my M a g i c

If you don’t have the latest version of Microsoft’s Office suite of applications (Word, Excel, etc.), then you may be having trouble opening files. The file extension of these new office documents ends in x, and no matter what you do, you just can’t open them, right?

If you’re a Mac user (like every one of us in this office), you can download the conversion tool.

Here’s a link to Microsoft’s web site, where you can download the conversion tool for your Mac: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx?pid=Mactopia_AddTools&fid=6B9238E1-CF69-48C4-BF2D-C4A8ACEEE520#viewer

From time to time, we are asked by instructors who teach in the computer classroom to install special software for students to use. But we also look for potential FREE software to offer students and faculty, and this graphic program is one potential program we could install.

The apple.com/downloads site describes this software as:

Tens of thousands of Mac users have downloaded Vvidget, making it one of the most popular point-and-click graphing solutions for Mac OS X. That same software is used to automate graphs for desktop applications, dashboard widgets and web sites. Vvidget has been used for years by Mac independent software vendors, corporate developers and technical professionals because it is easy to use, integrates seamlessly with the application development tools provided with Mac OS X, is widely available with free download of the base system and can be combined and redistributed with developer’s own applications.

Interested in this or other free software? Let us know.

I’m trying out a new web browser, Chrome, which is from the people at Google. So far, Google has only released a version of Chrome that runs on Windows XP or Vista, so I’ll tell you right off the bat that it won’t be my primary web browser, because my primary computers run Mac OS X and Ubuntu 8.04.

In their explanation of why they created a web browser, the Google people say this:

…we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox“, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites.

This makes a lot of sense, coming from Google, and not, say Apple or Microsoft, because Google is the main producer of web-based … stuff, for lack of a better term. They are THE search engine (really!), and they are the best at putting their web-based applications onto computers.

So far, I’m not convince that it adds anything truly new to the web browser world. Mozilla Firefox is a great open-source web browser, with a full community of developers working on add-ons, plug-ins, themes, security, and every other feature that Google claims Chrome has, except the “sandbox” environment (which may exist, I just haven’t come across it yet). If you’re a heavy user of web-based applications, and you’ve experienced a lot of app-crashes, then Chrome may be the thing for you.

And variety is the spice of life. Congratulations to Google for understanding that making their web browser open source was the right thing to do.

One thing that bugs me, though, is how Google is starting to look like the One Ring (of the Lord of the Rings).