Digital Paper Revolution

The Netbook Suite

I own a netbook, and have had it for about nine months now. I figured it was time to give my impressions of it, and maybe a little explanation of what I do on it, and how.

Stats

It's an Acer Aspire One, purchased off of Woot.com, so it was a refurb when I got it. It has all the same hardware as pretty much every other basic netbook out there: 10.1" screen, 1.6GHz Atom processor, 160GB hard drive, WinXP, etc etc. Sure, you could get an Alienware netbook now and have a portable gaming rig practically in your pocket, but I picked this little guy up for $270, about a third of the price of the Alienware M11X. Worth it? Completely.

Unattainable Perfection

I do have a couple of complaints about netbooks in general, perhaps some about mine specifically. As beneficial as the small size is, it comes at a price, and that price is the keyboard and trackpad.

The keyboard is small. There's no nice way of saying that. After 9 months, I'm used to it and can type almost full speed on it. My major problem is the placement of the arrow and page up/down keys. On this machine, they are 2/3 size the already diminutive key size, and they're crammed so close together that I am constantly hitting page down when I wanted to hit the right arrow.

I am no fan of any trackpad. Give me a proper mouse any day of the week. This one works, but it's tiny, so precision is difficult. It has (unmarked) scroll strips along the borders which are definitely helpful, but sometimes a rather bumpy ride. All in all, eh, it's okay, but I'd much rather have a mouse.

My Work, it is... Complex

So, netbooks are built and marketed specifically as a portable internet access point. For me, that is not its primary purpose. I originally bought it as a cheap way to test the websites I create in a Windows environment, but I have since come to use it as a development platform, used almost as much as, if not more than, my mac. I also use it for note-taking at meetings, and for running presentations and demos during the informal programming classes I run. When I get home, if I want a slightly larger experience, I plug in my monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and it runs a 1080p screen pretty damn well.

Never Leave Home Without It

While that could well describe the netbook itself, I wanted to point out a collection of applications that I personally use constantly on the little machine. I should also note that it was a goal of mine to only use legally free software and see how far I could get.

It's a Secret to Everyone

Everyone should have these things:

Google Chrome - In the Browser Wars, I have been finding myself using this one more and more. As far as the netbook usage goes, it's fast and it takes up the least amount of screen real estate of all the other browsers. I can tweak Firefox to be close, but Chrome still wins by a pretty decent pixel margin, beneficial on the small screen. It's also much less of a resource hog than Firefox, which helps with the slower processor.

Launchy - Launchy is billed as an application launcher, but it's so much more. Hit alt+space, start typing, and it searches for programs with that name. Type out a file path, and it looks for files. Put in a url, and it opens it with your default browser. It has saved me so much time compared to either going through the Start menu or file system to run programs, especially considering the dinky trackpad.

Dropbox - Dropbox is a file syncing/sharing system that backs up your files and allows you to access them from anywhere you have an internet connection. This one service has essentially made my thumb drive obsolete. It has (almost) made the lack of an optical drive a non-issue. Need to move files from one computer to another? Just put it in your dropbox on one, and it's already there on the other. Amazingly useful as a backup system, and if you decide to pay, you also get version history, so you can revert any file to any of its previously saved states.

Evernote - Evernote takes your notes. Like Dropbox, it uses centralized cloud storage to keep multiple computers (and mobile devices) synced together so you always have access to your notes. By "notes" I mean text, pictures, voice, web clips, all cataloged and searchable. I don't know how they catalog everything, so you may not want to keep confidential information here, but for everything else, it is damn handy.

OpenOffice.org - You should already know about OpenOffice. They've been around for a while now. But if you haven't, it's a free, downloadable (key point here) office suite. Is it comparable to MS Office? Depends on what you want to do. If you just need the basics, yes, completely. Need more? Well, try it out. It is free, after all.

NERRRRRRRD

I'm a coder. I code out.

jEdit - jEdit is a Java-based text editor that is actually pretty damn good. The basic setup isn't amazing, but the plugin community is crazy, so if you want a feature, you can probably find it.

FlashDevelop - I do a lot of Actionscript development, and I have found FlashDevelop to be far superior to Flash itself from a developer's standpoint. It built to mimic very strongly Microsoft's Visual Studio, only for Actionscript and Flash rather than C, C++, C#, etc. My only major complaint is that there isn't a Mac equivalent.

Microsoft Visual Studio Express - I do some C# development as well, and Visual Studio is a very nice option. The Express version is free, so I will take that, thank you very much.

FileZilla - FileZilla is a free FTP client that is easy to use and does everything I need it to. I prefer CyberDuck for the Mac, but FileZilla works well on the netbook.

Oooh, Pretty

Graphics programs. For pretty much all of these, you will want a USB mouse with a scroll wheel, otherwise you may shoot yourself.

GIMP - Full disclosure, I love Adobe products, but they are ridiculously expensive for a non-student individual. GIMP isn't quite Photoshop, but it is pretty good, and it is very free.

Inkscape - See everything I said about GIMP/Photoshop, just replace with Inkscape/Illustrator.

That's All, Folks

Honestly, that covers pretty much everything I do on this little computer. Obviously access to the webospheres means I also have google apps, flickr, etc etc, but as far as offline computing goes, that's the long and short of it.