Recently, I inherited a well-used 12" G4 Apple® PowerBook® laptop to use as a travel machine — that is, a small laptop to be taken along as a roving computer while I'm on the road at conferences.
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Since it wasn't my "regular" work machine, I wasn't going to get away with spending a bundle of money outfitting it with expensive software. But at the same time, I was going to be away at SIGGRAPH for a week, and I didn't want to shortchange myself on anything I might need during that period. What to do? Here's how I solved my problem.
In the first place, I had to decide what I needed. Top priority was a word processor (I do a lot of writing) and a spreadsheet (for keeping track of expenses during my trip). Then, since I also do a lot of graphical work, I wanted something that would handle 3D modeling as well as 2D painting. For relaxation after a hard day of tramping the SIGGRAPH floors, I wanted to be able to watch DVDs or video files (and yes, Virginia, there are plenty of perfectly legal video files available on the net). And of course, I wanted to be able to send and receive mail. Having defined my basic needs, I started shopping around.
First necessity was the Cisco® VPN client that would allow me to authenticate with Penn State's secure VPN/anywhere using my ACCESS ID. This was necessary to enable me to use email (using the Apple mail client that ships with OS X) as well as to transfer files to and from the servers in my office. So I installed the Mac VPN client available to anyone with a valid ACCESS ID from https://downloads.its.psu.edu/.
With that software on my laptop, I would now be able to reach PSU's secure VPN from the wireless network at SIGGRAPH.
Why did I want a BitTorrent client? Well, a lot of open-source freeware is now becoming available via BitTorrent (as you'll see in the next section), and using a torrent client is usually a lot net-friendlier than doing an HTTP download.
There are many torrent clients available out there, and Azureus is surely the slickest of them all, with its browser-like tabbed interface and flashy graphics. But on the other hand, it eats up a lot of system resources and, in my tests, generated a very great deal of network activity. So I looked for something more basic and less demanding.
The one I settled on was Transmission, available for free from http://transmission.m0k.org/
This is a lightweight, no-frills BitTorrent client with drag'n'drop functionality, and it isn't hard on either the network or my laptop's G4 CPU.
Word processing is an indispensable part of both my job and my personal pursuits, so being able to do quality document editing was a must. There really wasn't any choice to be made in this matter — I went straight to the NeoOffice website (http://www.neooffice.org) and used my Transmission torrent client to download the NeoOffice suite.
NeoOffice is a really slick OS X-only port of the OpenOffice suite that's been engineered to run natively under Apple's OS X. Certainly NeoOffice's word-processing component, Writer, is a professional-level product in every way, and can read and write over twenty different document types, from simple .txt to Microsoft's new .docx format. The interface has no eccentric surprises, and anyone who's used MS-Word® will have no trouble adapting. Unlike some Open Source products, it's both full-featured and easy to use. In fact, I've been using it exclusively for half a year, and I'm writing this article with NeoOffice Writer.
Another part of the NeoOffice suite is Calc, the NeoOffice spreadsheet. I admit up front that I don't generally do complex things with spreadsheets, so I can't claim to have given it a strenuous workout. But for keeping track of manuscript submissions, car repairs and trip expenses, it's never failed me.
There's also a presentation manager called Base, but since I haven't done many PowerPoint®-type presentations lately, I can't comment other than to say that the price is right, and that — in my cursory tests, at least — it works.
2D Graphics
Adobe Photoshop® is another product that I can't do without in my work. Unfortunately, there was no way to justify the cost of Photoshop on a machine I'd only be using occasionally, but once again, the Open Source world came to the rescue in the form of GIMPShop.
Many people have already heard of GIMP (the Gnu Image Manipulation Program), a utility that's been around for years. It's freeware, and it works. But unfortunately for those who are already PhotoShop users (or want to learn Photoshop), GIMP's menu structure is odd and often very confusing, limiting its usefulness severely. Let us all give a tip of the hat to programmer Scott Moschella, who has dissected the GIMP menu structure and rewritten it until it looks like something any Photoshop user can handle with ease.
Note that if you're installing GIMPShop on a Mac, you'll have to install the OS X X11 windowing software (it's on your OS X install DVD if you don't have it preinstalled), because GIMP itself is an X11-based program. But this is a minor inconvenience.
No, GIMPShop isn't a drop-in replacement for every one of the rich features of Photoshop. And the GIMPShop interface isn't 100% Adobe — but it's so close that no Photoshop user will be confused for long.
Even if anyone in my unit had actually been willing to spring for the price of AutoDesk's industry-standard modeling/animation software Maya® on my laptop, there was no way that its G4 processor and 1G of memory would be happy with it. But there is another way, and it's called Blender.
Blender is an open-source, free, 3D modeling/animation/rendering package available for download from http://www.blender.org/. The good news is that it works very well, even on less-powerful machines. The bad news is that if you've ever done a project in some commercial environment like Maya or 3Ds Max®, the GUI is going to be utterly alien to you. It's not that there's anything wrong with Blender's interface, it's just that it's...different. Different from just about everything else. Way different.
In fact, many people now using Maya who would like to migrate to Blender are deterred from doing so (I heard their complaints myself, at SIGGRAPH) by the necessity of learning a software interface that's so utterly unlike everything they've trained themselves for years to handle. My own feeling is that this "do your own thing" approach is hurting widespread acceptance of Blender in the worldwide animation and modeling community.
And certainly, the GUI has been improved to the extent of providing click-buttons for many functions that once required a fistful of keystroke combinations. And the coming release of Blender V2.5 is said to have a much more user-configurable GUI, one that users will be able to reassemble into something more comfortable to them. But persuading the Blender programmers to make even these concessions hasn't been easy. In the frosty words of Ton Roosendaal, the lead developer of Blender, "Blender isn't for Maya users — Blender is for Blender users." So much for reaching out to the masses.
Nevertheless, none of this is to say that Blender isn't quality software, because it is. Just be prepared to slog your way through the online documentation to learn it, because there's very, very little commercial documentation, especially of an introductory nature.
If you're doing modeling and animation, you may well also need a good audio editor. Best of the freeware audio editors is Audacity, available from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. In fact, it's a handy tool to have, even if you aren't doing any animation at all.
For playback of video and audio files (as well as CDs and DVDs), it's hard to beat VLC, downloadable from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. The list of multimedia file types it supports is too long to list here, but there's a comprehensive list at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html. It can even be a better .mov and .mp4 player than Apple's own QuickTime® Player — or at least, a more forgiving one, for it will usually be able to play back a file too full of errors for QuickTime Player to handle.
One little utility that I find extremely useful when traveling is MP3 Alarm Clock, available from many sources, but I got mine from http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/12211&vid=35360. It enables you to use not one, but a whole folder of MP3 audio files to wake you up in the morning. I use cathedral chimes, but MP3AC lets you wake up to whatever pulls your chain.
Want to do folder-sharing via either AFP or SMB, but don't like the way OS X 10.4 limits you to only sharing your own home folder? Try SharePoints, and leave OS X's dumbed-down sharing behind.
Sick and tired of that irritating startup chime that Apple says you have to have every time you boot up your machine? Try Startup Sound, a little preference pane that'll shut it up for good. I've been using it on all my OS X laptops for years, and it hasn't failed me. Startup Sound lets you either turn the chime off or mute it down to a lower level, if you prefer.
Of course, many of the utilities I've described above are OS X-only, because (A) That's what I mainly use, and (B) the machine I was configuring for this article was an Apple PowerBook. But others are compiled for many platforms, including Windows® and various Linux flavors. So if you've been intrigued by any of them and want to try them out, visit their websites and see if there's a version for you.
Okay, so I got my little PowerBook outfitted with an entire range of free Open Source software. I could do word processing, spreadsheets, digital painting, video display and lots of other great things, all without spending an extra cent. I was good to go, right?
Uh, not entirely. I arrived at SIGGRAPH, opened up my PowerBook on Monday morning just as the conference was beginning...and the battery died. I was tied to an outlet for the rest of my stay.
Hardware happens. But at least when I was in range of an electrical outlet, I still had access to all the software I needed to keep on working. And the money saved would pay for...well, a dozen replacement batteries.