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The top ten open-source apps you've never heard of

Posted on 5 Sep 2008 at 15:18

Simon Brock runs through ten well-kept open-source secrets, and examines why some others didn't quite make the grade.

4. StorYBook

Like many people who write professionally, I believe I have a great novel in me somewhere, though of course I have all sorts of reasons why I haven't written it yet. The latest of these excuses is that I use a Macintosh and no-one has a good port of StorYBook for that platform. (Actually that's not completely true, apparently the real problem is that no-one has ported Java 6 to the Mac yet.) But anyway, if you want to write a book then best start with StorYBook (http://storybook.intertec.ch).

Why StorYBook and not an ordinary word processor like OpenOffice or even Microsoft Word? Well, a book or a play ultimately has a quite different structure from an ordinary word-processed document: there are characters who have roles that persist throughout the story, and you'll often to want to look at them in isolation. StorYBook allows you to create character and plot outlines - it calls them strands - and enables you, the author, to modify and manage these strands separately. When you come to write the full text of your novel you're still going to need the word processor, but hopefully with StorYBook you'll have got all the material organised before you start that job.

5. Firebug

With my developer's hat on I'm happy to write in almost any programming language: over the years I've written code in everything from Pascal, Fortran and COBOL through to ML and Prolog, taking in languages like Simula, Smalltalk, C++ and PHP along the way. However, if there's one language I've always hated it's JavaScript. It isn't that JavaScript is a particularly bad language: its syntax is based on Java and although it's not properly object-oriented, it doesn't really get in the way of writing reasonably sound programs. However, what does trip you up all the time when trying to write JavaScript code are the programs that execute that code, namely web browsers. Trying to debug JavaScript programs inside most web browsers is a nightmare. There are links between Internet Explorer and the Windows script debugger that help somewhat, and Safari has its error console, but in Firefox you can use Firebug (http://getfirebug.com).

Firebug is a complete debugger for JavaScript and can be embedded as an extension into Firefox. I'm not generally a great fan of debuggers - I always remember a lecturer at a well-known US university saying that if you have to use a debugger you've already lost the game - but JavaScript is different. In most languages you should be able to work out what an application is doing because you can log its behaviour to some medium (a file, for example) and work out what it's doing and what's going wrong. You can do a small amount of this using alerts in JavaScript, but it soon becomes very tedious.

With Firebug you get a complete debugging environment. Firstly, errors in your JavaScript are properly flagged, so you can see which line gave the error and set break-points so you can inspect variable values to see what happened. Moreover, in the latest version you can edit the JavaScript code from within the browser and re-run it to fix a problem. If you're writing Ajax then you can see your requests and their responses.

6. Chandler

Chandler (http://chandlerproject.org) is one of those applications that we keep talking about in this column and it does just seem to keep getting better. Chandler is one of the best open-source projects we've seen that's attempting to create a personal information manager - in other words something in which you can manage your calendar, your events and your email. You can either use the project's own server or a hosted solution to share your calendars and tasks with other people, as well as communicating them to a group using email. One of the reasons we really like Chandler is that it's cross-platform and runs on everything you could want it to run on. Although some of the early releases were pretty ropey, the most recent real releases have been pretty good. It may not yet be a real competitor for everything that Exchange and Outlook can do, but it soon will be.