Software Fun

I've had some really good experiences using new software recently.

I love it when software is simple to use and does what it's supposed to do without fuss. I also love it when I have tricky things to do and I can find software to do exactly what I need. In this post I will share three simple tasks I had to do for the first time and how easy it was in the software that comes with Ubuntu. ...

1. A week or so ago, my daughter Susannah came to me with a need to scan some pages from a text book. I have a 3-in-one HP Officejet that I use very occasionally for scanning. In linux the standard scanning software used to be SANE which does a great job of providing the nuts and bolts of connecting to a scanner. In the Ubuntu menu under "Graphics" there is an item called "Simple Scan". Click on that and you get a simple window. Click on the "New document" icon then click on scan. As you do each page, it shows on the window, progressively building up the document, with each page shown. At the end the scanned document can be saved in a variety of formats, including pdf. Nice, simple, does what it says.

I used the program myself this afternoon and discovered that the pdf is just a graphic file, and so text can't be extracted. I uploaded it to an online OCR service and had the text and graphics back in a Rich Text Format in seconds. In future I will probably try other OCR software rather than using an online service.

One task that I have to do for our music team is photocopy music and then attach a copyright notice to each copy. It occurred to me, as the photocopier was jamming, that it would be easier to scan the sheet music to a pdf then use Open Office to edit the resulting file and put the notice on each piece. That will save me printing stickers and manually attaching them.

2 On Monday I had to give a talk about my trip to Canada at Alex's preschool. I needed to print some photos onto A4 sheets. I opened my file manager, copied some likely candidates into a Temp file then used eye-of-gnome, which is the default image viewer, to check which ones were the best. As I selected each one, it was a quick matter of clicking the rotate button to make the photos fit the landscape orientation then Control-P to print. Each photo was automatically sized to the page and printed. It took just a few minutes to sort them and print them. I've used eye-of-gnome often to look at photos but this was the first time I had needed to print photos quickly.


3. Yesterday I realised that I needed to record a short audio tutorial from our New Testament Greek lesson the evening before. I wasn't confident that this would be an easy task. I plugged a microphone into the back of the computer then looked under "Sound and Video" in the Ubuntu menu. I opened "Sound recorder" and tested it but nothing came out. I looked for Sound under System Preferences and found that mic input was turned off. I turned it on, turned the recording volume up and started talking. The result was not studio quality, but it was a very cheap microphone, using basic software and it did the job that I needed.

In each of those examples someone has produced software that does the simple jobs adequately. There are more complicated options available such as audacity for sound recording (it has some brilliant sound editing features) and Gimp for graphic editing. I use both of those from time to time, but on this occasion the simple software providing the basic functions was all that was needed. The fact that it worked easily and did what it was supposed to made it a pleasure to work with.

As I discovered that I could do these simple tasks easily, it inspired me to think of other uses that the software might be used for. Because I could get good results quickly in a field that was unfamiliar, I now have confidence to do some things that I might not have attempted before.