Softwares I have found useful
Here is a non-complete list of software and hardware and a brief explanation why I like them
OpenSUSE linux distribution
There
are lots of distributions and I one can like any of them. When
describing SUSE(pronounced: suzy) in one sentence we usually say
YaST. SUSE has an extreamly useful setup tool. Of course this
tool is also portable but the rest of the system is also tuned to it,
so if you take it out of its environment you might not find it
functional. During the years I have found it fledged improving and
pleasing to use. From the major linux distributions I have also tried
ubuntu and I can confidently suggest OpenSUSE over it.
LaTeX and ConTeXt document preparation system
I
don't want to steel anyone's opinion, but so smart and beautiful that
you will wonder how could it have existed without you knowing about
them. In a few years time you get so used to LaTeX, that you will use
it for everything. For letters, long documents or notes. ConTeXt is
latex if Leslie Lampert would have written it 15 years later. It is more consistent in design, but
it lacks the packages you liked in LaTeX that much. You can find
examples in this site both for LaTeX and ConTeXt typesetting.
A
usefulness of a text-input document preparation system is fairly
questionable these days. Not because of OpenOffice, as LaTeX beats it
both in design time and end result, but because the usual way how we
read these documents changed. Nowdays we want to put movies, 3D
objects, maps buttons or even code into our documents, and the
text-input is at the best "not yet" prepared for the new staff. If you
once
see a good Apple Keynote presentation you will never understand how
could we ever tried to use TeX for presentations.
I
like LaTeX and ConTeXt because the excellent trade-off between the
design time and the end result. If you don't have lot of time to write
a document or you are not in the mood of doing something too complex
LaTeX will probably give you the best results.
Scribus desktop publishing
Where LaTeX is just not enough. With
scribus you will not finish fast, but if you learn it well enough you
will be able to go beyond LaTeX and OpenOffice. In general I would not
suggest you to typeset books or long documents in scribus, but in cases
where you are limited in size and you still want to something
convincing it can be useful. Documents, like CV-s, menus, covers are
nicely typeset in Scribus.
MPlayer the movie player
An
excellent video player utility it is very simple in design and it plays
all movie formats including but not limited to WMV and QuickTime on
linux! This is all it would need to become a useful tool but its
capabilites go far beyond.
Portable Document Format (PDF)
One of the very popular document formats. You can read lot about it at wikipedia. It also has historical significance, but I mostly like it for its contemporary advantages. First of all it works on the screen. Though many people think of PDF as a for print format it excellently fits electronical publishing. It has support for movies (we hope that we can enjoy it on linux as well from Acrobat Reader version 9.), 3D objects through U3D (at the time of writing this document it already works on linux), maps and annotations.Why is it better than ODF?
With
OpenOffice you can edit your documents on-the-fly, but it will never
give you a result which is convinient to read on screen. Unless, of
course, you export it to PDF first. Most of critics that PDF gets is
concerning the editability. Though PDF is believed to be a read-only
format it is not true. You can do the editing through annotations,
which some times give you better results than simple editing does. It
also supports JavaScript so its capabilites are fairly extentible.
Why is it better than HTML?
HTML
is a document format designed for the needs of electronical publishing.
As flexible it is as difficult it is to use it. First of all, you
create a document with images, movies, perhaps something else. To give
this document to somebody you need to give the whole directory,
compress it to avoid encoding problems, de-compress it. If you manage
to transfer html you can still lack some of the plugins necessery for
its reading. PDF is a complete format everything you can possibly put
into it can be read with AcrobatReader. Even more documents (with pdf
portfolio). In one single file.
Macromedia Adobe Flash
I
am not particularly in faviour of this format but it is present in 99%
of computers your documents will ever reach. It is farly more popular
then PDF or ODF. You can also converp PDF-s into it straigt forward.
This is especially useful if you don't want to convert all your
documents to HTML (mostly manually).
Emacs editor
There
is an old joke that states: With all the plugins and development Emacs
is now slowly becoming an operanting system. All it's missing is a
handy editor. Of course we are exagurating a little bit. Emacs is a
fledged editor, designed in the times, when it was not in the fashion
to grab the mouse after each sentence, and when you didn't have the
space to make commands all that obvious with a menu or a colorfull
icon. In exchange after you've learned all the hotkeys you can complete
your tasks remarkably fast. It is something similar to television. If
you stop watching it you stop missing it.
TrueCrypt
Philip Zimmerman had a good discussion
on protecting your privacy. Anyway if you decide to encrypt your
harddisk, I think TrueCrypt is a good software to start with. It is
easy to install and use. TrueCrypt uses some interesting models. I like
the idea of a finite number of encryptions and the fact that your
partition is filled with random data befor formatting. TrueCrypt also
supports plausible denial, but thats security is a the best
questionable.
If you use OsX I would rather recommend PGP.
If you use OsX I would rather recommend PGP.
swftools
A
set of applications for automativly generating Adobe Flash. I like it
because it can generate a Flash document directly from PDF. As 99% of
the computers has Flash installed, this allows the visitors to watch
all the documents in PDF quality. It also saves me the time of
converting the documents into html. All the documents in this page have
been generated with it.