Cool betas I’ve been a part of (in order)

Posted May 15, 2006
Filed under: Random |
  1. Gmail. This one literally changed the way I work.
  2. WordPress.com. I wanted a WP.com account from the second I heard they were available. I begged for invites on some blogs, but to no avail. Fortunately Flock came along and gave me access.
  3. NeoOffice2 (actually, this is an alpha). Patrick Luby put the OpenOffice2.0 codebase into a native Mac OS X form. I paid to download the alpha early because I wanted to support the project and keep it going. I hope that by beta it'll be faster, better and stronger. Oh, and less of a memory hog. I don't have 150 spare megs to spread around.
  4. Writely. Everyone who joined Writely before it got Googlified got to keep their account. The general public has to wait. Ha.
  5. Yahoo Mail Beta. It's better than the old Yahoo Mail, but it's still no Gmail. I like the stripped-down interface of Google products.
  6. Google Pages. I think at first it was called "Trogdor." It's a simple Ajax WYSIWYG web page builder based on some templates. Very Geocities, though it could be useful those "h. t. m. l. what?" types. But here's what's cool: 100mgs of free hosting, easy upload, light filetype restrictions. I host all of my PDFs, Word docs and AppleScripts there.
  7. Yahoo 360. The service ended up sucking, though.

I guess what I'm saying is that I want to try out some new stuff. How about a fast, native, open-source word processor for OS X that has equation editing capabilities and doesn't require a gwTeX/Fink TeX installation? Like AbiWord, but if the font rendering worked (and equation editing was once again supported).