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Porting OpenOffice To OSX
jeffy124 writes "ZDnet has an interesting article on how OpenOffice, Sun's Open-Source version of StarOffice, needs some serious help in being ported to the Macintosh OS-X. With Microsoft about to release Office 2001 for OS-X and demo it at next week's MacWorld Expo, support in getting a Mac OS-X port out for OpenOffice is critical to keeping a Microsoft dominance of yet another operating system's office suite to a minimum. The project is need of someone to step up to the plate as a project lead."
That combo leaks memory like Niagra leaks water.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
And they're most certainly not using old P166s where I worked. :)
The first 'commercial' word processor for NeXTstep was WordPerfect. Want to see what happens when you take the code for another platform, and mung it enough so that it kind-of works on an elegant system like NeXTstep? Then you want to see WordPerfect.
I'd really hate to see that happen on MacOS X too...
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Which is why Office XP is going to have a hard time making inroads in the market. Microsoft isn't going to let you install it without guaranteeing you paid for it, and no one is going to be interested in paying nearly $600 for an Office suite.
Sure, there will be "cracks" for Office, but the majority of folks aren't interested in actively stealing Office. They won't go out of their way. They will simply stick with what they have got.
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Breakfast served all day!
I think he was specifically refering to the OS X port, not the whole thing.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The FSF doesn't give you the right to pull back the copyright. They give you the right to use the code you donated under any license you want, given a month's notice. (They claim the month's notice is merely some sort of legal CYA thing.)
The main reason they need these people is to help establish themselves as THE "Ultimate Office Suite". Whether that will happen I do not know but it will be sure fun to find out
Hey, the Abiword developers' hearts are in the right place, but the thing is still nothing more than a richtext notepad with rudimentary column support. Wake me up when it's caught up to a word processor from 10 years ago.
KOffice is much farther along feature-wise, maybe because they have a real roadmap and they're people who don't have contempt for office suites. You get the feeling the Abiword people prefer TeX and Emacs and don't understand why anyone would want to use a word processor for something with a glossary, footnotes and embedded images.
OpenOffice may be a slow, lumbering beast, but it's a full-featured slow, lumbering beast. Its only intractable weakness is the same one that dooms SmartSuite and Corel Office and the rest. It's not 100% compatible with MS Office. And it can't be. Endgame.
So does FSF and the GCC team. Lots of Free Software requires you to sign over the copyright.
I don't think he was implying that this makes it non-free so much as he was saying that it's more trouble than it's worth. Even a bugfix can span more than 10 lines of code.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Does this mean that we can expect MSOffice on Linux soon? Maybe I'm missing something here but how is MSOffice going to be on OSX if it's based on BSD and Microsoft's apparently not developing Office tools for UNIX. Then again maybe that was what they were planning all the time. Remember the rumor about Microsoft hiring Linux developers, maybe it was for this development. .NET at a charge of course.
Watch out though as you probably be required to allow root access for installation and then you kernal will be patched to route all traffic through
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
To read the latest discussion on Abiword development, check out this page.
I wonder how many people have tried MacGIMP because Adobe's taking so long to release Photoshop for OS X? Judging from some of the chat boards, I'm guessing a lot.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
First, before anyone asks.. OpenOffice is licensed under the following licenses.
:)
GNU General Public License (GPL)
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL)
further information: http://www.openoffice.org/license.html
The problem I find with contributing to OpenOffice is that they will not accept code submissions over 10 lines of code if one has not assigned copyright to Sun. This can not be done electronically, only by snail mail or fax.
I was considering helping but I'd like to keep my copyright. Also, I'd have to sell out the bucks for the upgrade to OSX
BTW, to those who asked.. openoffice just opens a large window and draws its own widgets inside of it, so the platform issue of toolkits/apis is at a minimum.
That isn't a true Aqua-native version, though, is it? I thought that was still running using Xfree86 as it runs on MacOS X (which is a bit clunky from what I understand).
D
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OpenOffice blatantly rips off Microsoft Office's UI in a number of ways. No, its not an exact duplicate, but many things work exactly the same as they do in MS Office.
I have StarOffice (OpenOffice's kissing cousin so to speak) sitting on some Solaris boxes at work and have had some dyed-in-the-wool Office users who are not technical people at all sit at them and they were able to get their work done. That's what counts. Not bug-for-bug compatibility.
My journal has hot
There are a lot of posts here to the effect of "MS Office is already dominant, and it's pretty good as well, so why bother with a competing product?"
Do most of you Mac users really feel this way? Perhaps Mac users have had only one office suite for so long that they have forgotten the improvements that can be had by competition.
No realistic person thinks that OpenOffice will overtake MS Office any time soon even if it is as good or better feature for feature. But the presence of two full featured office suites will cause both of them to improve through competition. Remember how bad Word 6 was on the Mac? Microsoft did improve it later, but had they had competition, it probably would have never been that bad in the first place, and Mac users wouldn't have had to suffer through several years of a bad word processor because there was no other viable alternative.
The Mac market is small, and perhaps that's why there are several areas where most of the players except the dominant one have dropped out, but if the Mac platform is to grow as Apple would like, it will need to once again have competition among applications.
OpenOffice is a good way to reintroduce competition, because being an open source product, it does not need to have large market share at first since it does not need to bring in revenue.
MS Office X will be available sometime i the forth quarter, OpenOffice is well over a year away from even having a rudimentary presense on OS X. This project should have started two years ago if it wanted any hope of acheiving the stated goals (have an open solution on OS X at the same time Office X is released). Furthermore OpenOffice is being pulled in ten directions at once - gnome/gtk+ - windows - XUL. Pulling in one more (quartx) won't help matters much. Microsoft _will_ achieve dominance on OS X, it is a certainty, the question is whether others will be able to crawl up or pull it down. That question is open, but a jihad to beat them to the punch is an obvious distaster.
-Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
What are the chances that the
It's not about dominating one market. It's about options being available, AND people actually making use of the options.
I'm sure I could write a mission critical application using the Atari 2600, thereby making sure that someone doesn't "dominate" the market. Whether or not anyone will actually use it.....
Rushing a port of this thing out is exactly the wrong thing to do. Having a buggy piece of software available will delight few, and alienate most. You want to be best to market, not first to market.
As someone who has to support MS applications on Mac OS, I have every right to bash MS.
First off, MS changes the damn file format with each major revision, forcing upgrades and general havoc when people try to exchange documents-- especially between MS-funded Universities and poorer school districts running ages-old MS software. You can hack solutions together, but generally they're expensive in terms of user education (find out what other person running, send document several times until you get a format that works) or monetary costs (deploying document translation software, plus user education, additional license hassles, and etc).
Secondly, MS Office apps are not WYSIWYG. The same document looks slightly different between different versions of Office, e.g. Office 98 vs. Office 97 vs. Office 2000. Makes it a real pain when someone is trying to print something on a version of Office different from what they wrote it on.
Printing wise, PowerPoint is just a pain. The Office 98 version of it comes with a hard-to-find "black and white printing by default" that you have to futz around in the print dialog box to undo on each new install (let's hear it for plain-text prefs files!). Also, PowerPoint prints funny; I can't tell how much time I've wasted trying to get poster-sized documents to print out right, while other applications (AppleWorks, FrameMaker, raw PostScript on unix) print just fine.
Security wise, Office applications are a joke, requiring the installation of anti-virus software to patch a deficient scripting system. Besides the auto-start worm, MS Office word macro virus are the only virus I've seen ever on the Mac OS platform (in 12 years of usage). On machines without Office, I don't need to go to the trouble and expense of installing and maintaining anti-virus software.
Expensive, buggy, insecure bloatware.
The absolute worst thing which could happen is 'porting' OpenOffice in some way whereby it adopts the Aqua appearance without the mac behavior.
If you port the application with the correct APIs in Carbon or Cocoa, I don't believe there would be any way for it to behave differently. The OS X services are built in when ported to the correct APIs, this affectively grants a level of similarity between all applications that are OS X native. If you have Aqua, you have the OS X behavior as well...
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
Here we go with the tired old myth again... The real story (check "Inside Windows 2000" or http://www.sysinternals.com if you don't believe me), is that there are indeed 2 sets of APIs, but not for the paranoia-fuelled reasons that /.ers like to present.
/.ers, who want to play with the kernel for reasons varying from genuine interest and curiosity through to full-on intellectual masturbation, but in reality most people want to get on and use the OS. And if you think you can't mess with NT internals, check the references above...
Programmers call the Win32 API, which is fully documented (http://msdn.microsoft.com), and is the interface to Windows that everyone should use for development. Meanwhile, there is an internal kernel API, which is undocumented and should not be called directly. This allows Microsoft to modify kernel functions without breaking application code - it's a simple abstraction layer.
Now, OK, you might well argue that Microsoft should document their kernel API too, for the masochists in the crowd. However, how many people really want to mess with low-level IO calls which may change in the next servicepack, when Win32 exposes a consistent set of filesystem calls for file creation, deletion etc.?
This sort of thing may be anathema to die-hard
support in getting a Mac OS-X port out for OpenOffice is critical to keeping a Microsoft dominance of yet another operating system's office suite to a minimum
Does anyone actually want to make a good product any more? Or do they just want to ensure that Microsoft loses market share? What about the fact that Open/StarOffice are pretty much rip-offs of MS office anyway?
> Why is MS Office so popular?
It has nothing to do with the actual application, and/or its ease-of-use. It has everything to do with the fact that MS Office file formats are THE method that people use to collaborate on documents over the Internet. They send these things around in emails like they weren't full of hidden, private information, the last ten versions of the document, and carrying viruses.
Imagine that your boss sends you a Word document, with the revisions tracking features on, and you open it up in OpenOffice, work on it, save it, send it back to him, and he opens it in Word and it is garbled. You and OpenOffice are going to be blamed. Much better to just suck it up and use Word from the start, then when something goes wrong with the document (something almost always does) you will be able to say, "hey, I'm using the newest version of Word, here, it must be somebody else's fault."
What's needed is PERFECT support for the newest Microsoft file formats, available as a BSD library or something, so that anybody could hook it up to their app and everybody would be able to read and write this common format FLAWLESSLY. Failing perfection, it will go nowhere. It is useless to anybody unless it is guaranteed to work just like the newest version of Office. That way a person can use it while knowing that they are not going to destroy a Word document that comes across their desk during their daily work by opening it in OpenOffice or whatever they prefer.
I like to write in BBEdit, but I have to paste the stuff into Word before I give it to a publisher, and then work in Word on any edits that were made, once the document comes back to me. Can't see a way out of that yet.
Microsoft's dominance in office software is not about the features or the ease of use, it's just that office workers need to share their work with co-workers, and they are used to doing that with a haphazard system of sending MS Office documents of differing versions to each other by email. The documents sometimes carry viruses, and they still send them around. The documents often contain private information and previous revisions that are accessible to anyone with a plain text editor, and they still send them around.
... it would have to be open to the user plugging into a translation dictionary that wasn't made by Microsoft, it would have to open a Word document and then save it as a Word document, or open a WordPerfect document and save it as a WordPerfect document, (all this without every asking you to save a document in the app's OWN format) and it would also have to promote a new, common, open format so that we could do away with the past cruft. That would be software that actually does what Office users need. (Mac OS X may be providing the groundwork for this with the object-oriented Cocoa environment, Services, AppleEvents, QuickTime translation, and more.)
... very open, very compatible, easy to use, reasonably priced. Good security, no viruses (can you believe!), and respect for the user's humanity would also be a nice bonus. It is there for the taking. A key is to stop thinking "word processor", "spreadsheet", etc. and just think of a user sitting down to do some office work at a fast, stable machine that's always connected to the Internet. Those machines are available all over running BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and some versions of Windows. What can you do to enable office people to get their work done better and easier than they can by starting up MS Office? What can you do to enable collaboration between users, regardless of what company developed their software?
If you create a better system for people to do office work and share it with their fellows, that is what will replace MS Office. It would most likely be HTML and XML based, and leverage the Internet and company network heavily. It would run on every platform, and be cheap. It will do all kinds of things for the user that Office is not doing, removing whole levels of complexity. It will have to be available as an open source BSD-style licensed library that EVERYBODY can use to make their app a part of the office workflow. Sort of like what MS Office would look like if you really made it take advantage of the Internet
A new office system to replace MS Office will have to look at the needs of Office users and satisfy them in a way that MS never can
StarOffice/OpenOffice is not GTK+ based. Stardivision used to have their own widget library that acts as "frontend" for other widget libraries. That means the most work for doing a new port was actually porting the widget library called "StarView" to the new platform's native widget library.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
I think it's fair to say that Open Office, more than any other piece of desktop free software, is pushing Linux/Free Software onto the corperate desktop. It's hard to beleive that the recent announcement from Ford Motor Company about its long term goal to move to completely Open Source desktop was motived by Gnome Office or KOffice. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if Ford had in mind Windowmaker + Open Office on old pentium 166 - 300 machines. It sure beats buying Pentium IV's to run the new-fangled XP suite of bloatware.
Of course, when subscriptions happen you wont be able to pirate all your MS software. I think the first rule of drug dealing is: the first few times are always free. (beside the point and not relevant, but the second rule is probably: Always keep them waiting!! Ugh!).
Yes. I have a link for you. Basicly, Ford says that it's a long term goal of theirs to move to an Open Source desktop.
Article on Ford's announcement.
The article said they needed people, but didn't suggest one way or the other that they'd be paid for their work. Maybe so, maybe not.
Why should I help Scott "no privacy" "gates sucks" McNealy with his corporate strategic goals, without getting much in return?
Secondly, the writeup says 'lead'. Wouldn't the folks who are already writing bits of this product be the best applicants? Fishing for people out of the blue with no experience on the architecture of this particular product seems kinda strange, given that the source is open.
Closed Source pays its developers. I use that to pay my rent, which won't take free-as-in-beer lease agreements. Open Source is a spare-time hobby for the most part (the luminaries get speaking fees, the rest of the developers get... source code).
Hey, there are some projects that are sponsored, and some guys are finding cool companies that pay for open source. I hope this is one of those cases, but the article didn't give me much hope or indication of that.
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programmers and porters would be well served to throw in some 'MS Office Compatibility' in terms of functionality and/or 'Help for Microsoft Office Users'
Microsoft Excel has for years offered "Help for Lotus 1-2-3 Users", and Microsoft Word has for years offered "Help for WordPerfect Users."
Since these applications are trying to be fungible by supporting all of the commodity features in approximately the same way, the only reason to stay in the market is to get a piece of the market share. There's no corporate advantage to being compatible, other than to muscle in on established turf.
[
I agree, porting this to have a nice Cocoa-based GUI wrapper would be a LOT of work. OTOH, the same is true with GIMP, which may be more worthwhile (maybe). I do wonder if just starting a Cocoa office suite from scratch might be a good idea. Any old NeXT users around? What was "the" word processor for NeXTStep? Was there one? Does it still exist, and if so, who owns it? I know "the" spreadsheet was Mesa, which rocks.
Frankly, I've been pinning my hopes on Nisus, which is rewriting Writer for Cocoa (not Carbon) and has always had a sweet word processor. However, these days, just a good wp and spreadsheet isn't enough; people want integration with that abomination powerpoint (ugh, the bane of corporate presentations... not cuz the app sucks, but cuz the presentations suck), the worst database ever (access), and other MS garbage.
Frankly, I think the most crucial feature of an office suite is TRANSPARENT handling of ALL the features (cruft) of MSOffice documents - revisions, that stupid highlighting stuff, etc - and that's hard to do. I still worry that many users will be "forced" into using MSOffice, not because better suites aren't available, but because MS has embraced/extended what a word processor or spreadsheet should do to the point where nobody can really compete.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
All the openoffice comments are in German, don'tcha know.
house, with a boarded front door. There is a small car here. A grue is chasing your ass and you have 5 seconds to start the car and drive away before he eats you. Would you rather have the ignition placed next to the steering wheel just like you expect on all other cars, or would you rather have a little variety and have to go searching around for it?
Remember, you only have 5 seconds. Choose well, grasshopper.
Better find another "funny" acronym. Although I never found the Mac OS to be less stable than Windows 9x, Mac OS X is extremely stable. I've got an unsupported 6-year-old Power Mac 7500 with an overclocked PowerLogix G3 processor running Mac OS X, and it's been up for 10 days straight so far. The only times I've had to reboot it in the last month is when I updated the OS.
Recently I compiled/installed MySQL, the newest version of Apache, PHP, and PHP-Nuke, and I'm hosting a PHP-Nuke site off of it. And it's still running without a hitch.
I've run my share of Microsoft programs, and I'd to say that their software has gotten better, but it's still a little flaky. In fact, I used to be able to completely freeze my Mac (requiring a reboot) opening a corrupted Word document. Mac OS X may be the perfect environment for Microsoft because Mac OS X can handle their buggy software.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Because when it comes right down to it, the average Joe in his cubicle doesn't give a rodent's posterior about "fighting the Microsoft hegemony," he's just trying to do his job with as few complications as possible.
And by 100% compatible, I don't mean you can import the file and resave it in native format. As soon as the user sees that progress bar pop up that says "Converting from MS Word," you've suddenly shattered all illusions of 100% compatibility; they know that some formatting, somewhere, is going to drop out, and they'll never find it (but their client undoubtably will).
Because for you a second rate product would be a step up. ;-)
When I need to edit text I use vi.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
No that was my sig. If I were comparing vi to Word it would be like comparing a first rate product to Word. I can do anything in vi that you can do in word... faster . With professinal typesetting if need be. Ok,ok, maybe not vi alone, but I've got enough tools on a Unix box to suplement vi, and ways to automate that suplementation(sp).
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
It was an on topic sig, I got rid of it.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
If it really bothers you, you are obviously allowed to fork it, ala Xemacs. A bit more work than you're probably looking for, but certainly a viable option (and you can keep taking code from them forever, as long as new realeases stay GPLed)
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I think you forgot your anti-paranoia pills...
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Well, there was FrameMaker. I'd love to see that for Mac OS X... besides that, there was a whole set of productivity applications from LightHouse Design.
So what's my point:
- I agree that most people use MSO for compatibility reasons more than for ease of use.
- I think that (at least for the all important Word Procesor) people who clame MSWord is easy to use have never really tried anything else.
- It is quite possible to make a better User interface than MicroSoft's, It will be an issue of compatibility that will make or break Open Office.
Perhaps the best thing that could happen would be for OfficeXP (even more) Restrictive and convoluted license to bomb and send the market looking for alternitives.JfMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
For $100 million, you don't think MS couldn't get all the hidden APIs they wanted?
Strikes me that Microsoft's porting
:-)
Office to OSX finally answers the
popular troll about porting Office to linux.
No doubt it will run SUID root with
Active-X and Outlook.
Talk about "embrace and extend"....
You are so far wrong it'snot even funny.
Is OpenOffice GTK+ based? I seem to think it is, in which case the big problem here would be to get GTK+ or a reasonable facsimile ported over to OS X. Question is, can that be done easily?
/Brian
Sun plans on using OpenOffice as the basis for StarOffice 6 -- just like Netscape uses Mozilla as the base for Navigator.
Unfortunately, quite a few parts of StarOffice weren't owned by Sun, so Sun couldn't relase the source for them. Because of that, much got broken when the propriatory parts were no longer available.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I use Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Office 98 daily with no problems at all. Compare this to bloat/shovelware Netscape and their inability to release a stable browser in years that requires less than 30 megs of RAM.
I will continue to use MS office products as well over some unstable open source port that will never have the dedicated update support that a money making company can provide.
I was kinda hard on Sun. The tone of the article was absurd though...
"The project is need of someone to step up to the plate as a project lead"
Give me a break... Any fool who volunteers his time to make it easier for IBM & Sun to sell workstations is a complete and total idiot. Where is CmdrTaco & company? They are constant open-source nags/cheerleaders but you see nothing from them but Slashcode. (Which is a slow, bloated piece of shit)
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Sun Microsystems needs an experienced developer to lead a team of volunteers in porting Sun's OpenOffice application to Mac OS 10.
The candidate will be compensated soley by free Sun t-shirts, mousepads and mugs. No salary or fringe benefits are available.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Microsoft Office has held a commanding lead in the Mac market for about 10 years - far longer than in Windows, where MS has to fight off Lotus and Borland back in the Win 3.1 days. Mac users are also historically very willing to put up with shit from Microsoft - e.g. the very slow and buggy Word 6. Now that Office 2001 (and previously 98) work well, why switch?
sulli
RTFJ.
Of course, if/when MS moves to subscription pricing, then GPL software looks more attractive. But will it be any good? This story implies that it won't.
sulli
RTFJ.
Seriously, if you're not going to do it right, don't bother. It needs to have documentation, good icons, help files, and work like a MacOS program. If it's just a cheap port of the Linux version with MacOSX windows and buttons, you might as well not bother. Mac users won't put up with that crap the way *nix people will.
I could be way off, but it seems that crossplatform compatability is the biggest deal here. I work in an office of 40 Windows computers and 25 Macintosh computers. We use Microsoft Office because we can share files so easily with eachother and people outside the office. All our vendors and clients use MS Office. Microsoft knows how to make software speak "MS Office" better than anyone else ... because they wrote it. And that's the biggest issue, being able to share with others.
Even if OpenOffice blows MS Office away, MS already has a strong foot hold that even the new people want to be able to communicate with, trouble free.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I must disagree. I can think of atleast one certain website that, if the /. effect took its toll, would increase productivity 10x fold.
Let's be honest here. Why is MS Office so popular? A lot of people will say 'ease of use', but it's really just that most people who use it are used to the set of features and mentality that Microsoft has gotten everyone familiar with. Open Office if anything, is easier to use than MS Office. Still, getting it to run on OSX, programmers and porters would be well served to throw in some 'MS Office Compatibility' in terms of functionality and/or 'Help for Microsoft Office Users'.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Along with the other comment about Win32 APIs versus kernel APIs, there's a very simple way to see there's hidden code. MSDN supposedly has all Win32 API calls documented. However, if you use a simple DLL viewer, including those supplied by MS to developers, you will find functions that are otherwise undocumented. Using non-MS tools, you can investigate DLLs for classes that are undocumented as well.
The functions and classes are there. But unless you look, you won't find them because MS, for whatever reason, won't document them.
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Developers: We can use your help.
People here seem to be forgetting that Apple has been producing their own Office competitor for some time. It's called AppleWorks, and the latest version (6.2) is an OS X native application. Sure, it may not have all of the bells and whistles that Office has, but it does everything that I need it to, including:
Open MS Word and Excel files.
WYSIWYG word processing with all of the standard gizmos (spell check, mail merge, etc.).
OLE style drag-and-drop functionality for video clips\sound files\whatever.
PowerPointish presentation software.
A decent spreadsheet and database.
Plus it integrates super-well with all of Apple's other software, such as iMovie and Quicktime. All that, for a third (or less) of the cost of M$ Office. I got my copy yesterday, and I'm very pleased with it.
While I would love to see OpenOffice for my platform, I don't feel that I'm without options. One of the beautiful things about OS X is that it's still a free-for-all and there are no dominant applications. Without a stranglehold on the OS, Microsoft has to compete just like everyone else.
This
For OS X, they will both be running natively using only Apple's public API's, and we will get to see how much better OpenOffice is when not running on a crippled MS Windows platform.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Two points: one, Apple has a buddy relationship with Microsoft, so they're not going to create anything that competes directly with Microsoft products. They used to have an integrated web browser email client (cyberdog) but abandoned it years ago. Appleworks is equivalent to MS Works; it's under-powered for most tasks. Two: Apple has changed its relationship with the developer community. You no longer have to cough up megabucks for the documentation or tools; they're free for the asking from the Apple Developers' site, and the tools come on the OS X CD. Much better than when you had to spend $500 on CodeWarrior, $200 on Inside the Mac OS, a few years ago.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Microsoft should at least release a free PowerPoint viewer for OS X, as they have for Windows, but I agree that PowerPoint is a tool to make uncreative people think they're creative.
And Access isn't the worst database ever; I guess you never had to use Paradox :)
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
There are some interesting comments over there, too.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
They're recommending using C++ and C to call the OS X Windowing APIs, which doesn't sound like a good idea, since the GUI could be built much quicker with Objective-C and AppBuilder.
It almost seems that building a MacOffice from scratch would be easier than this port, but I'm no expert in porting projects.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
"You want to be best to market, not first to market."
That all depends. If your sole motive is to make the *Best* product, then being first is not that important. If you are after market share and want a return on your investment, then being first is critical.
If you look at the software industry over the past few years, the "first to market" strategy is clearly being followed.
Look at micro$oft. IIRC ever 1.0 version of software they have ever shipped has been crap. (IE, 16-bit windows, first version of NT, and so on). Eventually the patches and bug fixes are released and the product is usable. (OK, maybe in the case of M$ that is a bit of an overstatement, but grant the point for the time being).
There are tons of games that ship and you need to download megabytes of patches to make it playable. I think in the case of Half Life, I had to download a 25MB patch. Should it have shipped if it needed that much work? Probably not, but if they did not ship it when it did, their sales opportunities might have suffered.
The point is, if you can get to market, first, people will purchase it, regardless of the quality. Once they have it, these same people will stick to that product and are not likely to replace it with an alternative.
To coin a phrase, being first isn't everything, it's the only thing.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Okay, so there are a area a lot of Mac people who use Microsoft Word out there. And they have very talented Mac programmers that make pretty good applications - I would go as far to say that their Mac apps are greatly superior to their PC apps. But raise your hand if you actually bought it instead of copying it from a friend. The reason this project is so important is that, as a community, we should have an option to not have to buy Office X. Or Appleworks, either. As a community, we can create our own applications. And StarOffice sounds like a good start. (And for those complaining about the OS X IE: All the alternatives, OmniWeb, iCab and my favorite, Opera, are much better. All browsers for OS X are still in beta, so pick another one to use.)
What do you think. All cars should be black, manufactured by Ford, and have the title of being a Model T or should we have Subaru, Toyota, Chevy, etc. The interfaces are generally, via. recognizable, but not so different that you wouldn't be able to recognize it without much effort. People don't respond to extreme changes but get bored with no change, in other words, I'll take the second because it shouldn't be so different I wouldn't be able to find it(no one would buy it.) If they were all the same, no one would buy them either. Some Chaos is better then complete order.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
The only way to go is to create an open file format for documents and then get enough companies/groups on as many OSs as possible to create much better applications than what Microsoft so pathetically offers. This does not mean, as Microsoft believes, piling on the features whether or not they are actually a good thing nor whether or not they are implemented well. It means doing the basics the best and innovating intelligently. We need to put them behind the curve, and in an open source, widely available, very easy to use way. That and perform a whole heck of a lot of human sacrifices.
Microsoft dominates without justification, as always, but I believe it is possible to topple them. Everyone gave up on being better a long time ago and instead tried to emulate. Now it's time to bring back real advances.
--- What?