Software : Opinion: 'Software vendors are mere stewards for ideas' |
| Opinion: 'Software vendors are mere stewards for ideas' Posted: 18 Dec 2010 04:00 AM PST  From the outside, the world of open source software can appear turbulent, disorganised and disparate. But when it comes to the creation of software, these consequences work to its advantage. Open source development is a democracy. These attributes make Linux effective, interesting, diverting and productive. You can do what you want with the source code behind the software. You can add features, remove broken ones, fix problems, bolt on attachments and even copy an entire project verbatim. You can sell the software, use it as part of a commercial endeavour, rebrand it, copy it, redistribute it and charge to support it. You can make it your own. The set of free software licences used by most open source software guarantees these freedoms, and for most of them, your only obligation is to share your changes to the source code. It's still the best reason for using free software, and it's something none of its competitors can touch. This is why there's so much choice and diversity, and it's from this chaos of unstructured development that order eventually coalesces, forming some of the major open source projects we all love, from OpenOffice.org and GIMP to Fedora and Ubuntu. It's a competitive environment, where the low cost of software means features and usability are what bring a project to dominance, rather than a great piece of marketing or an influential sponsor (even if both of these are having an increasing effect). In a world that's become used to six-month release cycles and free updates, it's easy to forget that the random fluctuations of free software development are never far from the surface, and that's definitely a good thing. This fluctuation is the best evidence we've got that the developers still care, and that apathy isn't taking a project to the retirement village of an inactive SourceForge account. Dramatic changes still happen, and two influential free software projects have recently undergone the ultimate metamorphosis – they've been forked. Forks are cataclysmic A fork is the complete duplication of a project from one host to another, usually by a group of developers and users who have become so dispossessed and disenfranchised by the original project that they have no other option. Outwardly, it's a sign that a project's leaders aren't listening to its contributors. Inwardly, it's a sign that nothing is changing and that the project may have lost its purpose. A fork is a cataclysmic event. It's never taken lightly, and usually only as a last resort. It's happened many times in the past, most notably with XFree86, the X Window system used by the vast majority of Linux distributions and many other free operating systems. X is one of the most important components in Linux. It handles screen updates and the way the user interacts with the system. The old guard at XFree86 had become unpopular – in a world where other GUIs were rapidly gaining functionality, such as anti-aliased fonts, shadows and compositing, X was going nowhere with XFree86. It was forked and became X.org. At the time, many of us thought this was a mistake. Why risk a vital OS component with an untested new group? But the results were staggering. X.org implemented almost all the features we'd wanted for years, and went from strength to strength. Mandriva, the Linux distribution, has become Mageia. Some of its core developers and community members have taken the brave decision to go it alone. Like XFree86, it's a fork that's come after many years of apathy, with too little innovation and financial reward. A fork in this case has nothing to lose, because the alternative is nothing. A fork for those people who still care means Mandriva's survival, and that's exactly what can't happen in the world of proprietary software. Even more dramatic is the latest fork of OpenOffice.org, the essential office suite that gives many people the only real alternative to Microsoft Office, and is now owned by Oracle. Under its previous owner, Sun Microsytems, change happened too slowly. There was a particularly draconian grip on what changes were allowed, and even the copyright over those changes. Things haven't improved quickly enough at Oracle either, and this has given the community enough momentum to create the LibreOffice fork. LibreOffice and Mageia are important parts of the continued success of free software, but what's more important – and quite unlike the proprietary world – is that free software vendors need reminding that they're stewards for people's software and ideas. And Linux is the best possible ark for bringing those ideas home. |
| Tutorial: How to export photos from iPhoto Posted: 18 Dec 2010 02:00 AM PST  Using photos from your iPhoto library in other applications is fairly straightforward. Just drag them from the iPhoto window onto the app, into a document window or onto the Desktop. What you'll get is a copy of the file in its original format – unless, that is, it's a raw file, in which case iPhoto will produce a JPEG conversion. To get at the raw file itself, you either need to right-click on its thumbnail and choose Show File to display its location in the Finder (which is a bit of a pain), or choose the Export option from the File menu and select Original from the File Export tab. There are a number of other flexible file export options here too. Dragging thumbnails from the iPhoto window creates same-sized images with the same filenames, but in this dialog it's possible to specify different sizes, formats and file types. You could create a folder of images for a web page, for example. Need to send low-res samples to a customer, friend or colleague? This is the place to do it. And if you've used Places to add geotagging details to photos, exporting them via this dialog will embedd the location information in the metadata. This Export Photos dialog has four tabs, though, and File Export is just the first. Using the others, you can generate web albums and movies from your photos, and while there's some crossover with iPhoto's other web and slideshow tools, they're still worth a look as useful alternatives. The Web Page export tools are basic, but could be useful if you need to prepare an interactive gallery for anyone to use. The two remaining tabs, QuickTime and Slideshow, both create standalone movie files from sets of photos, but go about it in a different way. The Slideshow tab works alongside iPhoto's own slideshow features. The QuickTime tab generates a much simpler slideshow in the QuickTime format, dispensing with fancy transitions and effects, and substituting a simple fade between photos. The Export Photos dialog is useful for exporting batches of photos with custom filenames and settings, but its other export options, particularly the QuickTime export, could prove just as handy. Let's take a look. How to use the Export Photos dialog 1. Export file format
When you use iPhoto's File Export tab, you can choose the file format, the quality (for JPEGs) and the file size – useful if you want to export pictures for web pages or email. If you want the original photo, you should choose Original from the Kind menu. 2. Export file size
If you need to change the size, choose from iPhoto's Small, Medium or Large settings, but you'll probably find it more useful to specify the dimensions using the Custom setting. This enables you to set the maximum size for width or height – 1,000 pixels, for example. 3. Web Page export
The Web Page tab generates a basic web album, exporting it as a set of HTML files to a disk folder, rather than uploading it to a remote server. Select the size of the thumbnails and the grid layout, and the size of the photos you see when you click on a thumbnail. 4. Exported web pages
For slick-looking web albums, send your photos to iWeb, or MobileMe galleries (if you have an account). The pages produced by this option are very basic. But it is a quick way to produce clickable galleries for your own use or distribution to others. 5. QuickTime export
The QuickTime export option generates a movie where each slide is displayed for a fixed period (the Display image for: box) using a simple 'fade' transition. You can set the size of the QuickTime window/movie using the Width and Height boxes; photos are scaled to fit. 6. QuickTime playback
Doing this is a lot quicker than setting up a custom iPhoto slideshow, both in terms of setup time and how long it takes iPhoto to generate the movie. The movie that's produced can be controlled using simple play/pause and forward wind/rewind buttons. 7. Slideshow export
If you select the Slideshow tab, iPhoto will create a more sophisticated movie based on the last-used Slideshow settings, including any themes, transitions and music. The Custom Export button opens up more options, but they quickly get complicated, so try out the presets. 8. Slideshow movies
The Slideshow option generates an MPEG4 movie rather than a QuickTime file; this will open in iTunes by default, but you can also open it with the QuickTime Player. The results are slick, thanks to iPhoto's slideshow features, but the movies take a while to generate. |
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