Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

It’s been sev­eral weeks since I con­ver­ted from a Win­dows to a Mac desktop. Hav­ing re-jigged the set­tings on my Mighty Mouse, I’ve regained both my right and even middle-click and am rap­idly find­ing Mac altern­at­ives for my “can’t live without” programs.

One of the biggest hurdles I’ve come across to date is the fact that sadly, the Open Uni­ver­sity (OU) is almost totally Windows-centric. Their Com­put­ing Help­desk appears to refuse point-blank to offer sup­port any other oper­at­ing sys­tems and most, if not all, of the course-provided soft­ware only works on a Win­dows machine. This includes, the ‘Online Applic­a­tions’ CD-ROM that comes provided as stand­ard with their courses (and provides vital/compulsory course con­fer­ence soft­ware) and a fully-featured, legit (with key) copy of Adobe Pho­toShop Ele­ments that came as part of my pho­to­graphy course. Bugger.

It’s also worth not­ing that TMAs and ECAs sent via the Elec­tronic TMA sys­tem must be readable/useable on Win­dows machines using Microsoft Word (97–2003 ver­sions). Appar­ently, tutors have to provide their own PCs and obvi­ously due to the same mon­et­ary con­straints we all exper­i­ence every time some soft­ware giant brings out a new piece of bloat­ware at what seems to be a rate of every 20 minutes, the tutors mostly pos­sess older ver­sions of MS Word.

As both a ‘poor’ stu­dent on a diabol­ical budget and a stu­dent that has spent time and effort learn­ing about the joys of Open Source/Free soft­ware, if I can find a piece of soft­ware that doesn’t cost me any­thing then so much the better.

First stop was the vital course con­fer­en­cing soft­ware, First­Class. First­Class is used by stu­dents and tutors alike to par­take in uni­ver­sity life (we have groups, bars and clubs etc — just ‘vir­tual’ ones!), online course dis­cus­sion, group pro­jects, study-buddy gath­er­ings and actual live tutori­als (where we all meet at given times to take part in activ­it­ies as a con­ven­tional class of stu­dents would in a face-to-face envir­on­ment). First­Class is the cent­ral hub to the Open Uni­ver­sity Dis­tance Learn­ing exper­i­ence, not hav­ing access to a First­Class Desktop Cli­ent was unthink­able. (The web-interface is fine for short-term use when at a friends house, but is pretty unsuit­able as a sole port of access.)

The ver­sion of the FC cli­ent provided by the Open Uni­ver­sity only works on Win­dows, but there’s no need to panic. Luck­ily, you can down­load a Mac ver­sion (free) from the offi­cial First­Class web­site. Squee! If you’re used to installing and set­ting up FC with your login and OU server gub­bins on your PC, install­a­tions should be a no-brainer. Should it all go a bit squiffy and you need help, see this nice page over on the OUSA Mac Gen­eral web­site.

Next on the list was some­thing to write my assig­ments on. Now strictly speak­ing, the OU does per­mit assign­ments sub­mit­ted in .rtf format, which pretty much means you can use whatever text/word-processing soft­ware you like.

How­ever, some assign­ments require that charts, graphs, tables, images and draw­ings be inserted/embedded into doc­u­ments and .rtf format can mangle these ele­ments and make them unreadable/unmarkable. Also, the vast major­ity of tutors use a marking/commenting con­ven­tion that involves using the MS Word comment/notes func­tion to embed feed­back dir­ectly into manu­scripts. Stu­dents have spent (and con­tinue to spend) years cam­paign­ing for tutors to provide indi­vidual, per­sonal feed­back on all assignments/courses as it is vital to our learn­ing exper­i­ence and aca­demic pro­gres­sion (it’s all very well get­ting a 75% mark over­all, but how do you know how to improve or make up the other 25% without some insight from your tutor?) There­fore, it’s a good idea to do every­one a favour and make it easy for tutors to provide this feed­back by sav­ing your work as .doc so that the com­ments don’t get all dis­com­bob­u­lated. We’ve fought hard to gain our right to feed­back, so why then cause our tutors more grief/work by tak­ing away vital func­tion­al­ity needed to give that feed­back? Mad­ness, innit?

Apple iWork’s ‘Pages’ allows you to export a doc­u­ment to .doc format and shows up embed­ded com­ments (or ‘notes’ as Pages calls them) in a side bar, but some stu­dents report unre­li­able res­ults when receiv­ing returned/marked doc­u­ments that have been saved using .doc format, includ­ing: mixed-up foot­ers, inser­ted ran­dom blank pages and messy embed­ded com­ments. Not to men­tion, a lot of MS Word–spe­cific func­tions are either non-existent on Pages, or their equi­val­ents are some­times tricky to find. Then, there’s the fact that Pages and the rest of the iWork suite costs money. And Microsoft Office for Mac cost even more money. Humbug.

To help its stu­dents, the Open Uni­ver­sity provides, for free, a copy of the com­mer­cial office soft­ware StarOf­fice, which copes with the .doc format quite nicely thank you. But, you’ve guessed it. StarOf­fice only works on Win­dows. Damn and blast.

How­ever, StarOf­fice’s Open Source sib­ling is none other than Open­Of­fice. Squee! Although there is a Mac-compatible ver­sion of Open­Of­fice, it requires some­thing called X11 in order to work, which is a whole other layer of faff­ing. Life’s com­plic­ated enough — down with the faff­ing, I say! Luck­ily, some very nice people who are very, very nice indeed have made NeoOf­fice — an office suite based on Open­Of­fice but looks, smells and oper­ates like a Mac animal — with none of the X11 carry-on. Double-squee! The NeoOf­fice suite is my new best friend. Not only is it free, but like Open­Of­fice, its func­tion­al­ity and GUI is closely modeled on the MS Office suite of pro­grams. This means that if you know MS Office like the back of your hand, the same is pretty much true of NeoOf­fice. NeoOf­fice ‘Writer’, ‘Calc’, ‘Impress’ and ‘Base’ replace MS Word, Excel, Power­point and Access, respect­ively and for the most part, either work the same or in some cases even bet­ter (see the com­par­ison chart on NeoWiki).

There are some dif­fer­ences (e.g. embed­ded com­ments come up as tool-tips when hov­er­ing over yel­low mark­ers as opposed to col­oured bal­loons with dot­ted lines in the mar­gins), but noth­ing fatal, from what I can see.

Aside from my dis­tance learn­ing escapades, I’ve had to make some other switches with some of my other beloved Open Source/Freeware pro­grams. Namely: Cyber­duck in place of Core FTP LE (I tried Clas­sic FTP for Mac as it had a GUI much closer to Core FTP, but it was S-L-O-O-O-W to the point of use­less, which was sad), Anti­RSI instead of Workrave (Anti­RSI is slicker, but loses out as it doesn’t include exer­cise instruc­tions like Workrave did. Again, this makes me sad.), UnrarX which replaces Rar­Z­illa Free Unrar (untested so far, but I’m assum­ing ‘same thing, dif­fer­ent hat’) and Eltima’s SWF & FLV Player stands in for Applian’s FLV Player 2.0 (Eltima’s effort trounces Appilan’s in terms of “num­ber of things it can do” and “how good it looks doing them”. This is good.)

There’s only one piece of soft­ware I’ve yet to replace: Jasc/Corel Paint Shop Pro. Now before every­one rushes to the com­ment box, please bear the fol­low­ing in mind:

• The replace­ment must be able to handle nat­ive Paint­Shop Pro files (e.g. .psp). Con­vert­ing these files to some­thing else would mean that all the raster/vector lay­ers would get merged/flattened — this is Very. Bad. News.
• The replace­ment must run on Mac OS X Tiger. I do not have Leopard/BootCamp/Parallels or any other fan­dangly whojimagub­bins that would allow me to run Win­dows on my iMac. I have no desire to run Win­dows on my iMac; if I want to work on Win­dows, I’ll boot up my PC — I use my Mac because I don’t want to be faff­ing with Windows.
• Please do not sug­gest GIMP (it requires X11 to run on a Mac) or Adobe Pho­toShop (I can­not afford to pay obscene prices for software).

Can any­one recom­mend any­thing? I’m going to try and find out if Adobe Pho­toShop Ele­ments opens .psp files and may con­sider part­ing with £50, if that is the case. Does any­one know if .psp file work on Ele­ments on Mac? [EDIT: They don’t work on Ele­ments — I’d have to con­vert them all to .psd, it seems.]

All sug­ges­tions welcome!