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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,
The Word .doc file format has not yet been mastered, no powerpoint compatibility, poor lettering on Glyphs, no sound or video.
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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
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.
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
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.
Don't you think that learning the basic, grade-school-levels skills like spelling and grammer would be a more appropriate reaction than this whining? If you don't like being accused of bad grammer, learn to use good grammer. If you don't like constructive criticism about your spelling, learn to spell. No, a spelling checker won't help ... did you really want to say affect or effect?
See what I've been reading.
Ah yes, the valuable "dont-want-to-pay market." They are, of course, the real prize market that most companies shoot for.
Gobe's price is a THIRD of the Office UPGRADE price!
The problem is that they aren't good office suites. (Don't know about Gobe.)
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... I USE!! those features!).
I need indexes, tables of contents, style sheets,
StarOffice is getting close. But it's not there yet. KOffice doesn't have any sort of index. AbiWord didn't impress the last time I looked. Applixware hasn't been updated in a few years. Word Perfect doesn't work with recent Linux distributions. KLyx has disappeared from KDE. Etc.
KOffice and AbiWord have seemed the major hopes, but haven't been very impressive yet. (This weekend I ended up borrowing my wife's computer so I could use MS Word to organize a small collection of poems (with table of contents and index
To be absolutely truthful, at the moment the best word processor on Linux seems to be a combination of a browser and a text editor (write it in html, and then look, to make sure you got it right), but this isn't very appropriate for printed output.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But seriously, flaming someone for poor grammar in a language that's not their native one is really, really, really lame... English is my native language, and I'm sure my grammar and spelling leave somthing to be desired, but that's becuase I don't care enough to check everything. The reviewer is trying above and beyond the call of duty (ever tried to speak a foreign language? if you haven't, don't bother sharing your opinion) to be intelligible, and a such deserves to be applauded, not flamed.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
You're right, and you're right.
Microsoft does produce good software, sometimes the best in its class and usually "good enough" if not.
Microsoft also illegally attempts to make sure that nobody else can create products to compete with theirs, or failing that to make sure that nobody could sell these products.
The fact that any of Microsoft's products would have won in the marketplace anyways does not diminish the fact that Microsoft breaks the law to ensure this happens.
PS: Does GISBoy refer to Geographical Information Systems? I'm starting to look into that sort of thing. I've tried using Grass, it's a completely unusable piece of crap as far as I can tell. Any good software or docs you can recommend?
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
When a spelling flame, using hate-filled language like "basic grammer skills", gets modded up, you know it's time to find some other site which isn't such an asshole magnet.
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