Friday, May 1, 2009

Firefox v. IE8 - which is better?

Just to show that it's not biased, PC World has an article today comparing Firefox with Internet Explorer 8. It's a well-reasoned article, in which the author tends to come down on the side of IE8, although acknowledging Firefox has advantages in some areas, and admitting he runs both every day. One thing the article does not mention - and one of the biggest selling points for me - is the huge range of add-ons that have been written for Firefox by open-source developers all around the world. This is something that Microsoft cannot hope to emulate. It's a strange reversal of the Microsoft v. Macintosh battle. One of the strengths of Windows is the immense range of third party software that has been written for it for which there is no equivalent in the Apple world. If these third-party programs are helping to keep Microsoft well in front, surely the same is true for Firefox?

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Microsoft Office service pack download

Microsoft has begun letting users of Office 2007 download Service Pack 2, marking a milestone in the company's document format battles with governments and other vendors. Office 2007 SP2 includes support for the OpenDocument Format, an open standard backed by many companies including IBM and Sun Microsystems but initially resisted by Microsoft. Customers who download the service pack will be able to save documents in ODF and Adobe Systems' PDF, just like they would any current supported file format in Office. They can also set ODF as the default file format. Previously, people could use ODF through a separate plug-in that translates Office documents to ODF and vice versa. Click here to download. Warning: The full Microsoft download is a hefty 290MB.

Firefox tips and tweaks

Despite the improvements to Internet Explorer 8, I am still a Firefox fan. And I'm not alone. One survey of the most used applications on Windows puts Firefox at the top, followed by Google's Chrome browser. Internet Explorer trailed at #3. And among the youngest users, IE did even worse. Anyway, PC World blogger Rick Broida has this helpful article showing you how to get the most from Firefox's tabs, tweak mousewheel behaviour, and use the spell check in forms.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Zipping folders

I was going to extol the virtues of compressing folders in XP and Vista by using the operating system to zip them, particularly when backing up your data or sending files by email. But after some reading and personal experimentation I am changing my tune.
Firstly, whereas in the past you needed a utility like WinZip to create compressed or zipped folders, since XP you have been able to do it without a utility. It's a bit clumsy. You have to create a new zipped folder (right click / New folder / New compressed (zipped) folder), and then copy documents into it. Or in Vista, you can select documents, and then right click / Send to compressed folder. So far, so good. The trouble is, from user forums on the internet, it is apparent that when you subsequently try to access the documents in the new zipped folder, all sorts of problems can arise. Many have complained that the folder contents are no longer visible, or cannot be opened, etc. It appears to be a worse bug in Vista than in XP, but I can't in all honesty recommend that you use this feature. Another issue: the amount of compression you achieve is very small, particularly with photographs and pdf documents. Typically, you get miniscule difference with a jpg image (which is already compresssed by the format), and a test run I did on a pdf file resulted in only 7% gain. The best gains are with Word documents and the like, which compress by big margins.
Fortunately, there are good alternatives to XP and Vista's efforts. Probably the most popular third party program over the years has been WinZip, but it is not free, although the trial version seems to run for a long time. A free open-source program is 7-Zip, which I have used without any problems.
Given the slightly arduous process involved in zipping, I tend to use it mostly to send documents by email, when it is a handy way to provide a container for multiple documents which I want to keep together.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Should you go wireless?

Dave Thompson, one of the few writers to make The Press bearable reading, explains in today's issue why going wireless with everything is not necessarily a good idea. "...long-time users of such (wireless) devices have uncovered an inconvenient truth: wireless doesn't necessarily mean practical and some things just work better hard-wired," he writes in Think Twice Before You Go Wireless. My wife and I host many international students, so we find a wireless modem ideal to give them an internet connection. But we made sure it was well secured against outside tapping. For the rest, we are happy to let the world go by, although I must admit all that cabling can be very messy.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Print screen

A little feature of your computer (both Mac and PC) often overlooked is the ability to take a photo of what's on your screen, known variously as a screen shot, screen dump or screen capture. I use this quite regularly, usually to extract a pic from a Word document or a pdf file. Now I know that you can copy a photo from Word and paste it into an imaging program like Photoshop or Irfanview, but the result is often awful quality. A better alternative in that case is to zoom right in on the image - say around 500% - and take a screen shot, then paste that into Photoshop. If the photo extends beyond the borders of the screen, take shots of it in sections, and montage the sections. The same technique can be used to extract pics from a pdf document; although in theory Acrobat has a tool to grab pics, I find that sometimes the results are not good.
To print your screen, look for the "Print Screen" (or maybe Prnt Scrn") key, which is probably at the top right of your keyboard. You can paste the image straight into a Word document, but not an email; for that you have to save the pic to your hard drive. To save the pic, open your image editing program, make a new document (from the File menu), and then use the paste command. Crop as appropriate and save. If you paste into Photoshop, it automatically creates a new layer for the image, so you will have to merge the layers (Ctrl-E or Cmd-E)) in order to save as a jpg or tif image.
The PC Print Screen facility is very basic, and there are many screen capture programs which can do a better job. A free one I use is Gadwin Print Screen.