Recently in Applications Category

The OMG!Ubuntu blog reports on the decision, however preliminary, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas to remove the GIMP image editor from the 10.04 Lucid LTS release of the wildly popular Linux distribution.

Read the well-wrought entry linked above for the drawn-out reasoning behind moving the "professional"-quality Photoshop killer GIMP from the Ubuntu base (it'll be available in the Ubuntu Software Center, or your other favorite package-management tool).

Those assembled seem to think that GIMP is not used enough and is not consumery enough. And that the F-Spot photo manager can do basic photo editing and is much better for the average user.

Oh, do I have bones — plural — to pick over this one. I still haven't made my decision on whether I'm for Mono (using the Microsoft-compatible open-source tools) apps or against them (and F-Spot, along with Tomboy notes and, if you've added it, the Banshee music player seem in my mind anyway to be the highest-profile Mono apps in the GNOME world).

All I can say is that with the geek-political climate these days, more Mono rather than the same or less will just give more users a reason to jump off of GNOME (and Ubuntu) in order to keep one's collective hands, if not clean, than at least Microsoft-free.

Again, I haven't made a personal decision about Mono as yet, but I'm far from happy with F-Spot.

And yes, I've been using it somewhat regularly. For my purposes, I'm not crazy about having to import images into F-Spot. digiKam can deal with images in any directory structure, and I'd like my photo-organizing program to do the same. I understand that F-Spot is more iPhoto-like in this aspect. I still don't like it. It's OK for my personal images, but I can't keep my businessy images separate. Everything's in one big pile in F-Spot, except when you dig into the actual directory structure the app creates. Yep, just like iPhoto.

In F-Spot I can add a caption in the "comments" area. Unfortunately that data does not come up in any other applications I use to edit or view photos. I can't edit the IPTC data that 100 percent of professional photojournalists use (and those are the guys whose images I handle day in and out).

F-Spot will sharpen and adjust the color of images. It will crop them. But it won't resize them. Huge, huge deal-breaker for my "professional" use of this application. (And why would I use something for my "home" images that won't do the job with my real work if I don't have to?)

Truth be told, I don't require all that Photoshop offers. On the PC I use IrfanView. And basically my "quest" for a Linux/Unix image viewing/editing program runs along the lines of "give me something that does what IrfanView can do."

Even the GIMP (and Krita, too, O fans of KDE) can't deal with the IPTC data in JPEG images, which I absolutely need.

The digiKam image manager in KDE, through the great Kipi Plugins, CAN deal with this data, and pretty well, too (although the limit on the length of the IPTC credit line is a bit grating and seemingly unnecessary).

So I've been using digiKam for the past few weeks somewhat regularly. (Truth be told, I tend to work in IrfanView on my Windows box at the office about 80 percent of the time when editing photos; it's the environment I know, and that does what I want it to do.)

digiKam is a bit unwieldly. Like many KDE apps, there are menus for days, along with choices to match. It resizes. Good. It sharpens (although the results aren't as good, seemingly, as in every other app that sharpens images; there are, again, lots of choices, and I barely understand — and can't get a great result — from them. digiKam can crop, but you can't enter the exact dimensions of your crop in pixels and then drag the box around to make the perfect crop like I do in IrfanView. Not a deal-breaker, but not good either.

And did I say digiKam is unwieldy. Why are there separate "edit" modes for the metadata and the image data?

I've had little ol' gThumb on this Ubuntu machine for awhile. And hearing that the UDS suggested and then rejected it as a "replacement" for either GIMP and/or F-Spot prompted me to try it out. Sure I had opened a few images, but I hadn't yet done any heavy lifting with gThumb.

It was time.

Gthumb, little ol' gThumb (that's what I'll call it for the purposes of this entry), does almost everything I need:

-- Deals with images in their current directory structure
-- Resizes images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Crops images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Can edit/add IPTC caption info (to the main caption area only) with the "comments" feature
-- Allows for easy save-as of images

The only thing gThumb doesn't seem to do (and I could be missing it, though I don't think I am) is sharpen images. I can live without that, especially if gThumb can create and won't destroy existing IPTC data in JPEGs.

(Note: Besides Krita and GIMP, my previous favorite light image editor for Linux, MtPaint, is also an IPTC-data-destroyer and therefore can't be used for my "real" work.)

So thanks UDS people, for mentioning gThumb. And if you're asking my advice, and I know for damn sure that you're not, keep the GIMP or don't. I'll install it anyway.

But look deep into your geeky, geeky hearts and find it within them to replace F-Spot with gThumb. Or at very least make gThumb part of the Ubuntu base, make it the default image-organizing app, and let the rest of the free, open-source software-using world discover this most worthy of applications that for the most part can free me from the purgatory of Windows-based photo editing applications for good.

(And while I'm on the well-trod soapbox, let me mention that I wrote this entire entry using the newish Webkit-based Epiphany Web browser, another lovely bit of GNOME that I liked in its Gecko days but like even more now.)

(And sorry [really] about all those parentheses, within which I'm thinking all too often these days.)

I don't think it's in my blogroll, but it should be (and will once I get to it). Webware, which subtitles itself "cool Web apps for everyone" is, indeed one of the best technology blogs out there.

The number of entries is astounding, and the quality of those entries is high.

If you want or need to keep up with what's happening — and going to happen — in Web-delivered services. The number of companies, devices and types of services they cover are too numerous to list.

Just read Webware already.

I'm a big user of the top utility, which provides a whole lot of data on what processes are running and how much memory and CPU they're using. I open up a terminal window and run top more than a few times every day.

I've seen htop before but haven't bothered to install it on any of my boxes in quite awhile.

I don't know what prompted me to do so, but I finally installed htop in Ubuntu 8.04. It's easy to do:

$ sudo aptitude install htop

And to run htop:

$ htop

The great thing about htop is that you can kill a process from the application itself. Just arrow down to the offending process and hit F9 to kill it.

It's a lot easier than opening up a new terminal window and using "kill" the old-fashioned way.

I just had to kill Firefox, which was pegging the CPU for some reason, and htop saved me a few steps.

Htop actually has configuration options, which can be accessed with the F2 key while in the application. I'm not at the point yet where I'm ready to mess with this, but I've known for awhile that the output of top can also be screwed with via command-line switches. Haven't done that, either, but it's nice to know that both top and htop have options.

And I really, really like being able to kill processes from within htop.

Jeremy Reimer writes an excellent article for ArsTechnica on the demise of Microsoft Word and the whole idea of a "word processor" that is designed to format text to be printed out on (gasp!) paper and handed about:

The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world

In the longish article (and yes, it is worth every word), Jeremy shows us why Word is an anachronism, why any number of other applications — and principally the Web, content-management systems and wikis (such as MediaWiki, which powers Wikipedia) have pretty much made the traditional word-processed document not just obsolete but also a pain in the ass.

Just read it already.

The image above right is a clay tablet found at Ebla, Syria. It dates from about 2250 BC. Nice, isn't it? One thing you can say about clay — it can last a long time (if you don't crack it in half ... or worse).

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

After having problems with line spacing a couple of versions ago in the Windows build of the Geany text editor, I moved over to Notepad++.

While Notepad++ is a nice applications, I prefer Geany because I also use it in Linux and OpenBSD (especially in OpenBSD, where it's my default editor in X).

But the line-spacing problem was killing me. Using the default Windows linefeeds, I kept getting extra lines in my text files, which was a problem when it came to copy/pasting my text.

Today I downloaded the latest version of Geany for Windows, and the linefeed problem seems to have gone away. I looked in the release notes for the past two versions, and I didn't seen any reference to the problem, but the fact that I can now use Geany in Windows means that Notepad++ will fade to the background for awhile.

I don't use Geany to write hard-core code. I mostly just run it for general writing and a bit of text cleanup and HTML coding. There are probably better editors for heavy HTML coding, and that's something I'll have to look into.

To run Geany in Windows, you need the GTK+ runtime libraries. If you don't already have them, and chances are if you are unsure, you probably don't, download the version of Geany that includes them.

If you do have GTK+ — and I do because I installed it along with the GIMP image editor — use the "nogtk" version.

For Linux and BSDs, Geany is usually available as a package.

Go here for all info on Geany for Windows and Unix-like OSes.

I'll be using Geany in Windows rather heavily over the next week or so, and I'll write about it again in the near future.

I continue to praise Geany, the GUI text editor in Puppy Linux.

I'm not a programmer, but I use text editors just about every day. Especially for Web work, text editors are must-have tools for writers and editors.

And for me, a text editor needs to do a few things -- and do them well.

Here is my list:

It needs to start up quickly.

It must open ALL files, not just those with .txt suffixes.

It must have word wrap but NOT actually wrap the lines in the text file itself (i.e. wrap for display purposes only).

It must have a search/replace function.

It must have word count.

It must change upper-case to lower-case ... and lower-case to upper-case.

Not an extensive list, but many, many text editors cannot do these simple tasks. Mousepad in Xfce can't (though it is fast), Gedit in GNOME can't. Beaver in Damn Small Linux also doesn't do all of these things.

What I use in Windows: The free EditPad Lite -- a great text editor.

Mac OS X: the default GUI text editor in OS X (I think it's called TextEdit, or something like that) is pathetic. Sorry Mac people. I'd love to have someting better for when I use the Mac, which is often.

Do I use command-line editors? Yes, I do, but it's just much easier to use a GUI editor when I'm working in a GUI. Half of the time, I'm cutting and pasting type from Web pages, e-mails and the like, and it's just too hard to do with console editors. I tend to stick to Nano (Pico in the OS X console) because I just don't use vi enough to keep my skills fresh. And I don't want to get anywhere near Emacs -- I just don't have the desire or the time. Give me Nano, and I'm happy at the console.

Again, I don't program -- I just write, so my requirements for a good text editor are probably very different than the usual crowd at which text editors are named, meaning coders.

I've had Debian Etch with the Xfce desktop on the $15 Laptop for a couple of weeks. It took up a lot less space than Slackware 12 with Xfce (and NOT KDE), so I left Debian on the computer, a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 64 MB of RAM.

I had a trick to get the ALSA sound working in Damn Small Linux, but it wouldn't work in Debian. I don't have the soundcore module installed, and that's the next step in getting the sound working.

I also found out that doing a Google Docs session in Debian on this box is ... frustrating. The screen moves way too slow.

So I went in a different direction. I popped in the Damn Small Linux 4.0 CD (I know they're up to 4.2, but I haven't downloaded and burned the new ISO yet ... I plan to soon).

Already the box seems much snappier. I'm using the toram boot code, which means the whole OS pretty much loads into RAM, but DSL does use the Linux swap partition on the hard drive. I find this to be a good compromise because I'm not committing to even a "frugal" install on the hard drive, and whenever I want to upgrade, I can just burn a new CD and use it -- I'll be using the same swap space when needed, but I won't have to upgrade any files on the hard-drive install because I'm not doing one.

As I've said before, for Linux distributions designed to be used as live CDs -- like Puppy, DSL and Knoppix -- I find that it's best to use them as they were intended and not to do full installs, or even frugal installs (although I've violated my own "rule" many times).

I'm going to run DSL 4.0 for awhile on the Compaq. I might switch it out for DSL 4.2 sooner rather than later because I use MtPaint -- a new app in DSL 4.2 but a longtime Puppy Linux image editor. Once I get a chance to run a Google Docs session in Firefox on DSL, I'll be able to see if it goes better than with Debian ... and how much better. I'll do the same with Puppy Linux before committing to anything, but if I'm using live CDs, there's no reason why Puppy and DSL can't coexist very well on this box.

I still need to do the actual tests, but I get the feeling that I'll be wiping Debian Etch off of the hard drive and leaving just a Linux swap partition and empty ext3 partitions for Puppy and DSL. We'll see.

I've been using IrfanView heavily on my Windows box. And yes, I love it more than ever. I've been using it to process screen grabs (I use the Print Screen key to copy the screen image, then I start the new image in IrfanView, paste it in and crop what I need).

And I love the "create custom selection" feature, which I have preconfigured with the exact pixel dimension I need for one of the images I have to cut regularly. First I size down the image to a little bigger than I want it, then I go to "create custom selection" in the menu, and a box the exact size I want it is superimposed on the image. I can then crop right there, or right-click with the mouse to move the box exactly where I want it.

Now that I have Wine on my Ubuntu 7.04 install (yes, IEs4Linux did work), I need to start trying to run IrfanView under Linux. If it works, I will be a very, very happy camper indeed.

I've decided to go all in with Google Docs.

Since it's easy to upload files to Google Docs from the app itself or via a unique e-mail address provided to each user, I'm throwing everything up there I can find on my office hard drive. The only "problems," so far are that i have quite a few documents in AbiWord format that aren't recognized by Docs. I didn't expect it to work, but I tried anyway and got the error message, "Sorry, we do not currently support '.abw' files." Does that mean they might do so in the future?

Not a big deal either way, as I can re-save them in .doc format and upload if I need to. The "critical" files that I made in AbiWord are all in .doc format (since I tend to e-mail them to people who don't use AbiWord), and those went up fine.

It's a good feeling to a) have a backup of everything and b) have the ability to access the files from any Web-connected computer.

As I say every time I write about Google Docs, I've set my browser to NOT print the customary headers and footers so I could print a clean-looking file on paper if I wanted. But I haven't really been printing out anything lately, and that's probably one of the biggest non-secrets of Google Docs -- we so rarely print stuff, and the more accessibility we have to docs on the Web, the fewer reasons we have to commit them to paper in the first place.

I saw an ad for Google Apps, which links to this page containing a video of what Google Apps can do for the business world. Here you can compare the various versions, meaning why you should spend $50 per person per year rather than nothing.

I already solved my biggest problem with Google Apps by killing out the headers and footers in Firefox's printed pages: go to File -- Page Setup -- Margins & Header/Footer and set everything to "blank" under Header/Footer.

Since the insidesocal.com domain on which this blog lives has had so many problems with DNS-type attacks, with the solution being blocking the whole of Europe, I've been spreading my technological cheer around some other blogs.

It gets confusing. And in an attempt to actually spend a little time on the entries before they're published, I've been writing in Google Docs. Actually, testing gOS, which relies heavily on using Google services through the Firefox browser, made me take another look at Google Docs, which I've used on and off for awhile.

The whole idea is to have all my writing stored in one place, accessible from any network-connected computer, so things aren't left to die in one /home directory or another on the six or so computers I use during any given week. And as I say, maybe writing and not immediately publishing will make for better entries overall. Later but better.

And while on the subject of Europe, there's a rumor floating around that the IP block for the continent has been removed. So if you see this entry and happen to be a European, please send me an e-mail and tell me the country from which you hail. Thanks.

Go here for a great list of traditional (read: expensive) commercial software and the free, open-source programs you can use instead. The Webi page includes links to the home pages of all the FOSS (free, open-source software) programs it cites.

Two I plan to try are Cinepaint and Paint.NET, both image editors.

Many of my favorite apps are missing -- but the fact that there are enough FOSS apps that you can miss a bunch and still have a credible list is a very good thing.

Still, what's nice about this list is that it includes apps for Mac, Windows and Linux. I've always said that the best way to experience open-source is to do it on the OS you already know. Then the transition to a free, open-source OS like Linux will not be so daunting.

Free, open-source software is important for many reasons, but one of the biggest for me is that it enables me to compute with a clear conscience. Let's be real, most of us are using PCs with pirated software. Even if Microsoft Office, Photoshop and what have you are made by big corporations who charge many hundreds of dollars for their products, that's still no justification for stealing them. I feel a lot better using software that's meant to be free -- and freely modified, as are all FOSS programs.

And remember, you can't have freedom without "free" in the first place.

IrfanView.

Between the application itself and its plugins, it's light as can be but does absolutely everything I need.

It took me awhile to figure out how to crop a photo to exact dimensions and get control over that process, but I did figure out that final missing piece of the puzzle.

OK, there were two missing pieces. I couldn't figure out how to create an image file, but now that I've crossed that bridge, I'm ready to say that Irfanview is the best shareware/freeware image-editor out there. I say "shareware/freeware," because developer Irfan Skiljan says the program is free for home or noncommercial use but requests a $12 or 10-euro donation for business use.

While I prefer remaining in the world of free, open-source software, a $12 shareware, closed-source program is way better than a many-hundreds-of-dollars closed-source program like Photoshop.

And the great thing about IrfanView is that it loads in a couple seconds. Try that with Photoshop.

Now if only Irfanview was available for Linux and Mac. That would be great. As it is, I will try running IrfanView with WINE (the Windows emulator) in Linux, and I will report back.

Along the way, I tried out MANY applications. I still love MtPaint, the best lightweight image editor for Linux, but it doesn't handle the IPTC info that I need to preserve. I'll have to check whether it destroys it, as the GIMP so tragically does whenever a JPG is saved.

Others I tried included the KDE apps Krita (love it ... but it doesn't do IPTC; again, I'll have to check what it does to existing data) and digiKam.

The latter -- digiKam -- is digital-camera interface software for the KDE Linux/BSD desktop. Soon KDE is coming to a Windows machine near you, and I predict that MANY Windows users will adopt KDE as their user environment of choice.

Anyway, digiKam does have an editing function, and it does support IPTC, though to the extent that IrfanView does. The problems: digiKam wants to create its own directories (like iPhoto) that seem to mandate multiple copies of the same images in hard-to-navigate-to places. And the act of resizing a photo can, for some reason, take many minutes and/or crash the app. If only the KDE people would put full IPTC editing capability into Krita, which I think is a great image editor. Fix that and fix the initial-open-quote problem in KWord, and I'd be a die-hard KDE user.

But again, IrfanView is -- in my opinion -- the best photo-editing program for Windows that's out there today.

Update: I didn't realize that my version of IrfanView was old. I'm using Version 3.95, and the latest is 4.10. I'm downloading the new app and plugins now. I will report later on how it works.

Another update: This guy installed IrfanView in Linux with WINE. And so did this guy. And this guy, too.

This, however, I don't understand at all, but it might help. Also, check out this thread.

Even further update: The IrfanView forum.

I can't believe I didn't think of this before. When the GUI text
editor Geany wouldn't cooperate with the X setup on my Debian 4.0
laptop, I took the advice of all the users of self-described "crap
computers" at ubuntuforums.org and went for the smaller, faster Leafpad
editor. Problem solved. Many of those posting listed all the apps they
user on their low-end systems, many running Xubuntu, some Fluxbuntu but
quite a few Debian with Fluxbox, just like this laptop.

I already knew that the Ubuntu community can be a great help not just
for users of the various 'Buntu Linux distros but also Debian, Mepis,
Mint, and just about every other distribution of the operating system.
Remember, when you get down to the kernel, Linux is pretty much the
same, and a humongous, growing community with lots of newbies is bound
to be helpful.

Back to the low-spec app list. I'm already on board with Sylpheed as the
quickest GUI mail client, AbiWord as the best light word processor,
Dillo as a great GUI browser in addition to the Elinks, Lynx and W3m
text-only browsers, with Lynx my current favorite. (Note: I've been warming up to the e-mail component of Seamonkey when I use Puppy and Vector.)

One thing to remember with a true low-spec computer -- you need to plan
for both GUI (the X Window system) and CLI (command-line interface, in
this case the bash shell) environments. All CLI programs will work in a
GUI environment -- just open a terminal window (generally Xterm, but
there are more than a dozen others) and type in the program's name. But
GUI apps will not run in a console (i.e. the shell).