Open [Source] Season

I've found myself using a LOT of open source software recently. If you aren't familiar with the term, go Google it and you'll get a pretty good understanding. Basically (see, you didn't Google it because you knew I'd more or less explain it for you in the next sentence), open source means that the code used to execute a given application is made available to everyone with the idea that the more developers you have play around with something, the better the product gets. So... that's a very loose idea for you to take home.

Anyway, point being...I've been finding all kinds of neat stuff, and it's all free of charge and really useful stuff. I myself am not a developer, so while I can take advantage of the efforts of the open source community, I will likely add little more than the occasional feature suggestion or bug report.

NOTE - open source does not always mean free, and likewise, free software (freeware) is not always open source. There are pay versions of open source products out there, with the difference usually being things like customer support, product guarantees and typically useless things (when was the last time you actually got good help from customer support, or were able to jump through the right loopholes on a product warranty?).

Most people know about Mozilla's Firefox browser by now - if not, see www.firefox.com. In addition, those same folks at Mozilla offer a mail client (think Outlook, or Outlook Express) called Thunderbird. Both are free, and both are quite good. Thunderbird isn't a full-blown Outlook replacement, but compared to Outlook Express, it's a world of difference (read: much much better).

So I've been using both of those apps for quite some time, but recently I've come across a bunch more stuff. A biggie for me is Open Office (www.openoffice.org). It's got a couple of different components to match the Microsoft Office packages - there's a word processor (MS Word), a spreadsheet app (MS Excel), a presentation app (MS PowerPoint) and a couple of other goodies in there. It compares well to the Microsoft product offering, with a couple of major differences:

1. Open Office is free. Microsoft charges 100's of dollars for their stuff
2. Open Office is fast...it doesn't eat up all your computer's resources and slow you down like MS Office does
3. Open Office lets you build PDF compatible forms (good for business people like me)
4. Open Office lets you export PDF compatible documents from any of the applications. Microsoft doesn't have any such capability without 3rd party support (and $$$)
5. Did I mention it's free?

Okay, enough on the Open Office, moving along...the next cool thingy is a suite of products that can run on your USB flash drive. Pretty much means that instead of you installing applications on your computer and leaving them there when you hit the road, you drop the programs on your USB drive and then make any computer you're using "your" computer. There are a couple of groups offering this, but the one I'm using right now is called PortableApps (www.portableapps.com). I'm not going to go into too much detail, because you can go to that website and see the stuff right away. Suffice it to say that I've set up my USB drive with the following:

• browser (complete with bookmarks/favorites and such)
• e-mail client (Thunderbird, with all my e-mail addresses and username/password stuff)
• my office applications (Open Office, complete with templates for invoices, faxes and all that jazz)
• virus scanner (hey, those public computers can be loaded)
• username+password manager (keeps the websites, usernames, passwords and other info right there, fully encrypted)

I'm running all those applications - including all the data stored for them - on a single 512MB USB drive...so yeah, it's very small and runs fast. Really cool stuff.

Obviously, I'm a certifiable dork, and this isn't really super-exciting ground-breaking information, but hey, it's made my life easier and doesn't cost anything, so I figured I'd share my findings with anyone who might likewise need less hassle from their computer-driven existence.