Let me know how it goes. And if you are in the USA – Happy Thanksgiving!

Applications are now the key to OS adoption. I love using iPhoto and iMovie on my wife’s MacBook Pro. They are fantastic apps for a novice photo and video editor (like me). Outlook and Office on Windows continue to be significantly better for office productivity, email, calendaring, and contact management than any other available options for me. Everyone I work with passes around PowerPoint presentations and Word documents. Without 100% compatibility the Mac and Linux alternatives to Office make it unusable for me. Adobe uses Exchange so Outlook is the only real option for email, calendaring, and contact management. Outlook may not be sexy or simple but it just works. There are also some great plugins for Outlook that really improve my productivity. For instance, Adobe’s travel agency has an Outlook plugin that automatically syncs my travel information to my calendar. I frequently hear my co-workers who use Mac Mail / Entourage complain about calendar mishaps and other issues, which makes me thankful that I have never had any issues with Outlook in the past seven years that I’ve been using it.

Ubuntu Linux is my primary desktop OS and since I need Office for my day-to-day work I use VMWare Workstation and boot the same Windows 7 install that I also can dual-boot into for presentations. This provides me with the ability to use the OS I’m most familiar with (Linux) most of the time but to also use Windows for Office when needed. It’s just too bad that I can’t run Snow Leopard in VMWare since that would certainly alleviate some marital tension because my wife hates it when I use her laptop to produce new episodes of Drunk on Software.

As I said before I’m underwhelmed by Ubuntu 9.10. It’s not a bad release. Most stuff works. But looking back at my review of Ubuntu 9.04 it seems that not much has really changed:

• Battery Life – Still great!
• Suspend – Still works great except that I still can’t see my F3507g Mobile Broadband card after I resume (open bug) unless I toggle my wireless kill switch.
• 3G Mobile Broadband – Now consistently works much better! And works out-of-the-box (unlike on Windows).
• Email – I would love to switch to Evolution from Outlook but MAPI is still not working for me. Whenever I try Evolution crashes.
• Display – The Intel drivers are working great except that setting the Display Preferences in Gnome’s Preferences still doesn’t work. Using xrandr from the command line works fine though – even when plugging into a projector.
• Boot Performance – Improved by a few seconds. From BIOS to logged in in under ten seconds!
• Office Productivity – OpenOffice is unusable for me. It’s UI is clunky and it’s compatibility with Office is still not perfect.
• Screen Sharing – Still no Adobe Acrobat Connect presenter plugin for Linux.
• Flex Builder for Linux – The alpha is about to expire. Please vote for the feature request.
• Accelerometer – Still doesn’t work out-of-the-box.

Overall I really appreciate any steps that Linux takes towards being a more viable Windows / Mac alternative. And who am I to complain? I don’t have to pay for Linux and have never really contributed to making it better. So overall I am happy with Ubuntu 9.10 and there are only a few things that I wish were better. The good news is that improvement of Linux on the Desktop is accelerating while desktop OS innovation seems to have stagnated due to the OS market being commoditized. As long as the applications that run on Linux continue to improve then the future of Desktop Linux seems bright. Maybe what we need is more cross-platform applications using Adobe AIR? :)

With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.04 aka Jaunty I wanted to give a brief overview of what works for me and what doesn’t. My requirements for an operating system are not the same as everyone else’s. So some of these may not matter to others. First let me describe what I primarily use my computer for. I travel frequently so things like battery life, suspend, and 3G connectivity are important. My employer uses Exchange so being able to access my email, contacts, and calendar while offline is essential. I do development on Java and Flex so those development platforms must work. I regularly present at conferences and user groups so connecting to external displays and solid presentation tools are essential. So let’s see how Jaunty does in these areas:

Battery Life

The 9-cell battery on my Lenovo W500 now lasts four to five hours! This is a significant improvement! In the past I was never able to get more than about two hours. Also tools such as PowerTOP help me identify which processes are waking up the processor most frequently.

Suspend

I never hibernate to disk so I’m not sure if that works. But suspend now regularly works when using the Intel video card (my laptop has both Intel and ATI). The only problem with suspend is that my F3507g doesn’t come back after I resume. I’m not sure if there is a bug for this yet other than a comment on another bug.

3G

Sometimes 3G dial-up works. My F3507g card for some reason is a lot slower than using a PCMCIA 3G card. But strangely I can only get my PCMCIA card to connect occasionally. I’m not sure if there are bugs for either of these issues. Overall NetworkManager has led to significant improvements in 3G connection handling. And more improvements are expected with NetworkManager 0.8, which will include ModemManger.

Email

Using Evolution for my personal email via IMAP has always worked fine. However using Evolution for my work email has been hit and miss over the past few years. It used to work sometimes before my email account was switched to Exchange 2007. Since then it has pretty much not worked at all. I could use IMAP but then I wouldn’t be able to access my contacts and calendar. So unfortunately I’ve been using Outlook via VMWare. I do have hope though that the evolution-mapi support will soon stabilize and I can ditch Outlook. Right now there are a number of evolution-mapi bugs, some of them crashers.

Display

After a number of problems with my ATI card (performance, suspend, Xrandr, etc.) I gave up and switched over to my Intel card. So far things have worked much better than they ever have with display drivers on Linux. Xrandr now actually works to mirror my display when I plug into an external monitor. However I continue to have problems with gnome-display-properties and compiz.

Boot Performance

One of the best improvements with Jaunty is boot performance. My W500 now boots from the Grub menu to GDM in 16 seconds! Hopefully the next release of Ubuntu (Karmic Koala) will incorporate the kernel mode setting stuff to trim the boot time down even further.

Office Productivity

For some people OpenOffice is a viable alternative to Office, but unfortunately not for me. The PowerPoint and Word conversions are not 100% perfect. The reviewing / tracking changes mode in Office is still second to none. So I’ve been trying to use online solutions like Buzzword and SlideRocket more. Once these new platforms support full offline editing I think I’ll be able to mostly stop using Office. But for now I’m stuck with Office via Windows on VMWare.

Screen Sharing

I frequently use Adobe Acrobat Connect to do remote presentations. However there isn’t a presenter plugin for Linux so this is another thing that keeps me using Windows. Please go vote for this on the Acrobat.com Ideas website.

Accelerometer

My laptop has an accelerometer and although the hdaps module is supposed to make it work the module won’t load. There is an open bug for this one.

Overall

Overall Jaunty is a solid release that moves Linux closer to being my full-time desktop. For the first time I can see on the horizon the day when I no longer have to use Windows (dual-booted or via VMWare). Thank you Ubuntu and everyone else who builds this great stack of open source software!

(Original video size is 1024 x 768 so you might want to open it in a new window or tab.)

The future of software is services in the cloud and rich Internet application on the client. Adobe has pulled back the curtain and given us a glimpse of this with new products like photoshop.com and acrobat.com. Intuit is beginning to do the same with QuickBase and Flex through the Intuit Partner Platform. For developers this means that applications can be built with Flex and live in the cloud. These applications can even integrate with QuickBooks. Intuit has built an Eclipse plugin that works with Flex Builder. This makes it extremely easy to build cloud-based Flex applications. I’ve recorded two short screencasts that will walk you through how all of this works:

Part 1: Creating a QuickBase application with Adobe AIR and Flex

Part 2: Creating a QuickBase widget for the browser and the desktop

To get started or to read more visit Intuit’s Developer website.

Adobe Systems has been making great progress turning the dream of consistent, ubiquitous, and cross-platform software run times into reality. This is one of the many reasons I am excited about what Adobe is doing with their software platform technologies and I am happy to be a Technical Evangelist for them. The Flash Player releases have been sim-shipping on all three major platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) for almost a year now. But the recent addition to the platform stack, Adobe AIR, is still lagging a bit behind on Linux. Today Adobe posted a beta build of Adobe AIR 1.1 for Linux on the labs.adobe.com site. We all hope that soon even the AIR releases will sim-ship on all three major operating systems. But until then, go download this beta, give it a try and let Adobe know how it works for you.