testDecision Overload
I have spent a lot of time trying to go through this massive collection of data I have downloaded over the years. I tend to run across things and look at them later, I download them to make sure I have a copy incase it goes away and I never get around to actually looking at it.
We all have to make decisions on what software we use and with all of the opensource and/or free solutions available nowadays it makes the decisions harder. I have made some very clear choices:
MySQL, PHP, Python for most of my development needs. My IDEs are commercial, I have tried to use some opensource IDEs but none have met my needs. Eclipse looked good, but while I did not spend enough time going through it I felt it was too generic. Eclipse was built and plugins handle each individual language, etc. I am in no way bashing Ecliplse, obviously with such a large user base something is giving these individuals what they are looking for I just did not see the benefits in my short use of the software.
RSSOwl for reading syndication. 99.9% of Java programs I have used are ugly and slow, RSSOwl is the exception in most cases. The software does not have that ugly Java look and it moved quickly for the most part. So I highly recommend checking it out, I cannot think of too many features it is missing, for my needs at least.
One thing I have no yet been able to make a decision on is an Office Suite. I was a big OpenOffice user, but I changed to Office 2003 when Outlook became my preferred email client. I use it primarily because of its large feature list and the VERY clean contact management. Now that I am learning C# I may create my own contact manager that mixes some of the features of Windows Address Book and Outlook 2003. The problem with that is that I now use Plaxo and I would have to learn how to integrate that into the software as well. Now that I am off topic I will get back to my point. I ran across some OpenOffice articles that outlined some of the features that were new since the last time I actually used it for something. I found that when I opened the software I was reminded of the features that made OpenOffice so nice, but it is missing a number of things I feel it should have.
In a perfect world, OpenOffice and Microsoft would get together and create a free office suite that combined the features of both pieces of software. I say in a perfect world because that will obviously never happen. Office has been one of the life preservers around Microsoft’s neck. Windows gets pirated by many just as office does, but I think that office is one piece of software that may keep people from moving to Linux, there are just too many features and it operates much smoother than OpenOffice in many respects. That is just my opinion though, I know it has been a factor keeping me from moving to Linux, but there are a lot of other applications I would have to do without as well. I will not bash either piece of software, but if you are only using Office I recommend you compliment it with OpenOffice
