UGN InfoManager

Last week, our Mac user group had a great meeting with a PC user doing the presenting. Well, actually, his wife is slowing making him a switcher, but he has to use a PC for work where he supports high end printers.

The subject was Open Software. He gave us a brief history of the open source software concept. He also discussed Apple's use and support of OpenSource software including an Apple.com page that listed these activities.

Then got directly into the subject at hand. Our disk of the month person had placed most of his programs on the CD and we sold out.

While Steve didn’t go into any in depth demos or reviews of the software, he did cover a lot of ground. Among the programs discussed were AbiWord (word processor), Adium X (chat client, that I use), Blender (3D modeling), CocoAspell (spelling checker), Cyberduck (FTP browser), Darwine (OS X to run Windows), Formulate (PDF form filler), GIMP.app (Image manipulation), HandBrake (DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/convert), Juice (handles Podcasts), NeoOffice and OpenOffice and more.

One of the interesting things about his presentation, was it was done on one of the "YUM" iMacs. So it was a pretty slow machine with only 384 megs of RAM. He had just upgraded Jaguar to as far as it could go and he had no problem running these programs, although some opened a little slowly.

The reasons for going open source, are of course cost, no Microsoft, the great community that supports the software and the great variety of software available, most of which are cross platform, so you don't have to learn multiple programs to use different OSs. (Linux, Windows and Mac are supported on most.)

As an aside, Steve mentioned that PortableApps.com. Which is a Windows only site, but I would love to see the concept come to Mac. The idea is to provide software that you can place on a flash drive so that you can take your apps with you and run them on other computers. You might want to check that out as well.

We have found, that it helps to have a hand out and if appropriate, software & documents on our CD of the month. In this case, we abandoned our normal format in terms of dating browsers, chat clients, etc. because the Open Source software would not fit on the CD by itself, let alone with other shareware and freeware programs.

I think that the subject matter turn off our older Mac users, so our turn out was light. But about half of the audience was new, so perhaps the subject will actually turn out being good for our membership growth. It would have been better to publicize that we would be being staying away from the more geeky stuff.

Go to MacUpdate, VersionTracker and other download sites to find the software. Or do what I did to get the screen shots for the handout. "Google" the name and go to the software's home page.