gobeProductive 3.0 - Office XP killer?

Deffexor writes "It appears that gobe (that famous software company that made the invaluable "office suite" for BeOS) has unveiled their v3.0 release of gobeProductive for Windows and Linux. ArsTechnica has an excellent review of why this is such an important "office suite". While gobeProductive isn't as full-featured as OfficeXP, it certainly does garner a whole lot of Bang-for-the-Buck (especially with the FamilyLicense). The author does a great job of summarizing the superiority of gobeProductive in his conclusion when he says,"This review, which is fifteen pages of graphics and text (in the word processor), along with 5 separate sheets chock full of information, only uses 7MB of RAM while running. Microsoft Word XP (WINWORD.EXE), sitting idle with nothing open, uses 11MB of RAM."" Of course, RAM usage doesn't matter as much these days, with the standard RAM installed being above 128 megs, but still good to know. Update by RM, 8:58 US EST: Only the Windows version of gobeProductive v3.0 seems to be available at this time.

Comments

Re:Linux?

[Ghazgkull]

They mention the Linux version here:

http://gobe.com/press/pr8_29_2001.html

pricing and availablity

[Alien54]

As seen on the order page, it costs about 80 dollars, and is available for Windows and BeOs.

Some of which seems a bit odd.

Re:Compatible

[qurk]

Well, the article states it had a little problem importing some word documents, mostly in tables and charts, and the flow of text around images.

Re:Linux?

[Steev]

From the FAQ:

Q: The initial release this fall is Windows only. How do I get the Linux version?
A: There will be a certificate in the package that entitles you to a free Linux installation CD once the Linux version is available. Fill out the certificate and send it to us. Once the Linux version of gobeProductive is released we will send a CD to you.

Q: Will both Windows and Linux installation CDs come with the package after the Linux version is completed?
A: Yes.

Re:The only thing that matters

[afidel]

the winmail.dat problem can be solved 2 ways, one is tell the sending party to change send format from rtf to either text, or if they must have pretty fonts and colors to html, this way outlook will use mime encoding instead of making the entire message one big rtf package. The other one is to run exchange server as the server will break the message apart if it is destined for a non-native client.

Re:Ram usage doesn't matter???!

[Bake]

You could have defragged your disk and then run pagedefrag from Sysinternals.

It's usually best not to mess with the pagefile. Just let pagedefrag defragment it for you. The only catch is that you have to reboot to defrag the pagefile since pagedefrag needs full access to the disk. Oh and it also defrags your registry and other system files.

Re:Compatibility w. Office?

[CynicTheHedgehog]

I ran some of my Word documents through it and a few things jump out at me:

1. Font and style importing seems to work perfectly
2. It destroys any table formatting you have, and in some cases drops the entire table (leaving only the contents as lines of text)
3. It won't wrap tables. Tables get pushed to the beginning of the next page.
4. It drops any kind of bullets you may have had. Again, the text is still there, it's just no longer bulletted
5. It can't align text vertically (title pages have all the text scrunched up at the top). This is a feature I wish more word processors supported.
6. OLE objects? Forget it.
7. Word drawing tools/objects? Forget it.

Also, when saving into Office format, this is what I noticed:

1. Word can't even load some documents with tables--it complains that the tables are corrupt
2. Table formatting is gone
3. Bullets are gone

And last, but not least, when saving as HTML I got these results:

1. Table formatting is gone (you get ugly 3-D 4px borders, HTML default)
2. Bullets are gone
3. Font formatting seems to work perfectly

However, I did notice some endearing things:

1. You can select non-contiguous portions of text and format them
2. Styles and table formatting are intuitive and easy, assuming you unlearn the way you do it in Word.
3. Menu options are more informative
4. Fewer unnecessary features (less clutter, more room for frequently used options on the main menus)
5. Spreadsheet has impressive functionality

Moral of the story: if you use gobeProductive and ONLY gobeProductive, it's pretty darn good. But if you have to interface with ANYTHING else, you're S.O.L.

Re:It might be a great product but...

[Anonymous Coward]

A few observations:

• MS OFFICE is now essentially an un-reviewed corporate purchase item. I'm willing to bet most companies spend more time deciding between janitorial or coffee/refreshment services than they do reviewing their office suite expenditures.
  
• It'd be interesting if there was a tool you could run across your HD to pull up all Office docs and report the page size of them. It might help to note that it doesn't take a $300 Office Suite to author 1-3 page documents. I'm writing a book right now (it's notes and scraps at the moment) and I would specifically prefer NOT to write it in a MS product. Thankfully, I have the option of doing that.
  
• Most corporate PCs cost ~$1200 or less (having worked at a lot of dotcoms, everyone but the developers got machines than were less than $1000; this was certainly true at Charles Schwab) but they'll give up a few hundred dollars every year or two for Office.
  
• Developers are used to using different tools at new jobs .. occasionally certain kinds of developers will find themselves in loose development environments that let them migrate their emacs or other favorite tools into their new jobs. Apparently nobody else in an organization can handle this.
  
• Office suite users are, BY AND LARGE, the least demanding of users but it's their lack of technical flexibility that makes Office the default set-up. (this point specifically excludes power users like legal employees and such).
  
• My cynical view is that within most small- to medium- sized organizations the group that would scream loudest FOR Office would be the marketing organization, and their job, as defined, is to change or influence purchasing behavior. The irony here is huge.
  
• How often do you really change documents with someone who can't be asked to re-send in RTF?
  
• Alternatives to MS are still frustrated by other apps, too: I run Opera full-time, but since installing GetRight I can't get multimedia to work properly at all; form handling is often screwed up; Yahoo shows double-stacked ads in Opera. There is no decent email app alternative to Outlook on Windows (hate hate hate Eudora). Fortunately the mail apps on Linux are still very strong; but on Windows not so much (yes, I can probably run pine/mutt in cygwin, but it's not the same). And as another side note: why don't Windows-based mail apps color quoted text? WYSIWYG shouldn't preclude mark-ups that clarify content, IMHO.
  
• These guys need to port Gobe to OS X.
  

Re:It's nice to read reviews and all, but..

[snarfer]

There's a trialversion at http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10016-100-853 9292.html?tag=st.dl.10001-103-1.lst-7-1.8539292

Re:It might be a great product but...

[ictatha]

That's probably because you did the logical thing and searched for it on the Microsoft site. I did this earlier and couldn't find anything either... So I went to Google, searched for "MS word viewer", and the first link that popped up went right to a microsoft site where I could find a MS Word viewer.