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This is our final week of fundraising, and luckily for us, Boing Boing linked to the Metro Ads project this Tuesday morning!
The project will also be featured Wednesday on Italy’s daily IT news site Punto Informatico.
The OpenOffice.org Metro Ads project homepage can be found at http://homepage.mac.com/bhorst/
We’ve started collecting funds via Fundable.org to purchase ads in New York City’s free “Metro” newspaper.
Visit our Fundable.org project site to contribute!
Want to discuss or ask more questions? We have also set up an OpenOffice.org Ads Google Group for that purpose.
Press attention is starting to gather, starting with a great deal of attention from Digg.
I’m excited to announce the launch of Wikipages.com, my new wiki yellow pages website.
Everything is under heavy development, but being a wiki, that’s expected! This release is not quite a beta, so maybe we can call it Wikipages Alpha.
For now, New York City, San Francisco and Philadelphia are covered. Soon to be added are Los Angeles and Boston.
Please take a look and feel free to add your wisdom and experience to its pages. The whole point is to build a self-sustaining community! Comments and suggestions are very welcome. (bhorst at mac dot com)
Yesterday was a big day in the open source world, with the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0.
I hope the project doesn’t mind if I quote almost the entire press release here:
“OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the productivity suite that individuals, governments, and corporations around the world have been expecting for the last two years. Easy to use and fluidly interoperable with every major office suite, OpenOffice.org 2.0 realises the potential of open source. Besides a powerful new database module and advanced XML capabilities, OpenOffice.org natively supports the internationally standardised OpenDocument format, which several countries, as well as the U.S. state of Massachusetts, have established as the default for office documents. More than any other suite, OpenOffice.org 2.0 gives users around the globe the tools to be engaged and productive members of their society.
Available in 36 languages, with more on the way, and able to run natively on Windows, GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris, Mac OS X (X11) and several other platforms, OpenOffice.org banishes software segregation and isolation and dramatically levels the playing field. And, with its support for the OASIS Standard OpenDocument format, OpenOffice.org eliminates the fear of vendor lock in or format obsolescence. The OpenDocument format can be used by any office application, ensuring that documents can be viewed, edited and printed for generations to come. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a breath of hope for small economies that can now have a local language office suite well adapted to their needs and to their economical possibilities, reducing their dependency on the interests of proprietary software vendors.
“OpenOffice.org is on a path toward being the most popular office suite the world has ever seen; providing users with safety, choice, and an opportunity to participate in one of the broadest community efforts the Internet has ever seen. As a member of that community, I’d like to offer my heartiest congratulations.” – Jonathan Schwartz – President and CEO of Sun Microsystems.
Built by a community including Sun Microsystems, its primary sponsor and contributor, Novell, Red Hat, Debian, Propylon, Intel, as well as independent programmers, translators, writers, and marketers; OpenOffice.org 2.0 demonstrates the success, dedication and proficiency of the open source software community.
That community now includes the City of Vienna, which recently started deploying OpenOffice.org throughout. “We are very happy about the functionality and quality of the OpenOffice.org software. We are confident that OpenOffice.org will be made available to all of our 18,000 workstation users.” – Brigitte Lutz, City of Vienna.
Louis Suárez-Potts, OpenOffice.org Community Manager, commented that “OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the culmination of a collaborative process involving thousands working in dozens of languages everywhere in the world. It shows that open source can produce software of the highest quality and assure the robustness, usability and security that users expect in their office suite.”
In addition to the OpenDocument format, the redesigned user interface and a new database module, OpenOffice.org 2.0 also adds improved PDF support, a superior spreadsheet module, enhanced desktop integration and several other features that take advantage of its advanced XML capabilities, such as the ability to easily create, edit and use XForms.”
Additional information is available in the OpenOffice.org 2.0 Press Kit.
The required textbook for the University of Arkansas’ CSCE 1012 College Computing Skills course is The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org!
Also, the School of Architecture lists OpenOffice as a supported program for its students.
My book, “The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org,” is reviewed on Mad Penguin.
“The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org constitutes an ambassador to the world of OpenOffice.org and open source software. Its best use may be as a gift for friends, family and co-workers, to draw them into a world of new and superior computing. Also, though, it serves as a handy and portable reference for the rest of us geeks who just might need a little mental prodding from time to time, even when using an old standby like OpenOffice.org. In short, Horst’s book gives some good ammunition for bringing new users into the open source world.”
Today I saw The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org for sale at the Barnes and Noble store in Union Square (Manhattan). There were two copies, and two or three other OpenOffice books near it too. This is the first time I’ve seen my book on a store shelf, and it’s also good to see the OpenOffice section is growing!
SolidOffice.com has received its long overdue upgrade, and I have chosen WordPress as the vehicle to maintain it as a dynamic site into the future. Primary work areas for SolidOffice are to include open source software, OpenOffice.org (particularly for Mac OS X users), various writings, and publicity for The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org, my first book, released in January 2005.