Panther's TextEdit to Open MS Word Files

2muchcoffeeman writes "Further signs that Jobs and Gates probably won't be vacationing together anytime soon: New Damage has what looks to be screenshot proof of Panther's TextEdit.app opening a Microsoft Word .DOC file. Panther beta users who have tried this report at MacSlash that it works, to a point. So what's next? Is Apple now going to bring back the late, great MacWrite Pro?"

Comments

Openoffice.org?

[xyrw]

Apple could surely use code from Openoffice.org to create an LGPL component that could do the conversion for them... couldn't they? It would be so much better than firing up Oo.O for a simple Word document.

Re:Openoffice.org?

[dbrutus]

It would be inconvenient as they're actually trying to create a programmer's tool in cocoa so that you can write and read from .doc as if it were a simple text file. The TextEdit capability is just a sample app to show that their project code is working. They could start with Oo.O but they probably would need to completely rewrite it so why bother?

Apple is stepping up

[chia_monkey]

Apple has been getting bold. And I love it. I still wonder about it all though. Safari rocks. Of course MS gets scared and stops making IE for Mac. FinalCut Pro kicks ass. Now Adobe wants to stop making Premier for the Mac. Apple has Keynote to compete with PowerPoint. And PDF creation with OS X is damn simple.

Apple is taking on all the big boys...something you just don't see these days. It's very exciting. And let's all be honest. Why do Mac users buy MS Office? Because it's good? Nope. So they can open up .doc files made on a PC. Go Apple!

Re:Apple is stepping up

[Atzanteol]

Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

Seriously, this is what I've always hated about both companies. They *need* control over their platform. Apple has a draconian rule over their hardware, and is pushing for more of the same in software. Microsoft will simply crush opposition in software, but is pretty reasonable about hardware (drivers are another issue).

Re:Apple is stepping up

[PeeweeJD]

Why do Mac users buy MS Office? Because it's good? Nope. So they can open up .doc files made on a PC.

Actually it is good. It does not conform 100% to the apple OSX guidelines, but it is close enough for me. Its also fast and stable.

It is also nice to be able to create documents and share them with those less fortunate (Windows people). There is no spreadsheet program that is near what Excel does.

Openoffice.org is great and all that, but until they can get it to run outside of an X window system, it can't compete with MS Office on the mac.

If Apple wants to kick MS square in the nuts, they need to put out some kind of competitive office suite that opens up, and saves MS office files. It would not surprise me if they did the same thing with OOo as they did with safari. Apple has been burning alot of bridges lately with MS and there is only one left that I can see hat matters any (MS Office)

Re:Apple is stepping up

[cpeterso]

When did Microsoft ever MAKE money from IE for Mac?

Re:Apple is stepping up

[Jucius Maximus]

"Safari rocks. Of course MS gets scared and stops making IE for Mac."

Safari was just an excuse. MSFT was planning on discontinuing IE for the mac for a long time now and Apple knew it. MSFT will use a backwards version of the tactic they used to oust netscape from the browser market. They will use their browser monopoly and IE features integrated into Longhorn OS to marginalise the OS market. You'll need Longhorn to access web services (banking, bill payment, etc.) that Microsoft plans to make "essential" and exclusive to windows users. That way they attack Apple and any other OS rivals simultaneously. Damn those MSFT busienss strategists are smart...

Why? Because it makes sense.

Re:Apple is stepping up

[American AC in Paris]

Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

Seriously, this is what I've always hated about both companies. They *need* control over their platform. Apple has a draconian rule over their hardware, and is pushing for more of the same in software. Microsoft will simply crush opposition in software, but is pretty reasonable about hardware (drivers are another issue).

To each his own. I've never held it against Cuisinart that I can't use cheaper Hamilton-Beach parts in my food processor. I don't begrudge the fact that I can't buy a Hyundai Town Car. I don't hold it against Apple that I can't call up Bob's Discount Apple Parts and build my own OS X box.

Apple makes a damn solid product, box to bits. Part of the reason they can do this is that they don't need to waste time and money trying to support several thousand incrementally different sound cards, network adapters, modems, video cards, mainboards, etc.

Re:Apple is stepping up

[rtm1]

Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

I don't think so really. If MS announced that Office was going to support OpenOffice native formats and KOffice formats then would we be upset? Probably not.

The difference is that Apple is supporting more standards and formats, while MS typically tries to force their own standards on you to the exclusion of all others. And when MS does implement other people's standards they typically throw in some proprietary 'feature' that fosters incompatibility.. That's what we scream bloody murder about.

Re:Apple is stepping up

[dbrutus]

Web services nightmare

July 4, 2006

Dear Mr. Bank CEO,

Apple customers + Linux customers are about 7% of the desktop market. The xxx Bank web banking solution doesn't support anything but Internet Explorer which is not available on any platform but Windows. As a shareholder, I'm concerned that we're losing customers and money because of this. I intend to bring this up at the shareholder's meeting. You're in the business of making the bank's shareholders money, not shilling for Microsoft. There is *no* reason not to support everybody's computer platform. Their money spends just as well.

Sincerely,

Large shareholder mac user

Re:Apple is stepping up

[BitGeek]

Thats kinda silly-- Apple does control their hardware-- nothing draconian about it.

AS to their software, they are not trying to be the only software provider for their platform-- they spend millions every year building free development tools, and working to get the message out.

They built safari and then released a killer webkit to allow any app builder to easily put a html renderer (or web browser) into thier app. This isn't draconian-- they recognize that there are a lot of apps that could use web or http access conveneintly for unexpected things, and so they provide support for it.

Apple is really kicking ass in developmetn tools-- they aren't top of the line yet, but they have a lot more momentum than even open source ones like eclipse. They want everyone to develop for the mac platform.

The only places where they are competing head to head with third party developers are ones where those developers are working to kill the mac platform.

Premiere on the mac SUCKED and has sucked for years, driving many Mac users to windows. Office is designed to do the same thing.

Thank god apple is finally going after those people who are working to undermine their platform and showing that the best of breed video editing (for instance) is once agian on the mac platform.... and with good reason given the great multimedia platofrm they've built with quicktime and their hardware.

This isn't control-- its support for the platform!

Re:Apple is stepping up

[Maserati]

I'm not keeping numbers at work, but PowerpointX is right behind Quark 4.11 as my #1 source of trouble calls. Lately, I've just been opening them in Keynote (we only have one license for the moment) resaving them as .ppt's and sending them back. This usually cuts the file size down by a third and solves a lot of simple corruption issues. I switch an executive assistant to Keynote tomorrow.

EntourageX is #3 on my list, and I'm looking forward to the improved mail.app in Panther, as it is right now, mail.app is completely unusable for someone bumping into EntourageX's 4GB database limitation. I want it faster, a lot faster before I start deploying it. We used AppleScript for the QuickMail Pro-> Entourage migration (a bigger upgrade than going to Mail.app will be), so that won't be a big hassle.

G5s this Fall !

Re:Apple is stepping up

[thaddjuice]

I think that what we're trying to say the difference here is that Apple has been putting out products that are better and the other companies are realizing that they can't compete. Adobe and MS aren't withdrawing Premiere and IE because Apple is doing anything to suppress their ability to develop for the platform. Apple is just making better software, plain and simple. MS drives the competition away by bullying OEMs and closing standards. That's why we scream bloody murder.

Re:Apple is stepping up

[carou]

Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

Not at all - Apple wins customers by making products which are better (or better value) than the competitor's offering.

Yes, iMovie is (effectively) free, and perhaps that discourages the light users from buying high-end packages from third parties. But that's obviously not Adobe's core market, and when you want to move to a more advanced program you can freely choose between Final Cut or Premiere, and it's a level playing field. That's perfectly fair competition.

The fact that Adobe have decided they can't compete with Final Cut is no indication of foul play.

Microsoft win customers by making the competitor's product unviable. (e.g. bringing up bogus error messages to incite FUD, or making their own products difficult (or impossible) to uninstall, or strongarming OEMs into contracts which bias the market in Microsoft's favour.)

I think a lot of Microsoft's Mac products are better than their PC equivalents: on windows, they can rely on their monopoly to get sales; on the Mac they actually need to make a superior program, because there's no other reason to use it by default.

So Apple are making a simple editor which can read .doc files? Big deal - a low end program will only attract low end customers. The sort of people who only needed to buy Word because of the number of .doc files they have to read, and that's only because so many other Word users don't know better than to send text files as .doc attachemts to emails. This market should never have existed anyway.

Now, I'm sure that TextEdit won't compete with the features of Word, and the people who actually need that program can quite easily buy and install it. Apple are not blocking those potential customers from spending their money on Microsoft.

Re:PDF

[danrees]

Because when you use shift-cmd-3 (full-screen) or shift-cmd-4 (area) to take a screengrab, Mac OS X uses PDF for its output.

Re:PDF

[djward]

PDF is the default screen capture format in Mac OS X (10.2), and I assume in Panther as well.

This might work, but then again maybe not...

[danrees]

The problem with any application providing support for MS Office formats is that the format changes from version to version, therefore it is difficult to preserve the content and formatting of documents perfectly. Anybody using OpenOffice.org will notice that formatting done on MS Word is modified slightly when opened in OpenOffice.org - for documents where layouts are more complicated and space matters (e.g. CVs), this causes problems.

If Apple can create a filter that preserves complex formatting, it should be on to a winner for home users. However, I somewhat doubt that Apple can do so, when Microsoft's own versions of Office can't even cope with changes in the file format...

Re:This might work, but then again maybe not...

[figleaf]

Word/Excel formats didn't change in Office XP.
Powerpoint formats haven't changed since Office 97

Freeware app that gives similar functionality

[xyrw]

Here's a link to a freeware app that already enables Cocoa applications to do a similar thing, but with text only: AntiWord Service. It works on Mac OS X 10.1.5 and higher.

It works

[Anonymous Coward]

It works, but it's not perfect, in some of my documents there are some minor problems, mostly with escape characters. Though, more importantly the fonts are rendered beautifully, instead of the jagged fonts that one has to deal with when using Office v.X.

Re:PDF

[Kvorg]

They used pdf because it is the easiest format on the MacOSX, of course. The Quartz layer is running DisplayPDF, a subset of PDF (analogous to the relationship of DisplayPS of the late NeXTStep, and regular PS): that is what gives the smooth and fast look of vector graphics and permits for blazing fast GL-accelerated PDF rendering. It also means PDF is a very basic part of the system (see Quartz reference and Quartz 2D library ("Quartz 2D gives you access to powerful features such as path-based drawing, advanced color management, anti-aliasing, Bézier curves, PDF generation and playback, and transparency"). So PDF is the default MacOS format, these days.

A good slashdotter would peek in the file and notice this:

Producer: Mac OS X 10.3 Quartz PDFContext

It would have been kind of cool if the window would be rendered in vector graphics, in the reality, and directly displayed to PDF. A vector desktop still seems to be a dream, or did I get something wrong?

Re:PDF

[tyrione]

The Quartz Extreme Rendering Engine original Display Postscript for Openstep now takes advantage of Postscript Primitives in PDF, plus direct hardware rendering to the GPU via other custom APIs to produce an advanced UI that renders line by line in real-time, smoothly with anti-aliasing built-in, plus never a loss of window viewing when one is moving them around the desktop.

I had no idead EPS could manage and update Postscript coordinate points from Global to Local, on the fly?

Office Package Speculation

[Johnny Mozzarella]

I have heard rumors of Apple working on an Office suite which includes a word processor called "Document" and a spreadsheet app cleverly called "Spreadsheet". It seems as though they are going to test and hopefully perfect the most important feature in TextEdit first, reading .doc files.

Once they have the bugs worked out, they will release Document which will be able to open .doc files perfectly and resave them into Document's native XML format. Document will hopefully be available for Mac OS X and Windows.

Microsoft's .doc format has a death grip on the business world. Unless there is an affordable alternative that can read .doc files it isn't going very far.

The word processor is the only piece of the office package that most users need. Apple should make just Document for the PC and make it affordable. It will introduce many PC users to how software should be written. Like the iPod it will be a trojan horse that will hopefully cause them to consider a Mac for their next purchase.

This won't replace office until

[commodoresloat]

...Apple puts a talking paperclip into TextEdit

HOLY FUCK.

[Mikey-San]

I just got Slashdotted.

So far, I'm holding up, thanks to Smallbits, my host. AWESOME host, also host of Bungie.org.

I am going to make a t-shirt that says: "I've been Slashdotted. Have you?"

Re:HOLY FUCK.

[elemental23]

Slashdot should give a t-shirt out to their vict^H^H^H^Hlinked web site admins reading "I got Slashdotted and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".

Re:The question is...

[andrewski]

Never. The other stuff aside from Darwin is closed and will likely remain so. They are reimplemented in GNUstep fairly completely today. It isn't just possible, but rather trivial to port from one to the other if that is a design factor.

Darwin, however, is both open source and Free Software.

After all, when they went to BSD, they inherited most all the apps and filters from Linux too.

OS X is based on Rhapsody, which was Openstep 5.0, which was based on OpenStep 4, which was based on Nextstep 3.3, and all but OS X trace their lineage to BSD 4.3 (IIRC). OS X is based off FreeBSD, which too traces its lineage to BSD 4.4. The new Panther is supposedly based off FreeBSD 5.x series, which almost gives me wood. Linux never really gave much to Apple. Apple did, however, port Linux to a great many Macs though, and gave that project to the community.

Apple is indebted to the FSF for its use of GCC, like Next was before it, and generally has played really well with the community in recent years.

Apple's versus MS's tactics

[Slur]

Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?

No, absolutely not. The things that have bugged me have been:

• Leveraging their OS monopoly and closed data formats to create barriers to competition rather than making a better product. (Internet Explorer, DirectX, etc.)
• Pretending to embrace standards then creating extensions that make their version incompatible and platform-locked. (Java being the prime example.)
• Using FUD - misrepresenting competing methods and technologies - in order to make themselves appear better. (Most recently pretending that Safari uses hidden APIs.)
• Creating silly political initiatives like the Freedom To Innovate Network (FIN), astroturfing, and occasional phone surveys to create the appearance of grass-roots support.

All that Apple has done is to push standards, make excellent use of open standards and Open Source APIs, and apply a consistent and elegant design aesthetic to their OS and their applications. In short, they have excelled through integrity and hard work. If Apple has an unfair advantage, it is only that they have applied a greater effort than others seem to have the courage to do.

Re:PDF

[kilgore_47]

PDF is a native graphics format for MacOS X.
open /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemStarter/QuartzD isplay.bundle/Resources/BootPanel.pdf
Look familiar? (on preview: drop the space in "QuartzD isplay" that slashcode put there)

A vector desktop

[Redundant offtopic t]

It would have been kind of cool if the window would be rendered in vector graphics, in the reality, and directly displayed to PDF. A vector desktop still seems to be a dream, or did I get something wrong?

When I first heard of Apple using display pdf for the gui and high resolution icons in something named "the dock", I was hoping that they had implemented what SGI did with their OpenGL--vector graphics on the desktop. Now, that was (is still? been 10 years, kinda hazy) an amazing desktop. each window had a thumbwheel that would continuously scale the icons in the window. the icon for the media drive would change to show empty/full/in use by overlayed animation. Eye candy, sure, but informative eye candy. Main things about a vectorized gui--clarity and speed.

Seems to me that apple has everything in place to do this--opengl and display pdf. They can go a step further to my ultimate dream--resolution independent wysiwyg. That is, system-wide, having 12 point type be 12 points high whether the display is 72ppi or 123ppi. Also, having the menu bar stay the same apparent height through resolution changes. (yes, my eyes are getting old.) Win hints at doing this with small/med/large font selections, but Apple has the technology to do it right.

NSText

[rohanl]

When I read the parent, it occurred to me that this is much more than TextEdit being able to read Word files.

TextEdit is a very simple program. Apple even supply the full source for it in the developer tools under /Developer/Examples/AppKit/TextEdit

All the real work is done by standard Cocoa classes NSTextView and NSTextStorage. If TextEdit understands Word files, it means that they have added the support to these standard classes. That means that *ALL* cocoa applications will inherit this functionality.

Re:Fucking PDFs

[BitGeek]

I think Jacob Nielsen is the Rush Limbaugh of design: A blowhard with no grasp of the facts.

IF he didn't pretend like his opinions were fact, or in some objective sense true, he wouldn't be as annoying.

Hell, I know people who still think images on webpages are overkill... They're free to design their sites with that in mind if they want... but they don't go telling everyone that theirs is the One True Way.

Nielson is not an authority- he's just opinionated.

Re:That's not only awesome, but..

[slughead]

no of course not

syntax coloring is for people who make mistakes :)

How is this different from WordPad?

[putaro]

WordPad, bundled with Windows (at least it's in Win2K, I don't have an XP box to check) will open basic Word documents just fine. I'm still waiting for my Panther CD's so I can't check the limits of TextEdit.

So, OS X will now have some basic functionality built into it that Windows does. That's good, but I don't think it's the end of MS Office.

Re:NSMicrosoftDoc

[robbieduncan]

I went one better for you. I compiled and ran the version of TextEdit supplied as example code with XCode on Panther. It was able to open a .doc file. I can confirm that it is using NSTextView and NSTextStorage (not custom subclasses) to do this. So it looks like all Cocoa apps using text views will be able to provide basic .doc file handling for free. Very nice :)