Key bindings in Firefox; edit vs. sidebars!

[Art Alexion]

Eric Dunbar wrote:

>>>My partner now automatically restarts the computer when she finds it
>>>in Ubuntu -- she finds the FireFox interface too unpolished to bother
>>>with
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>That's a chocolate and vanilla thing*.  I have always found IE
>>unpolished and have always installed Netscape, then mozilla, on every
>>windows machine I am forced to use.
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
>>>& OO.org isn't compatible enough with the Word or Excel documents
>>>that she has to download for work :-( ).
>>>      
>>>
>>Fair enough, though I have found all but the documents with complex
>>frames to be quite compatible.  For Excel files, have you tried gnumeric
>>(far superior IMO to OOo Calc)?
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
> I like GNUmeric but OO.org is similar enough to Excel that there's 
> virtually no learning curve (seeing as I've been using Excel since 
> version 3 I don't want to have to re-learn things (yes, in 1989 
> Microsoft had a spread sheet, that, _at the time_, was so far ahead of 
> its time... unfortunately, conceptually it hasn't progressed since 
> version 5.0 (1994)).

I suppose that is why I prefer gnumeric as I was a Borland QuattroPro 
user who never could adapt to using Excel.  It seemed to take an hour to 
accomplish things I was used to doing in a few minutes.  I suppose it is 
likely that is a matter of habit as I hear Excel users complain how long 
it take to do things in programs other than Excel, but with the death of 
QuattroPro, and before discovering Linux, I tried really hard to like 
Excel, and ended up using a 1996 vintage version 7 of QuattroPro (first 
WP release) instead.

Again, chocolate and vanilla.

>
> Off on a tangent... in Microsoft's history I can only point to three
> pieces of software that Microsoft got right and (more-or-less) created
> themselves: Excel, Internet Explorer (before they created an
> artificial monopoly and _stopped_ developing it) and Windows NT 4.0
> (for its time, a _damn_ stable pseudo-consumer OS).
>
Another chocolate and vanilla example.  I never liked any release of IE, 
and pre-IE 4, IE was a poser, not a browser.  It had such little 
capability compared to Netscape.  Typical of microsoft, IE 4 introduced 
security disasters in tandem with unnecessary and ill-advised 
functionality.  See my comments above for Excel.

IMO, MS' greatest user app achievement is Word.  I use OOo Writer 
because I work in Linux and don't want to go the Crossover Office route, 
but it has structural flaws such as a poorly designed DOM that leaves it 
far behind Word.  The problem is that OOo wants to compete with Word's 
functionality, but Word's best feature is their document logic and how 
rationally document structure can be manipulated by the user.  As 
someone who uses a word processor more than any other piece of 
productivity software, the features are just fluff as you can do more 
yourself designing simple macros as long as the DOM is understandable 
and rational.  OOo, doesn't seem to be addressing this.



-- 

_______________________________________
Art Alexion
Arthur S. Alexion LLC
arthur [at] alexion [dot] com
aim: aalexion
sms: 2679725536 [at] messaging [dot] sprintpcs [dot] com

PGP fingerprint: 52A4 B10C AA73 096F A661  92D2 3B65 8EAC ACC5 BA7A
The attachment -- signature.asc -- is my electronic signature; no need for alarm.
Info @ http://mysite.verizon.net/art.alexion/encryption/signature.asc.what.html

Key for signed PDFs available at
http://mysite.verizon.net/art.alexion/encryption/ArthurSAlexion.p7c
The validation string is TTJY-ZILJ-BJJG.
________________________________________

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 374 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20041202/beb007a6/attachment.sig>