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EIOffice 2004 vs. MS Office 2003
ryen writes "Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore able to run on both Windows and Linux. EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? Flexbeta has the review." That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.
That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.
Heh. Not anymore.
Ack, even I'm getting tired of the "we slashdotted your site" jokes.
"Written in Java so it can run on both Windows and Linux"
hehe, what about all the other platforms there's a JVM for? Like, uh, OS X? Solaris?
How myopic.
Anyone remember that one?
Yeah, it flopped.
Java just isn't that great for application development.
While I can try out a million different versions of office, and get equal satisfaction. Everything really comes down to standards.
.doc .xls .ppt standards. M$ is still winning the same game, just different players.
Until there is something 10x more superior than
1) Great another competitor, we should support it
2) Its in Java it will suck
3) Java sucks
4) It should be in Perl
5) It should be in C
6) I use vi and troff.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
But the web site doesn't have any trial versions.
Its hard to put down $150 without seeing if it will actually open up my spreadsheet and documents.
The review had an eval copy, but no such animal on the web site. Too bad; Do you have to wait for a warez copy to figure out if its worth buying? Makes me think they have something to hide.
Believe it or not, I think real Excel compatibility is the hardest to achieve because there are so many different macros (VB Script), charting features, and other goodies in Excel that its easy to get "locked in".
I read the first page then it was gone, anyone have a mirror?
... does it have enough features to get people to switch from OpenOffice?
Was this done by Old MacDonald?
write once, debug everywhere?
The site seems to be slashdotted. And, entire apps written in Java are damn slow, particularly on Linux.
but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office?
No, not as long as Openoffice is kicking ass!!!
I thought that said ELOffice. I was gonna ask if Mexico or on of them southern areas decided to get into the software industry.
Good idea though...seems like Java is really trying to bitchslap MS as often as they can.
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
"EIOffice 2004 puts a word processor, presentation package and spreadsheet into a single application, not a collection of programs. The integration is smooth and deep, and there's a natural feel to the way it all works together."
Is it good enough to never need OLE?
And yet it still has the fatal flaw of no database program.
Build an office suite with a file based database with a GUI and then you can start to attack the MS Access component of MS Office. Until then, you're replicating Star-Office and OpenOffice for some reason (and then trying to sell it for $149 USD on top of that).
Get paid to code OSS
Does anyone know if it's written using Swing? SWT? Something else? depending on that it may actually be very usable (or not).
does this mean that Evermore Integrated Office will be EverLoading on my desktop forEvermore?
I'm sorry, I actually don't hate Java, but I just couldn't help myself
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/gymbrall/
This is great ! I have been waiting for the helpfulness of clippy combined with the performance of java.
I'm sticking with OpenOffice.org for now. Just MHO.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
The problem is, most users are going to want to go through the hassel of converting everything. I am going to agree with a previous post, unless .doc, .xls, etc become standarized... this just wont take off.
The flying hamster of DOOM rains coconuts on your pitiful city.
That might be a record in speed.
/.
Or perhaps, they got linux working on an X-Box, and managed to install Apache? Now we know the xbox can't withstand a
In Canada EI stands for Employment Insurance, something you collect when you lost your job, affectionately known as "The Pogy." So looking at EIOffice, does it mean that your employment in an office is ensured, or is it the Pogy Office where you pick up your cheque?
I have NEVER seen a Java application RUN on Windows. Instead, they just seem to execute slowly...
Since the server is apparantly powered by xbox
w eb en/images/indexBig.jpg
http://freecache.org/http://www.evermoresw.com/
We'll need Longhorn specs to run that. Or else it's.. click.. wait... click...wait... Lazy bums! Write native i386 linux!
-- Friends don't let friends buy Nokia.
Please, to all non-MS developers out there: stop chasing Microsoft!
... well, the instant something doesn't work, or just doesn't work exactly the way they're expecting, they'll dismiss your product as a cheap knockoff.
I understand the motivation behind designing office suites to look like Office clones, window managers to look like Windows clones, etc.: the idea is that people switching from MS products will find it easier to get used to the new software if it looks like what they're used to. But I really think this is a fundamentally flawed line of reasoning, for two reasons.
1. No one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. You may expend endless blood, toil, tears, and sweat trying to clone $MS_PRODUCT down to the last widget, but you'll never get it exactly right. And if you try to lull users into feeling like they're using $MS_PRODUCT
2. Microsoft interfaces may be the "standard," but they're not the best. In almost every market niche I can think of, there's some product that's faster, more powerful, and/or easier to use than whatever Microsoft is pushing. If you're going to copy something, copy something better than Windows, Office, IE, ad nauseam -- or better yet, start with the best as a baseline and innovate from there.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Does that mean that it sucks as much as MSoffice?
My main complaint with MSoffice is that the UI was apparently designed by lunatics. A free, open-source clone of MSoffice is a start, but it will still suck just to be backward compatible. Why doesn't someone put together an office suite that transcends this junky interface?
To their credit, it looks like they've improved on MSoffice in some details, but as long as their goal is still be look/feel compatible with MSoffice, it doesn't make me excited.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Java Apps always felt "creepy" to me. And slow. Have they fixed those problems yet?
That's what I read for a second. I don't know, with OpenOffice around.. The office suite market is one of the ones with highest barriers to entry.. it has both an 800 pound gorilla monopolistic product, and a full-featured open source alternative. Once you have those two elements in a market, it's really really uphill from there, even if you have a good differentiator, like being written in Java.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
As if OpenOffice doesn't need its own speed improvements, now someone wants to try to market one written in Java?!?
Sorry, but Java is ass slow for things of this nature. Office suites are not a good candidate for development in Java.
Is an old news in China.
Five pages compressed into 1 post, lots of pics that I never saw so I think the italics stand for captions.
EIOffice 2004 Vs MS Office 2003 - Page 1
.doc. This and the fact that EIOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office shows that huge efforts were placed to attract MS Office users into switching. Other file formats that EIOffice can save and open are PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel, rich text format, html and txt format.
Posted by Team Flexbeta on 26 May 2004 (28566 views) Rating: 4.94 EIOffice 2004 looks so much like MS Office 2003 that you wouldn't have a hard time getting used to the graphic interface once you get started with it. Coded in Java, EIOffice features a word processor, a spreadsheet application and a presentation graphics application. All three applications look and behave similar to MS Office's applications; Word, Excel and PowerPoint. EIOffice is able to edit and save MS Office file formats as well as a few other formats we will discover soon.
Word Processor
From the screenshot it is clear how EIOffice's word processing suit looks extremely similar to MS Word. The order and shape of the icons are not the only similarities, so is the labeling. For example, the tabs, File, Edit, View, Insert, and Format are all labeled just like in MS Word and in the same exact order. The word processor offers many features such as spell checking, password protecting document, tracking changes and a thesaurus. There is a nice feature which lets you transform the document you are currently working on into a presentation. Though the transformation isn't 100% the way I wanted it to be, a few editing here and there molded the document into a nifty presentation.
EIOffice 2004 Word Processor and MS Word
Another feature which EIOffice 2004 carries is its ability to suggest the entire word you are typing before you finish typing it. For example, when typing the word "feature", by the time the letters "fea" are typed, EIOffice suggest that the word you are trying to type is indeed "feature" and highlights the word for you. A simple enter on the keyboard accepts the word.
The spell checker in EIOffice 2004 works very well though the suggestions are not as relevant as that of MS Office 2003. Using the misspelled word - woship, EIOffice 2004's suggestions were Yoshi, wish, wash, midship and welsh. The same misspelled word in MS Word brought up the correct suggestion: worship or worships. I don't have any idea why EIOffice 2004 suggested Yoshi as a possible correction to the misspelled word. Unfortunately, EIOffice does not offer grammar checking like MS Office does.
Mispelled word in EIOffice 2004
There is a nice application bar floating on the upper part of the current document which enables fast switching from one office application to another. With a simple click of the mouse I was able to toggle between the word processor, the spreadsheet application, and the presentation graphics creator. This is made possible because EIOffice is one application which bundles the three previously mentioned applications.
Switching Application Bar
EIOffice 2004 is able to open and save MS Word file format,
EIOffice also features a nice scientific editor which includes many scientific figures, shapes and symbols. The figures include diodes, transistors, and capacitors. There are also chemistry symbols such as chemical reaction formulas and atomic structures. Apart from the typical math functions and figures, EIOffice also includes curve functions such as the exponent function and the sinusoid curve.
Science Editor in EIOffice 2004
Presentation Graphics
My one complaint about EIoffice is the file formats. The last thing we need is yet another file format. OpenOffice/StarOffice, KOffice*, TextMaker*, and Abiword can all save documents in StarOffice format (* these two will have that feature in their next release). We have a rule here at SteamyMobile that you can use whatever office suite you want, so long as it uses the StarOffice format, meaning that in the future, when document search and indexing programs are released, they will all be able to use the same format. If EIOffice could that, we would use it too.
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mobile porn
Why can't companies be origional in Icon design? It's like they are asking for MSFT to sue them for some infringement.
Name three things wrong with the MS Office UI. I wonder if you can.
El Office - A product of Mexico
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
IIRC, Lotus Development Corp v Paperback Software Intl demonstrated us in 1990 that copying the look and feel in exact form is copyright infringement.
Corel tried writing their word processing software entirely in Java 5 or so years ago and it failed rather miserably, but that's most likely because they were way ahead of their time and java was not the fastest platform to be running software on at that time.
And if you use C/C++ your application will be easy to make fast, no matter what you're doing.
This is a very silly claim, at least as bad as the one you were responding to, that if an application is written in C/C++ it will be easy to make fast.
Then why do we have so many very-poorly-performing native applications out there.
I have seen enough cases where a well-designed Java app outperforms by an order of magnitude a poorly-designed C++ app.
I am all for using C/C++ where it is appropriate, but C/C++ is no magic silver bullet when it comes to performance any more than Java is. In either language, if you have carefully-constructed libraries, porting can be quite straitforward and if you have a design that plays to the strengths of the platform, performance can be reasonable. Performance and portability are always a matter of design. It does not just happen as a result of choice of platform.
That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.
But is EIO OLE-compatible?
Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore... completely worthless.
but I have problems with Java and Linux. I think others do too. I think things like this should be qualified with "could run on linux" as opposed to "so it runs on linux". But maybe that's just to raise my self-esteem.
nobody is going to fork out 150$ by looking at that website
did you forget to take your meds?
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in? For some reason, the Evermore Software folks are attempting to use this as a marketing bullet point (it's the first point on their web page, even), when Joe User really just wants to know why it's better than MS Office.
I write Java to pay the bills, and as such I'm a big supporter of the platform. But users just don't care. In fact because of the Microsoft FUD machine, saying it's Java might even be a turn-off to quasi-technical people. I once had a government purchasing manager say "Java? We're moving away from that because Microsoft no longer supports it." Idiotic yes, but to paraphrase Forrest Gump: Customer is as Customer does.
Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have. You can sell it to anybody. But from the customer standpoint it simply doesn't matter.
In both this and Open Office, I don't see a replacement for Outlook, which in my opinion, is the best part of the MS Office suite. There are 50,000 text editors out there (I use Textpad), many different spreadsheet programs (I don't use any), but there's nothing that even comes close to Outlook. Outlook clones, anybody?
They did what StarOffice did that stopped me from using theirs. Putting the products in one app sucks. Star OFfice blew chunks until they split it. OpenOffice Rules.
Maybe they could get Nelly to promote it.
Andele andele mami, E.I. E.I.
OFF-IIIIIIIIIIICE! What's happenin now?
Andele andele mami, E.I. E.I.
OFF-IIIIIIIIIIICE! If the head right, Nelly there ery'night
Don't use it for massive programs with complicated GUIs.
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:PvmFqMTMSZkJ: www.evermoresw.com/+&hl=en
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
...if it's worth $15, much less $150. A real review would be nice. Does it really handle all the things the Office products handle? How is the integration? I, personally, don't care, but my users do.
/. effect for me, and I got there pretty quickly after the story was posted.
I would dearly love to have one suite that would run on Linux, Windows and Macs, *and* interchange documents with reasonably current MSO products. I can't tell if this one meets those criteria, other than not supporting Macs. Sadly, they aren't alone, there.
OOO does OK at supportoing the MSO standards, but isn't there, yet. ABIword and Gnumeric are great apps, but don't interchange docs that well (my fallback is simply to have apps on all three platforms that interchange documents).
Then there's the nightmare of scheduling software, but that's another issue.
BTW, neither the review nor the EIO site exhibited
xml.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
So it will be a pain in the ass to install or run, and it will be dismally slow and wont work right half the time.
MS probably funded it so they could say 'see, we have competition', knowing all the while that it wont catch on becuase it will suck.
EIOffice 2004 Vs MS Office 2003 - Page 1
.doc. This and the fact that EIOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office shows that huge efforts were placed to attract MS Office users into switching. Other file formats that EIOffice can save and open are PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel, rich text format, html and txt format.
Posted by Team Flexbeta on 26 May 2004 (29992 views) Rating: 4.94
EIOffice 2004 looks so much like MS Office 2003 that you wouldn't have a hard time getting used to the graphic interface once you get started with it. Coded in Java, EIOffice features a word processor, a spreadsheet application and a presentation graphics application. All three applications look and behave similar to MS Office's applications; Word, Excel and PowerPoint. EIOffice is able to edit and save MS Office file formats as well as a few other formats we will discover soon.
Word Processor
From the screenshot it is clear how EIOffice's word processing suit looks extremely similar to MS Word. The order and shape of the icons are not the only similarities, so is the labeling. For example, the tabs, File, Edit, View, Insert, and Format are all labeled just like in MS Word and in the same exact order. The word processor offers many features such as spell checking, password protecting document, tracking changes and a thesaurus. There is a nice feature which lets you transform the document you are currently working on into a presentation. Though the transformation isn't 100% the way I wanted it to be, a few editing here and there molded the document into a nifty presentation.
EIOffice 2004 Word Processor and MS Word
Another feature which EIOffice 2004 carries is its ability to suggest the entire word you are typing before you finish typing it. For example, when typing the word "feature", by the time the letters "fea" are typed, EIOffice suggest that the word you are trying to type is indeed "feature" and highlights the word for you. A simple enter on the keyboard accepts the word.
The spell checker in EIOffice 2004 works very well though the suggestions are not as relevant as that of MS Office 2003. Using the misspelled word - woship, EIOffice 2004's suggestions were Yoshi, wish, wash, midship and welsh. The same misspelled word in MS Word brought up the correct suggestion: worship or worships. I don't have any idea why EIOffice 2004 suggested Yoshi as a possible correction to the misspelled word. Unfortunately, EIOffice does not offer grammar checking like MS Office does.
Mispelled word in EIOffice 2004
There is a nice application bar floating on the upper part of the current document which enables fast switching from one office application to another. With a simple click of the mouse I was able to toggle between the word processor, the spreadsheet application, and the presentation graphics creator. This is made possible because EIOffice is one application which bundles the three previously mentioned applications.
Switching Application Bar
EIOffice 2004 is able to open and save MS Word file format,
EIOffice also features a nice scientific editor which includes many scientific figures, shapes and symbols. The figures include diodes, transistors, and capacitors. There are also chemistry symbols such as chemical reaction formulas and atomic structures. Apart from the typical math functions and figures, EIOffice also includes curve functions such as the exponent function and the sinusoid curve.
I could go on, Craig, but I wouldn't want you to feel bad about your Microsoft.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
What is the market for this thing? Its not going to compete against MS Office- no db just to start- and it can't compete with OpenOffice - price alone- so who's going to use it?
While I am not the biggest fan of OpenOffice (disclaimer I have tried OO and deinstalled it in favor of MS Office- flame away)I would use it in a second over this thing because OO is free and OO really does have some nice features.
B O R I N G
.. when (if) he gets laid.. he does it in both positions...
EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore...
It spreads macro viruses only half as fast as MSOffice!!!
"U seem to be running EIOffice. Do you want to convert all to word format and uninstall EIOffice"
Options:
1. Yes
2. Yes
Striving to be common...
Striving to be common...
Andele, andele, server EI EI
SLASHDOOOOOOOTT!!!! What's happening now?
Andele, andele, server EI EI
SLASHDOOOOOOOTT!!!! If configged right, server serves every time!
Buy for only $149, or a three computer license for only $398. A registered student can buy at the "special discount price of only $149." And an educator can get a three computer license for only $398. Great discounts, especially considering how much more expensive Open Office is!
I got a friend obsessed with that song, if I say 'B-I-N' she will go into the song instantly.
EIOffice is the only alternative office software that actually runs slower than Microsoft Office, a feature that most clients associate with quality. By using patented Java EAYR technologies (Eat All Your Resources), EIOffice can compete at the same level as other established packages.
It takes a copy of Microsoft "Word" to open "Microsoft Word" documents. There may be translators within EI Office but as a consumer I am not going to read the fine print to discover that. So, as a Mac user I will bite the bullet and if need be buy Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac for $399.95.
This is easier and time is money.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
Transistors and Beer!!
You get a free office suite with every Happy Meal.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
"Supported Browsers
* Microsoft Internet Explorer
* Sun HotJava
* Netscape Navigator Platforms Tested Linux
* Microsoft Windows 98
* Microsoft Windows ME Microsoft Windows NT
* Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows XP "
For one, half of those are OSes, not browswers. For two...well, IE is there. Not Firefox, Opera, etc. This just makes me wonder.
EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? If it has everything that MSOffice has what added benefit is there to switch? You mean corporate buy-in? How many millions are they going to give in kick-backs for businesses to switch? How many arms are they going to twist? Can they play as dirty as Microsoft? The best products don't succeed just because they are the best. It is all in the "marketing".
So Mr. Gates having a rough day so posting as an AC on /. to berate java? I mean we all know it's kicking the hell out of ASP, but really - who pissed in your cornflakes this morning
I tried your advice, now the state has custody, so I guess it's back to the TV
thanks you insensitive clod
Quoth the server, "Nevermore." =)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
Early Windows versions were very slow and for a time the only decent way to run Windows was under OS-2. It truly was a better version of Windows, being written in assembler, was much faster and more stable. But that just solidified Windows as the *standard* (duh..) and eventually code and hardware caught up and OS-2 died.
It just goes to show that even a vastly improved clone of existing MS software can't succeed (unless it's free...) because people will treat is as a beta of the next MS release. The models to look at are when existing standards are overturned i.e. Excel versus Lotus or Quark versus PageMaker. They supported importation of the *standard* formats (at least initially) but the rest of the software was their own distinct implementation.
Seems as though the web server runs on java too...
~c
because an MP3 works nearly everywhere, just as a .doc
Microsoft Word files do not work "nearly everywhere". They don't even work very well on the platform they were designed for: they have version incompatibilities, contain hidden information, do not format reproducibly, are difficult to manipulate programmatically, are difficult to version control, require hugely expensive software to work on, and they carry viruses. Microsoft Word is about the worst of the document formats in common use, and it wasn't even designed for interchange. Just about the only merit it has is that it is what you get by default when you choose "Save" in Word. And that's probably the only reason it is popular. But even Word gives you some better alternatives.
*WORD* is the easy part.
Even powerpoint is almost a non-issue
How about Access/Excel...
So for any clone, ask these questions
Yes, but does it run crystal reports?
Yes, but does it run access (.db7) and have access-like switchboards off of which MANY soho businesses live? [Dentists, doctors, small mom & pops..] The JET engine may suck, but its the de-facto standard for mom and pops.
Yes, but do the macros they use at every major investment bank and packages like XLMiner work?
When there is a suitable ACCESS replacement for small business and something that runs crystal reports and data mining packages like XLMiner run, Microsoft is in trouble.
That last 10% of features will keep many major institutions around until near the bitter end.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Thought it was Fonzerelly's Office
..and of course the HRDC office has now officially been split into two departments. They are now known as SDC and HRSDC. Man is this getting off topic. But I laughed because everybody calls the unemployment office the ei office. (employment insurance)
Use OpenOffice?
I'll go a step further. .doc often breaks when you move it around, but it doesn't matter because everyone BELIEVES that it'll work anywhere. The reality doesn't matter much (in this case) only the perception of it.
plus-good, double-plus-good
I know whenever I use Java, I speed up, especially the arabica variety.
ba da bing
"No regular expressions. This makes find/replace useless."
I'd argue this is a feature problem, not a UI/Look and Feel problem.
"No notion of "Styles." OpenOffice's Stylist menu is omnipresent and useful. MS W$rd's style pane is useless; it merely changes my styles whether I want it to or not."
I don't get what you mean by this... I haven't used OO's features enough (I'm booted about half the time in Windows and half in BSD, but whenever I write a paper I always seem to be booted to Windows and using Word) to judge, but they seem about the same.
Word's UI is improving quite a bit. For instance, fire up Word 97 and try to insert a header or footer; I forget exactly where it is, but it's not easy to find, buried I think in a second-level menu that doesn't even make that much sense. In Word XP, it's right in the view menu, much easier to find. (Though OO's placement in the insert menu makes even more sense.)
I know economically (short term) it makes sense to copy existing standards, but someone somewhere needs to rethink how people use computers, and thus create perhaps radically different UIs.
This applies to the OS (desktop motif, ugh), applications, file management, etc.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
BINGO and Old McDonald Had a Farm are not the same song. The OP is talking about the latter.
Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have.
If you think that, you aren't going to compete on any platform. When I run something on Linux, I expect that it integrates tightly with the Linux operating system. None of the cross-platform dreck that has come out of Sun (OpenOffice, Java), does that--they all treat Linux as a second class citizen and ignore Linux key bindings, user interface conventions, etc. WORA is useful for a small niche market, but most developers couldn't care less.
I am grateful that they are telling me that this is a cross-platform Java office suite because I then know what I can expect from the UI.
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in?
You're right: consumers don't. But consumers might care about getting lower cost software, better features, more reliability, easier extensibility, etc. Languages can help there: much of the reason why Mozilla and OpenOffice are such behemoths and such a bitch to extend is their choice of language and object system.
Java is a much better language to write large end-user applications in than C/C++, but Sun, unfortunately, nixes that advantage with their insistence on "cross-platform support".
C# offers similar advantages at the language level, but, unlike Java, it emphasizes the use of platform-specific libraries. That's why you are going to see lots of Windows and Linux software in C#, and unlike Java, users neither will know nor care that it's written in C#--they'll just get better, more robust software more quickly. (There is nothing magical about C#--any language could have taken the place of a Java-like language with platform specific libraries--but C# actually seems to be taking off.)
Yet another example of outsourcing!!!!
i mean not particular your statement. but all this claims about java isn't crossplatform is just rubbish. when you track it down, it's almost some developer who thinks hardcoded file/ or fontnames are funny.
proof: one of the more complex pieces of software is for sure a j2ee app server. now, take jboss. download this one archive. unpack it to your solaris, HP-UX, linux, bsd, even windows. start it. it runs. more? try sourceforge.
beer as in "free beer"
...gently down the stream...
+1 Informative? Mods really aren't paying attention today.
Yeah, I'd say all those secretaries using Word are really missing those regular expressions. And comparing Word to vim!?
Exchange
Unfortunately, we are married to Exchange 2000, and now MS CRM (which integrates tightly with Active Directory and Exchange), so there is literally a zero percent chance of using something else.
I'm getting REALLY frustrated with Microsoft lately too (activation of every copy of Office 2003, Office license moving nightmares, limitations of Exchange, massive servers needed for it, etc etc etc), but I can't break free....
(disclaimer: I didn't RTFA..., this is more of a rant...)
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
Java can be quite fast, if you just imagine it running on a beowulf cluster.
Java has a shitload more overhead than C/C++ (JVM and all).
True, but the lion's share of this overhead is paid for once during startup. One of the lessons of windows is that people are willing to wait extra time for something to start as long as it works well once started.
If you mean overhead in terms of memory footprint.. Medium to large java apps chew up about the same resources as their C/C++ counterparts.
And there isn't anything you can do about it.
Partially true. You can tweak the JVM parameters so that you either pay most of the start-up overhead up front, or as you go. For server apps, up front is always better. For other apps, it kind of depends.
Java is a poor choice for application development no matter how you look at it.
Entirely incorrect. The larger a C/C++ application becomes, the more prone it becomes to a gamut of bugs which are not possible in Java. (More prone because the larger the application, the more difficult debugging becomes)
Another big plus with Java, and maybe this exists with C/C++ and I don't know it, is the way the rigidity of the language has enabled fairly advanced tools to be created. I nearly never have compile time errors any more because my development environment of choice, IDEA, catches them all before I've saved the file I'm working on. For someone like me who loves the XP-style of coding where you write a test case before you write the class, this is a huge boon. When I'm done writing the test case, the IDE has highlighted all the method calls I've made which do not exist in the target class. A couple mouse clicks will take me to the class file and insert a stubbed method definition. The IDE takes care of the form, allowing me to concentrate on function.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I've got your lost packet right here! Oh, and there's another one! They're everywhere!
Look at their site, they have a science editor package that can be used to write science publications, reports etc. looks cool..
The advantages of MS Office are:
The advantages of OpenOffice are:
What the heck are the advantages of EIOffice?
So, WTF?
I have yet to find ONE alternative that will even display ONE document with a little complexity right. Often everything is mangled beyond repair, I have NO clue how people can survive on Open Office or 630 or whatever name it had. It was a number anyways, it didn't work either.
;-)
And don't get me started on RTF-documents and images.. Brrrr. Huge documents due to lousy compression..
I have yet to find ANY alternative. Would be glad for a tip, but everything I've tried hasn't come near dechiphering the proprietary Word-blob. Not even Word itself can rescue some files
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
After - quickly - scanning their website they are missing one very important business application. Outlook.
MS Office comes with Outlook, the eternal scurge of mail clients. Though for all its problems it has many useful features like the journal, calendar, note, and the intergration with the exchange server system.
Sorry EIOffice lacks this support and is unlikely to gain much in the way of a business application. For business applications, the killer app will be email and it's intergrated "tools" such as the ones I listed.
-Ghost
See, I totally thought the Electric Light Orchestra had released an office suite.
"...fire... on high...."
Before being able to voice my opinion on the software I need to try it. From what I can tell there is no demo, so that make it a little harder. I would only be willing to shell out that money if I feel it is worth the expense. Currently I have tried MS Office, AppleWorks (previously ClarisWorks), Think Free and Open Office. MS Office, despite what many here may think of it, is still a reference for completness, functionality and interface design (the Mac version at least). I am willing to try another solution, but first I need to get a feel for it. Until an 'EIOffice 2004' demo is available, all I will say 'nice to see another contender, but it is worth the case?'.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Note that Kaffe needs volunteers to help track down and fix platform-specific compiler errors. If you want Java on your platform, pitch in and help.
Constitutionally Correct
Plus 25 License - $ 398
If you are 55 years of age at the time of purchase, or will turn 55 within the next 12 months, Evermore Software offers the Plus 25 License for $ 398. This license entitles the user to install EIOffice 2004 on a maximum of three machines with free product support and upgrades for 25 years from the date of purchase.
To qualify for the Plus 25 license send a scanned copy of your birth certificate to us_support@evermoresw.com. You have five years from the date of purchase to submit this document to be considered for the Plus 25 license.
http://www.evermoresw.com/webch/download/download_ f.jsp
Which explains why Microsoft went to such great lengths to speed up the boot process (significantly, I might add) in Windows XP?
so we have to hate it regardless of its merits, especially if we like to use linux because SUN will not lead the linux distributions bastardize the java source code.
( I use linux, I use Java )
Allow me to translate:
Since JVM spawning overhead is astronomic, your box can only run one at a time. So our application runs as a monolithic single process, most likely bigger than your EJB container.
Thank you very much.
Yup. Is anyone even *trying* to go head to head with Access ? On any OS platform?
There are quite some conditions that C++ and any other proper language catches at compiletime while they are only caught at runtime in Java. what you say may be true, but is partially the result of the language being broken, and in part it is indeed an accomplishment of it being more rigid in some things.
Also, if you put enough compiler-like intelligence in your IDE, then the same is possible with C++, and I have no doubt it has been done. I prefer my compiler telling me whats wrong thop. It has a better idea because it is actually doing the compilation, and the errors I will get are specific to the current implementation of the compiler that I am using.
Getting the same type of errors from two different things is just confusing, people will see it as two different things while in fact they are the same thing.
I dunno. For windows workstations, I primarily use Win2K pro now (though I do have XP Pro machines as well). I used NT 4 before that. I didn't notice that XP was substantially faster at booting than either of its predecessors. Is it?
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
machine. I run it on an Athlon 1800 with 512 megs of ram and the thing positively flies. CVS is slow at the best of times anyway.
Have you tried increasing the heap size allocated to the Virtual Machine?
I am NaN
Word's UI is improving quite a bit. For instance, fire up Word 97 and try to insert a header or footer; I forget exactly where it is, but it's not easy to find, buried I think in a second-level menu that doesn't even make that much sense. In Word XP, it's right in the view menu, much easier to find.
Okay, I fired up Word 97, like you said. Hmm, I wonder what this "Header and footer" option in the view menu does?
Just wanted to point out to all that didn't RTFA, this product is from China. Incase you proof check here.
Now I know slash is full of good 'ol Mickysoft haters, but do we realy want to be celibrating a product from a country that's eyeing our technology jobs probably more so than India? It hasn't started yet, but most people agree that off-shoring develpment jobs to mainland China will happen soon. And this is basicaly their proof of concept that they can do it.
So, maybe its for the best not to give these guys any more publicity then they allready have.
"Failure is not an option, it's part of the standard package"
Java apps always run slower than native apps because of the vm
Open Office is portable to most OSs
Open Office is free, this java thing isn't, hundred some bucks, not much less than M$
"I have seen enough cases where a well-designed Java app outperforms by an order of magnitude a poorly-designed C++ app."
I've yet to see an instance of a well designed java app outperforming a well designed C or C++ app, though.
Another big plus with Java, and maybe this exists with C/C++ and I don't know it
You destroyed any credibility you had with that statement alone.
How can you compare Java when you don't even know what you're comparing it to?
I've been programming full time in Java (9 years), C (20 years), and C++ (11 years) for ages, I think I know what I'm talking about.
Looks a little like the Windows logo. Is all originality gone?
"Never tell me the odds"
There are quite some conditions that C++ and any other proper language catches at compiletime while they are only caught at runtime in Java.
Ummm, okay. That may be correct, but you've given nothing to go on. There are many conditions that Java will at least catch that most "proper" languages never do, and go unnoticed until someone has root access to your box.
Also, if you put enough compiler-like intelligence in your IDE, then the same is possible with C++, and I have no doubt it has been done.
Template expanding, typedefs, overloaded operators and macros can easily make C/C++ impossible to read to the casual observer. It would not suprise me to find that no C++ IDE has reached the sophistication of IDEA. IDEA manages it because Java is a simpler language.
I prefer my compiler telling me whats wrong thop. It has a better idea because it is actually doing the compilation, and the errors I will get are specific to the current implementation of the compiler that I am using.
I think I can correctly ascertain from that, you've never used IDEA or Eclipse for editing a Java program of any substantial size. The comment does not make sense in context.
Getting the same type of errors from two different things is just confusing, people will see it as two different things while in fact they are the same thing.
I've never heard anybody make this complaint. Probably because they never get errors from the compiler. Their only source is the IDE which not only tells them what the error is, but will also suggest how to fix it and can do the fix automatically.
For example, if you make a call to an IO function, you need to catch or throw the exception java.io.IOException. IDEA will catch this, underline in red the problem code, and if you click the little lightbulb on the problem line, will offer to auto-fix the error by either surrounding the code in a try/catch block, or adding IOException to the method throws clause. For me, forgetting exactly which checked exceptions a method throws or whether or not I had the correct imports were the more common sources of compiler errors.
IDEA is kind of like having a junior programmer/code monkey at my disposal. He makes suggestions on how to fix the simplistic issues of my code, and I choose whether or not to sign off on one or to do a more intelligent fix myself.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Because everyone knows that windows machines (at least mine) spend a large chunk of their time rebooting?
All of the Java applications I've used are very sluggish. IBM Update Connector is a prime example of this. It takes forever for the software to analyze the machine being updated and to check for updates over a broadband connection. I usually avoid Java applications because of this.
I have 2 very extreme examples of the importance of correct design for speed.
First Example
A colleague wrote a COBOL program that took about 4 hours to run, I changed one "word" defining the access type ACCESS-IS-RANDOM to ACCESS-IS-SEQUENTIAL AFAICR (As Far As I Can Remember). That reduced the run time to about 70 seconds.
Second Example
One would expect an assembly/C program written for a 16 bit processor would be much faster than something written in interpreted BASIC for a 6502 8 bit processor.
However, I wrote a colour printer driver in Acorn's BASIC for a BBC model B (dual processor), that took 11 minutes to print out a colour picture. I was told that an application on an IBM PC took 2 hours!!! to do the same thing.
I did 0 to 4 passes for each line depending on the colour of the pixels, I bet the other application changed ribbon each time the colour changed - maybe even changing the ribbon 3 times for the same pixel. I don't know for sure, but it took a second or two to position the ribbon for a different colour.
-Nivag
What really irks me about your post, however, is that the grandparent was modded to Flamebait for posting a fairly evenhanded opinion, but no fact. You've been modded to Interesting for posting what is, essentially, a flame against the grandparent, and still no fact.
You admit you find Java a waste of time, yet state that the parent was evenhanded. How do you know?
Unlike either of you I have written Java GUI apps that run on a variety of platforms (including the old Oracle Network Computer). It's really not hard to make an app that works pretty much the same just about anywhere. I did not, as the parent states, run into "issues that look a lot like porting issues". You run into that a little more if you have to support specific byte ordering in files, but that has nothing at all to do with GUI's. For the GUI itself I have NEVER had platform specific code, like you do with typical porting.
I'm not just talking about some form entry system, I'm talking about a variety of things from rich interactive maps to very complex MDI document data entry systems.
The parent to your post may have been a little harsh, but calling him a zealot just because he has experience you lack is unfair.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can explain tha tit will run across all computers at home, Mac or PC - one less thing for them to worry about if there's a mix. So not Java per se, but that ability to run it on a wide variety of systems (including older Windows).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually I was doing an IDE comparison, based on language features. Someone who has so much experience programming would normally learn to read better.
So what was it you were doing full time in Java 9 years ago?
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
And this is superior to NeoOffice/J how? (P.S.: The J stands for Java)
I admit that I found the web page uninspiring, but that's no proof the software is worthless. OTOH, I know that NeoOffice/J works on the Mac as a native application.
OTOH, NeoOffice/J is an open source project, and claims to be offering a preview of the features that will (may?) be available in a future release of OpenOffice.org. Normally I prefer OpenOffice.org (java is SLOW!), but on the Mac it saves starting X and then running OpenOffice.org under a separate windowing system than the Mac's native one. I.e., it saves lots of time and overhead. So on the Mac I use NeoOffice/J (which is also available on other platforms).
So, again I ask, in what way is ElOffice superior?
(The review site is slashdotted, so I am relying on the meager information I got from the ElOffice home page...which I found eye-strain provoking, probably because the text was in picture format, so I couldn't resize it, and because I couldn't enlarge the sample screenshot.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Just what this world needs is another office productivity suite. Why do companies do this? What is the value proposition in attempting to mine this already thoroughly exhausted market? Are word processors something that developers just love to write code for? I don't get it. Will someone please provide me with a clue?
Nothing prevents C++ tools from having the same features you're talking about. It's all a matter of what the IDE developers decide to include in the IDE.
The one feature of Java that I miss when writing large C++ applications is the ability for each class to have have its own main() method. That provides a nice avenue for debugging that is unavailable in C++.
There are so many misconceptions in each sentence of this story that it's tough to know where to start.
Designed to compete against MS Office
Well, the first vulnerability that MS Office has, is that it's slow. So to compete, you need something fast. So you don't write it in Java.
EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore able to run on both Windows and Linux
Language is almost irrelevant for portability. Java runs on Windows and Linux and a lot of other environments. But so does C++. There is even a choice of portable GUI libraries - wxwindows, Qt, others.
2) Are you insane? You can assign anything as a keyboard shortcut, including full-blown Macros.
3) Uh, no. Just because you don't know how to use them doesn't mean they don't work. You can create styles using the dialogue. Or just type in a new style name into the box and Voila! Instant new style. I'm not sure I even understand your complaint.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
runs on windows and mac? you say this is written in Java, I bet it "crawls"
First point:
Some parts of Java are slow. Not everything in Java is slow. If one uses lots of collections (LinkedList, HashMap, SortedMap etc) then it means it uses lots of small objects for keys and values, and the program has a lot of casting, therefore this part may be slow. Java is not slow in number crunching, because it uses the same concepts as C/C++. Swing is definitely slow.
Second point:
What Java looses in speed in certain areas, it gains in development speed. You just develop once, and run it in whatever environment there is a virtual machine for.
Third point: really advanced coding techniques (like templates) can't be done with Java. Java generics will not solve this problem, because every generic type must be derived from class Object.
Overall, Java is the best environment for coding 90% of the world's needs right now...unfortunately, it is the other 10% that it is really interesting (system software, compilers, libraries, architectures, protocols etc).
As for ElOffice, I don't know. I hope it succeeds, because the world needs alternatives.
What's the benefit of an integrated office suite? I'll tell you, it lets them charge more because you're getting software you don't want!
The only thing on Office that's worth the CD it's shipped on, in my opinion, is Excel. Word is an appalingly badly designed program that provides less real document structure than HTML 2.0, and Powerpoint is the anti-clue. I'd happily pay Microsoft 1/4 the price of Office for 1/4 the software, if I could buy it one program at a time.
1) Feature issue, not UI issue. In any case, yes, Word does have regular expressions. Hit the "more" button.
.vimrc. Now that's playing with power.
I hit the "more" button and typed in my usual s/Mi(ke|chael) Sims(.*)integrity/Asshole$2retard/gi. It said "0 matches found" on a document full of matches. Are you blind?
2) Are you insane? You can assign anything as a keyboard shortcut, including full-blown Macros.
Yes, but can I assign shortcuts in batch? I can use vim to edit
3) Uh, no. Just because you don't know how to use them doesn't mean they don't work. You can create styles using the dialogue. Or just type in a new style name into the box and Voila! Instant new style. I'm not sure I even understand your complaint.
Again, Microso$t has made a common occurrence like creating 50 styles into a drudgerous task. I can't be arsed to go through the same dialogue box 50 times in succession! Offer me, the power user, some power!
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
Let's see... $399 for MS Office or $398 for EIOffice. That means I could save a whole dollar by switching to a system no one's ever hear of. For my dollar, though, I get to install it (legally) on THREE computers. (You know, instead of passing the CD around the office anyway.)
Quite frankly, for my small business, the answer is still perfectly clear. It does everything I need it to do and more and the price is right, too.
... know or care about Java, or interoperability, but Joe Company might, because they got trained IT dudes hanging around to translate. And they are more likely to actually purchase something.
Joe User gets their nephew to stick a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of MS Office on if the nephew doesn't care, or OO if he does. either way, a much lower profit potential with Joe User. they run whatever OS came on the machine, and any additional apps they run are more often than not been warezed in some manner, or are very common freeware downloads, like winamp, etc..
Nothing prevents C++ tools from having the same features you're talking about. It's all a matter of what the IDE developers decide to include in the IDE.
While I agree in principle with what you are saying, nothing prevents C++ tools from having the same features, I wonder if the reason I do not see these features in, say Visual C++, is because the job is exponentially more difficult in C++ than Java.
An example of why this could be problematic for C++, consider changing a typedef or macro used in a template. The IDE would have to consider the expansion of all templates based on the change in the typedef. This is a substantially more complex situation than Java allows.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
when I first read the name I read it as El office. Maybe we should drop this goofy font that represents an uppercase L as a lowercase l? what does a lowercase l look like in this font? whats this fonts name? I'd like to sub it for another.
This is what I am REALLY wanting from something that runs on Linux. OpenOffice and Koffice both are lacking this feature. I use Koffice because it + kde + xinerama does a better job than OpenOffice does. But once I start the slideshow I can only go forward and back, I can't control it easily from the main app (which I can still see). The first alternative office suite to do this will get my vote.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
I'm not trolling here, but as often as I've heard these arguments from intelligent-sounding people I don't understand why my machine locks up for a good minute or more whenever I visit a web page with Java. That doesn't seem to be comparable to natively compiled applications which take seconds, rather than minutes, to start up.
This is an honest question from someone who doesn't know much about Java (i.e. implementations), but knows a fair amount about OO design. Can you enlighten me?
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
I was thinking what would it take to have an office application which is nasty "statically linked C program". Yes there will be a huge load but I am ready to purchase more ram to load it in the memory.
I can't take this DLL hell anymore. This one will not have any installation. just copy the binary on your desktop double click and it runs.
Better if I can boot with it and my PC runs office. I can tell you lot of people would love that. We need no "operating system" ... we need no "device driver" just give us an office thingee which runs straight on the PC hardware.
I guess this is just an outburst of living in DLL hell and infinite world of updtes.
- People who believe other people have no right to live, got no right to live ...
99) I use Databus and LaTeX ... becouse, you know ... I'd like to be able to vote.
WTF...these guys are touting "Paste Link" a.k.a. DDE/OLE/etc. as some sort of high-tech super-advanced feature. That pretty much turned me off to the whole deal right there.
And if I wanted 1 program for all my office needs, I'd use the shitty MS Works that comes with every computer these days...
-JT
Hmm, I thought it was that. I knew I should have checked...
Anyway, I was in a summer program in 2001 during which I had a short course in Human-Computer Interaction, and one of the things we briefly looked at was Word. The professor gave us three tasks to do, and one of them, I *thought* it was adding a footer but apparently not, was buried much deeper and in a different place than you'd expect.
You have some unfathomable browser plugin problem. The machine isn't really locking up on Java.
I had the same problem -- and I was doing Java development at the time! My server code ran great, but every other applet crashed or hung the browser. Urg. I can understand why endusers think Java sucks.
website design courtesy of www.geocities.com sitebuilder
Nothing costs nothing
"even if you already have a newer version of Java" ... you gotta believe there are some pretty scary hacks in that code.
The real question is, why does a random company sit down and try to develop a complete MS Office competitor based on Java, when there already exists such a beast? Well, two such beasts if you count OO.o and SO separately.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
- Clippy
- Bob
- Programs that automatically execute arbitrary scripts (IE, Outlook, etc)
I'm sure there are more..."[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Absolutely true. Ever try to use the versions feature over a network? Don't
*wonders if this has been fixed (is running Office XP)*
Netcraft confirms it..... Java is dead!
Post a story about an Office suite and mention Java in passing. Result? Great discussions about Java vs everything else. That's right, it's language wars time.
Why bother with the pretence that this site is about anything other than language wars and Microsoft bashing? How about a programme as follows:
Monday: Java great - discuss.
Tuesday: Microsoft suck.
Wednesday: Python or Perl?
Thursday: Microsoft still suck.
Friday: GTK or Qt?
Saturday: Windows is crap and Linux rules.
Sunday: Microsoft suck etc etc etc etc.
Just a thought.....
> Ummm, okay. That may be correct, but you've given nothing to go on
It has been a few years since I did any substantial JAVA project (2001 or thereabout) but the first thing that comes to mind is runtime vs compiletime type-checking.
> There are many conditions that Java will at least catch that most "proper" languages never do, and go unnoticed until someone has root access to your box.
I'd restate that a bit, JAVA doesn't provide things like real pointers in most cases, and as a result doesn't provide the functionality that allows for things like buffer overflows etc.
At any rate, the result is as you say, it is a lot harder to make JAVA code that can be abused for compromising a system.
This comes with a price however, it also means JAVA doesn't give the functionality where it would be needed either.
> I think I can correctly ascertain from that, you've never used IDEA or Eclipse for editing a Java program of any substantial size. The comment does not make sense in context.
I did use Eclipse, but again, this has been a few years ago.
At any rate, my statement makes no sense to most JAVA programmers because you nromally don't get to deal with different runtime environments and compilers. SUN does a good job there in ensuring all official JAVA implementations look exactly alike from the point of view of the programmer and IDE.
This is different when you have independent implementations of compilers and runtime environments such as with C and C++
Again, this comes at a price, there is no real competition among providers of JAVA runtime environments.
> I've never heard anybody make this complaint. Probably because they never get errors from the compiler. Their only source is the IDE which not only tells them what the error is, but will also suggest how to fix it and can do the fix automatically.
I think your assertion is correct, see above for why it is that way imho.
> IDEA is kind of like having a junior programmer/code monkey at my disposal. He makes suggestions on how to fix the simplistic issues of my code, and I choose whether or not to sign off on one or to do a more intelligent fix myself.
Which is fine when you are a senior programmer. The result I have often seen however is that it allows hiding lack of understanding untill it is way too late to fix things properly. Also, it allows for sloppyness and more or less rewards it.
Knowing what conditions can be caused by doing a certain call, and as a result knowing what exceptions it can cause, is a very good thing when you are debugging code, and generally helps understandign what your code is doing. I personally prefer an environment that forces me to have that knowledge. If the automated fixes really save me so much time that it becomes relevant, I consider myself to be too sloppy with my code.
THe one thign I really wonder about is this:
Approx 10 years ago, I was workign at IBM and we just got this nice OS/2 version that came with a JAVA runtime. At the time, the same arguments were being made regardign portability and the better development environments that were possible.
10 years later, I still have to see a single complex and widely employed JAVA application.
Where JAVA does seem to do well is in corporate environments where rapid development is a major issue. It also seems to do well for complex, server-side applications and for small web-based client-side applets.
I assume there is a reason why complex JAVA applications only happen in environments that are very well defined and are controllable, and doesn't happen for the average end-user application. It has been tried, but so far such effords resulted in badly performing, and functionally lacking applications (Corel office comes to mind), and the complexity of installing such applications seems to keep people away from them as well (Freenet for example)
At any rate, JAVA is a usefull tool, and SUN did a good job at design wi
Here's the thing I don't get about Java: If you make one GUI for multiple platforms, how do you get it to conform to each platform's Human Interface Guidelines?
You can get pretty cose. I think the Look & Feels go some way to getting the app to behave fairly close to a native app in many respects... That really just covers widget behavior though, which is not the whole ball of wax.
I'd personally rather see a nice ANSI-C (or Obj- or ++ or whatever)* program, properly abstracted, with a GUI for each platform you want to run it on and a configure script that figures out which one you want at compile time.
How often does that happen though? I think the answer might actually be never. Can you really think of an example where there is a common code base with really different GUI's on top for different platforms? Even Office X (which is very dufferent from Office for Windows) is a completey different codebase, as far as I know (which admittedly is not very far!). If that does share a code base it helps make your point a little...
Personally I really do not believe much in platform specific UI guidelines. If you look at the best apps around, like Photoshop, instead of conforming strictly to platform guidelines they have refined the interface to help the user as much as possible, and work the same on pretty much any platform.
Though proper hooks into the OS are good to have (like drag and drop, which Java does support) in the end I think a GUI developed towards the domain at hand rather than the OS is much more powerful to the user. That's why for what cross-platform apps I've written I really have not been too careful with conforming strictly to any given set of GUI guidelines, but did make sure important features (like printing) worked.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How the hell did both the responses to my post wind up with unclosed italics tags on them?
I think you had the wierd coinceidence that both of us did not close tags property... noticed that just as I hit post. So, don't blame Slashdot for that one! I tend to hit "i/" a lot.
Anyway, the point above is irrelevant because, again, I'm not interested in what Java can or can't do. The point was, is, and always will be that, originally, the grandparent poster I referred to was modded to flamebait for presenting a personal opinion, and his/her respondent was modded Interesting despite posting a flame. The grandparent, whether he had a valid point or not, was not "taken to task", he was merely flamed. That's the crux of the point.
But my position is that it was not a flame. The poster called the post "clueless" - which it was. It's not just an opinion to say that Java has to be ported anyway, it's just not correct at all. That's why I think the original post should have been modded down, and why the followup was not really flamebait or a troll.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Paperback lost because it lacked the money to appeal the decision. Lotus would later sue another software company and lost in appeals court. Read more about Lotus v. Borland