number of legitimate websites.
So, if you’re still paranoid – congratulations, you should be! – then you can always look at some of these URL malware scanners to see if there are any nasty surprises lurking in the links of your emails.
Having a good virus and firewall protection layer and ensuring that these programs are regularly updated will help protect you from these sorts of attacks. As will ensuring that you also regularly update and patch your email client, browser and operating system.
Vigilance and common sense, however, is the only true protection – so always remember the five golden rules:
If you’re not sure where the link goes don’t click on it.
If you’re not sure what an attachment is don’t open it.
If you receive unsolicited* (spam) email don’t ever reply to it
Unless your email client or antivirus program already has an automatic email attachments scanning feature, always download and scan attachments first before opening them
and finally
If the email comes from a known contact with links/attachments but with very brief and often baffling and grammatically-questionable text, e.g. “hey u – check this out!” always contact that person and ask whether he/she really sent it or not.
If they reply and say they never sent it then that person’s computer is infected with a virus which has most likely sent itself out to every one of their contacts already. This can be very devastating not just for the security and privacy of a business, but for its reputation too. So if you do suspect you’ve received such a virus be sure to tactfully inform them of that fact, as the sooner they’re made aware of it the better.
Be aware that whilst many spam emails pretend to have an opt-out link at the bottom these are often used to verify that your email address is correct and clicking on them will only result in more spam. It can be hard to tell, sometimes, because you may also be receiving legitimate ezines/newsletters that you subscribed to but have since forgotten about. When in doubt, look the company/organisation up on Google and if you’re still not sure, you can always just flag the emails as spam.
The Klite Codec Pack is a collection of all major media codecs and also includes an excellent, standalone media player called Media Player Classic. As its name suggests Media Player Classic is designed to look like an older version of Windows Media Player. It is a very lightweight media player meaning it is quick to launch and takes up little in the way of system resources. MPC plays all major video and audio files and is also capable of playing DVD video files.
VLC Media Player is another free, high-quality media player. The player is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and many other operating systems besides. Like MPC, it is far more lightweight than Windows Media Player and can play all major audio and video files as well as the ability to directly play DVDs.
In today’s world protecting your privacy, security and your confidential and financial data is paramount.
Many computers come off the shelf with trial periods of major brand anti-virus suites installed, usually McAffee or Norton. These software suites may offer a degree of protection however once the trial period expires they tend to not just merely nag you, but try to actively terrify you into buying the full version.
It’s enough to make you afraid to get out of bed in the morning.
Thing is there are many antivirus programs out there which don’t cost a thing and, in many cases, offer superior protection to boot. Read the rest of this entry »
Last time we talked about Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office. Following on from that we’re now going to take a look at two more productivity suites, Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Photoshop.
Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat
I’ve never much liked Acrobat Reader. I’ve found it slows systems to a crawl, especially on startup, nags you for endless updates and is constantly crashing browsers, printers and causing systems to freeze.
Imagine my delight when a friend of mine – who had previously been having a seemingly endless nightmare involving 20-odd XP machines running Acrobat 7 printing to a Canon copier and crashing on print each time – introduced me to the answer to all his, and my, prayers.
Foxit Reader is free to download and use, it’s as light as a feather and does exactly what it says on the tin, opens PDF files – no more, no less.
Maybe it’s just me, because I love this product so much, but it also seems to me that Foxit actually renders PDFs better and sharper than Acrobat does.
Cute PDF Writer, meanwhile, is a free PDF printer, very handy for if you want to convert files or documents of any sort to PDF.
Free Alternatives to Adobe Photoshop
The Gimp is a free, open source program for editing photos and images. Whilst being called “The Gimp” isn’t exactly a compliment where I come from, this program is actually quite cool. It might not be a Photoshop beater, but it certainly comes quite close. The inbuilt GIF animation function is also ideal for those seeking to create banners and animations in GIF format rather than Flash.
Aviary is free, web-based creative suite. The suite is an offshoot project of Worth 1000, a popular Photoshop contest website (with some amazing graphic work on show). Each of the different applications all have (somewhat Mozilla-like) bird-themed names, such as Phoenix, its own graphic editor, Raven, the online vector graphic editor and Myna, for editing audio tracks. Other projects include an upcoming Word Processor (could this be another Microsoft Office competitor?) and a video editor called Starling. The latter, in particular, intrigues me.
Coming next, some great free antivirus and anti-spyware programs.
Many people still don’t know that, for every paid software solution they might consider, there’s always an open source or freeware alternative that, in many cases, is far superior.
When the price is zero it’s always a great incentive to try something new but don’t think that the applications listed here are somehow inferior just because they’re free. In many cases these applications offer far more options, far more protection and far more freedom of use than their paid counterparts and take up far less system resources too.
So without further ado, let me kick off my free software series with…
Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office
Generally if you buy a new PC with Windows it will be bundled with a copy of Microsoft Works. Works, however, saves its files in a completely different format to Office and so can be a hassle when you want to share your documents with others. Frustrated by this drawback most people generally give up and buy Microsoft Office not knowing that there are other alternatives that can allow you to edit and save Office compatible files without handing out huge wads of cash to Microsoft.
Open Office is among the most commonly used alternatives to Microsoft Office with its own versions of Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux systems, in a variety of languages, and even gives you the choice of having either a US or British English version, which I think is really spiffy. In addition, as of version 3.0, Open Office is also compatible with proprietary Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, etc).
With the ability to be installed on all major operating systems and full compatibility with Office 2007 but no licence costs, Open Office is the ideal solution for multi-platform offices or any organisation looking to keep costs down.
Google Docs is operating system independent. It is not a program but a series of web-based services that perform the same functions as any standard office suite, except that instead of being installed on your hard drive, all the documents are hosted from Google’s data centres with all interaction through your browser.
Google Docs is therefore a perfect example of cloud computing, a term which has become something of an industry buzzword of late but is in reality a concept almost as old as computing itself, that of large servers or mainframes hosting all the files and software for so-called “dumb-terminals”.
The only real limitation with Google Docs is browser compatibility, though this isn’t really an issue with modern browsers like Firefox, Opera or Chrome, as well as Internet Explorer 7 and 8. As of March of this year, however, Google has dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 entirely so Docs won’t work on older systems such as Windows 2000. Read the rest of this entry »
