Moving information

Posted by Graham Smith
Nov 27, 2007 at 06:02 PM

Randall,

I have been going through a similar issue and still working through it, so what I say now may change but for many things I am now using plain text or ISO standard formats (PDF and ODF), plus cross platform apps (linux,OSx and Windows).

Emacs has become my standard writing tool/data snippet management/PIM , and I just sync the files between computers (all of which run Emacs). But Thinking Rock looks like an interesting multiplatform GTD task manager.

Main document production is with Lyx which again runs on all three platforms. Presentations are now done as PDFs rather than PowerPoints. OpenOffice fills many gaps, but not used that often. I already used R and Stata for statistics which both run on all three platforms. I’m using Firefox with scrapbook for web snippets and zotero and jabref for references which are all cross platform (but there is an issue sharing Zotero files at the moment). Email is thunderbird and the mail files are on the server, so I can read them with Thunderbird regardless of which OS I am running.

I still use MSWord a lot because I collaborate with people who use Word, and I can’t find an affordable cross platform GIS solution (so that is still all Windows, but if I had the money TNTMips is a superb GIS ),plus my sound analysis software is all Windows only

And a couple of stats programs I use (Genstat and Brodgar are Windows only). Main photo editing tools (LightRoom and Photomechanic) are windows/mac only but the Bibble raw converter that I sometimes use is Mac/Linux/Windows, and the Gimp seems to be becoming a realistic multiplatform alternative to Photoshop.

I have discovered a couple of things in my multiplatform approach 1. there are some incredibly good programs out there that I would never have discovered if I had’t started this quest, and, 2.Some aspects are annoying so you find some programs that are multiplatform, some that are Linux and Windows only, some that are Linux and Mac and some that are Windows and Mac, rather than all three, plus sometimes the spec varies between platform, or the version for one platform is several versions behind the one available for the main platform.

Sorry the detail in this, but the cross platform quest is an interesting one, should you accept the challenge :-)

Graham