Download free software and help the poor

Yes, you heard me. To celebrate this festive season, SoftMaker has made their excellent alternative to Microsoft Office freely available. On top of this they will donate to charity with every download.

With such a commendable act, why not contribute towards a good cause and try out an Office alternative. So head over to Load and Help (http://www.loadandhelp.de/home-en.html).

Celebrate 12 days of Xmas with Apple

As they did last year, once again Apple has released their "iTunes 12 Days of Christmas" app for users of iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) to treat their customers with seasonal freebies.

So expect free games, music, videos and more between 26th December and January 6th. There's already a nice freebie (for some) when you first download it.

Just so you know that I'm not kidding, here's the link to the app: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/itunes-12-days-of-christmas/id406478317?mt=8&affId=1896249

Btw, the app itself is free...

Will we ever get Dreamweaver on Linux?

I have been a keen user of Ubuntu for some time now, and have to admit that this distribution has improved by leaps and bounds. However, what I do honestly miss on windows is... Dreamweaver. Some will swear by it, some will swear at the mention of its name. But for me, it is a very powerful tool when used correctly.

Such a very popular and powerful web design and development tool is available on Windows and Mac OS, but not Linux. If you would just consider, Adobe has already supported the platform with their Adobe Reader and Adobe Air. Why is Dreamweaver not available? It just seems that there's not such a huge call for it so they just don't see the need to put in an effort for another platform.

One chap at Adobe suggested to use Dreameaver under wine, but it doesn't work so great. There is an alternative to wine which, according to a user on the forums, works flawlessly - Crossover. However, the former option is not free, so some may be dissuaded where they would be paying for a Dreamweaver license and for Crossover. Still, there's nothing better than having the actual for-the-platform program.

As I browse the forums searching for an answer, all I'm presented with are Linux alternatives. Some are editors and some are WYSIWYG tools:

• NVU/Kompozer - which is good but feels like Frontpage
• Quanta Plus - which is intended for KDE and is pretty decent, but not as user friendly as Kompozer. It works in GNOME, but managed to shut down with me a couple of times
• BlueFish - a pretty cool editor, which supports an arsenal of scripting languages
• Screem
• GEdit
• GNU Emacs
• and any other editor you can think of.
  

At the moment, I'm stuck with a bunch of apps:

• Kompozer for quickly creating mashups for clients
• BlueFish for all my coding (and cleaning up the code from Kompozer)
  
• FileZilla to publish the site. Kompozer does have a site manager tool, but I avoid using it as Kompozer is not used often. Plus FileZilla is excellent for FTP.
  

Even with this collection, I'm still stuck in getting anywhere near the functionality of Dreamweaver. Also, I'd like to avoid overloading my computer with a bunch of apps just for web design and development.

So please Adobe. Pretty, pretty please, with cherry on top. Bring Dreamweaver onto Linux. It is definitely worth paying for.

UPDATE:
Looks like I'm not the only person who feels this way. Someone on the forums has provided a link and some advice for contacting Adobe: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-946645.html

UPDATE #2:
I can't believe that I totally forgot about Aptana. I used this very able system on Windows a long time ago, but my workplace at that time decided to follow a policy of permissible software to use for all things programming.

This tool includes

• code assistance for html, css and javascript
• javascript debugging
• site manager including ftp (and other remote working methods) for file transfer and syncing
• switch between your code and rendered previews

This is much closer to my desired experience

August - Website of the Month!

Yes. It is long overdue. So here's another for the bookmarks: bit.ly (http://bit.ly)

An absolutely brilliant tool for shortening a URL. Particularly when sharing long links to websites in your blogs, tweets and emails.

Need I say more?

OpenSource in Education

After a long silence I'm back. Since I've landed my new lecturer role I have been busy creating Schemes of Work, Lesson Plans and researching ways to increase resources for students so they may have a better learning experience.

In fact, it is the former of the items that this article relates to. The first obvious question is why? Well, the college that I am in provides tuition for international students, who have given up a lot to come here and study. Many of these students are struggling to find work to support themselves during their studies, so if they require resources "free" is a keyword.

These type of resources, that I refer to here, are mostly concerned with software. So let's get started.

OpenOffice.org

Students will be using Writer for all their courses, Calc for subjects relating to maths, economics, accounting, etc, Impress for subjects that require students to present.

There are a number of reasons for selecting this application:

1. It is open source which means that the students do not need to look for cheaper alternatives to Microsoft Office. This encouraged students to be proactive in their learning and inspired them to install the software at home and work on their assignments in their own time
2. It is a recognised alternative to MS Office
3. Generous licensing terms in distributing the application
4. Encourages collaboration between students so that they may share work and study together. In fact lecturers here have picked up on this and are sharing documents with students. Unfortunately, with Office 2007 it is easy to forget to "Save as" an older version to share with others.

Mac users will benefit from NeoOffice.

Dia

While OpenOffice.org has a Draw application, which many students are using effectively, what if they want to produce Flowcharts, UML diagrams, etc?

This application was slightly inspired by Microsoft Visio but is aimed towards a more casual approach to drawing diagrams. You can also export diagrams to many formats including PNG and SVG.

Notepad++

A very decent text editor, with support for many different languages and can integrate with the compiler of a number of languages.

I currently use this to teach Java programming.

jMemorize or FreeMind

The students still need to revise and work on improving their memorising capabilities. jMemorize uses the flash card technique which are familiar with. Alternatively, FreeMind, makes use of the mind mapping technique and is sometimes used to create a site links page for web sites.