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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,
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
"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 :-)
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.
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
This will also mean that people can use the suite at home and bring there work with them to the office. The local OA geek wont be up in arms (as much) if they have a license for a local machine... this will help Gobe put a wedge into business machines - they will be able to have their suite seen by IT types and managment...this is an EXCELLENT idea.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.