portable Lotus Symphony installation
Category symphony
As a followup to my last post, here's something that I somehow completely missed a few weeks ago (despite posts about if from Scott Treggiari, Mitch Cohen, Stuart McIntyre, and Arne Nielsen):
What's a Keepod? Apparently, it's a roughly credit-card-sized portable hard drive with a built-in USB connector, designed to be the ultimate portable application/data container: plug it into any PC, Mac, or Linux machine and, not only can you access your portable data, but you can run a pretty comprehensive set of applications directly from the device, regardless of the host OS, without leaving a trace of those applications (or your data) on that host. Sounds pretty handy.
Since they range in price from 29 EUR ($42) for a 2GB card to 69 EUR ($101) for a 16GB (NOTE: these prices include shipping, so you might pay a bit less, especially if you live in Europe), I'm not quite intrigued enough yet to try one of these, given that I can snag a 16GB Micro SD card (with SD adapter) on NewEgg for about $40 or a 32GB thumb drive for about $65... then again, I've found both of those form factors prone to occasional disappearance, so I can certainly see the appeal of being able to store portable data in my wallet, not to mention the convenience of being able to access that data via their associated applications, even if the computer I'm currently at doesn't have those applications installed.
So I may pick one up at some point. If any of you have already tried one, I'd be curious to hear whether you would consider it a worthwhile purchase. In the meantime, the reason I finally noticed that they've packaged Symphony to run on these devices is that, motivated partly by the comment thread on my last post, I decided to refresh my memory regarding how many clicks it actually does take to download Symphony from its primary location (spoiler: despite already having an IBM ID, the total click count was 13), and noticed the Keepod press release. Intrigued, I checked out the site, and noticed that you don't actually have to own a Keepod to run their portable build of Symphony. After creating an account (which, admittedly, you do have to create in order to download Symphony from their site... but you also have to create one to even place an order for a Keepod, so by the time a device owner would come back to the site to download portable applications, they would already have an account), I went back to the Symphony page on their site, then started counting the clicks it took to actually download the software.
4.
Yes, you read that correctly: it takes more than 3 times as much clicking on a site IBM directly controls to get the software they're giving away for free as it does to obtain a custom distribution of the same free software on a partner's site. Naturally, there's still some teasing going on:
And apparently they did, 'cause that's when the save prompt actually showed up and I finally got to download the ZIP. But even with all that teasing, it never stopped being immediately obvious how to proceed to the next step in the teasing. I didn't have to choose an operating system (maybe because on the Keepod it doesn't matter... or maybe because HTTP request headers tell the server what operating system you use, and some web servers actually pay attention to that), I didn't have to choose a language (maybe they only support English in this build, or maybe they checked the request headers and assume I speak English), and I didn't have to choose between downloading via HTTP or the vendor's proprietary download manager. In other words, despite spending perhaps more time than the average end user manning a laptop, when I got to the real download link, even I was nearing an "ugh, never mind" conclusion... despite the download process being both less tedious and more obvious than IBM's. Which reminded me that the only reason I persevered through the 13-click process when I originally downloaded Symphony was that I'm a Yellowbleeder, and Yellowbleeders know that, if we just push through this sort of thing, good software awaits us on the other side. And we're used to it. The "Facebook Generation", on the whole, is not. Just sayin'.
In any case, I followed their installation instructions (extract the ZIP file, then move the extracted folder to the Keepod), except instead of moving it to a real Keepod, I just moved the folder to an external USB drive. The first time I launched it from the external drive, it popped up a MessageBox saying something like, "Hey, that's not a Keepod!"... and then Symphony opened just fine. After playing for a bit, I closed it. After starting this blog entry, I'd forgotten the wording of that error, so I launched it again to transcribe it word for word... except this time, no error, only Symphony. YMMV, but I'm quite stoked... both that IBM decided to bundle Symphony this way, and that I can run it portably even though I don't own one of those devices. In fact, on second thought, maybe I will get a Keepod after all... it would be rather handy to have my slides in a form I can access from an alternate computer in case this one unexpectedly dies on me at the conference... as long as my co-presenter can still access all of our code demos, of course.
As a followup to my last post, here's something that I somehow completely missed a few weeks ago (despite posts about if from Scott Treggiari, Mitch Cohen, Stuart McIntyre, and Arne Nielsen):
IBM, VMware and Keepod products family manufacturer NSEC, today announced that they have partnered to offer IBM's Lotus Symphony productivity software suite on Keepod devices for the first time.
What's a Keepod? Apparently, it's a roughly credit-card-sized portable hard drive with a built-in USB connector, designed to be the ultimate portable application/data container: plug it into any PC, Mac, or Linux machine and, not only can you access your portable data, but you can run a pretty comprehensive set of applications directly from the device, regardless of the host OS, without leaving a trace of those applications (or your data) on that host. Sounds pretty handy.
Since they range in price from 29 EUR ($42) for a 2GB card to 69 EUR ($101) for a 16GB (NOTE: these prices include shipping, so you might pay a bit less, especially if you live in Europe), I'm not quite intrigued enough yet to try one of these, given that I can snag a 16GB Micro SD card (with SD adapter) on NewEgg for about $40 or a 32GB thumb drive for about $65... then again, I've found both of those form factors prone to occasional disappearance, so I can certainly see the appeal of being able to store portable data in my wallet, not to mention the convenience of being able to access that data via their associated applications, even if the computer I'm currently at doesn't have those applications installed.
So I may pick one up at some point. If any of you have already tried one, I'd be curious to hear whether you would consider it a worthwhile purchase. In the meantime, the reason I finally noticed that they've packaged Symphony to run on these devices is that, motivated partly by the comment thread on my last post, I decided to refresh my memory regarding how many clicks it actually does take to download Symphony from its primary location (spoiler: despite already having an IBM ID, the total click count was 13), and noticed the Keepod press release. Intrigued, I checked out the site, and noticed that you don't actually have to own a Keepod to run their portable build of Symphony. After creating an account (which, admittedly, you do have to create in order to download Symphony from their site... but you also have to create one to even place an order for a Keepod, so by the time a device owner would come back to the site to download portable applications, they would already have an account), I went back to the Symphony page on their site, then started counting the clicks it took to actually download the software.
4.
Yes, you read that correctly: it takes more than 3 times as much clicking on a site IBM directly controls to get the software they're giving away for free as it does to obtain a custom distribution of the same free software on a partner's site. Naturally, there's still some teasing going on:
- The first click is a link labeled "Free Download"... sounds like that's a direct link to the ZIP file, yeah? Nope.
- Second click is the checkbox indicating acceptance of the license agreement (add an optional click to actually read the license agreement; I didn't... naughty user)
- Third click is a link labeled "Download". This even has a title attribute of "Download IBM Lotus Symphony 1.3". This will definitely be the ZIP file. Uh... nope.
- Fourth click is on a link labeled "Download IBM Lotus Symphony 1.3 Now!" (same hover text as the previous link). This must be the real download link. I mean, sure, the very first link had an animated down arrow graphic (this one, to be precise:
), but this one's even bigger, 
even though it's not animated. And they used an exclamation point in the link text... yeah, I'm sure they mean it this time.
And apparently they did, 'cause that's when the save prompt actually showed up and I finally got to download the ZIP. But even with all that teasing, it never stopped being immediately obvious how to proceed to the next step in the teasing. I didn't have to choose an operating system (maybe because on the Keepod it doesn't matter... or maybe because HTTP request headers tell the server what operating system you use, and some web servers actually pay attention to that), I didn't have to choose a language (maybe they only support English in this build, or maybe they checked the request headers and assume I speak English), and I didn't have to choose between downloading via HTTP or the vendor's proprietary download manager. In other words, despite spending perhaps more time than the average end user manning a laptop, when I got to the real download link, even I was nearing an "ugh, never mind" conclusion... despite the download process being both less tedious and more obvious than IBM's. Which reminded me that the only reason I persevered through the 13-click process when I originally downloaded Symphony was that I'm a Yellowbleeder, and Yellowbleeders know that, if we just push through this sort of thing, good software awaits us on the other side. And we're used to it. The "Facebook Generation", on the whole, is not. Just sayin'.
In any case, I followed their installation instructions (extract the ZIP file, then move the extracted folder to the Keepod), except instead of moving it to a real Keepod, I just moved the folder to an external USB drive. The first time I launched it from the external drive, it popped up a MessageBox saying something like, "Hey, that's not a Keepod!"... and then Symphony opened just fine. After playing for a bit, I closed it. After starting this blog entry, I'd forgotten the wording of that error, so I launched it again to transcribe it word for word... except this time, no error, only Symphony. YMMV, but I'm quite stoked... both that IBM decided to bundle Symphony this way, and that I can run it portably even though I don't own one of those devices. In fact, on second thought, maybe I will get a Keepod after all... it would be rather handy to have my slides in a form I can access from an alternate computer in case this one unexpectedly dies on me at the conference... as long as my co-presenter can still access all of our code demos, of course.
