Firefox 3.5 is Faster, Slicker, and Ready to Download

The latest version of Firefox is ready for download, and it will be worth the time.
There is a lot to love about the new release, but perhaps the most important improvement is speed. Speed matters now more than ever. We’re not talking about download speeds here, but more important things like application speed—how fast your [...]

Lawsuit against Zotero Dismissed

Good news! The lawsuit filed against the developers of Zotero (which I wrote about here) by the makers of EndNote has been dismissed. There are few details as yet–like whether or not the suit will be refiled–but hopefully this is a sign of things to come. From ArsTechnica:
Thomson Reuters, which makes EndNote, an academic reference [...]

Troubles for the Open Scriptures Project

Image via Wikipedia

The Open Scriptures Project, which I describe here, has hit a (hopefully temporary) snag. The project is dependent upon James Tauber’s excellent MorphGNT, which is open-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. That license should protect derivative projects, but the German Bible Society has called that into question. You can [...]

Next Version of MS Office Will Support OpenOffice Files

Some good news from Microsoft: Office 14 and the next Service Pack for Office 2007 will natively support the OpenDocument format (ODF) used by such software as OpenOffice.org and Google Docs. This open-source format has been adopted as a standard by recognized computing organizations and governments worldwide, succeededing to gain support in many areas that [...]

Saving Money with Open Source Software

The times, they are a changing. One interesting, and in my opinion welcome, change is a new push by businesses and institutions to move to Open Source Software. Aside from the fact that most open source software is free, there are a whole host of other advantages worth considering. Two that stand out: (1) interpolability [...]

Old Institutions, New Media

Several stories have caught my intention of late. We all know, of course, that the proliferation of computers, and especially the Internet, has changed the way we communicate, shop, talk, think, and research. What’s interesting to me is the trickle-up trends that have been occurring more recently. Old and stalwart institutions are often the slowest [...]

Zotero Gets New Partners

A question came up in the Zotero Workshop I did last night: what are Zotero’s future prospects? Will development continue to be strong, or is this a passing fad? The question is a good one, particularly considering Zotero’s ongoing lawsuit with EndNote, but the answer is pretty easy to come by: development for Zotero is, [...]

Sync Thunderbird Address Books using Funambol

There is now an easy way to sync your Thunderbird addresses and calendars with, well, anything!
Our family uses Mozilla’s Thunderbird to get things done–it syncs up perfectly with Gmail (use IMAP for best results) and Google Calendar (with this plugin). The only persistent problem I have had is getting all our address books to sync [...]

Zotero Lawsuit

For those following the ongoing lawsuit by EndNote producer Thomson Reuters against Zotero, this article provides a good synopsis of the story so far.

A Little Love for our Mac Friends

Open source software isn’t just for Windows and Linux. Most of the best and the brightest run on Macs too. Check out this list of 25 useful free software programs for you Apple.