Switch Week : Export your iWorks documents.
Feb 22You might not know it, but one of the greatest ways to sell an application is not only by making it a very good application, but also by using an enclosed file format. Its funny, but the majority of decisions in small businesses of whether to migrate to a newer version of office, is fuelled by the argument that “other people use office an its needs to be compatible”. That way a commonly present, closed file format used by a certain number of users ..ensures long time sales of your product.
With Pages Numbers and Keynote, Apple chose their own file formats to use. That also creates kind of a “legacy” problem. Part of that problem is that you need to be able to open / share your documents with other iWork suite users and part of that is that you need the iWorks suite to be able to open your own documents. Being able to break free from that locked in loop gives you the flexibility not only to exchange documents with others who do NOT have the iWorks suite, but also to make sure you can open those documents on your other computers that aren’t macs.
How to do it.
iWorks documents don’t ‘slide’ very well across operating systems. iWorks suite is capable of opening .doc .xls .ppt .rtf and .txt formats from other programs like the Microsoft Office suite and Openoffice (beware : Open document format is NOT supported). The other way around is a lot harder : No applications outside the iWorks suite are capable of opening and editing Apples closed iWork suite file formats.
What is the workaround.
Luckily there are the EXPORT options that allow you to ‘export’ your iWorks spreadsheet, document or presentation to a more open file format so you can open them up with non-iWorks applications.
supported formats – suggested formats
Pages documents can be exported to.
- DOC
- RTF
- TXT (not all versions of iWorks support this)
Depending on the file format you export to you will loose more functionalities and layout options. The PDF export gives you a document with all the layout but without the ability to edit, the other file formats have less and less of the .pages layout and markup options in favor of being able to edit the text.
Numbers spreadsheets can be exported to :
- XLS
- CSV
The same is true here, the farther you go down the list the less functionalities you can export. PDF gives you a read only document, XLS gives you the ability to open and edit the document in applications like Excel, Google Drive and Open Office. You might still have your graphs and pie charts but they won’t look as nice. With CSV you export your spreadsheet to a flat file with all your data separated by comma’s.
Keynote presentations can be exported to :
- PPT
- Quicktime
- HTML (not all versions of Keynote support this)
- Images
With Keynote you can export your presentation to static images, or a pdf document or to a Quicktime movie giving your viewers the total presentation experience. Only when you export to .ppt will you be able to edit your presentation slides. When you do the latter you will loose some of the mark-up or effects of your presentation.
You win some you loose some.
With an “export” you go down to the lowest common denominator of functionalities between the different applications. Whatever .pages can do with a document that Word cannot .. Will be lost. Most of the times your documents will still be editable but they need “touching up” after the exports. Other times you might find that certain transitions or effects that are unique to the iWorks suite are completely gone or do not work.
Be open in the choice of your applications.
So if you don’t want to go live in proprietary-file format-purgatory we suggest using “open” applications as much as possible. Openoffice and Google Docs are largely geared towards cross platform availability AND the ability to be compatible with many other ‘office like’ applications. If you have to share your documents with others, be polite and use “open” file formats like .pdf .doc .odf and even .rtf .html or .txt. This way you assure that the other party can read (and if needed, edit) your document without having to run to the store to buy iWorks (and quite possibly a new Mac). Using open filestandards shows “digital maturity” and ensures that you can still open that essay that you wrote on your old mac .. on your brand new Chromebook, Windows Tablet or Linux PC.
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Free your Music from iTunes with iTunes Export.
Jun 04Its quite amazing when you stop and think that iTunes is almost 10 years old this year. Apple’s end-all-be-all monotheistic gateway for your music collection towards your iPod device, is an application that is loved and hated equally. Like a teenage mom, iTunes went from a young, innocent slender application whose sole purpose was to curate your music collection, to an over-bloated thirty-something iPod-Baby machine that had acquired more functionality (and resources) over the years. Right before Apple gave iTunes a much needed binary liposuction with version 11, iTunes was one fat mama.
But that fat mama had started herding my music collection back in its younger years, and over the course of 10 years 15000 tracks have found their way into its arms. Over 100 playlists divide these tracks into manageable chunks and … I’ll probably never get them out again. Album art, MP3 tags, comments, stars, iTunes poisons my library with proprietary metadata and decides its a better idea to arrange the songs for me instead of my own ‘one album per folder’ setup.
When I started using Linux and other operating systems more and more, I got annoyed with the fact that I could not access my iTunes music from a different OS then OSX .. and that bugged me.
Hence it was time for the great escape ! A search for an application that would export every track in every playlist that I had to a predetermined folder structure that would be compatible with parallel universes WITHOUT iTunes. After hitting “The Google” for hours on end, I decided to enter the terms “iTunes Export” and came across a brilliant little application by Eric Daugherty called .. “iTunes Exporter”.
How it works ? Simple : On Osx (sorry , its an OSX app only) close iTunes and fire up “iTunes Exporter” Select the playlists you want to export and voila : iTunes exporter creates a folder with the name of the playlist and exports the tracks (using their id3 tags as file names) together with a playlist file. The result is simple and brilliant : Your (non DRM’d) music exported to a folder tree, ready to be imported into any media system of your choice. Its handy if you iPod-iPhone or whatever iDevice ever breaks .. or you just buy an Android device.
In the words of some Scottish guy with an ax and a skirt : FREEEEDOOOOMM !!!
Links : iTunes Exporter.
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Bittorent Sync brings cloudless cross platform file syncing.
Apr 27If I have learned one thing over the last couple of weeks is that although all good things in life are free, free doesn’t always last forever. With the sudden demise of Google reader (and the associated apocalypse for all of my fancy social-media-autoposting scripts) I’ve decided that my trust in ‘free cloud services’ is something that no longer comes by default. Lets face it : In any free online product that offers you a service without any visible revenue model, YOU are the product .. not the client. Its like that with Facebook, Google+, Gmail and so forth. You are in some form or another the “product” they brior whatever else they might think of : You make THEM money and THEY have no obligation whatsoever to keep the service (and your dng into the service in order to make money for their “Clients”. (Usually advertisers) If this is in the form of adds, your personal information ata/information/etc) available to you. Add to that that some of these services thread loosely around issues like “Privacy” and you need to start wondering : Would I not be better of doing this on my own.
One of these services that personally springs to mind is : Dropbox. Its free online storage offering us a cross platform solution for herding our files across multiple systems. But meanwhile that data also resides on “some server” “somewhere”. Equally tied into my workflows like “Google Reader” the loss of Dropbox would be a serious problem. Any alternatives ?
Owncloud is a beautiful solution that gives you just that. Run your own owncloud server and have clients on most operating systems. Access your files, contacts and (private) calendars from anywhere. Free and open source it has the downside of being a little tech-intensive when you want to set it up. (You need an Apache server and there is some tinkering involved when it comes to securing your traffic).
BUT : Now there is Bittorrent Sync and the setup is quite simple. You sync folders on your different machines using the power of Bittorrent. Yes the same protocol that rushes Linux ISO’s and illegal copies of pron dvd’s our way now helps us to get our files across.
HOW : Install the client on your different machines (all flavors of Linux, Windows and OSX are supported) and tell it what folder to sync. You will be offered a “secret password” that you will need to use when you ‘add’ a machine to your sync cloud and voila : there are your files.
No Cloud required : The good ? : No cloud required : you sync files between YOUR machines without the need for cloud storage with a third party. I would recommend choosing a “master system” that is always online to make sure a recent copy of “everything” resides at least somewhere. The bad ? : This stuff is pretty new, so I would not recommend using it for personal or financial data until it “matures” a bit.
Free : What are you waiting for : Head on over to http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html and give it a spin and TELL US what you thought of it in the comments section.
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kw405 : Nas4free as your cross-platform network filehub.
Dec 04We get technical this week with a great open source and free network attached filestorage solution called NAS4FREE. After running down the list of things it can do we show you how to tweak into the core of your cross-platform filesharing world, enabling you to use it as a central filehub for all of your devices and from all of your locations. We top it off with some information on how to virtualise the whole solution and give you a spot of music from Planet Boelex’s new track ‘Refurbished’ all of that and more on Kw405.
Shownotes.
