So, I spoke a bit about installing and trying out some programs. After doing so I’ve developed some opinions.
Camino is goood. It’s rendering is excellent, better than Firefox. It’s light-weight, there are heaps of things that are fun in Firefox but you don’t necessarily want or need them that much, I’ve sacrificed them for the moment.
What I really miss from Firefox is form-filling. Firefox was actually getting a bit hyperactive with my forms and I need to clear them but Camino is entirely underactive with form filling and when you read and comment on blogs it’s a damn nuisance to type out my screen-name, email and URL every time. I should mentions that it’s good with password forms, the integration with Keychain is really convenient. The only other form-filling that it has is from your identity in the your address book. That only gives out your name though, not your nickname and since I don’t want to tell the whole intarweb my full name and personal email address it’s not particularly useful right now.
I think if I were trying to design a new web page or something I would use Firefox for its Web Developer Toolbar, since I have Firefox installed and easy access to everything via Quicksilver it’s not a problem to launch.
Speaking of Quicksilver, it’s a must for any Mac OS X Tiger running laptop and would be good for desktops too. It’s especially good for the MacBook because you don’t always have a mouse attached and I don’t think you can deny that the touchpad isn’t as nice as using a mouse. Quicksilver indexes, finds and launches pretty much anything on your machine – okay, not usually hidden files but anything else. You just use the shortcut Ctrl-Space to bring the window up and then type, it searches your folders, application, documents, bookmarks and then you can do apply an action, whether it be opening or something else. I don’t even use my dock anymore except for minimised windows, Quicksilver is so easy.
Vienna has been going well. I introduced it to hubby and he started using it, then he showed another guy and he switched to it too! Benefits are that it’s simple, you can easily change views and folder structure of your subscriptions. The settings are fairly flexible, you can mark as read manually or automatically, you can easily mark as unread or flag a favourite article, you can have read items be deleted after a certain time period, or not. It has different viewing styles that are quite spiffy. At the moment I’m using Felix, it’s dark font on a white background with pinkish sections at the top and bottom with the title and timestamp and all that; of course pink isn’t for everyone, I just liked the format it’s very easy to read. My only complaint (at this point), which I might put in a feature request for, is that it can’t find a page’s feed. I believe you need to provide a specific RSS feed, which not everyone links to on their page. You can provide it with a certain blogging username and it finds feeds for you, but again, you don’t always know someone’s username, just the name they let you see. Maybe the only other thing would be form-filling, again because it has an inbuilt browser and it’s very convenient for blog commenting.
The GIMP works nicely under X11, Open Office isn’t as pretty. I’m hoping it will improve otherwise I’ll be tempted to get MS Office. 😯
