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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.
Standards? Hardly.
Wish there actually were some.
No Comment.
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
Java UIs are pretty fast if you use the proper tools (SWT as opposed to SWING). A quick comparison of NetBeans (Swing) to Eclipse (SWT) should bear this out.
Finding God in a Dog
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.
They were having to create the UI from scratch, and there were some very basic things not portable i.e. font sizes in AWT (given in pixels on PC and in points in Mac).
But by far the worst performance problem reported by a majority of people testing it was that people were demoing it as a browser applet and thought the download time (mostly over modems at the time) was part of the startup time of the program.
The Java word processing engine was much faster and more reliable (due to redesign) than the C/C++ version of WordPerfect at the time on the same machine.
I suspect it was also suffering from poor garbage collection and other JVM problems.
And no one understood the great modularity and pluggability that had been designed into it, due to political problems at Corel, who could never figure out a business model for it.
"Support for Macintosh OS X and Solaris is in development" -- bottom of the page.
Lack of trial version aside, the review hardly inspired confidence either. I only managed to catch parts of it before it got slashdotted, but take this little excerpt regarding the spreadsheet functionality:
The only difference can be seen after the chart is created. The bars in EIOffice's chart are grouped together, where in Excel's chart the bars are not close together. I tried editing the spacing between the bars in EIOffice by changing the gap width of each bar, but the chart was at an angle where the bars would still overlap. Excel gives the option to change the gap width, gap depth and chart depth. EIOffice only enabled me to alter the gap width; other than that, EIOffice permitted editing just about every aspect of the chart, including font style, colors sizes, you know the works.
From what I could see the review gives no indication what-so-ever as to if the EIOffice spreadsheet application can even compared to Excel on a functionality basis. Rather, the basis for comparison seems to be saying that changing cell spacing works differently, but that you're still able to assign pretty fonts and colors. Wonderful!
A chinese page, click the links in the table.
you won't believe it is a Java software.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
there is a free trial version at http://www.evermoresw.com/webch/download/download_ f.jsp
I was only wondering why they don't provide download in their english website.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Swing
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
well, you see, Java really isn't that portable.
I have worked since 1998 on Java software with a focus on UI and portability. Although OS X has never been on my radar, I have worked extensively on other people's code when it was "working fine in windows" but partially or completely broken in Solaris (later Linux as servers migrating over).
All the compatibility problems broke down to one of three problems:
1) Solaris patching. I don't know if Sun has fixed this, but patching of Solaris and patching of Java to work on Solaris was a true nightmare. The Solaris JVM was awful (was, I haven't touched it since 1.3 so I like to think it is all better now).
2) Hardcoding of directory separator characters instead of using File.separatorChar
3) Fonts. The UI issues on the Unix variants for early Java were huge. Swing didn't hardly fix anything because the underlying problem was truly hideous fonts. To the best of my knowledge, 1.4 has completely fixed this problem.
To the best of my knowledge #1 and #3 are fixed now. #2 is something you usually only see from recent grads or people new to Java programming.
I can't remember the last time anything I wrote in Java and packaged as a jar had trouble working in Windows or Linux. Certainly has not happened since 1.4 came out.
I've worked recently with C/C++ code and experienced C/C++ portability fun between platforms. The code was used for reading a writing DNA chromatogram format files. Worked perfectly in Solaris. Wrote out 4 gigabyte blank files in Linux in the odd circumstance when it would actually run at all. The problem turned out to be endian handling. This problem doesn't occur in Java, however in C/C++ when you simply tell the machine to write out blocks of memory (that happen to be data structures) the resulting byte order is whatever the machine natively uses. The IO routines don't know if one piece is a double, another a long and yet another a short.
Java is really portable. It's also quite fast. Nearly all complaints about Java's speed these days come from Swing, which is really caused by an overdesign of Swing (from a design stand point, Swing is very, very nice. Unfortunately what makes it nice also makes it quite slow)
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
If you aren't active in the Java world, please don't post your speculations as fact.
It is not difficult to write cross platform Java. An earlier post in this thread details how, so I'm not going to.
If you do have issues, porting from Win32 to any unix usually gets you all you need. Once it runs on Linux, it will run on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.
Agile Artisans
One usual reason why there will be separate installers for different OSs is just that - it's the installer. Things like desktop icons, start menu, which shell script to run, these things are platform dependent, whereas the application itself is pure java.
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
They can actually be quite fast and responsive, if written correctly. I run eclipse...
Actually, Eclipse doesn't use the standard Java GUI library (Swing), and uses the IBM developed SWT, so it takes more than just coding the app "correctly".
The standard Java GUI can be written to be fast and responsive without using SWT however. Just check out the IntelliJ IDE.
http://www.intellij.com
I used it exclusively for my Java development, until I switched to Eclipse because of cost. Swing development can be tricky and responsive apps become harder to develop with it. Good thing thread programming is so easy with Java, because with Swing, you'll need to use it plenty.
-B
Sorry for a little confusing information, i think these direct links may work better for non-Chinese dudes.
4 81 &svr=1c e2003_fo r_linux.tar.gz
0 3_for_Win.ex e. exe
linux:
http://soft.66169.com/dl.php?id=1032591&cknum=7
http://www.evermoresw.com/download/eioffi
windows:
http://hlbr.onlinedown.net/down/EIO20
http://crc.onlinedown.net/down/EIO2003_for_Win
And for other platform, I heard some people simply unpack the tar ball and run the jar files, i had never tried personally, so I don't warrantee it works.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
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
Experienced programmers used to working with C or C++ know about this and write code where this isn't a problem.
I'd like to believe that was true, but my experience has been that even experienced programmers tend to do something like:
* write code to load in hunk of data from file
* write more code assuming data has been loaded correctly.
* test to make sure data and code using it is functioning according to requirements
* move on to next problem
Unless "works on big, little and mixed endian" is in the requirements (and it usually isn't) the naive approach is usually taken, even by programmers with 15 years of experience. Making sure the code is endian neutral often means replacing 1 line with 10-50.
Someone mentioned on Slashdot that the Windows API can accept either a forward or back slash, but I don't personally know.
I'm not sure that's correct. I just tried opening a file from notepad and a command prompt and mixing slash directions. I'm sure there are some windows api functions that are okay we whichever slash you use, but I would expect widgets that use that underlying API to mirror that insensitivity.
Writing portable code in C, C++, or Java requires that the programmer know how to do it.
"know how to do it" in Java boils down to maybe 1 or 2 rules of thumb. In C and C++, the issues from Java exist (e.g. path separator), but so do others (e.g. endianness). It is easier to write cross platform code in Java.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Actually, you should use the File.separator and File.pathSeparator fields for that.
unusably slow UI.
Read a book like "Java Performance Tuning." The main reason Java UIs seem slow is that developers are using them in a very sloppy fashion. If you do it right...preload your graphics class, pool and reuse objects where possible and handle refreshes on your own, your UI can be jetspeed. Check out Jalbum or Eclipse or any of the hundreds of really fast Java programs out there and you'll see what I mean.
If you wrote a GUI in any other language and expected it to refresh every object in the background every time you changed something in the foreground, you'd see a performance hit, too.
You still have to test on different platforms. Oh, and if you'll notice, *they still have two binaries*
No...they have one binary, two installers. The installer for every system is different, because every system handles the installation of software in a different way. The binary -- freenet.jar -- is the same for every system, in fact the Windows version comes with instructions on how to run the same version minus the pretty Windows widgets on any UNIX like system. And while you SHOULD test on different platforms before claiming to support them, most of the time Java just works -- unlike C, which often suffers from problems like reliance on the Endian nature of integers, etc. Sure, you can make C that runs everywhere on the planet, but it is NOT as easy as writing Java in the same way. All you have to do in Java is refrain from using native{} blocks, refrain from using external libraries that use native{} blocks, and use file and user settings from Preferences and System.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I've written many client-side Java applications that make use of audio, networking, data storage, etc. that work identically between Linux and Windows in binary form. Java portability (JVM bugs notwithstanding) has been 99%, with JVM bugs accounting for the 1% incompability since they caused subtle runtime differences.
I stopped writing Java clients for three reasons:
Binary portability has never been an issue when sticking to the SUN-defined Java API.