Cleanse, Tone, Defrag: Choice
I’m getting old. Says the twenty-two year — but no, really, I am; and not just because I have a penchant for cardigans, the occasional hot water bottle and a certain Australian daytime soap. No, I remember my first PC. Blimey was it gloriously beige mammoth, both in weight and stature, of a machine; and yet here I am today, typing away on a wafer thin in comparison laptop.
Typing away on a third party word-processor. Who’d have thought it? Well, me.
I remember in secondary school (sorry, high school for those so inclined), carting a box of floppy discs back and forth containing all my Microsoft Word documents. Sometimes you’d be hard pressed to fit two on a floppy the amount we did. Then there was the whole incompatibility thing between different versions of the same program.
Today? Not an issue. Sure, in some parts there can still be some hiccups such as different fonts and the like, but by and large it’s not a problem now.
The biggest thing we have today is choice, and such is the tone of this weeks instalment.
No longer are constrained to one browser, one word-processor. We have a veritable smorgasbord of techy choice, sure to please all tastes; and better yet, a near fully realised multitude of inter-compatibility options. Firefox and Safari being able to lift browser settings and bookmarks from Internet Explorer and vice-a-versa. Microsoft Word and iWork getting along like a house on fire. Adobe Photoshop and Corel sharing a cuppa.
While we won’t see a complete homogenisation in, well, ever, all this serves to make everyone’s lives easier – developers and users alike – and to be honest, that all we really want.
There’s also a whole host of fantastic free alternatives. No longer do we have to pay for basic services such as virtual protection, but the argument of us paying enough as it is and defences coming as standard is for a whole other day.
Then you’ve got your freeware productivity programs, such as Open Office that are completely open-source and have been built-up by the community that near enough mirror without being liable for plagiarism, Word, Excel, Publisher, Access and Paint. On the Mac side, there’s Bean – a free alternative to iWork that offers a more refined, honed word-processing experience.
However one of the greatest pieces of freeware come from the mighty Google – Google Docs. Okay, so maybe not the greatest, but in terms of functionality and back-ups, it’s unbeaten. We’ve all been there – typing away contently on our latest project, essay or script, and then out of the very literal blue, the program crashes and either you’ve been complacent and not saved in the first place, or the file’s been corrupted or just mysteriously done a runner. With Google Docs however, all your work is safe, magically backed-up to that glorious cloud in the sky.
For aspiring graphic designers and photographers who can’t shell out for the obscene prices for the likes of Photoshop, there’s GIMP – a free image manipulation program that gives users a taste for retouching images and constructing vector images and the like. Talking of vectors, try Inkscape, a fantastic free, again open-source program, that’s comparable with the industry illustration standard, Adobe Illustrator.
There’s choice out there, some rivalling the officially branded programs. It really is an exciting time; really, I’m just grateful we don’t have floppies anymore.
“Cleanse, Tone, Defrag” is a weekly column dedicated to bringing you the best advice in staying ahead in the world of tech.
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