Edward Tufte has promoted the use of inline, word-sized graphs called sparklines to communicate data more effectively, giving rise to several methods of creating inline graphs within documents, including spreadsheets. This article describes one very simple way of incorporating dynamic bar graphs in your spreadsheets. It works in Excel, IBM Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice, and Google’s [...]

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Getting started Creating graphs with Adobe’s Flex 2 is a pretty simple task, just throw together some short XML and you’re done. But like most “easy” technologies things get a little more difficult when you want to do more advanced things like making sections of the graphs stand out or keeping multiple graphs in sync [...]

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For the last several years, Acrobat Reader has drifted between sluggish and mind-bogglingly slow, particularly when starting up. Acrobat is a great tool and PDF files widespread enough to make the reader software a requirement on any system. So why is it so dang slow? There are tools to speed up Reader and articles describing [...]

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Right on the heals of upgrading to version 12.20, we’re testing the beta for UltraEdit Version 13.00. UltraEdit Beats the Competition In January, we compared text editors for Windows, actually hoping to avoid paying for another upgrade to UltraEdit. The comparison included PSPad, Notepad++, EditPlus, UltraEdit, e, inType, TextPad, Crimson, jEdit, Vim, and some others. [...]

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Following up on the Text Editors for Windows post, I decided to upgrade UltraEdit and wrap in the UltraCompare bundle. PSPad and a couple Notepad replacements such as Notepad2 and EDXOR will remain on my system. I’ll also keep an eye on TextMate knockoffs e and InType.

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Windows ships with Notepad, a bare bones text editor that manages to be both handy and next to useless. So if you do any regular text editing you need something more, an editor that can reformat text, record macros, do syntax highlighting, that supports regular expressions in its search/replace dialog, or knows about ftp. Perhaps [...]

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This dgp technology demo is great. However, since the symptoms it addresses (organizing many disparate documents on a desktop space), the real world usefulness is questionable; the real solution seems to be better organization and a clear desktop. Nevertheless, the demo is still cool. Very very cool. dbp is the dynamic graphics program at University [...]

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For this tutorial you will need a copy of The Gimp. You can download it here for Windows, Linux and OS X. For any project you need a goal, so for this tutorial our goal will be to create a fantasy image of a far away galaxy. Cheesy? Yes, but also very easy if you [...]

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Not exactly an Excel-killer yet, but here comes Google Spreadsheet. It is interesting; sharing spreadsheets, import/export, lots of functions, and so on. If you’ve been losing sleep waiting for it, well, now you can rest easy. Otherwise, okay, another Google labs thingy. You have to sign up for an invitation at this point. Via Google [...]

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IBM has an article for developers about developing cross platform applications useing .NET. Well, using Mono. As someone who has (poorly) written a cross platform application using Mono I can say that it is definitely easy. As long as you keep portability in mind when programming the cross platform bit should fall into place without [...]

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