Archive for March, 2006|Monthly archive page
Sweetness
WP.com added the sidebar editor for the Simpla Theme. I guess that’s what all those server errors were about.
links for 2006-03-13
-
Another ajax spreadsheet app
links for 2006-03-12
-
Stata white test module
-
Stata regression tables output module
Can you really do without desktop software?
That’s what a lot of people keep saying. I’m not sure that I’ll ever be willing to make the switch, but lets take a look at the vast breadth of application needs that are already taken care of through one or more web applications.
Email. Email probably started the idea of replacing desktop software with web applications. I know that I personally stopped using desktop email clients in the early 90s (before I could drive a car). My old Yahoo! Mail account was great — I could check my email from anywhere. You still can of course, and it makes sense to only use webmail: you need to have an internet connection for a mail application to be useful, so why not just use a browser-based interface. Ironically, now that I’m using multiple Gmail accounts to triage different email needs, I’m back to using a desktop client (Mail.app) to make it easier to manage all those accounts. But I could go all webmail, if I wanted.
RSS. RSS aggregators are another great example of a desktop application that can easily be supplanted by a web app. I’ve tried every desktop newsreader out there. And they work well. But what’s the point. Between Bloglines and Google Reader, I have all the RSS goodness I need.
Word processing. Of course, there’s Writely, which inspired this post. And Writeboard, which is a bit simpler, is another great tool. These tools allow you to easily create formatted text documents. And although they don’t have all the same features as OpenOffice or Word, they do make collaboration a snap. Writely even lets you save as HTML, ODT, Word or PDF — so it can also be considered a web-based HTML editor and PDF creation utility.
Spreadsheets. Two web apps stand out: Num Sum and Numbler. Both allow you to create basic spreadsheets, including simple formulas and formatting, and share them with others collaboratively. Num Sum lets you make professional looking charts, right in the browser. Numbler, like Writely, even has a right-click interface. Both allow you to export your spreadsheet as a CSV file.
Image editing. Pixoh is an easy to use, online image editor. It allows you to easily import local or online images, create basic edits like cropping, rotating or resizing, then export them to several formats.
Data analysis. Rweb is essentially a server running R, the statistical programming applications. The website allows you to input data or upload from a local or online file and type in a routine. It then processes your routine and returns both results and request images. Besides the ability to install new packages, it can basically do anything that a local installation of R can.
Obviously there’s a broad range of functions that can be taken care of by web apps. They are all limited in one way or another compared to their desktop analogs. But they are all fairly new — as time goes on, programmers will find ways to catch them up to their counterparts. So the real question is this: with so many open-source, cross-platform applications that can also covers these functions, is there a huge advantage to using web apps over desktop apps? What happens when the server is down for a half an hour? Or when your internet connection breaks?
For me, web applications will replace any desktop software that requires an internet connection to function properly — like email and RSS, and probably soon FTP. But for anything that I can do offline — like word processing, statistics, image editing, etc. — I’ll probably always work primariliy from desktop software, although I’m excited about the possibility of being able to use the kinds of web apps mentioned above to augment my toolkit, storing and sharing files online, and accessing and editing them when I’m away from my computer. Still, if all you had was a machine, a connection and a browser, you’d be able to get a lot of work done.
Turn off number format autorecognition in OpenOffice
Wow, that’s a long title. And inversely proportional to title length, as always, is the number of people that will find this useful. But I did:
Word and OpenOffice/NeoOffice and probably other word processors have this nice feature that converts text into tables, based on the placement of tabs, periods, or user-selected characters. So I could easily turn:
1;2
3;4
Into the appropriate table by, in NeoOffice for example, selecting the text then choosing [Tools] : [Text <-> Table]. The problem is that OpenOffice is too smart. It automatically recognizes whether it’s looking at text or numbers — at least it tries to.
Unfortunately, I’m creating tables made using the Outreg module for Stata. This nice little ado file takes multiple regressions and turns them into fancy tab delimited text files that can be used to make journal style tables. But it reports standard errors in parentheses under coefficient estimates, like so:
6.7
(2.34)
But NeoOffice (and I assume, OpenOffice), thinks that the parenthesis represent negative numbers, like in accounting. So when I tableize my text, I get a bunch of negative numbers that should be in parenthesis.
Ah, but as always, there’s a fix: Go to [Tools] [Options] [Text Document] [Tables] and uncheck the box that says [Number format recognition] under the “Input in tables” heading. Problem solved.
links for 2006-03-11
-
Make regression output look like journal articles(tags: econometrics stata)
That whole writely thing
Google bought Writely. It was big news. Over on the 37Signals blog, they argue that Google isn’t building a monolithic web os, complete with a web office app, but rather presenting people with some basic tools that serve the needs of 80% of users. I totally agree, and I think it’s cool.
Anyway, no rant here, just letting you know that now that Google has purchased Writely, the PDF creation thing is free. So if you were lucky enough to already have an account (now you get to be cool while all the buzz generated makes a million new people join the waiting list), you can make PDFs for free, online.
These widgets are sweet
I’m totally sold on the idea of widgets versus total HTML customization now. The hard stuff (getting the CSS to work right, tweaking until you’re sick, etc.) is done for you. And the fun stuff — deciding which content to display and where — is even easier. Just last month I was strugging with some cheesy feed2js function to get search results into the sidebar of a Blogger blog. With these new WP.com widgets, I could do it in 10 seconds.
I had to switch themes to take advantages of this sweetness. I could really use widgets for the Simpla theme.
