Web design & FOSS
Front-end web technologies and Free Open Source Software.
Friday 25 September 2009, 12:48 PM
Free Software is dead!
Long live free software!
Last week I gave a workshop on Markdown, the lightweight markup language used for writing for the web (the S5 presentation is available for download). The Open Source text editor I recommended for the Macintosh was Smultron.
Last week I was also using PortableApps.com to view images on a restricted-access Windows machine. The software I used was Cornice, a cross-platform image viewer written in Python.
Both projects, IMHO, are immensely useful (why is there such a dearth of fast, compact and stable Open Source image viewers?!). Both projects are no longer actively maintained. This is sad news. The good news is that because the source code is open, anyone else is free to take the code and develop it further.
Here’s hoping someone does that soon.
PreviousComments on this post
You bumped into one of the most under-rated benefits of Open Source.
Since I have been doing all my computing on the trailing edge of technology, I use refurbs and recycled computers, there have been more times then I care to admit when I was forced to toss a piece of hardware because I couldn't find driver software for it. Open Source at least gives you an opportunity to continue to use hardware components until they actually expire!
As far as applications go, sometimes an older application actually run faster and are more appropriate for particular function sets compared to the "new and improved" versions. in the non-open source world MS Word is excellent example, it has suffered from so much feature bloat that its a relative resource hog compared to its earliest versions.
> MS Word is excellent example, it has suffered from so much feature bloat that its a relative resource hog compared to its earliest versions
Oh yes, I remember Word 2.x, the first computer program I learned to use, and I typed "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness"!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word#Word_1981_to_1989
It's also a valid point about whether software _needs_ to be developed, if nothing else can be added (or taken away). Maybe Smultron is the ultimate lightweight text editor as it stands? ;)
