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OpenOffice.org: New Beta, and Ximianization
sander writes "OpenOffice.org, everybody's
favourite non-Microsoft office suite has just released a beta of its next version, OpenOffice.org 1.1. It's up for downloading , but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any cool screen shots anywhere???? The new release comes with a large variety of new features, from real goodies like Flash export for the slide shows , support for WYSIWYG DocBook/XML and mySQL databases to pretty boring ones like better footnotes (whatever that means)." And wahgnube writes "Here are the slides from Michael Meeks' presentation at the Open Office conference in Germany which give us details regarding the changes made by Ximian. Can't wait for the next major Ximian GNOME Desktop release."
Where is the info about ximinia... Ximimim... ximininia... Awww screw it!
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
It looks like Michael and his team have done great things with OO, and that the OO team has also made great improvements.
Does anyone on either team want to comment on how many of the Ximian changes are in the OO 1.1 beta?
"support for WYSIWYG DocBook/XML and mySQL databases "
I recently (over spring break) built a machine for my mother's workplace. She actually had a worker interested in Linux, and so she let me dual boot the machine with Red Hat 8 and Windows 2000.
However, yesterday she sent me an email wondering where the Access-like program is in Red Hat. Honestly, I touched Access a little bit in some painful computer apps class I took a few years ago in high school, and never really had the need to do anything it's suitable for on my Linux box in the passed few years. Therefore, I have very little experience in the area.
I did find some PDFs about how to set up Open Office to work with MySQL, but they were definetly much too complex to set up than they really should be. I could have her set up SSH and perform then I could perform the install remotely, but the less I have to do the better. Additionally, the more she can learn to do by herself, the better.
Does this recent release improve the situition?
Ack, now I'm getting all confused.
I thought Ximian had committed themselves to Gnome Office. Now I'm very happy to see their work on OpenOffice.
With all due respect to the Gnome Office people, I'd much rather that developers commit themselves to a more fully integrated, cross-platform, OSS office suite like OpenOffice.org then something that only runs a system with GTK & Linux.
Sure, Abiword is cross-platform, but Gnumeric isn't, and neither are many other components in the Gnome Office Suite.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Good news for open source zelots everywhere. I was beginning to wonder what was happening with OOo. Since the grapevine had been quite for some time I didn't think much development work was going on.
Kudos for everyone involved. I look forward to the full release with bated breath. There are a number of niggles and annoyances that were really beginning to get to me, thankfully they appear to be addressed in the new version.
One feature I would like to see would be some form of "talkback" a-la Mozilla. That could make bug spotting easier for them. Nice shiny rpms and debs would also help people rather than just a tarball.
Keep up the good work! When I learn to program well enough I may give them a hand.
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
I like OpenOffice. I use it on the primary Win box at home and the linux laptop. But dear God I must have offended some deity because not only will it only run as root for me (on Linux, obviously) but the thing takes several minutes to boot up, if I'm lucky! Sometimes it just complains about missing some printer related binaries (that I can't ever find to get installed) and crashes completely. Once up, though, it stays up, so that's a goodness.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Can anyone tell me what is meant on page 14 of the slideshow by:
"MS the default format"
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
just downloaded the beta and dispite the lack of any visual improvements they did get the load time from over 5 secconds to around 2. ;)
I've tried to install the last two OS X releases with no luck. Last time it installed some required libraries and then hung on the main part; this time it hung upon opening and had to be kill -9'd from a terminal. (Go Unix underpinnings!)p.Not quite sure what to put in a bug report since I'm not sure what the expecte installer behavior is.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
A reason why 1.0 got kicked off my PC within days after the install was the total lack of support for crossreferences. I was nearly converted to Open Office until I tried to insert a reference to some numbered section in my document. There was just no way to do it. I checked the documentation, helpfiles, web forums, newsgroups and eventually I discovered that this feature was simply not implemented.
In Latex, word, wordperfect, framemaker etc. you can insert a reference to e.g. section numbers, figure numbers, literature references, etc. Not in open office. There is something called crossreference but it is really some sort of bookmark feature (i.e. you can set a reference and then refer to it). That of course is totally inadequate. I recently browsed issuezilla to see if there was any activity around this IMHO showstopping issue (as far as I'm concerned). But I couldn't find much at all. Apparently its a known issue, some persons are assigned to bugs related to this issue (e.g. 3802 & 4439) but not much else seems to have happened since these bugs were filed (pre 1.0 beta). I was hoping that this would be addressed in 1.1 but judging from issuezilla they are not taking this very seriously.
I'm currently using framemaker and ms word. The latter is unstable & generally sucks for large documents and Framemaker isn't getting the maintenance it needs to remain competitive (last two versions basically did not add anything useful). I want to replace them with a stable alternative like open office. However, crossreferences are important to me. I use them all the time and manual updates are not an option for me. I can live with some UI quirkyness (plenty of that in open office), lack of clippy, poor usability, poor performance, etc. but the basic functionality needs to be there.
Jilles
from real goodies like Flash export for the slide shows..... to pretty boring ones like better footnotes (whatever that means).
.
Uh, yeah. Like what do footnotes mean, when we can have pretty Flash Animation
Sometimes it's embarassing to admit associating with some of the people who frequent this site.
OK, so where does it actually say that Flash export exists? So far as I can see it's only at the stage of being talked about as a future feature.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
- PDF export and mailing
- DocBook import/export
- Improved Online Help
- Autodetection of newly installed languages for spellchecker, thesaurus and hyphenator
- Accessibility Support (including Windows)
- Support for recovering slightly damaged OpenOffice.org files
- Flash export of presentations/drawings
Now the list of refinements in the individual applications is quite minimal, and yes there is scope to improve them all, but 3 of the above are issues I have been dealing with recently (pdf, docbook and language files) and I'm over the moon to see them about to appear. As with all Free software, the only real reply to you is can you do the work or will you pay towards having the work done? If the answer to both of these is no, then you have to accept that it is work done by volunteers (at least to you they are volunteering their work even if someone is paying them for it) and that they will do what they want first and won't prioritise your desires. If you want your issues taken more seriously, put your money where you mouth is (or your coding skills). If you can't afford to pay for the work, be thankful you haven't already had to pay for all the work thats been done.Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Unlike all the other office software that looks beautiful and sexy, Openoffice looks like a trashy prostitute. ;)
The promise of Mr. Project is cool, but it seems that everytime I try to install a gnome application (SuSE 8.1) I get caught up in dependency hell... Will MrProject be ported to OpenOffice? Are there any other MS Project alternatives in the open source world that are fairly feature complete?
I can't wait. Have you seen the OO bonobo demo? It's wickedly sweet.
PDF export and mailing
Already had PDF export. Really nice, I use it all the time for my colleagues stuck using MSOffice.
DocBook import/export
Yay! It's about time. This will make writing technical documents a breeze. If it will import/export proper DocBook, this could go a long ways towards ridding the world of MSWord as the defacto "standard" for technical documents.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
It's not a question of doing feature X that you think is unimportant over feature Y which the whole world wants. A developer is not a drone capable of having his skill allocated just anywhere you please. I don't write 90% of the things I have the skill to write, and that's because I don't want to write them. If I weren't doing what I'm doing, however useless, I'd be doing something even less useful. I would not be fixing the bits that you need fixing.
What I'm saying here is it's not either/or, choose a feature. It's "Do you want this feature, or would you rather get nothing?" I'd much rather have a guy working on Flash export on OOo than have him off on some pet project which goes nowhere.
I want my Cowboyneal
Do you even know what DocBook is?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
So what? It is better to have an ADEQUATE alternative to MS Office which works for SOME people PART of the time then to have no choice at all.
Personally, I've never used footnotes. For me docbook support is more important. But it's not about what I want, or what are 'necessary' features. It's all about what people are willing to do, and I am glad to have whatever they offer.
I want my Cowboyneal
So let me get this straight the people working on OS/FS projects don't have a clue about whats important and the people working in commercial software do? What about StarOffice then, it is commercial software and it is based on OO.o and hence updates go both ways. How many pieces of commercial software do you sit there and look at the release notes and go "thank god they dealt with all the things I needed them to, and they didn;t add one thing I didn;t want". You seem to believe that core functionality is missing from OO.o, but that depends on your target market! If you ask my Aunt it's fine, cause she just wants to get work done and despite going from wordstar on a 286 to OO.o 1.0 on a Pentium she has yet to come back with a single question on how to do anything after she was given two pages of notes on how to use the system by my 60 year old mother who uses Word97 all the time and had looked at OO.o for about 20 minutes before she gave it to my Auntie, agreeing to deal with any problems my Aunt had! If you ask me it's fine, but I don't do much power stuff with office, I just slap together some documents and spreadsheets. Pdf creation facilities are not in Windows or Linux at an OS level, and something like a PDF can be created so many ways it's just not funny, so if OO.o can produce lovely pdfs by using it's own native tools I think thats magic, and crushes the problems of sending documents electronically. When you want to get the work done, do you send someone a pdf, or do you send them a word doc? Which gets less replies?
As for what you have said that is ignorant, re-read your posts and ask yourself one question, if you heard a human talk with all those swear words would you think they were ignorant (or at least had some form of speech impediment). And also stating that you know more about something than someone else when you don't know them and you are unwiliing to provide any indentifier for yourself is also ignorant. Care to login and continue?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
If you go to the OOO OS X page, download the program, and make sure you read the whole page and have the right things in the right places, it works fine. I'm running 10.2.4 on a PBG4 800 btw.
You are completely mistaken. Windows does NOT have PDF functionality built into it ANYWHERE. Yes, you can use *Postscript* drivers for some printer in Windows, but that is NOT PDF. Why don't you go and do something about your ignorance with regard to computers? If you want PDF capabilities in Windows, you need to buy the Adobe product. So, you are completely wrong (as usual), it's NOT built into the OS.
Hehehehe. I like the asswipe post from the other AC. It's VERY appropriate.
Un-news
Running out of steam are we asswipe?
Un-news
they are the dirtyest :^)
everything is not perfect spheres