It would seem as though there is little left to do in the world of word processing and office suites but fix bugs, ensure compatibility, and add tiny little new features to advanced features no one uses. That is not necessarily true, though.

Imaging you had only ever used a browser that browsed the internet and did nothing else. What else is there to add to that browser, you would think? But, now, if you had a browser that did nothing but browse the web, it would seem like a feature-free browser and you would switch right back to Firefox will all your extensions. The same thing could happen in office suites.

If you have not already figured it out, what I am saying is that extensions are likely to be the next big innovation (or copied innovation from browsers) in office suites. (After all, OpenOffice is already starting to put more focus on extensions.)

It is easy to think “oh yeah, extensions will be great,” but what kind of extensions would you really use in an office suite? Well, for one thing, there are always the time-wasting extensions. You could have RSS feeds, or a media player, or whatever just to waste time have fun. On the more useful side of things, you could have an extension that looks up words on some website and displays the result right inside the office suite. Another example would be an extension that could pull in data, such as stock prices, from a web site.

If extensions do take off, it will give OpenOffice another advantage over Office. Since OpenOffice is already moving in the direction of extensions and Microsoft is often slow to implement new features, it seems almost certain that OpenOffice will get a boost over Office from really supporting extensions. This is turn would give Linux a boost, because the more people who like OpenOffice, the more people who don’t have to worry about Office not existing for Linux.

As one blogger points out, Opera’s minimal success is difficult to understand, because Opera is filled with innovative and useful features, yet it has no where near the adoption of Firefox. The blogger’s explanation is that the user interface and experience is too different from Firefox and IE, and therefor not appealing to new users. While this may in part be true, I believe that openness is the key difference that prevents adoption. By openness, I mean the ability to customize the browser to be what you want it to be. Firefox accomplishes this on multiple levels. First of all, everyone is encouraged to write extensions (and a lot of people do.) These extensions are enough for most people to customize their browser to be anything they can think of. (Skins should be mentioned too, but Opera has those.) At the base of this ability of customize Firefox is that it is an open-source project. You can’t get any more customizable or flexible than that.

The author of the post mentioned above dismisses these differences as not things the average user would care about, but I think this misses a key point. Firefox is mostly spread through word of mouth, originating at tech-savvy users who care enough to do the research. These tech-savvy users tell their friends to use whatever browser they like and soon enough their friends are telling their friends and so on. In this way, some one who has no idea what an “extension” is or what “open-source” is may be using Firefox because it is open-source.

There is no reason this should only apply to Opera and Firefox. This same reasoning can be used with almost any piece of software. If you can think of any more examples of this, go ahead and post them in the comments!

The Wine team has recently announced that Adobe Photoshop CS2 works under Wine, a program to enable Windows programs to run on Linux. (Softpedia news article) Although Photoshop CS2 on Wine may not be perfect yet, it may well be soon, potentially opening Linux up to many people who rely on Photoshop. CS2 is one version back from the current version, but it has not been long since CS3 was released, so it is likely that most users are still on CS2. While it is great that Photoshop CS2 works, this is just the beginning.

Adobe’s applications, ranging from pro photo management, to web design, to video, are widely used by many, many people, including web designers (of course, I use GIMP and it works just fine), photographers, graphics people, videographers, and so on. One application might not enable many of these people to use Linux, but as time goes by and the Wine team makes it possible to use more and more of these applications, many people who have been tied to Windows will suddenly be cut free and able to choose Linux.

While I was looking through the Linux news, I read a Linux.com article that criticized CNR, a website that lets you download a small file that can be installed with one click for both open-source and commercial applications on multiple distros. The article cites a number of bugs and missing features as reasons why CNR is still a “work in progress.” Some of these issues are big (no way to uninstall software with the CNR client) and some are small (old version of some applications.) While it is true that CNR is not perfect, I am convinced that CNR or a similar piece of software is the future of application installation on Linux and possibly on other operating systems too.

On a regular basis I see both complements and complains about how software installation is handled under Linux. On one hand, a lot of people (myself included) like how everything is in one place and can be installed with a few clicks. On the other hand, though, many people find that parts of the installation process such as selecting the package name or knowing which file to download (.rpm, .tar.gz, .deb, you get the point) can be difficult and confusing. This is why I believe that one-click installation systems like CNR are the future of Linux installation. All the applications are still in the same place, but there is only one type of file to download, not many.

Of course, this does not fix the problem for applications that are not part of this one-click install system. Ideally, these applications would be able to make their own small file that could be installed just like the files from the official one-click install website, with a warning about them not be tested, of course.

Despite any bugs that may exist in current implementations, CNR and similar systems are the future.

Following Elephants Dream and Peach (to be released in April), both open-source movies sponsored by Blender, Blender, an open-source 3D modeling application, and CrystalSpace, another open-source project relating to 3D graphics, are starting out a new project - a 3D open-source professional game.

The project, called Apricot, will release the final game at the end of July, if all goes according to schedule, for Linux, Mac, and Windows along with all the models, sounds, and code used in it. The game will be mostly developed by a group of developers who will be paid to work in Amsterdam.

Based on the quality of Elephants Dream, I think it is safe to say that whatever comes out of Apricot (the only decision made about the game is the use of the characters from Peach) will be a truly professional quality game. Based on my list of the most popular wishes for Linux and other similar lists around the Linux community, professional games for Linux are clearly important for many Linux users and if they happen to be open-source and use only open-source tools, what could be better? You can help out Apricot by pre-ordering the game (as well as all the graphics, music, code, etc.) on DVD. Hopefully, Apricot will be big success and there will be many more similar professional open-source games developed in the future.

After the EU required Microsoft to share some of their documentation on printer/file sharing in 2004 and losing their appeal in September 2007, Microsoft finally got around to doing it, according to ZDNet. The Samba project gave Microsoft almost $15,000 for the documentation they needed from Microsoft to ensure interoperability with Windows on printer and file sharing, which will be given to them through the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation. Samba is the project that makes file and printer sharing with Windows computers possible.

Although it is frustrating that Microsoft cannot just make the required documentation available, now that the Samba team does have the documentation and is allowed to release the code they write based on it so other projects can use their implementation (the documentation itself will remain confidential), the important thing is that from now on Samba and other open-source projects will be able to create software that is fully compatible with Microsoft software.

Further Reading: Samba News Story, CNET News Story

A recent post on the Commercial Open Source Software blog points out a little discussed problem that some businesses and even home users may face: not knowing what software to pick. As the post points out, there are so many open-source applications available to do so many different jobs that sometimes choosing the perfect one can be nearly impossible. While there are websites where you can look through the available applications such as SourceForge, these sites are often more aimed more at developers than at users. Instead, I believe this is a problem that can be best solved with software portals.

Software portals, such as Linspire’s CNR (CNR.com), provide a web-based interface to find programs and install them with one click. Software portals are still quite new so there is no truly cross-distro one and they may not have all the applications people want to install or all the information about those applications, but, as software portals grow, they can become more than just a place to install software, they can be a place to find software.

Note: This is the 100th post on the Linux Loop news blog! Hopefully I will post more statistics here later, but for now here are just a few:

• This blog was started (along with the rest of Linux Loop) about 4.5 months ago. That means an average of about .75 posts per day. Not bad at all, but I still want to get that number up to a solid 1.
• In the month of December, the number of posts exactly equals the number of days so far!
• This site has received over 11,000 visits in just the last month!

Make Tech Easier recently wrote a guide on setting up a program called SBackup to automatically backup all of your important files to another place. There is no major news with SBackup, but it made me realize the importance of Linux distributions including an easy-to-use GUI application to make backups easy. For technical users, installing the backup solution of their choice is simple and they can choose from terminal tools like rsync or from GUI tools like SBackup, but for less technical users, the kind who are starting to use Linux more and more, who don’t know that they need to go find a backup program, they will only backup if there are graphical tools they can use out of the box to automatically set up their backups.

With Leopard advertising Time Machine and more and more people talking about backups, consumers are starting to realize that their data is not safe. Unless every operating system, Linux and others, makes it easy for them to press a button once and have backups all the time, backups will remain something for the geeks.

Linspire’s “one-click” installation website and client software known as CNR, click-and-run, has expanded its field to include Ubuntu users, as well as Linspire and Freespire. Support for Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE is coming soon. Systems like this for installing software attempt to create one website that you can go to and click one button to install any piece of software you want, but have previously been limited to a single, or just a few, distributions. Although the concept itself is not new, there are two things that distinguish CNR from other similar systems. First, CNR spans multiple distros that are not directly related. Second, the software offered is not just free software, you can get commercial software there too.

Another interesting aspect of CNR is the premium subscription. For $50 per year, you get discounts on commercial software, professional support, and some other benefits. What interests me is the professional support. I cannot find anywhere on Google or on CNR.com if that means support for CNR or support for the applications. If that means support for the applications, it could be quite useful to new Linux users who are switching to new, unfamiliar software.

Overall, I think that CNR will be a useful asset to many Linux users and may attract some people to Linspire’s products, but I don’t think that it will become the standard for installing software on Linux. While I do believe that Linux would be greatly helped by a universal system similar to CNR, I don’t think that most distros will be willing to include CNR by default while it is still tied to Linspire. Although I could be wrong, I believe that most distros will wait for a fully community-operated service similar to CNR before integrating anything into their OS.

You may have seen the term “GNOME Online Desktop” is feature lists for Fedora 8 or in a number of other places, but it is hard to know what this means. Does it mean an operating system online? Or you desktop turns into a browser? It turns out that neither of those is quite correct, but elements of both are correct. The GNOME Online Desktop provides integration with various web services on the desktop. See Red Hat Magazine’s tour to find out what it does and how it works.