I’m a big fan of open source, or alternative, software. I’m not a fan of paying hundreds of dollars for an application. Needless to say I’m not a big fan of Microsoft or Adobe.

So what’s a good open source graphic design application? I’ve tried a lot of programs and now I’m looking at GIMP. GIMP is the free alternative to Photoshop. But how well does it work?

A friend said that it’s hard to convert from Photoshop to GIMP. Since I’m a Fireworks fan, I guess I don’t have to worry about that one.

Google Analytics is a great program, but add in Adobe AIR and it becomes even better with the Google Analytics Reporting Suite module. It’s a stand alone application that gives you direct access into your Google Analytics account with a few great features thrown in.

The first thing I love is the ability to have multiple profiles.

I have a handful of profiles and where as switching between each one isn’t to difficult in Google Analytics, it is a bit tedious. With Google Analytics Reporting Suite, I can save profiles (aka bookmarks) for each account I want to access. Then I just double click and I’m in. No more having to load the GA website, enter a password, choose a profile then a site and then getting to the stats. This is just so much simpler.

I don’t remember who, but in my recent feed reading someone said that Adobe’s Apollo was going to be a great thing. So I installed it last night only to be left confused on what I was doing.

Apollo is basically an invisible application that you can run mini applications on. Much like Yahoo Widget Engine or Apple’s Dashboard. Only instead of small widgets, Apollo’s idea is to make full blown applications like an RSS reader. Once created for Apollo, they’ll work on Mac and PC without any extra coding. It really sounds like a cool idea, as long as users adopt it.

I’m very unhappy with Adobe right now. I called yesterday and asked them if Adobe Acrobat Standard could convert Word documents to PDFs on a Mac and keep all images and clickable links. They said yes so the program was bought. However, none of my documents contain clickable links after they’ve been converted from Word to a PDF.

So I asked why on Adobe’s forms and I was informed by a user that clickable links in PDFs from Word are not possible on the Mac. What??!! I made a point to ask specifically for this feature on my Mac and they told me it was possible! What a crock!