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,
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
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.