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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.
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".
... 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!!!
"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
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
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...
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
...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
Do you mean "creepy" like in the middle aged guy who hangs out near high school and oogles 15 year old girls while wearing a trenchcoat?
Yes.
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
I remember that too. At the time the high end CPU was the Pentium Pro 200. Today's CPUs are so overpowered for simple word processing I think we can afford the overhead. For a long time I was skeptical too about Java, but look at Jedit to see what's possible in a full featured text editor. Sure, the memory usage is a little high (25MB w/ an empty document) and it launches slower than a native app, but still, it runs great on a modern CPU.
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.
Swing
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."
xslt
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
*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)
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
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.)
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)
The advantages of MS Office are:
The advantages of OpenOffice are:
What the heck are the advantages of EIOffice?
So, WTF?
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
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
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"
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