A Modest Construct

After a number of delays, OpenOffice 2.4.0 has been officially released. Get it here. Check the mirrors for your own OS and localization. OpenOffice 2.4.0 has not quite been released yet. Some major new features include OpenGL transitions for Impress, some major charting improvements for Calc, and block selection for Writer.

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Continuing the tradition of my previous post about Safari, I thought I would revisit Firefox’s performance on the SunSpider benchmark.

Clearly, Firefox has also made drastic strides in its Javascript engine, which is an entirely new piece donated by Adobe (and is the same engine, or so I understand, which powers…

Safari 3.1 has been released, bringing with it all the latest and great Webkit code. Even though the UI still sucks (at least on Windows; ever hear of native GUIs, Apple?)

I decided to benchmark the Javascript performance of the new Safari against its more immediate predecessor, 3.04. This testing was done…

This plugin has been superseded by the much-improved Semantic Classes plugin

I’ve written a small Wordpress plugin that provides some new template tags that return a post’s tags, categories, author, and date; useful for CSS trickery.

You can view its page here.

This initial release provides the following items:

<?php generate_tag_class(); ?>

This function returns…

After a long string of betas, ApexDC++ (an DC++ client based on StrongDC++), has finally reached a stable release with v1.0.1. See here.

ImgBurn, a popular disc image burner, has seen a major version change. Most important in this release is support for burning audio formats—anything for which it can find a compatible DirectShow filter. See the rest of the changes (including a smorgasbord of bugfixes) here.

Note: the only DS filter for FLAC…

Pidgin (formerly Gaim) is now at v2.4.0. Changes include Yahoo! Messenger 7.0+ file transfer support, offline message support for AIM, some UI tweaks, and various bugfixes.

Just a few days ago, I compared the relative sizes of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) and OASIS’s OpenDocument format (ODF). I noticed that while OOXML was smaller for smaller amounts of text, ODF was smaller for larger documents. I was curious as to the turning point for this curve,…

A while ago, as OpenOffice.org 2.0 approached completion, I compared the file sizes of Microsoft Office’s binary format against OpenOffice’s new OpenDocument format. Recall that OpenDocument is an XML-based storage formatted that is ultimate compressed into a zip file, creating smaller file sizes. Microsoft’s new Office Open XML is essentially the…