Sick and tired of Eudora's ad-driven free e-mail interface, I found myself finally giving in to Sean and Matt's advocacy for Mozilla Thunderbird. And now I'm busy monkeying around with Firebird, the browser. (Yes, yes, I know, most of you are looking at me as if I just fell off of the back of a steam-powered turnip harvester. Well gosh -- this newfangled open-source software! It sure is something! You say it's been around for awhile! )
Anyway, I admit that for the code-illiterate the fun is in playing with a new set of knobs and buttons, admiring a spruced-up look, and perhaps in the easy-to-forget assertion of one's ability to actually stray from the oh-what-the-hell-they're-right-there ubiquity of Microsoft's toolset (or in the case of Eudora, an alternative that was good way back when I was dialing up on a thirty-pound Mac laptop with a greyscale screen, but now seems not so lovely.)
Of course, I'm now missing little bits and pieces of functionality (if anyone can tell me how to swap out reply-to addresses in Thunderbird, I'd be much obliged); Firebird seems not to want to display the handy little bold/italic/link creator tool that normally resides right above this Movable Type window. But my cavils are small -- by and large, these two pieces of software are working smoothly.
Dare I go whole hog, applications-wise?
Posted by BT at September 02, 2003 11:34 PMStrangely enough, I just switched to Firebird (from Mozilla) myself. Shucks, pardner, nice to see a fellow yokel in the sticks. Smooth, simple, and (the most important thing) not contingent on the clunky Mozilla mail client. But you do have me thinking about Thunderbird. Does it beat TheBat though?
OpenOffice, however, tried my patience too often, particularly with the compatibility problems with Word. Sadly, it could not handle screenplay format very well. Believe me, I tried. But when you're swapping files with fellow slickers, it falls by the wayside. So I'm still using trusty Word 97: simple, no frills and far from the resources hog that Office 2002 is.
Posted by: Ed on September 3, 2003 04:36 PMSorry, I'm still on the not-so-lovely Eudora (which I like well enough in its OS X incarnation), so can't help you with Thunderbird. But yes, after 8 months of Mozilla I would never go back to IE, though Safari may yet tempt me. And your link to OpenOffice gave me the nudge I needed to download the OS X version, all 160+ MB of it. Won't be using it full-time until it's wrapped in Aqua goodness instead of Unix windows, but it sure was fun to print out an MS Word file from an open source app.
Posted by: Rory on September 3, 2003 04:43 PMMy Thunderbird question has been answered -- it's in the Account Settings dialog under the Tools menu (whereas I had been frustratedly seeking it in Options).
Of course, now that I've downloaded the latest build of 0.1, Matt alerts me to the just-released 0.2:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/release-notes.html
My timing, as always, is spot on.
Posted by: BT on September 4, 2003 09:05 AMYay, Bill!
Having composed resumes with all their silly indenting and bullet-pointing in oowriter and saved them to rtf and various Word doc formats, I have to say yes, there are noticeable problems with the conversion from oowriter to Word. From oowriter to Word, saving as Word 6 works best, and nearly perfectly. The Word 97/2000/XP converter messes around a little more, and there's no arguing that revisions mode confuses oowriter completely.
A recent survey showed about 97% compatibility between the two. That's pretty good, but as they point out, their sample was selected from docs available on the web, which to some degree may be designed for simplicity. And the 3% were unusable, which is kind of bad.
BUT, I have not once opened a Word doc in oowriter that I couldn't fix easily (if it even mattered), nor have I composed an oowriter document that couldn't be saved to a shape that looked equivalent in Word. (Admittedly, I'm avoiding revisions). I hear that newer versions are improving but I've been satisfied with 1.0.
Anyway, all you have to do is to get all your friends and colleagues to switch, then you won't have any more conversion problems. Go for it Bill! I promise to share documents with you afterward (kiss kiss).
--Matt
Posted by: Matt Morgan on September 4, 2003 05:20 PMYo Bill,
Here's a small discussion of the rich-text editing features of Firebird. The author is using the OS X version (go Macintosh!) but I'd imagine the feature is cross-platform.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106327/2003/08/26.html
Posted by: Rob Schafer on September 4, 2003 09:43 PM