OStatic

IBM announced today that its free office productivity software suite Lotus Symphony will be finalized in a version for the Macintosh later this month. The move will bring more competition for Microsoft Office on the Mac, and it will also represent strong competition for OpenOffice 3.0, which, as we covered here, was a big boost for Mac users of OpenOffice because version 3.0 is a true Aqua application. In addition to being optimized for Aqua in its Mac version, Symphony shares code and history with OpenOffice. Here are the details.

If you've spent much time blogging or working in any form of electronic publishing, you've probably run into the sticky issue of copyrights on images. One wants to believe that copying and pasting any image from any web page is perfectly fine, but you can get in a heap of trouble if you ignore copyrights. Fortunately, among the several types of licenses for images that Creative Commons makes available, you can find ones that allow for free, open use of images found in large libraries. In this post, I'll cover two easy ways to do this with the free photo sharing service Flickr.