Slashdot Mirror
Looking At Gobe
mneptok writes: "OSNews is running a review of a beta version of Gobe Productive, the office productivity suite initially developed for BeOS by the former producers of ClarisWorks. The beta tested by OSNews is for Windows, but a Linux GTK (and that's toolkit only) version is planned for release after the Win32 version ships. A public beta of the Win32 version is imminent. Looks like a nice, affordable 'army knife' office app for Windows users, and a serious contender in the Linux office space." We had some coverage of this a while back,
StarOffice 6beta rocks my world (at least, those parts of it that deal with office productivity).
I've been throwing off the Microsoft yoke in stages - my mail client is eudora lite, my office suite is staroffice, and my browser is k-meleon. Hooray, I guess.
Don't tell anyone, but I actually save all my wordprocessing docs in RTF. So the program I use doesn't matter all that much, to some extent.
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Check this artical for more information about this.
But how can it succeed if it isn't free... how will it make money?
-pyrrho
It's always nice to see new linux software, even propritary..
Still I don't quite see the market. Office people want what they know: MS Office,
if your not using that, it really doesn't matter what you're using. So why not chose something that doesn't cost 120 bucks, like StarOffice or KOffice?
Still, I haven't used the software, maybe it IS an OfficeXP killer. My point is: It'd have to be.
The Word .doc file format has not yet been mastered, no powerpoint compatibility, poor lettering on Glyphs, no sound or video.
...
There's nothing more important in the Office world than compatibility M$ file formats. Which reminds me that the current antitrust settlement doesn't say anything about opening file formats.
Back to StarOffice & powerpoint viewers (thanks god there's Wine!)
The Raven
The Raven
You guys should check out Gobe's import/export filters. They actually developed an API that anyone can write to, so if they port the API and the filters over to Our Favorite OS(tm), which they are apparently going to do, then any application can choose to just write to that API and will immediately be able to save or write in any of the proprietary formats that Gobe supports.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
What I was really hoping to see was Microsoft split up as per Penfield-Jackson's recommendation at which point we would have seen MS-Office for Linux. I've got no issue with Microsoft competing with good products, I just hate to see them use their operating system monopoly to reduce choices (bundling IE) or exclude competitors (not supporting Linux).
First i read is 'Globe', and thought "WTF is looking at a Globe got to do with anything?"
.rtf then to Koffice or StarOffice (mainly cuz some of the stuff dont conver to .rtf well)
Then i saw the fact that there was no L.
So is it pronounced GOB, like a gob of glue,
or maybe GOOB.. like.. GOOBER! haha
or GO-B?
Oh well... Good to see some development in the linux office arena. I'm sick of StarOffice, I want Applixware back, and Koffice ain't my cup o'tea either.
Really, I need something to replace my dad's machine running win98 and MS Works 2000, I'd LOVE to switch him over to SuSE, but he's got tons of old MS Works word processing docs that i'd need to convert, haven't had the best success going to
Oh, well, my $.02
there is definitely a market for a non MS suite in the hundred dollar range.
I can remember Claris works, and a number of other similar and excellent products. Not every one wants to spend multiple hundreds of dollars just to write a basic letter.
Heck I would be very happy with a Lite version of windows and office, half the features for half the price. I kan do witout a spel cheker. or all of the fancier features no one uses. Give me the 20% or 30% that 80% of the people use 90% of the time.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Damn, that's cool. Does this require a license from Adobe? I know GPL'd readers exist, but I can't remember ever seeing a program other than Distiller (that is the Adobe PDF program, isn't it?) that writes PDFs...
;)
I sure as hell don't see it under Word2000's Save As
"Disclaimer: I don't care if you don't find my grammar/spelling appropriate. Honestly, that's the best I can do. I bet you don't speak Greek at all. ;-)"
/. so I'm going to go out on a limb and say its generally /.'ers that are dishing the crap. Well, stop it. I hate to pull out the "you're representing all of us" routine, but its true. Everytime I read an article describing the slavering hordes of fanatical and rude linux users out there, I cringe, knowing that it is almost all directly traceable back to this website. And no, I'm not saying it is CmdrTaco's fault, if it wasn't /., it would be somewhere else. But come on, if you don't have anything nice to say.....
For those of you who don't normally read osnews and Eugenia's reviews, she continually gets crap over her spelling and grammer. Specifically, she gets a lot more whenever they are linked by
*off soapbox*
*ontopic*
I really liked Gobe Productive when I used BeOS. I even bought a copy. However, I wish they had decided to use qt instead of gtk... It just mesh better with the rest of my desktop. Oh, well.
We need to be able to export our damn documents, too. People often times forget about this, and much of the consequent effort is directed at giving _us_ the ability to read their Office(tm) documents. We're doing OK, though -- S.O. 6beta is sweet.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Gobe Productive is a nice suite including plain old word processing, spreadsheet, graphics, illustration, and presentation. If you remember it was originally planned for BeOS 3.2 on Intel architecture. A few beta versions were released for Be. My question is why would they come out with Gobe only for Windows? It is pretty obvious that Microsoft Office DOMINATES in all the things Gobe does and (argueably) does these things better. It seems that it would be a better choice if they released this software on platforms like Mac, Linux, Unix, BSD etc. first and maybe Windows later. It is an alternative at the least to MS Office. It is going to cost less ($124) than Office but it is going to be hard to get users to change to Gobe. The good thing is that the $124 allows you to install it at home and at work without fearing liscensing issues.
Hopefully the Linux version of Gobe will do better than the Windows version. Somehow I just don't think it will sell at all on the Windows platform except to a few ex-BeOS users.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Where is the logic, on Linux, for using this? Or, for that matter, on Windows?
At $120 US for the suite, it's not an unreasonable price, but the basic functionality (imitating MS Orifice) is already there for the most part on StarOffice, etc for nothing, and for Windows you'd just buy/pirate OrificeXP.
Recall that Applixware basically went out of business when the free-use/open source suites came out on Linux. What the hell are these guys gonna do? I feel for them, I really do. If they want to keep this alive they should seriously consider something along the lines of the OpenBeOS/Blue OS/atheOS projects. Sorry... please convince me that I'm wrong.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
I dont know about anyone else, but i went to their site (not slashdotted, yet). But MAAAAN. For some reason it made Opera choke and puke on trying to scroll that last image(the one with all the ugly people on it :) ... they really need to hire a few cheap models or something hehe)
That and the layout, ick... doesnt fit on my 17 inch screen? WTF is with that?
OK its just Opera freakin. Looks like it works ok under IE, heh figure that designed for IE... never seen THAT before.
Fuck it if it doesn't come with free source code!
CircusLinux
Koules
And the one site we all love dearly.
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
What if microsoft was paying people top post/moderate stupid comments on slashdot to make slashdots members look stupid...
You know for a commercial product to be releasing with such a broad license is just plain cool. I don't care if I don't plan on using it, but the "Family License" giving you the ability / right to install on _all_ your home machines plus one machine at work is awesome. I wish more companies did this.
there's Koffice and I'm pretty sure gnome guys won't stop on Gnumeric...
And the good side is that the two or three suites can share code, leaving to the user to choose based on look and feel and size (more bloat, less bloat...) and as they mature and gain in quality it'll become harder and harder to sell a closed source office suite for Linux and other open source OSes...
But we must admire these guys efforts. Congratulations Gobe, I hope you sell lots of copies to Win users.
What ? Me, worry ?
For $125, you get a "family liscense" which permits you to install their software on all the computers in your home plus one computer elsewhere (presumably one at work). This demonstrates a surprising amount of prescience on their part.
The real money for liscensing is in corporate liscensing. The really financially damaging software "piracy" is among corporate (or government agency...) clients. There's not terribly much to gain from having draconian liscensing schemes that prevent multiple parties in a household from having the software installed; one might even argue that there are no economically justifiable reasons from curtailing any installations, but that's another argument.
Historically, office-suite penetration has occurred from the corporate level down to the private level; that is, people are forced to use software at work and therefore find themselves having to use it at home as well. The corporate market is fairly well saturated by microsoft Office so it'd be suicide for Gobe to fight there first. Far better would be to worm into the home office market, and try to get employees familiar with it so they can demand their employers reconsider.
By making it almost pleasant to use their product (and for a reasonable price), they get my vote.
When the Linux version is released, it's gonna be great for FreeBSD users like myself. I like to run simple, quick programs. (For example, IceWM as opposed to a desktop environment like GNOME or KDE.) As I recall, Gobe was lean and quick on BeOS. I hope the Linux version is like that too.
Oh well.
Gobe is seriously beautiful. I had the last version on BeOS and I found it tricky at first having come from a predominantly MS Office background. But when you get used to it then you realise how well designed the UI is, and how bad MS stuff is :)
:)
It is also shocking to be reminded off how bad the Linux office productivity stuff is in comparison. Staroffice (5.2 at least) is shockingly bad, and Abiword just looks like MS Wordpad, though I do like GNUmeric. K-Office is nice but still feels unfinished.
But the most impressive thing about Gobe was its size. Or rather the lack of it. This program is just *so* slick and I will be getting a copy when its finished
Po
I quite like its simplicity.
I liked the way all the selection entries in the dropdown font menu appeared in their own fonts.
About 2 years ago I built a computer for someone & he wanted ClarisWorks for Windows installed, but I couldn't find a downlaod anywhere of it.
Even old versions or demo versions that you use to get on magazine CDs.
We have too many solid contenders today. All of which are just not quite solid enough for daily use.
Register my plea for a kickass application that people will want to migrate to, away from Office.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you still want ClarisWorks v4 for Windows, gimmie an address to send to. It's 5*1.44mb.
So buying Gobe means you can use it one your W32, BeOS & Linux partitions.
Then they can have the 3 versions all on one CD in a crossplatform box. Retailers love that - it makes stocking easy.
Bit like if you buy the boxed version of BeOS you get both X86 & PPC versions inside it.
Actually I think the boxed version of ClarisWorks itself came with both Mac & Windows versions in it. You know, like it had compatible with both Macintosh & Windows markings on the box.
I tried to download the Star Office 6 beta recently, but for some strange reason it tells me that it can't find SOT638MI.DLL (ok, on Win Me, I admit).
Anyway, I tried to visit StarOffice.com and got the following message:
StarOffice.com Temporarily Shutdown
A Power Failure has damaged our main host...
Will come back soon...
Is this the right site? Does anyone know what happened?
Star Office will support Mac OS X.
SO drops support.
Gobe makes an office suite for Be...Be drops off the face of the planet, BeOs wise.
Gobe wrote the precursor to Appleworks (i.e. claris works) Dropped or Sold? Dunno.
And for all the slamming I've seen (ok, and done, too) of Microsoft... I've played with the GM of Office for X... all I can say is "wow".
Silly me for hoping Star Office would get there first and "save me".
(colorful series of explicatives deleted)...for all of the proclamations that Microsoft does not give the consumer a choice...I have to ask myself now "Do their competitors?"
I'm dead serious.
Maybe it is a sign of the times that Microsoft owns Windows and Macintosh computers lock, stock and little/big endian bits, or maybe comptitors have just given up trying altogether.
Has MS proven "that he who tries to be strong everywhere, ends up being strong nowhere" the phrase wrong?
Saying there is no competition because 1 player owns the marked is one thing.
Saying there is no competition because no one is trying at all, is another.
Someone give me a reality check, please!
Either I'm missing some critical piece, or I've hit the problem dead on....only thing is I don't know which.
Help.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
Karma. Whore. Alert.
Wow - this poster's been around a long time. Or did he just hit google and rewrite this ZDNet review?
They had point oh releases.
Yes. Insightful commentary there. Microsoft dominate the market. Worthy of postive moderation, even.
Yeah, don't forget QNX and Amiga Workbench. Actually - they should work backwards from where most customers are going to be.
Genius!
Figures eh? Sounds authoritive!
Again - from the slashdot article.
...
Thankyou very much
:)
cosmus@tpg.com.au
Mick's the name
I'm still in contact with that bloke - I'll be able to ring him up & say that I managed to find ClarisWorks for Windows, for him.
He'll then think I've been spending the past 2 years deligently looking for it for him
His post didn't get modded up so remove the dick from your asshole and shut the fuck up.
I think that there has been talk of doing a new release for Windows, but the Apple online store only seems to have AppleWorks 6.2 for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.
To me, the most interesting thing about Gobe is that apparently a group of at most 10 seasoned programmers (see picture on their site and some of those guys are the executive team) came up with a high quality MS Office replacement from scratch in a relatively short amount of time. And they did it without any help from the Open Source community. But alas, this post is not another cowardly retreat call to proprietary software. Quite the contrary. The difference is that these guys were paid to work on Gobe full-time until it was production quality. If similar talent could be focused on say.. KOffice or OpenOffice, imagine how fast those projects would move along. Who would pay them? Quite simply, any smart company that is tired of throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a black hole every time MS decides to put out a new version Office. All that's needed is a company or non-profit to organize this effort. A non-profit, of course, may be of greater value to businesses because it'd be a tax write-off.
I have followed the posting-history of this user and they are a shameless karma whore. That they did get moderated up this time is no reason why I shouldn't point this fact out.
The real money for liscensing is in corporate liscensing. The really financially damaging software "piracy" is among corporate (or government agency...) clients. There's not terribly much to gain from having draconian liscensing schemes that prevent multiple parties in a household from having the software installed;
Others might not agree with this statement...
According to Wired, regarding Windows XP:
I'm with you in that I think that the money is in corporate liscencing. Then again, I don't have any software that anyone would want to buy.
For BeOs users, the migration of Productive from our favourite OS to a Windows platform has been painful as it was symbolic of the demise of BeOs. As a WP/Imaging/Spreadsheeting application, Gobe Productive is very good and has all the functionality everyone needs. Isn't surprising how a small switched on software company such as Gobe can produce a quality item for a reasonable price whilst M$ charges a vastly greater sum for essentially the same thing ? Gobe in the past has been tainted by association with BeOs. There are stories that their approaches to vendors failed as soon as the vendors learned that Gobe was a supplier for a non-M$ OS vendor.
Unfortunately as long as M$ Word is out there, and M$ uses its customary tricks, the alternative WP programmes will be marginalised. Remember Word Perfect ? It has more owners than I've had hot dinners ! Give Productive a go, use Star Office, try Abi Word, and then maybe Word will be sold at a reasonable price and competition may start to work !
Seriously, X has been able to do AA for ages, why the hell don't more programs use it. I know everyone is waiting for GTK2, but where is it? It is 18 months late as it is, yet it is not a particularly major upgrade. I mean, what the hell is going on? Have they developers just given up?
They've not been slashdotted, yet, but whoever made that page has no knack for the aesthetics. Get a new webmaster GoBe! Please! My eyes hurt! Keep up the good work fellas.
OKay, back in the day there was a lack of office suites.... then programmers said 'let there be office applications' ., not the linux world is plagued with different types of office suites... none of which are 100% ms-word compatible. will this one be different? lets hope, following past trends this one will prolly get its 15 minutes of fame and die off..... so lets count the list:
...whats next? (er what else am i missing? isnt there an Offix suite or something like that)
1) abiword
2) staroffice
3) corel word perfect
4) kde office suite
5) Gobe
6)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
Back in the early 1990's, I was an avid user of ClarisWorks on MacOS. I've always felt it was by far the best office software I've ever used, because it was so well-integrated and simple. The one thing it lacked was a spreadsheet. Today, when I have to use Word (gag), I still long for the ClarisWorks capabilities. If the same people who made ClarisWorks are doing this today, I'd expect this could be some great software. I'd buy it.
I think you meant to say pubic beta....it's an easy mixup. I do it frequently.
I noticed that one of their investors is Linux Global Partners http://www.linuxglobalpartners.com the same guys who burned Metrolink and have promised a new Linux distro, based on the old Corel release.
I don't mean to raise questions about Gobe, but if they've hooked up with these guys I really wonder about their long term viability.
No office tool can compare to using LaTeX with Dia, xfig and many other wonderful tools. Loose the GUI. Become productive.
Does such a beast exist? If it did we could totally ditch MS completely at my office.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I've seen several posts raise questions about Applixware. It's currently published by http://www.vistasource.com [VistaSource], and I think it goes by the name AnyWare Desktop.
In any event, it's my top pick for a Linux productivity package, and it's reasonably priced (under $100). The user interface is similar to MS Office or StarOffice, but it is more utilitarian (and quicker to navigate). Plus, I think it is available for Windows desktops as well as most flavors of UNIX.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
With the uproar about XP licensing they may not have been able to pick a better time to release, if it's not delayed that is. I know this won't have the functionality to serve everyone initially, but this is more than enough for those of us who's needs are simple, and if it fares well in the market it should only get better. I'm so fed-up with Office right now (price plus lack of abililty for it to do as I say) that for my needs this may give me a way out. I'm impressed by what I've read so far, enough so that I've pre-order a copy.
I had to do a presentation about 3 weeks ago. I usually use LaTeX and print out my slides on overheads. Don't have to worry about power, bad discs, incompatible presentation software, etc. This time I decided to give MagicPoint a try. Downloaded, compiled, spent about 20 minutes learning the program, then put together my presentation. It does anti-aliasing, transparency and xswallow. There were a few things I wanted to do that it didn't support, but for the most part all it's missing are the bells and whistles you use in other presentation programs to distract your audience from your lack of information.
-- Were am I going? And why am I in this handbasket?
She's obviously had her hands on most major productivity apps - how about using one with a spell/grammar checker? Or ask someone to proof her work. More than that, she really needs to edit these and do some fact checking. These smack of stream-of-consciousness reviews, hardly rigorous and some way to go before appearing professional.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Gobe on BeOS was a pretty nice application. I remember when my friend was reviewing it, and we spent a long while testing it and trying to do things with it. Back then, this was around a pre-release of BeOS 4 I think, it was not too bad, but it had a ways to go.
The real question is, will it really offer us anything that we don't already have?
Well, if they impliment it like the Windows version, it'd have PDF save, which is always nice. The major thing I think, would be the Word abilities. If it actually has decent open/save functionality with Word documents, then I think this could be a very popular app. Let's hope they put the thought into development for us that they did for Windows, and give me a tar file! I Don't want no stinkin RPM!
NOw to wait and see if Gobe takes over all of our documentation efforts, or if it flops. Personally, I'm rooting for Star Office....
Yes, you're right. I used to use AppleWorks myself many years ago. But again, are those users going to be willing to part with triple-digit currency for it? When free alternatives are available?
The success of Office should indicate that the majority of people will use featured-but-bloated software. I still don't think this will expand the potential userbase _enough_ to make a difference.
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
The boxed product contained both
Personally? I'd pay $120 for Productive--even if it's only half as good as it sounds. I was a big fan of ClarisWorks for the Macintosh--I preferred it greatly to MS Word due to its simple, elegant design. If Gobe succeeds in bringing a ClarisWorks-like product to the Linux environment, I'd jump at the chance to use it.
How do the other office suites stack up? StarOffice is a positively huge application (especially for those who need only "light word processing.") KOffice seemed buggy and unimpressive. WordPerfect for Linux has one of the most rauciously flawed font renderers I've ever come across. So... I've had my eye on Gobe for some time--I hope they come through.
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Older PDF files have the nasty habit of being compressed with LZW (think GIF). Visit http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/lzw.html for more info on that.
/.) about problems reading some of the newer PDF files on *nix systems if they used fonts that weren't on the system. I could have this totally wrong ... does anybody know what I am yapping about?
I also remember reading somewhere (maybe
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
ClarisWorks for Windows reached version 5 before Apple absorbed that part of Claris responsible for CW development. CW was then named "AppleWorks" and a few minor bug fixes were released after that. Now Apple appears to have completely dropped the Windows version.
I first ran across ClarisWorks for Windows when I was looking to migrate from Geoworks Ensemble. I found CW and never looked back. CW is in the "sweetspot" between MS Works (which doesn't have enough features) and MS Office (which has too many, takes up too many resources, and whose menu structure is bloated to accomodate all of those features).
ClarisWorks was extremely tight. Modules were reused wherever possible. (From a software developer's standpoint, this is a no-brainer, but seems to be unique for many apps)
ClarisWorks for Windows included a Word Proc, spreadsheet, flatfile database (with multimedia field capabilities), vector draw, bitmap paint, and presentation modules. Also included were macros and the ability to customize toolbars, buttons, functions... It was possible to create "custom" applications with CW, customized so much, that it was not easy to detect that it was CW under-the-covers.
As for Gobe Productive, the fact that ClarisWorks developers are involved gives me reason to be hopeful that it will be a quality product.
There are a lot of longtime MS Works users that are not happy with the direction that MS has gone with Works. There are also people who use Office who would rather use something more streamlined (menu/function-wise)
And then there are those on "orphaned" apps like ClarisWorks for Windows, New Deal Office (formerly Geoworks Ensemble) who simply want to move on.
Obviously Productive won't be an MS Office killer, but it doesn't have to be, to be a success.
If Gobe can manage to include a flatfile database, it can carve itself a nice little niche.
What all the linux users who are forced to use MS at the office need to do:
Break out your favorite C compiler, and write a txt2myformat program. Have it convert raw ascii text files to your own personal document format.
Perhaps you want your format to encode everything in inverted unicode (lsb-msb reversed), then huffman code the results in 713 byte chunks, followed by a conversion of the first 7/8ths of the document to 7-bit encoding, and then stegonagraphically storing the remaining 1/8th of the document in the top bit of those.
Every time someone sends you a Word document, convert it to text, edit it, convert it to your own personal format, and email it back. When they wonder what's up, tell them that the word format is about as useful to you as your format is to them, and they need to start using open standards.
Same ac
Older PDF files have the nasty habit of being compressed with LZW (think GIF).
/.) about problems reading some of the newer PDF files on *nix systems if they used fonts that weren't on the system.
True, but all new PDFs are compressed with ZIP so this isn't a concern anymore.
I also remember reading somewhere (maybe
Well if the fonts in a PDF aren't on your system then you can't view them, obviously. But how is this any different from any other word processor file? The nice part is that fonts can (and in most cases, should) be embedded into the PDF so if anything, this is another reason to use PDF over something like RTF.
- j
It is important to note that the person who submitted the OSNews.com story "mneptok" is an employee of Gobe Software. Check out the shameless self promotion.
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Oh yeah, fuck you too.