Martin Notes

I’ve been using OpenOffice 3 beta for a while now and I must say it’s much better then 2.4. I contains some of the features I’ve always liked in MS Office, like comments at the side of the document and language selection. Both were pretty crappy in 2.4… I also have the feeling that the MS Word file format support has improved a bit, at least the bug that a document becomes read only when you add an index (how do you build a bug like that???) has been fixed.

There is still room for improvement. For example: it’s still not possible to accept changes with the right mouse key. This would really make merging changes much easier then it is now.

I hope that the support of the ODF format in MS Office will come fast, then I can just send ODF document to my collegues and clients. That would really make life much better, finally kill that idiotic MS Word format!

Linux, Opinion Linux, open office 3 beta

Google finally launched their sidebar with gadgets for Linux. That’s good. What’s bad, you have to build it yourself. The build process is well described, but it took me a while before I discovered that they have a separate description for Ubuntu (among others).

• You can download Google Gadgets from: http://code.google.com/p/google-gadgets-for-linux/
• The dependencies for Ubuntu are here: http://groups.google.com/group/google-gadgets-for-linux-user/web/building-instructions-addendum
• Build instructions: http://code.google.com/p/google-gadgets-for-linux/wiki/HowToBuild

I’ve added Google Gadget to my widget layer in Compiz so that it doesn’t take any screenspace. Just go to the widget plugin in Compiz and add: name=ggl-gtk

[UPDATE]

There is already a Ubuntu repo: http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/2008/06/introducing-official-google-gadgets-for.html

GUI, Linux, Ubuntu