On Tuesday I submitted the following modest list of software requests to IT:
-
Quicksilver (free)
Application launcher and much, much more! I know it still claims to be beta, but I’ve used almost every version since it was released, with no problems. -
TextWrangler (free)
Text editor -
PrintWindow Standard (free)
Prints Finder windows -
Badia FullMeasure XT ($79.99)
Multifunction Quark XTension that seems to do everything the constellation of tools [for Quark 4, mostly pirated] I used to have accomplished -
Editor’s Toolkit Plus ($69.95)
Word macro set for scrubbing manuscripts -
India Ink ($15)
Photoshop plugin for mucking with halftones -
MS Office 2004 ($?)
Not at all urgent, but for the record, the current version has much better style sheet handling than Word X. I’m probably one of two people in the building who uses style sheets in Word, but I’m just saying, is all. -
Firefox (free)
Current version (1.5; I’m still on 1.0.7)
I didn’t put FontLab or Fontographer on there, because I suspect editing our fonts—even when they’re *&$%# broken—violates a gazillion license agreements. Large multinational corporations are prickly about that kind of thing, I’ve happened to notice.
I also didn’t whine about getting Adobe Creative Suite 2 (my computer now has CS, which seems rather antique to me now), since I still wouldn’t be able to submit layouts to our compositor in InDesign anyway; I expect it’ll be rolled out departmentwide around the time that CS3 gets its second patch update. (Mostly for the same reason, I didn’t ask for any InDesign plug-ins. For the record, however, most of the things I want XTensions for in Quark are unnecessary in InDesign. When I do typset using InDesign, I find that Teacup Software‘s TableStyles and CellStyles Pro, PatternMaker, and PatternPack are handy, as is Dan Rodney’s Make Book Jacket script.)
The Almighty GoG replied that he would get me everything on this list, and that Office 2004 would be deployed this fall, once they work out some network-related issues. Yay!
In the meantime, I did install a couple of free Quark XTensions, since by some miracle (probably an oversight) I do have read/write permission on the appropriate folder:
What XTensions, plug-ins, and other tools are you addicted to, free or otherwise?
CS3? Damn, I just got my pirated CS2 hooked up. Gotta fire up the torrents again. :-P
Sssssh! Silence fore and aft!
For a while, I was convinced that Adobe wanted people to pirate InDesign, seeing it as a sort of viral marketing method. They’re clearly over that now, with the activation thingy in CS2, but the pricing is still reasonable. I’ve always paid for it, since version 1.5, but only a sucker pays full price. And I’ve gladly paid for all my Teacup software, except the plug-ins I’ve won at InDesign User Group’s raffles. They make great stuff, and they support it well; I very much want them to thrive.
Quark, though—I wouldn’t put XPress 6 or 7 on my home computer unless they paid me. And it’d have to be a fair quantity of pieces of eight.