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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,
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.
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).
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"
"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.
Search for ps2pdf, espitopdf, db2pdf, dvi2pdf, html2pdf, a2pdf, even pdf2pdf (for different versions). All free software, or it wouldn't be on my debian box :-)
Err... GhostScript will happily write PDF's. Try, for example, the ps2pdf command.
I sure as hell don't see it under Word2000's Save As ;)
But you can get an 'Print to PDF' thingie. You just have to install the Windows version of GhostScript, and some little program they offer on the same site allows you to install it as a printer driver. (it's been a while since used Windows, so I don't remember the details :)
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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."
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.
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.
What? KDE has PRINT to PDF, so any KDE program that can print can also produce PDFs. It doesn't require a license from Adobe, and its really cool.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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
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.
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.
I noticed on the website that you can pre-order Gobe Productive for only $39.95.
No, PDF does not require a license from Adobe. It's a remarkably open file format actually; I'm surprised that it isn't used by open source advocates more often.
- j
The problem is that they aren't good office suites. (Don't know about Gobe.)
...
... 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.
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
Yeah... that's how I always have thought of it. Except, when saying it out loud, it sounds wierd to make it into two words... so I just say "gobe" like "globe" but without the l sound. ;)
In case you haven't figured that out, it rhymes with these words:
- globe
- robe
- Moby (but without the "ee" sound)
- etc.
They did more than a few betas of Gobe Productive- the last of the Be line was Gobe Productive 2.0, which handled .doc more smoothly than any other non-MS product I've ever seen.
Worked magificently on BeOS 5 Pro and PE.
Buy the thing now, and you can get the windows and linux version for the same money. use it on win at work (if you suffer like the rest of us) and linux at home.
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
Yes, it was awesome. I've used ClarisWorks for 10 years. Prior to that, other Claris products for Mac. i.e. MacDraw, MacWrite.
I remember a friend saying many years ago "In ClarisWorks you can do anything!" And he's right.
The drawing surface is really a poor man's page layout program. You can set up multiple text boxes where the text will overflow from one box to the next. Set up complex multiple column layouts, and when you edit text in an earlier box, the text "flows" throughout the "linked" text boxes. Setup multiple "chains" of linked textboxes if you wish. Each text box has full word processing features. Wrap text around odd shaped pictures. Draw complex pictures. Paint pictures. (Paint is pixmap based, Draw is vector-object based.) Make slideshows.
Put spreadsheets into wordprocessing, to form tables. Directly draw or paint inside word processing documents. Even play a QuickTime movie inside of a word processing document. (It prints as a still image.) Spinning logos in letterhead or slideshows.
In fact, the biggest thing that I thought ClarisWorks lacked was that its pixel manipulation (i.e. Paint) is not more Photoshop like.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
It was originally on BeOS, so Gobe is Go Be Productive. Its a pun.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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