Re: test

The GZG Digest wrote:

> Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 12:02:28 -0800 (PST)
> From: Brian Burger <yh728@victoria.tc.ca>
> 
> What do you think of Thunderbird? I've got Firefox, but I'm not too
> impressed - Opera is still the best browser out there. Even if I
installed
> every Firefox plugin going, Opera still has more features right out of
the
> box, for a download half the size.

I'm very happy with Thunderbird. Like Kevin, I used to use Pegasus. I 
didn't have the crash issues, but I didn't like the fact that Pegasus is

slow if there are a lot of messages in the inbox, and sometimes it's 
just darned unintuitive. I liked Pegasus ability to do random sigs, 
though, but I now use Thunderbird exclusively.

I downloaded Opera, but I haven't done much with it. Opera displays ads,

and since I have low bandwidth at home it's a non-starter for me. I'm 
quite happy with Firefox (though I wish some of the extensions available

in 0.8 and before were available for 1.0). Firefox seems to have more 
real estate available to the main part of the browser, but that's just a

first impression from someone who only used Opera to verify the 
integrity of his web site. The reason I downloaded Opera was because it 
was pointed out to me that my new web site format broke in Opera. It 
worked fine in IE, Netscape and Firefox. I don't know if Opera is doing 
something non-standard, or if Opera adheres more closely to standards. 
At any rate, I was able to fix it so that all of the browsers view my 
site the same way.

Like Kevin (hey, Kevin, have you been following me around the Net?) I am

using OpenOffice a lot these days. It can create native Word and Excel 
files. I have noticed some quirks. I'm doing a conversion of HarnMaster 
for Call of Cthulhu, and the formatting I'm using (the same as used in 
HarnMaster) doesn't look the same when I load it into Word. There's some

weirdness involving tables, I suspect. Most documents look identical in 
the two systems. There's a bit of a learning curve, because OpenOffice 
has a slightly different metaphor from Word. I also noticed a couple of 
minor bugs in OpenOffice. It doesn't seem quite as polished as Word. On 
the other hand, I dislike the new version of MS Office, OpenOffice has 
built in PDF creation ability, the files in native OpenOffice format are

much, much smaller, and OpenOffice is entirely free. (For the techies 
out there, I _think_ OpenOffice files are saved in XML, making them 
truly cross-platform.) I'm getting pretty good with OpenOffice, and now 
only use Word at work.

To drag this on topic, anyone creating Excel utilities for FT, etc. 
should probably test them in OpenOffice, too, for cross system 
functionality.

(How's that for a lame attempt at on-topicness?)

Allan

-- 

Allan Goodall	    http://www.hyperbear.com
agoodall@att.net    agoodall@hyperbear.com