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I never used Claris Works much (or System 7 in general - our school skipped from Apple IIe to PC, and didn't own any Macs), but it was always my mother's favorite program. My dad said she was constantly cursing at MS Office when she eventually had to switch.

I have used Gobe productive which was a works suite designed by many of the original Claris works developers. It was originally made for BeOS, and latter ported to Windows and Linux. Unfortunately, the company went under, and for a while there was talk of it going open source. I really would have liked to see that happen, as it was a far better piece of software than OpenOffice, and even pledged some money towards it (although not much as I was a college student at the time), but alas it was not to be. They sold the product to someone else who has been maintaining just the windows version.

Gobe Productive is Windows only? I know that they ported it to Windows but had no idea people had forgotten that it started (AFAIK) on BeOS, and is still bundled with Zeta. I always thought the name GoBe was indicative of that. Their website even says they've started a Linux port as well.

Awhile ago, Apple re-hired much of the team from Gobe, creators of the amazing app Productive for BeOS. Productive was the most tightly-integrated, easy to use, and fast office suite I've ever had the joy to use.

The team that created Productive was also the team behind the original ClarisWorks on the Mac, which too was an amazing feat of integration in a small footprint. Then a different coding team took over, it became AppleWorks, and began to suck royally.

If the team behind Productive is the team behind this rumored office suite, it is going to be one sweet Suite! HA HA HA HA. Seriously, though, they are masters of the art.

There are MS Office replacements that are "better" than MS Office. Take, for example, Gobe Productive, a real integrated suite that doesn't distinguish between text docs, spreadsheets, and presentations and embeds all types of documents effortlessly. This program is truly innovative and is a departure from the modular, standalone chunks that make up the disjointed but popular MS suite.

A new, innovate program may be attractive, but not imitating a familiar look-and-feel hasn't been shown to work yet either.

• 'spreadsheet'
  
  YellowTab has a screenshot showing they are improving the AbiWord office package here. There is a donation page to help port OpenOffice to BeOS. Last but not least, GoBe at one time announced they would port GP 3.0 to BeOS, providing they had enough sales of the windows side. Sadly, this did not work out as intended. That's another topic for discussion. ;)
• 'instant messaging'
  
  The venerable and solid repository of BeOS applications' BeBits has these entries for instant messaging applications:
  
  • msn
  • icq
  • aol
  
  There are more, but I chose to show three examples of chat protocals.
  
• 'surf the web'
  
  Both Mozilla and FireBird have been ported to BeOS for quite some time now. In fact, just 2 days ago there was a new build directly from the cvs server for BeOS of Mozilla. I believe the current direction is towards FireBird, since it's just the browser, but that's a good thing. ;) I won't mention Opera, as the jury is out until Zeta comes out
• '3D Games'
  
  You've got that one, I will admit. but it's not so hot either on any OS other than Microsoft's, so it's a poor example for debate.

spamspamspamspam ...

Oh, and gobe is back in business! But I guess that's spam too, or at least off-topic.

Slashdot needs SpamAssassin for comments :) If your comment triggers as 3.5 or higher, it should yell "YOU FAIL IT!" at the user. Automatic 3.0 points if you're an AC.

That reminds me, whatever happened to Gobe Productive? It doesn't look like you can even order off thier site anymore.

gobe productive anyone? they have an all-in-one "word processing, page design, spreadsheets, charts, illustration, photo retouching, even slide-show presentations" program that is very lean. If memory serves it fits in a couple dozen megs of space(or less), not the couple hundred that office takes up. Oh, and did i mention, it is going to be GPLed soon?

Open/Star Office isn't doing the easy stuff yet its miles away from the hard stuff like OLE and Macros with VBA calls.

If you want OLE-stye operation, try gobeProductive. I presume you're under Windows, because you speak of OLE, which is good because the Linux port isn't really stable yet. gobeProductive is wetter than the wettest dreams of Microsoft's OLE development teams in terms of smooth integration.

As to the VB macros, no, thank you: I'll take the rusty spike in the ear instead. If you wanted to do that, you could hammer GnomeBASIC* into OOo and have a winner. I'd rather have Ruby, or failing that Python, and there are reprobates out there with a PERL fetish.

If you want Office macros to be useful elsewhere, I'd suggest throwing lots of money at Michael Kohn and asking him to write a OfficeBasic-to-ScriptingLingoOfYourChoice translator.

* I was a little miffed that they didn't call it something like Gnome Windowing BASIC so we could have a useful GeeWhizBASIC again.

Have you ever considered Gobe? It rocked on BeOS, and now its available on the Windows platform. And if you don't want to trust their marketing, then here's a review from Ars Technica. And if you still want to complain, go use vi or emacs or even notepad.

Amigori

1. add AutoDia/Dia2Code/Dia2SQL/DiaCanvas etc, daVinci Presenter (nonfree), JGraphPad, ObjectArtist, ...
2. Add JProjectTimer, Ma href="http://www.logilab.org/pygantt/">PyGANTT, jgantt/DayOrganiser, Narval::ProjMan, QtGantt, ...
3. Add KOffice, SIAG Office, gobeProductive (nonfree today, being groomed for GPLing as you read this, ...
4. One thing missing so far is a PDF editor; there is no problem with tools for making, viewing and converting PDFs.
5. Can't go past PuTTY for making Windows useful! (-: Try also WinSCP, and there are many GUI ssh managers available for Linux.
6. Mozilla's great. There are also `lite' versions (SkipStone, Galeon etc) and alternatives like Konqueror.
7. What can I say?
8. That's as bad as using an autodialler (the best way of forgetting numbers that I know of): what do you do when Password Safe or the system it runs on gronks and you need one of the passwords in it to restore a backup of it? Nevertheless, Free equivalents abound.
9. sorry, afk for now.

Gobe can be found here and the features they have in their product can be found here. That particular product is Windows-only but version 2.0 is BeOS as well.

Gobe can be found here and the features they have in their product can be found here. That particular product is Windows-only but version 2.0 is BeOS as well.

http://www.gobe.com/

I have the utmost respect for Sun, but if you're going to spend ~80$ then you may be better off waiting for Gobe Productive to come out. Which is here. I have been following these guys since the Beos days, and v 3.0 looks like hot shit. And Ars Technica seems to think so too. The Linux version is coming out soon, and if you buy the Windows version at its introductory price(~80$) they will send you the Linux version for free when it comes out.

does all this stuff, saves files to .doc, .xls, and .pdf and is due out for linux Real Soon Now(TM). oh yeah, it also costs the same right now. and also the license that comes with Gobe Productive is much more user friendly. apart from the fact that this is out for linux now, it doesn't seem all that impressive.

FYI: Gobe's website.

Well, if you're looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office, I highly recommend using gobeProductive. It's an excellent office suite, containing word processing, presentation, spreadsheet, image processing, and graphics editing, all in one application. It's also quite a bit less expensive than Microsoft Office.

If you're writing a word processor, here is my common-word-features-that-most-other-word-processo rs-mis s-list. :-): 1) TOC generation from heading styles 2) Outline mode (integrated with styles) Someone once showed me how easy it was to use the outline mode in Word to write a basic outline of your document (just think section titles) and then fill it in. After you've generated the outline, the entries in the outline automatically become section headings, which then are automatically included in generated TOCs.

Awesome feature, which is one of the few reasons I stick with Word if I have windows around (right now, I have VMWare running on my work PC, which is the only place I have a licensed copy of word and windows). I'm seriously considering Word for my iBook, though. :-(

I think OpenOffice does most of this, BTW, so I'm anxiously awaiting the release.

Sujal

Anyone know if this will work under the Linux emulation layer in the *BSD family?

I'm sure that when the Linux version is released that it will work just fine on the BSDs. However, be aware that if you were to actually do so, you would be in violation of the license agreement. According to The Gobe Familiy License, you are only allowed to install it on Windows and Linux computers.

It has everthing it needs to become an Office substitute. Don't you realize? It comes with a blue & white packaging!!!

"Prior to the Linux version's availability, packaging will include a coupon redeemable for a Linux version CD."

For those of us who use multiple platforms, it would be nice if their license was for any version on any platform. Any one see anything about a Mac OS/X version? An office suite that is uniform an consistient across Linux, Windows, and Mac OS/X would be useful. (I know that an Open Office port to the Mac is underway, so perhaps OO will be the solution).

From the FAQ:

Q: The initial release this fall is Windows only. How do I get the Linux version?
A: There will be a certificate in the package that entitles you to a free Linux installation CD once the Linux version is available. Fill out the certificate and send it to us. Once the Linux version of gobeProductive is released we will send a CD to you.

Q: Will both Windows and Linux installation CDs come with the package after the Linux version is completed?
A: Yes.

Some of which seems a bit odd.

They mention the Linux version here:

http://gobe.com/press/pr8_29_2001.html

You can buy BeOS from Gobe Software.

I'm using gobeProductive 3.0.2 on Windows (they have or will have a Linux version). It's like a light-weight replacement for MS Office, done by the same team that did Claris Works for the Mac.

The word processor is very easy to use, and can save in the gobeProductive format, as well as Word, HTML, PDF, RTF, and plain text.

The office suite also has spreadsheet, graphics, image processing, and presentation software.

http://www.gobe.com/

I purchased it for BeOS and use it all the time. It is fantastic.
www.gobe.com

Also, we have AbiWord which works fine:
AbiWord

For those who are interested in the possibility of the BeOS being continued, check out BeUnited.org. Originally "a place to find and support teams for the development of high quality BeOS software", they are now "leading an initiative concerned with the licensing of the BeOS from Palm, Inc. and its subsequent upgrading, development and professional marketing on a global scale".

If they can be successful in licensing the OS from Palm, then the BeOS can continue. They currently have 136 new products or projects in their developer survey. Head over to the site to see how you can help!

Also, for those that don't know, there are several other really good sites dedicated to the BeOS:

The "sourceForge" of the BeOS: BeBits.com.

News and a discussion forum: BeGroovy.com.

Another news site: BeNews.com.

And, of course, the site that sells BeOS 5 Pro, and the Office Suite (available for Windows, too!) that goes along with it: Gobe.com.

It may not be open source, it may not have originally come from Linux ... it's Gobe Productive 3.0 and I think it deserves a little advertising here.

Productive 1.0 started as a product of the team who created ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks), but for BeOS. With it's wonderful interface, and the backing of the great but now dwindling BeOS community, Gobe stayed alive and released a 2.0 version a year or two before Be began to go under.

Productive is a great product, and I suggest you all look here to find a great alternative to Microsoft Office and Sun StarOffice. Now for both Windows, Linux and BeOS.

Well I've been saying that Gobe Productive looks like it's going to be great for promoting Linux in offices. And I see that they have a pre-order price special going on.

I'm not sure what constitutes some of these relationships; I thought Gnucash had been cut loose, but maybe I'm wrong. Does anyone have information about these corporate sponsorships, or what Xandros's acquisition of Corel means for them?

I used Gobe Productive on BeOS, and I've got to tell you if it is coming to Linux, then Linux is going to be a SERIOUS competitor for office use! This is GREAT news!

No MS Office, true, but there WAS (and still is) Gobe Productive.

Gobe Productive is still alive and kicking ass despite the failure of the Be operating system. (It's just screenshot, guaranteed goatse.cx free.)

Dominic is the designer and implementor of the BeOS BFS filesystem, a multithreaded journaled 64-bit filesystem that supports indexed file attributes.

In the beginning of the book there is some good discussion comparing and contrasting various filesystems, including what is publicly known about NTFS. Other filesystems discussed include BSD's FFS, Linux ext2, Mac OS HFS and Silicon Graphics XFS. He also discusses some of the basics of designing any filesystem, the general approaches taken towards filesystem design, and discusses the BFS in depth. It discusses much more modern and advanced topics in filesystem design than are covered in most operating system texts, like journaling and accessing the filesystem from a multithreaded kernel.

By "attributes" I mean extra chunks of data that live outside the main data sequence, and are used for such things as denoting the MIME-type of the file in the filesystem. By "indexed" I mean that an application can tell the OS that it wants indices created for particular attributes, and then applications can do boolean queries on the attributes and get the responses quickly.

There is a linux version of the BFS filesystem available as a patch - it is not yet in the main kernel tree, and I believe it is read-only. It is complicated to make it writeable because it is a journaled filesystem. You can get it here.

To try out the Be filesystem fully, get the free-as-in beer version of the BeOS from http://free.be.com/ to install under Windows or ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/beos/ to get the version you can install under Linux. The BeOS personal edition creates a virtual filesystem within a regular file on FAT or ext2.

If you have a partition to spare, much recommended is BeOS 5 Pro which you can inexpensively purchase from Gobe Software. The Pro version can also do symmetric multiprocessing.

Mike

Mike

And yes, Gobe Productive is a great "office" appl. The developers were involved with Apple's ClarisWorks and have come up with the ideal, lighter weight "works" package. It's all 90% of "office" users will ever need in an efficient, easy to use package.

-------------
He who doesn't evolve, dies.

Why bother with Star Office? Its almost as bloated and slow as MS Office. I've been using Gobe Productive for the last while and its been great. Reads/Writes Word and Excel documents as well.

Be, Inc. has also not been spending all their resources on BeIA. They are actively developing BONE (BeOS Networking Environment) which is a complete rewrite of the Networking stack. Early benchmarks indicate, IIRC, about 2000% speed increase over the current stack. Seeing that it has been under development for a bit, we are anticipating a release somewhat soon.
They are also completely rewriting the hardware OpenGL implementation, an early look at it indicates that it completely wipes the floor with both Windows and Linux.

-Gandalf Greyhame

P.S. Kuro5hin is coming back soon! Yay!!!!

Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing

I am one of the few developers to actually ship a commercial application, Spellswell from Working Software. I've kept Spellswell actively maintained over a couple of years, it is now at version 1.0.5.

So I didn't appreciate it when Be announced it was dropping active support for the desktop and "refocusing" on Internet Appliances.

Now promoting the system for Internet appliances is fine, but Be had spent years promoting its system as a platform for multimedia content creation, and in my view it is the best platform for desktop software. Check out, for instance, Gobe Software's Gobe Productive, one of the best integrated applications available.

While Be still has a desktop operating system and gives it away for free, it has made it clear that there will be no further desktop-specific development for the operating system; if a feature or bug-fix makes it into the system it will be because it is needed for Internet Appliances, and not because it is needed for the desktop.

I repeatedly tried to bring this failure to live up to its commitments on bedevtalk and beusertalk and while other professional developers supported my position, I was constantly shot down by the hobbyists and Be's own employees.

Finally I tried to point out the error of their ways in some detail by posting this to bedevtalk:

Some of Use Work For a Living

in which I pointed out that the appropriate response to criticism from developers like me would be for Be employees who subscribe to the list to communicate our concerns to senior management.

How did Be respond?

Tom Maddox, listmaster@be.com, unsubscribed me and asked the list if they'd prefer to have the entire list moderated.

Before you decide to devote time and energy to developing BeOS software, I ask you to consider whether you wish to take the risk to invest your time and money in a system that is only available from a company that has not only proved it cannot keep its commitments, it has stated repeatedly it does not want its dishonesty pointed out to it and will actively work to censor those who would work to correct its behaviour.

One of the reasons I am working to reorient my consulting business to take primarily Linux work is that I feel it is a mistake for any third party software developer to depend on any API, particularly an operating system, that they do not have the source code to.

If you feel you must support a closed-source operating system or API, I urge you to require the API vendor to sign a contract guaranteeing they will support the API forever - both in terms of maintainence and marketing - or else they will reimburse you for your lost revenue and opportunity cost if they fail to live up to their commitments.

I had much the same experience with Apple Computer which is why I became a BeOS developer.

BTW - My fiance told me that being unsubscribed from bedevtalk is like being kicked off the design committee for the Edsel. It's a beautiful OS and the engineering quality is excellent, but the sales prevention team there, uh, I mean the management, is determined to do everything they can to prevent the business from succeeding.

Perhaps Internet Appliances are a good idea, but after the galling lack of marketing cluefulness shown when they were on the desktop I seriously doubt they can get it together to succeed in the Internet Appliance arena either.

If you are an Internet Appliance manufacturer, think about whether you want to make your livelihood dependent on a company with a proven track record of failing to live up to its commitments. Consider that in many was QNX is a better OS for appliance and you can get a developer kit for free.

I don't think Linux is a very good platform either for the desktop or Internet Appliances but because it is free software that problem is capable of being addressed.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

No, no, no... the problem is not with WP8 or below, but WP2000 office. It's running using wine, (they didn't even do a native compile) so it's slow as heck. I tend to use BeOS and Gobe Productive lately, which is the fastest suite I've ever seen...

just imagine...

BeOS vs. DOS 2.1

Let's see... both have CLIs, both run on intel chips, uhh... they both can boot from a floppy. Sure - let's do a death-match

Installation:

• DOS 2.1 - no install, just boot from floppy
• BeOS - quick, intelligent install, though can also boot from floppy
• Tie

• DOS - CLI with a limited set of commands
• BeOS - purty GUI with POSIX-compliant CLI
• winner: BeOS

• DOS - Lotus 1-2-3, and IBM Write
• BeOS - many, many found on http://www.be.com/software/ including Quake II.
• winner: BeOS

• DOS - need really old machine, probably 8086 >= x >= 386
• BeOS - need rather new machine, pentium class and higher
• tie - BeOS requires expensive equipment, whereas DOS restricts me to only using shit I should have recycled ages ago.

• DOS - I once used my 9600 baud modem to gain a telnet connection, where I could surf the web using lynx.
• BeOS - native TCP/IP
• winner: BeOS

• DOS - I never saw it crash
• BeOS - I never saw it crash
• tie

• DOS - (originally bundled with $5000 piece of hardware) currently - $.25 at local garage sale
• BeOS - (originally $100) currently - free Lite version, full version is $69.95
• tie

Come back next week when we pit the Palm OS vs. Irix

Try Gobe Productive - it's what I use for all my stuff, and it has a good feature set. I paid about $80 from Buy.com in a bundle with the BeOS bible and BeOS R4.5, though you don't need R4.5 with FreeBe out there.

"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."

All of corel's existing ports run under wine. Beta testing Word Perfect Office 2000 for Linux was enough to make me buy a copy of Gobe Productive for BeOS - they were that slow. I couldn't use it for more than a half-hour at a time - it would just drive me insane. And no, I wasn't running it on a 486 - my computer is a dual PII 400. Let's just hope they don't kill Bryce for BeOS.

"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."

• Applications. Yes, there is no Microsoft Office for BeOS. But that has let interesting little companies such as GoBe and BeatWare produce genuinely innovative products at very low prices. There are at least two companies producing professional-level video editing systems for the BeOS. With Be's ability to produce astonishing multi-media performance compared to NT or MacOS, I think this is an exceptional opportunity for the hapless consumer, burdened with poor-quality Windows products in the video editing space, to use a worthwhile and cost-effective solution.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Loyalty. Those who use BeOS love it with similar fervor to OS/2, Amiga, Linux and Mac users. The main thing that sets BeOS apart is that it's designed to co-exist with Windows, so you don't have to give up your Windows to use BeOS. It's a lot like Microsoft's oh-so-successful transition between DOS and Windows - you could ignore Windows, but when you wanted to use it, it was there. At $ 69.99, BeOS is an impulse purchase, just like Red Hat Linux without the complex installation. No hefty investment in additional hardware needed, which I think is key to its success.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Quality. Like Linux, BeOS is rock solid. It stays up. Unlike Linux, it has a coherent GUI that's slick, easy to learn and consistent. It was designed from the ground up to run well on any hardware, but to take advantage of multi-processing when available. Also unlike Linux, downloading and installing commercial applications is very slick and smooth.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Installation ease. If your hardware is supported - and it's looking pretty good for new PCs - BeOS is trivial to install. Put the CD in the drive, boot, answer a question about partition size (well explained in the manual), and you're off.