Upgrades: Movable Type, Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office
Posted by Stuart at 10:26 AM on October 04, 2004Here and there over the past couple of weeks I have also been upgrading the software on my laptop. It started with an upgrade to Movable Type (the software that runs this website). Even though there was a lot of backlash in the MT user community earlier this year, I decided to go ahead and upgrade. And I am glad I did. Handling the ridiculous amount of comment spam I get on a daily basis is much easier with the new version. That alone made the upgrade worth it. But there are a few other features that I hope to take advantage of soon.
The second big upgrade was to download and install the Firefox browser from Mozilla. A couple of weeks ago the "Preview Release" version was released. I have to say that after using Firefox for a while now, I am very, very happy with the results. I highly recommend everyone ditching Internet Explorer for Firefox. At least download it and try it out. You'll immediately notice that it blows IE out of the water. Click this link to learn more or to download it.
In fact, I love it so much that I also downloaded Thunderbird, which is Mozilla's mail reader. I am using both of them on a daily basis now. (And I am very happy with both!) You can learn more and/or download Thunderbird here.
Then, the upgrade/ditch-Microsoft bug fully bit and I downloaded and installed Open Office. Now, this migration will take me a little longer to get used to, but I have already used the OO word processor and spreadsheet instead of using Word and Excel. I think it would be great to be able to completely ween myself off of Microsoft products. It's nice to know that there are finally some reasonable alternatives out there.
Update (5 October 2004)Open Office just released the latest version of their Office Suite (v.1.1.3). It is available from the OpenOffice.org website.
Update (5 April 2006)Looks like Open Office is up to Version 2.02. I won't keep updating this page, just go to the OpenOffice.org website and get your copy of whatever version is the latest. By the way, for those of us who are Mac users, you might want to check out Neo Office. Some people prefer it over Open Office.
Yeah, that's the problem I'm having now. But so far the Help section has been very... umm... helpful. Like I said, I think this shift will take me a little longer to accomplish, but I think I will be happy once I do.
Have you found anything in OO that you can't do?
The worst part about switching to Open Office is getting used to where everything in it is compared the the Microsoft variants that we all know so well.
Just last night I spent five minutes earching for the ability to change the colour of text!