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StarOffice 5.2 Preview
A few people over the last couple of days have pointed out that Sun has made StarOffice 5.2 available for preview. It's a big download, clocking in at 100+ megs for Solaris. There's also Linux (x86 only) and Win32 versions available.
What ever happened to the days where there's a link to a supposed "free" download, and you go there and there's a link that links to the file. What's up with this registering and asking me about the size of my mother's army boots just so I can get SO5.2 BETA!!! I didn't download it because I'm getting seriously ticked off with the registration crap just to download something I might not even use! I'm going back to vi and LaTeX. :P
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that the whole GUI glop that surrounds the StarOffice apps is the easy way out to cross-platform compatibility, documentation, and support.
If you did it the other way, where the apps adhered to the UI of the base system, you'd go nutt having to map all of the functionailty to different gestures on the native platforms. You couldn't really seel StarOffice as an app that makes the underlying system moot. You Windows-centric person who sat down at a Mac to use StarOffice would still have a learning curve to figure out how to do and find common things.
Ditto for support. You'd need to have support personnel experienced in every single platform (or break the team down into different, specific platform support teams).
As far as development is concerned, I'm sure it's easier to work on one unified GUI. Ditto for QA. You'd need to change your test plan for every platform otherwise. Ditto for documentation. There's only one GUI you have to guide the user around.
Is it the best solution from the viewpoint of the user, who is already familiar with the platform of his or her choice? Nope. But recall who these apps really get sold to. CIOs, the support and systems folks, etc. That's basically who this was designed for. It's probably a good argument against commercial apps of this sort.
Totally taking over the user experience can be a good thing... take some of the Metacreations tools, such as Bryce and Poser. They basically have their own interface, and take over your entire screen. You either hate them with a passion or love them. In general, I think, they were very successful with the target audience of graphic designers, though.
In this case, StarOffice just went for the lowest-common-denominator: the Microsoft Office interface. Probably a safe bet from a corporate viewpoint. People already using Microsoft apps on Windows (the majority of the potential market for the app, that is, when it was being sold) would be able to adapt easily. And it's already been proven that at the very least, people can muddle along with it. A radical departure would probably not been accepted by the market.
It would be interesting to see what StarOffice would have been, had it not been intended to be sold to a corporate market...
What's up with this registering and asking me about the size of my mother's army boots just so I can get SO5.2 BETA!!!
StarOffice is, unfortunately, in the clutches of an evil corporation. Oh sure, there are far eviler corporations out there (I could name one right now:) but Sun is certainly no angel, especially with respect to LInux which they perceive - correctly - as a threat to Solaris. Course they would be a lot smarter to leverage Linux instead of doing the subtle sandbagging-with-a-smile they engage in now, but what the heck, that's just my opinion.
In the short term, Sun owning StarOffice is good for Linux - it will speed Linux takeup on the desktop. But in the long run, we basically have to kiss StarOffice goodbye as an open-source program. That's probably bad.
Or maybe it's not. Actually, Abiword is really coming along and once it gets fleshed out a little more, I think I'll prefer using it by a ***wide*** margin of some of the other bloatware office products. KOffice is really promising too, and Gnome supplies a few pieces of the puzzle (gnumeric is already darn good and it's getting better every week).
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I downloaded SO5.2b (Linux) a couple of days ago. ITs interface hasnt changed much, but there are some subtle new features, some nice, some not. I was rather hoping that they would jettison the Windows-esque start button, but it is still there. Unfortuantely, some type of security problem causes the application to crash when accessing almost any web page. It does a nice job of sucking in your settings from 5.1 and even your mail and newsgroups from Netscape. Still quite buggy, but beta is beta.
Avoid those slow Sun ftp sites! A mirror have been made available for the linux and solaris versions:
ftp://ftp.c-60.org/pub/soffice/
I know that because we are just finishing our Excel 95/97/2000 filter. The Gnumeric people know this (just look at their source code comments). And your new colleagues over at the StarCalc team surely know this as well.
You probably know this: Do at least the Word specs have some resemblance with reality?
-Martin
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Also my wv project has a passable word reader that abiword is using as a word importer, and gnumeric has quite a good excel importer
C.
I sometimes write stuff
No, they haven't slimmed it down or made noticeable UI changes. This is a subtle upgrade.
It seems a bit snappier than 5.1. The Win32 version now embeds the IE browser engine if it's present, which improves web browsing from within the app. The IMAP mail support is a bit slicker, roughly on par with Netscape 4.x but with some extra niceties thanks to its integration with the rest of the suite. It ain't Outlook 2000 yet, but then it's also not succeptible to script macros in message bodies.
But the best improvement I've seen is in the MS Office import and export capabilities. It always did a better-than-average job of opening MS Office files, but it wasn't good enough to replace MS Office for shops with lots of Office documents floating around. Now, it's nailed every small to mid-sized Word, Excel and Powerpoint doc I've thrown at it, save for the Microsoft-dialect VBA macros, and it neither runs nor harms those. Based on my use of it over the past two days on Linux and NT, I now feel it's a viable product to roll into mixed MS Office environments for roles where VBA doesn't come into play.
Now that 5.2 plays nicer with MS Office files, I will definitely be evaluating it as a server-based X app for a 20-person call center I'm putting together.