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Apple's Rumored Office Suite
Several anonymous readers noted that the mac rumor mill is churning already with news for the upcoming MacWorld. The current rumor is a new office suite to replace the incredibly dated AppleWorks and incredibly bloated and slow MS Office.
...But Office v.X for the Mac is actually quite nice. I've yet to experience document incompatability problems with MS Office for Windows. For simple documents like research papers and personal writing it does the job reasonably well. Now I haven't written a large thesis with piles of footnotes, or a large book with a huge integrated outline... so it could blow for serious work and I wouldn't know. But the fact is that I need to submit my work in MS word format and it does the job.
Apple may come out with a quality office suite. But if MS Word/Windows users run into even minor incompatability problems with its output, it will fail. I assume the real reason Apple is doing this is because MS may stop supporting MS Office for the Mac. Which would be a real shame. I'm not saying the government should force them to continue supporting the product, but I strongly doubt it's an unprofitable product line. I would certainly buy the next release. Shouldn't shareholders have some say in this? --M
If by "from the get-go" you mean when it was still called ClarisWorks, I have to take offense (given that I wrote a lot of it). All the reviewers of the early versions, and millions of users, would disagree with you. In fact there are still lots of things you can do with AppleWorks that you can do with no other single program out there.
That said, by the time the name was changed to AppleWorks, the ball had clearly been dropped, and essentially nothing has been done for the past few years. So, dated - yes. Sucked from the get-go - I think (hope) you have a minority opinion there.
Details on ClarisWorks/AppleWorks history here:
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/clarisworks.php/
Bob Hearn
They reported that on Dec 29th.
Think Secret Predicts Sub-$500 Headless Mac
Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 29, @07:03AM
The MacOS version requires XFree86 to run and work has slowed on the Aqua and Quartz tracks.
I'm quite certain that should this rumored office suite actually come to market that it will not require XF86 to run. This should please the average Mac user that finds the current OOo interface terrible looking, not to mention very interesting to use.
Don't get me wrong, I use OOo and am happy for it. I hope to help the porting along as much as I can. Right now, it's still scary for most (Mac) people.
Slashdot's Apple section: Rumors for Nerds. Speculation that matters.
Probably already posted, but there's NeoOffice/J, which does a much better job of integrating into Mac OS X. Ignore the Windows-style widgets in the user interface - properly important things like styled copy-and-paste, printing, system fonts and so on work brilliantly, unlike with the X11-based port.
:-)
Also, it's very much in active development, and keeps on improving. They've been working on the low-level stuff first, getting that to work nicely, and they're now starting on making it much more Mac-like. Aqua menus are just one recent addition...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Powerpoint compatibility is diabolical, because it's native tables and graphics are rubbish, so it constantly embeds foreign application documents on the Windows side that cannot be displayed on the Mac. In the other direction, God forbid you actually paste a screenshot in, because it will be a compressed TIFF, and when that gets back to Powerpoint for Windows it will not only fail to display it, but will actively hard-replace it with a graphic of a broken red X.
Office v.X on the Mac cannot do html round-tripping. So for anyone who prefers to store files as html like I do (for easier style sheet editing - die wysiwig die - and for post processing and export), you are screwed. The html format is not interoperable between the two either, information is lost here as well.
& is shorthand for 'et'. It is actually 'et', written all as one character, if you look closely at it.
Rik
it's not quite a Powerpoint killer.
For you, maybe.
What killed powerpoint in our company was the total lack of an export feature for anything not resembling a PC.
After trying 3 different companies' variations of "ppt2dvd", and discovering that all three basically served as a low-framerate screengrab of the running presentation (one wouldn't even work in a dual head setup with ppt running the presentation on the second head), we gave up and used keynote's ability to convert the thing into a video file which we then turned into a dvd.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The fundamental difference between MS and Apple is that MS already has a monopoly in desktop operating systems, and US antitrust laws prohibit leveraging one's monopoly status in one market to monopolize another. Which is exactly what MS did with IE and with Office.
Apple, on the other hand, is not a monopoly, and does not fall under such rules.
Actually TextEdit consistently pleases and amazes me with what it can do (including open most MS Word .doc files)...and it integrates images in a way that I only wish Word could do.
The idea of an all-cocoa Appleworks-like product is just wonderful.
But that's the wrong way to go. Microsoft, Apple, and other vendors need to figure out how to create software platforms that allow good integration between applications that weren't developed by a single team. And none of them have managed that yet.
True integration requires open, flexible standards for content and inter-application communications. Nobody has really figured out how to do that yet, least of all Microsoft and Apple.
This is a good point. Apple developed something called OpenDoc, which consisted of object-oriented documents with plug-in replaceable reader and content generator code. That way, if you didn't like the text editor, you simply bought another that worked the way you wished. BBEdit had a module that replaced the one Apple shipped. IIRC, ODoc was killed in a MS-Apple deal that left Office running on Macs...
This line no sig
Gnumeric is better. As a statistician, he should be avoiding Excel anyway due to its known innacuracies in calculations. Gnumeric is better on that front, too.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Microsoft hasn't learned that lesson. They would happily drive all third-party software off their platform. They are notorious for working with their "partners" in the same manner that preying mantises mate. And Microsoft is totally on the rocks because they do that. Right?
So what is it that Apple has to learn, to avoid disaster?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Et cetera, often abbreviated to etc., and sometimes in older texts as &c. or &/c. It is often used to represent the logical continuation of some sort of series of descriptions. For example:
We need a lot of fruit: apples, bananas, oranges, etc.
It is important to avoid the phrase "and etc." because then you are saying "and and the others".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Deleteing Quicktime.app doesn't remove any of the codecs. I can drag it to the trash and empty it, no problem. Finder still previews just fine, thank you. As I understand it, WMP isn't quite so easily removed.
And as long as we're talking about the Finder, I could decide to trash it and port Konquerer, use it as my file browser instead. Or Safari. Or even IE. Now wouldn't that be ironic.
I can download the source and binaries for OS Xs kernel. I can install and run it without any GUI layer at all. Could you please point to directions on how one installs NT without the GUI layer?
Which is why I said 'portrayed' as inseparable. MS seems to want everyone to believe that their apps can't be removed without hampering core functionality. I'm not saying it's true. I understand that the apps are (or should be) nothing more than front-ends.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand