Colm Smyth's Weblog

Start your own business kit

Yes, I'm still looking for cheap but excellent Christmas presents and I found some other things I can add to that StarOffice 7 present for my sister, the home entrepeneur; in this partly-digital world, this is my way of making something "by hand". So what have I found...

Seth Godin's The Bootstrapper's Bible - although Charles Handy (The Elephant and the Flea) and Tom Peters ("Brand Me") have written about career independence, Seth Godin has some unique insights in this book (7 years old, but even more relevant today) which is available for free for the next week or so. Bloggers will love Seth's site too.
Firefox and Thunderbird - a new browser (that hates spyware) and a mail client (that cans your spam, faster than you can say wham bang thank you ma'am) - also 100% free from mozilla.org - with these two, her online work will be safer and more productive.
Templates - I'm not going to try to find creative templates for her business, but I am going to dig up some business related templates (invoices, promotions, reminders) - and I never realised there were so many out there for free, for example the desktop pub site at about.com has some good pointers for free Word templates; the ones without macros will work perfectly in StarOffice (and to be honest, I'm glad she won't be running VBA macros from documents downloaded from the web).
The Computer Arts magazine I mentioned earlier actually has some great free tools to download - for example, the Color Cop eyedropper is a neat tool for picking colours from the desktop and it displays the HTML colour code in real time - great for choosing colours from photos for her graphic art and web-site (she'll be able to use the Flash export from StarOffice to create some nice web presentations, and the PDF export for her brochures)
Speaking of HTML, I'll include JTidy for cleaning up any HTML she's written by hand; JTidy is a command-line program written in Java (I'm sure she has a Java runtime installed, but I can include one on the CD just in case); I can write a few lines of code to give JTidy a simple file-open GUI (and maybe make that available here)

And that's it! Next I'll see if I can find some decent pre-school educational software for my brother's family. Ideally I'd like to find Java applets so that I can create a nice HTML page as a "menu" - there seems to be a lot of good free Java-based educational software for teens, but finding good software for younger children really isn't child's play. If you know of any good safe software (especially Java applets), please let me know and I'll post the best ones here.

(2004-11-21 09:06:28.0) Permalink

StarOffice 7 is too cheap

I've been using StarOfffice for about 9 years (I started about 2 years before I joined Sun), mainly on Windows and Solaris, but more recently on Linux (Java Desktop System). It's always been a great office suite, very reliable, especially on longer documents where Word let me down a lot - anything over 3 pages seemed to make Word unstable.

Currently I use StarOffice 7 and it's rock solid with great interoperability with Microsoft Office (the documents within Sun tend to be almost all created within StarOffice, but I read documents (mainly Word and PowerPoint) posted on the web (for example, I've been looking at Tom Peter's PowerPoint deck - wow!) and occasionally I use templates from the office.microsoft.com for inspiration (I was actually using some nice Excel ones earlier).

So it's with amazement that I see Sun's promotion of StarOffice 7 for $39.95 (I don't even want to calculate what that is in Euro; well actually I do - I just used an exchange rate calculator and it works out at 30.60 Euro). That is an incredible price for a full office suite; I guess Sun must really want to get this product out to the market but in my view that is just too cheap; the templates and dictionary alone must be worth more than that, and it's got more applications in it than the Microsoft Office Standard Edition (oh my god, I just checked Microsoft's site - retail price is $399, I don't even have to use an exchange rate calculator for that because it's an even 10 times the price of StarOffice - 306 Euro).

I guess the only thing to do is take advantage of it while it lasts, so I've just figured out what I'm getting my sister for Christmas! She's started a home business making arts and crafts (like runs of 100 or less of really unique cards for busineses to send out to customers) and although she has a really nice PC, she's been using Microsoft Works up to now. She needs a real office suite though, for things like designing cards (StarOffice Draw), writing up invoices (StarOffice Writer) and doing her accounts (StarOffice Calc)). I can get her the current issue of Computer Arts magazine too - it has a Start Your Own Design Business topic (setting up a business, branding, logos, business card design) - just the right thing. Alright, that's one gift down (and just 33 shopping days to go!)

(2004-11-21 05:29:19.0) Permalink Comments [2]