Ommwriter is a Mac word processor with a bit of a gimmick. Like one of my favorite writing apps for the Mac, WriteRoom, Ommwriter goes full-screen, with a minimal interface and a focus on avoiding distractions. Ommwriter is even more extreme, though, adding a calming background and soothing music to the mix, and restricting your control over text formatting to a bare minimum to reduce fiddling.

The good: that fiddling-reduction thing really works. You can make your text larger or smaller, and choose between three fonts, but that's it. It keeps you away from the controls and focused on your words. Also good: there are 7 different musical selections, and the option to turn the music off altogether (which I recommend you exercise). The default background is quite attractive, but you can switch to basic white if you don't like it.

The bad: your only options for saving your Ommwriter docs are plain .txt or Ommwriter's own format. I suppose that's in keeping with the word-centric theme of the app, but sometimes a .doc comes in handy if you're sharing with an Office-devoted friend or colleague. Also - and this is clearly a matter of taste - the whole zen schtick feels a bit hokey to me. I'm all for removing distractions, and Ommwriter succeeds in that regard (except, perhaps, when it comes to the music) but I prefer the plain black screen and more robust formatting capabilities of WriteRoom.

Adobe's Acrobat.com service is getting a big update tonight, followed closely by a new mobile app for iPhone and BlackBerry. The name "Acrobat" goes hand-in-hand with the PDF file format, and Acrobat.com allows you to convert documents to PDF and save, store and view PDF files. It also features some other applications, including the Adobe BuzzWord word processor, a web meeting service called ConnectNow, and storage space for docs, spreadsheets and images.

The new features include searching by filename (I'm still wrapping my head around how they didn't have this before), but not searching within documents. That feature is reportedly coming soon. Your files are also now displayed in a file organizer that lists everything you have stored on Adobe's webspace - I think this includes saved stuff from other web apps, including presentations.

The mobile app is reportedly going to be a pretty basic mobile front-end for Acrobat.com, with the ability to upload documents and send faxes (what's a "fax?") from your phone. It will come in both free and paid flavors, and the free version will allow a limited number of uploads and faxes per month.

[via CNET]

Microsoft has finally made downloads of Office 2010 beta available, for both Windows on your desktop and Windows Mobile 6.5. Project 2010, Visio 2010, and SharePoint Server 2010 are also available on the Office 2010 download page, and you can get the mobile version of Office via the Windows Mobile Marketplace. Microsoft says the portal for all things 2010 is http://www.microsoft.com/2010/, but the first live download links I've found are right here.

Because we apparently need social networking in every app these days, one of the things Microsoft is pushing about Office 2010 is the new Social Connector, which "brings communications history, business collaboration and social network feeds directly into Outlook, with support for Windows Live and SharePoint Server." LinkedIn has been announced as the first social network that will plug in to this new feature.

More on Office 2010 soon, as Microsoft is getting ready to demo it at their Professional Developers' Conference as I write this. Happy downloading!

Adobe has done a lot to improve Reader in recent versions. I'm more than happy to run an open source alternative, however. Sumatra PDF is ridiculously small (a 1.2Mb download), lightweight, and handles the PDFs I throw at it without skipping a beat.

Today, Sumatra has finally hit version 1.0. Sumatra's a pretty bare-bones application, so don't expect any mind-blowing changes. What the new update boils down to is better compatibility, bug fixes, and performance tweaks.

Installed, Sumatra barely makes a dent in your drive space (not that you're counting at a few cents per gig), and it's very light on memory usage as well. The 277-page ebook I've got open is using just under 20Mb.

There's also a portable version available - an excellent way to make sure you've got a slim, speedy PDF reader with you wherever you take your flash drive. Both the installer and zip file are available for download from the author's site.

It's been a little while since Microsoft had leaked bits distributed on torrent trackers by -- shall we say enthusiasts?

Everything is cyclical, though, so I wasn't totally surprised to find reports of the updated Beta 2 of Microsoft Office 2010 making a public appearance on one of the more popular torrent sites.
The torrent is labeled as build 14.0.4514.1009, which matches up with what some testers have already received directly from Redmond. It certainly looks like the real deal, though nothing is certain when you download from anyone other than the original source. NeoWin is also reporting that while a product key is required, technical preview keys seems to be working just fine.

The public beta is due to arrive sometime next week, though at this point it looks as though Microsoft will probably have no shortage of "unofficial testers" to gather send-a-smile data from.

[via NeoWin]

Over the past few years, Microsoft has had to contend with increasing competition from free, web-based office suites such as Google Docs and Zoho Office. And when I say contend, I mean, maybe start taking notice of. There's no doubt that MS Office is still the 800 pound gorilla in the word processing, spreadsheet, and database field. But free competitors including those online applications and desktop solutions including IBM's Lotus Symphony and and the open source OpenOffice.org can't make the folks in Redmond very happy.

So it probably shouldn't be that surprising that Microsoft Online VP Ron Markezich referred to Zoho, Google Docs, and Zimbra as services that offer "fake Office capabilities."

What was a bit surprising is how well the Zoho team took that idea and ran with it. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu wrote a blog post about the topic yesterday. And today the company launched FakeOffice.org, a site that compares Zoho's application suite with Microsoft's.

Not surprisingly, Zoho points out a number of features that it's products offer that Microsoft's doesn't. Clearly, MS Office has a few features up its sleeve that you won't find in Zoho Office, including 100% compatibility with all those Office documents your friends and colleagues keep sending you. But it's worth checking out the site for the Fake Office "work online" music video, and the little comments such as the Twitter gadget, which is powered by "Fake MS Access."

Zoho has actually been an innovator in the online office space for a while, and most of the company's web apps offer far more features than competing Google Docs. But it's tough for a company with an unusual name like Zoho to take on the big guys like Microsoft and Google. Maybe Vembu should think about permanently changing Zoho's name to FakeOffice? It does have a nice ring to it.

Unfortunately FakeOffice.com has already been registered, which is why Zoho had to grab a .org address for their site.

[via Instant Fundas]

AbiWord is a light weight, open source word processor for Windows and Linux that can create and edit documents in a variety of formats including DOC, RTF, TXT, HTML, and ABW. The word processor is often overlooked in favor of the fuller featured OpenOffice.org.

But if you don't need a full office suite that takes up hundreds of megaybtes, AbiWord is worth checking out -- and the latest version released today includes a handful of interesting new features including integration with the new AbiCollab web-based service for sharing documents with friends, colleagues, or the general public (you can set your account to be publicly visible or private).

AbiWord 2.8 includes a number of new collaborative features including the ability to highlight text from different authors in different colors. You can also upload documents to AbiCollab.net, where you can store files, share them with contacts, and convert from one file format to another. You can't actually edit documents on AbiCollab.net, so it's not exactly a Google Docs killer. But you can create a document which users can then download and edit with AbiWord before saving and/or uploading their changes. And when you open a file from AbiCollab, it will automatically open in AbiWord on your desktop. When you hit save, it will be saved to the web.

The latest version of AbiWord also supports multi-page views, annotations, or comments in documents and scalable vector graphics. There's also improved support for ODT and DOCX documents.

One of the first moves from Google's Data Liberation Front is the option to take your documents out of Google Docs with a new Convert, Zip and Download feature. You'll find the new feature under "export" in the More Actions menu. You can download multiple docs at once - wouldn't be music of a data liberation feature otherwise, right? - and that includes text documents, presentations and spreadsheets in the same batch. Downloads are limited to 500MB at a time, which shouldn't be a problem for the typical Docs user.

The Data Liberation Front is an engineering group within Google, pushing to make it easier for users to get their data out of any Google service quickly and for free. Google Docs exporting is just the first: in fact, they've got a whole list of Google services and the best ways to move your data into and out of them. Currently, about 2/3 of Google services meet the Front's standards for data exporting, so they still have plenty more work to do.

The open source movement isn't just for grown-ups: Open Office 4 Kids is a slimmed-down version of the open source Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org.

The target age group for Open Office 4 Kids is 7-12, but after trying it out, I think there are a lot of adults who would prefer it over MS Office or the full version of OpenOffice. It's available on whichever OS you've set your kid up with: Mac, Windows and (of course) Linux.

Less UI clutter helps make OO4K super-fast. Load times for the app and for creating a new document blew away Office 2008 on my Mac, and I didn't experience any of the annoying lag in loading font menus that I sometimes get in Office.

OO4Kids also has large, very obvious buttons for all of the most common functions of each Office app. The "4Kids" branding is almost a shame, because this could also be Open Office 4 Your Mom Who Always Asks You How To Do Stuff in Office.

On the other hand, I'm glad that any 7-to-12-year-olds who use this app will grow up understanding that Microsoft Word isn't the only way to write a paper.

[via Ghacks]

While I haven't had any customers ask to purchase Microsoft Works in years, it still appears on the odd retail boxed laptop. With the coming release of Office 2010, Microsoft has decided it's high time to tag and bag Works and replace it.

Stepping in to fill the void will be Office 2010 Starter, which will be targeted at the average consumer's needs. Starter will package only Word and Excel with basic creation and editing abilities, and will be ad-supported.

Over on the Office Engineering Blog, VP Takeshi Numoto posted "Office Starter 2010 will provide new PC owners with immediate exposure to the Office 2010 experience on new PCs right out of the box." You know, kind of like how just about every boxed PC does that now with the 60-day Office 2007 trial. Except instead of a time-limited but full-featured Office experience, you'll get a stripped-down feature set at no cost. Ever.

Microsoft dangled another Office lock-in carrot recently with the introduction of Office Web Apps. Whatever the motivation - competition with Google Docs and OpenOffice.Org, for example - I'm sure most Windows users will welcome the opportunity to get any legal MS Office apps for free.

Hmm...Office Starter, huh? There's not going to be some asinine 7 document limit in this thing, right?

[via CNet]

If you're not a developer, you're probably not aware that Google Docs has an API available for various document-related services. Recently Google added a new feature that allows developers to create applications that will pass an image-based (.png, .jpg, or .gif) document to the API, and using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, generate and pass back an editable text-based document. Currently the service can handle documents up to 10 MB in size.

For non-developers, this is certainly interesting, but not terribly useful. Well, a live demo is available that will allow you to test the service yourself. At the time of this writing I was successfully able to convert a single page document, though there are reports that the service has become overloaded and is slow or sometimes fails to respond. Given that this is a demo, that's probably not terribly surprising.

If Google is exposing this functionality to developers, it seems at least possible that it could become a built-in feature of Google Docs for regular users at some point in the near future. With Google's recent acquisition of reCaptcha, it seems likely that Google's document-scanning capabilities will soon be better than anyone else's. That would make for an incredibly powerful feature for Google to offer its users.

[via Google Operating System]

Shiver me timbers! It's been a swash-buckling week here aboard HMS Download Squad, but if you've been off plunderin' other shores and missed the maelstrom of news here's a fair summary of what's been happening..

One of the more frustrating things I found when moving from Windows to a Mac in a business environment was receiving email messages that contained other messages as attachments. This is a fairly common thing for Outlook users to do, and it doesn't usually cause problems because Outlook can happily open those messages. It's not very good email etiquette and you should avoided doing it if possible (forwarding the message makes it possible for the receiver's email program to index and search the contents), but there are times when it makes sense -- such as when forwarding a batch of messages at once.

The problem is that the Mail app that comes with all Macs unfortunately isn't capable of opening Outlook's .msg files. If you use a Mac and regularly receive messages from Outlook users, it's likely you've run into this problem at some point.

45RPM Software created MailRaider to solve just this problem. It's a free app that does one thing, and one thing well: makes .msg files created with Microsoft Outlook viewable on a Mac, including any included attachments. Formatting may be lost, but typically that's not a huge issue.

One interesting aspect of MailRaider is that the developer has pulled out the code that he uses to read the mail messages, and has turned it into a framework he calls MOLE. MOLE is a free framework for developers to use that need to read Microsoft OLE documents on a Mac.

There are other ways to read Outlook messages on a Mac, but MailRaider's price (free) and simplicity are definitely compelling.

[via Lifehacker]

There's word today today that IBM has finally ordered its staff to abandon Microsoft Office immediately and switch to their own Lotus Symphony suite.

Symphony has been around since 2008, and apparently IBM is now confident enough in its office work kung fu that it's going to take over full time duties.

The move makes perfect sense. It's hard to imagine any company using someone else's software to do the chores that their own app is designed to tackle. Why ask your customers do something you can't even ask your own staff to do?

Symphony, of course, is based on OpenOffice.org and recently gained support for Office 2007. The announcement means 360,000 IBM employees now have 10 days to bid MSO a fond farewell before kissing it goodbye forever.

Sure, it's kind of a big hit for Microsft -- but how long did people really expect IBM not to use their own product?

We speculate that users who refuse to switch will have this image blown up and plastered all over their cubicle, where it will remain until they submit.

[via Linux Magazine]