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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.
Dated? Maybe! Useful for simple word processing? Absolutely.
I cann't fault it's ability to make a simple hand typed document without bloat, and for that I will continue to use it.
...to replaced the incredibly dated Apple Works and incredibly expensive,bloated and slow MS Office.
I think the submitter has an axe to grind. I have been quite impressed with Word on OSX, and indeed the rest of the available Office suite. I would prefer to use OpenOffice, but I feel it has a little longer to mature on OSX.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
... a better port of OpenOffice? Last I checked (admittedly about a year) there was a working port, but it required installing X11 and a few other "non-Macish" actions before it would work. Could they be better off just "fixing" it ?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
This rumor seems to make a lot of sense. If Apple were building a new office suite from the ground up it would take a while to do and would explain why AppleWorks say there and played dead for years. Most of the AppleWorks team has probably been working on writing the new office suite and a few people left working on AppleWorks updates and fixes. Also I can see this suite taking a while as Apple would want it to work very intuitively, something that Office frequently fails at and AppleWorks rarely shines at. There are so many formatting options and other tools that to build a really good word processor a complete re-think needs to be done on how the interface is organized. Right now its a nearly endless array of menus and sub-menus. Let's hope Apple does a good job of cleaning up the mess.
People need to realize that making a successful Office competitor doesn't equate to making it less "bloated and slow", or adding any sort of all-important feature set.
The only way any product in this space is going to go places is if it works just like Office, acts just like Office, feels just like Office, etc. Office is the standard, and for 99% of people that use it, it's flawless. Any deviation from this standard suite, even if it's an improvement, is nothing but a nuisance to the average user.
A common user seeing one single glitch (glitch defined as something different from how it works in Office) will run (not walk) to their standard MS Office icons.
How do I know this is true? Simple. There are tons of people who are actually into the OSS movement, love Slashdot, run Linux servers, run OS X, etc. that *still* run MS Office when they can run OpenOffice instead? Why is that? It's because even the most open-minded of us are creatures of habit. And if *these* people are resistant, imagine how the masses are.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
It's not a new office suite, it's an application called Pages that will be bundled in with Keynote to make a new suite of applications called iWork (to complement iLife). There's no word of a spreadsheet application for example.
If the rumour is true (and Think Secret have been very accurate over the past couple of years) then bundling all this software along with the $500 Mac is a great move for them. 1.25Ghz G4 might not sound like much, but it's faster than the last generation iMac I have, and it's already fast enough for the majority of computer users (those who surf, do email, write some letters and take pictures from their digital cameras). Combined with all the software these users are likely to need, it's a great price.
It is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?
There are really two classes of users that need ``office'' software.
At the low end, you have most home users and students. Most of this group just needs basic wordprocessing and spreadsheet functionality. The most advanced feature would really need to be spellcheck.
At the high end, you have the business users who use a lot of the advanced features like revision tracking, charting, scheduling, etc.
I'm not really sure one suite can cover both audiences.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Because normal people don't run X11.
When/if they come out with an Aqua-ized version of OO.o, the reason will change to "because Apple believes they can do it better". And I'd give them every chance to try, too.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
If this iWorks isn't 100%--and I mean 100%--compatible with Office, forget it. And is Apple making the right strategic move, here? One of the reasons that folks even contemplate moving from Windows to OS X, instead of, say, Linux, is that you can buy Microsoft Office for OS X.
If MS feels threatened by iWorks, they'll just kill Office for OS X. And then Apple has lost one of their best marketing reasons to go Mac instead of Linux.
Not that Keynote really caused any problems--but iWord is a different story. Maybe this is just so Apple can have a "professional grade" office suite to put on the their pro line, and if you need Office compatibility (like 95% of the world) you buy Office for the Mac? But it would save that other 5% $500.
I guess I don't see the wisdom of this.
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$tar -xvf
Now if the interface is an absolute paradigm shift that is an order of magnitude more efficient than the mah jhong tiles that define the top of applications in GUI's today AND it runs on Linux?
Then watch out.
Otherwise, people will put up with Office because it is what their company buys, and they don't want to learn 2 word processors/spreadsheet/groupware applications. IE: They will not want to use one application for 99% of what they do every day, and the other one for the Holiday Christmas letter.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
That OperOffice.org runs under X11 on OS X is enough reason not to use it for 98% of the people out there. It can't even use native menus and widgets, for Pete's sake.
I love that I can run The GIMP and friends through X11 on my Mac, but there's no way in hell I'd call it "perfectly good". X11 on Mac is adequate--enough to get the job done, but little more than that. I'll take native apps over X11 any day of the week.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Apple's new word processing software had been rumored to be called Document, but sources say it appears that name has been abandoned, possibly due to the confusion a user might encounter when being told "this document is a Document document."
:)
This brings to mind MS's annoying habit of calling things by generic names (Movie Maker, SQL Server, Word, Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc.). I wish they'd knock it off... it can really screw up a Google search, both for MS and non-MS products. They should stick with names like Excel and Powerpoint, and Apple should not pick up this habit. Call it iWriter or something. Hell, why not OOWriter
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Other replies to the parent identify the significant issues with OO on the Mac. Having tried for a year to rely on it for word processing, I finally gave up and switched to Mellel--a fine tool for a number of things, but not nearly as muscular as either OO or MS-O. The poor shell integration and reliance on X caused more frustration for me than using it was worth.
That said, OO is a fine product in it's Win and Lin incarnations, and I personally would prefer Apple to fully fund a team dedicated to properly porting the darn thing to Aqua, as opposed to rolling their own from scratch. There is a somewhat beleaguered dev trying to do the job, but they need lots of help. Some developers and cash would make their lives a lot easier.
A funded porting team would also benefit from being able to use the work of the OO core team in dealing with the always-vexing "catch up" issues such as managing the MS format changes, in turn letting the port team focus on making the OO updates play nice in Aqua. Less work for them, quicker updates for the user community.
(Not that Steve gives an expresso shot for what I think, but, hey, I can hope... )
No. When Apple does it, it works. When Microsoft does it, it satisfies the feature list.
Apple could do everyone (including Microsoft) a favor by concentrating their effort solely on components that read/write/render MS Office and Mac Works file formats in OpenOffice.org, and distributing OO.o with every Mac. Macs could become the preferred authoring platforms for every medium, extending their audio/video dominance into the office, for consumption by the vast masses downstream running Windows and Linux.
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make install -not war
Keynote and Powerpoint allow people to work harder and be more productive in their usual line of work. Most people have actual jobs where the powerpoint creation is secondary. Being able to do more (and have it look better) in less time is a win-win.
Flashy presentations is a sign of a lack of design sense. That's not a prerequisite to being smart.
Perhaps so. These are philosophical and sociological considerations, and outside the arguments over any relative technical and human-interface merit of the software in question.
As an aside of my own - I often need "flashy' presentations to compensate for the lacking attention span of those with the fat wallets, not the lacking of my content.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?
Yep. Because when Apple does it, the end user sees a benefit. When Microsoft does it, their market share increases. There was no logical reason to integrate the entire browser into the OS like it was in Windows 9x. The proper and better way is to embed an API, and put a browser out that works off that, like how OS X (Safari) and 2000/XP do it. Remember how in 98 IE crashes could make the taskbar disappear?
The integration between the iLife apps is a great example of good integration. On the Windows side, Movie Maker ignores Windows Media Player to find music, and the photo stuff in the OS is horrible and can't be turned into a movie slideshow easially.
Well, page numbers would be nice, too. And real control over your margins. And footnotes. And mail merge. And maybe headers and footers. Multi-columns would be nice. Okay, so maybe it needs *just* a bit more than tables. But tables would be nice, too.
ScienceSeeker.org
Oh come on now!
You can't say MS's office integration doesn't work, or that it merely ticks a box on some notional feature list.
The level integration and interoperability of the Office suite is something that most other software vendors aspire to, but few (if any) have achieved.
It's not an easy thing to acomplish. Which is why MS Office is as popular on the Mac platform as it is on Wintel.
I think embracing and extending Open Office (or even open-sourcing their custom app) would be a better move for Apple. Right now, it is difficult for many businesses to replace PCs with Macs because of Office. The Office version for Mac is more limitted and has some performance and interoperability problems. The only way Apple could break that monoploly would be to release a competing office suite (preferably for free) that runs well on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
The real advantage to that would be to make a Mac the logical upgrade for businesses. They are not a software company, and software is a difficult place to build value right now. Keep the software open, and sell the hardware.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
If Apple also comes on board, this would help a lot in creating a true office standard-format (for the first time in computing history, until now we just have fluctuating quasi-standards set by whatever version of whatever office suite happens to be in the most widest use) benefit everybody except Microsoft.
I will be able to read OASIS-documents in 20 years, but I have my doubts about MSOffice documents...
That's odd, I thought I just did.
I'm not really sure what you mean here. What do you allege Microsoft Office interoperates with? I haven't noticed that it operates very well with other vendors software, or that it even operates very well with different versions of itself. As for integration, it seems to be a middling effort, at best. The total integration, between both the office suite elements and between the suite and the OS, seems to be stuck at the level achieved by other vendors back around 1995.
Gosh, and I thought that illegal bundling arrangements and abuse of monopoly power might have had something to do with it. I realize that I hold and unpopular opinion, and that all right-thinking computer users recognize Microsoft for the innovative and benevolent capitalist they are, but I guess I just like being an iconoclast and a parriah.
I taught word processing and basic PC skills to paralegals in the 90's. In spite of Word's increasing popularity, many law offices stayed with WordPerfect. Here's what I saw happen:
Law offices adopted WordPerfect because its style sheets and macro features matured before Word's. In a business that produces massive numbers of identically-formatted documents, with many passages repeated from doc-to-doc, robust stylesheets and macros were a powerful selling point.
WordPerfect's keystroke shortcuts were also critical to its success in the law field. Most of the typing in law offices was done by secretaries, who were professional typists. They didn't want thier fingers to leave the keyboard for any reason. And they certainly didn't want to have to wait for a menu to pop up or pull down, and then navigate through that menu (even if they could do so without leaving the keyboard). WordPerfect enabled these professional typists to do everything with keyboard shortcuts only, and bypass slower menus. WordPerfect was to legal secretaries what emacs is to programmers.
Third-party vendors saw the dominance of WordPerfect in the legal profession, and developed thier products around WordPerfect. Whether it was an add-on to produce legal citations more easily, or templates for legal documents, they further supported WordPerfect's dominance in this specialized market.
After spending years developing thier WordPerfect reflexes, integrating third party products, and even writing thier own WordPerfect macros, legal typists were not going to easily abandon the application. So while most of the rest of the world switched to Word, the legal profession has kept on chugging away with WordPerfect. And now every lawyer I know still uses it.
User Training for Busy Programmers
yes. there's a difference between Apple "integrating" things and Microsoft "just locking everyone else out".
Open Office and Abiword both work just fine on my windows box.
Not sure why your troll received such high regard, but evil is not the problem with Microsoft Office. The lack of domain-expertise about the way a user interacts with an application is the real problem. Five minutes with Word will reveal this flaw. If, otoh, Word worked as well as Excel, nobody would ever question the value of Office. Heck, even a 1997 copy of AMI PRO works better than the latest versions of Word. Why is that? Because Microsoft only makes a product as good as it has to be to gain dominance. Perhaps Apple's suite will provide incentive to improve their product. That would really be the best of all worlds. Though I will probably reward Apple with my hard earned money, because the corporate philosophy is one of perfectionism. This fits my personality better.
I agree that Apple should be as open as possible.
Regardless of the direction Apple takes on this, open document standards are the most important consideration. I hope they are looking at Open Office or OASIS or any means of ridding us of the cursed concept of some big company having more rights with my data than I do.
I want to send my document to anyone I choose, and know that the recipient will easily work with my document, regardless of the machine or software that they are using.
I want to move between machines at home and work and in between in any of their modes, and still be abled to edit the document.
I want to know that the arrangement of bits and bytes are still useful as long as my data is useful
Business, individuals, the computer industry, everyone should benefit from changing to a document centred world from the current application centred world.
A bold move in that direction will help me to favor a shiny new Mac in a clamshell, when this machine goes belly up (hopefully no time soon). My workstatation/server will probably remain Linux.
The killer-app is dead.
The killer-doc must rule the new information era.
Long live the killer-doc!
>> The integration between Apple applications and the system
>> is simply amazing.
>it is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?
Integration isn't inherently bad. It's can be good or bad depending on how it's done.
There's a big difference between the way Apple does it and the way Microsoft does it. Often times, Apple does it to make the consumer's life easier and to provide a benefit. Microsoft often does it to bundle applications together so that you only get the benefits if you use all their stuff.
Case in point: Apple versus Microsoft for personal information management (PIM).
In this corner, we have Apple!
email: Apple Mail
address book: AddressBook
calendar: iCal
In the other corner, we have Microsoft.
email: Entourage
address book: Entourage
calendar: Entourage
Apple uses open standards to store their data. They use an open mbox standard to store messages in Apple Mail. They use vcard to store addresses. They use vcal store calendar stuff.
Microsoft allows you to export messages, but they're Entourage formatted documents, which can only be opened in Entourage. You can't easily move addresses out of Entourage. For example, in AddressBook, you can drag a group of names out, open the file in a text editor, make changes, save it, and drag the vcard back into AddressBook where it will update the changes. I can drag that vcard to any application and do whatever I want with it.
On top of that, any application can access the AddressBook's database in order to use contacts. That's cool.
On the other hand, we have Microsoft's integration. I upgraded to Office 2004, and I would like to use Entourage for email (we're using Outlook for mail at work), but I want to use AddressBook for my contacts (because of its support for Bluetooth phones). Microsoft has tightly integrated their own technologies so I can't switch easily.
Maybe Apple would do the same if the situation were reversed, but the courts (prior to the Bush administration) already convicted Microsoft of abusing its monopoly and illegally bundling applications for the purpose of locking out competition. Clearly Microsoft has a history of illegally bundling in order to control a market.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Here's how Apple could be successful even without MS Office
If the rumors about a robust Apple office suite are true, and I'm pretending I'm Steve Jobs, I'm guessing Apple will continue to work in and around the OS community as IBM has done (and Apple has already done so far).
Apple has learned quite a bit about the open source community by now, after their experiences with Darwin/Mac OS X and KHTML/Safari. The use of open standards is prevalent throughout the bundled applications (Mail -> mbox; Address Book -> vcard; iCal -> icalendar, etc.). Apple should continue this trend with their office suite.
Make the interface irresistible. They have already shown how to do it with ClarisWorks (I never used AppleWorks, but CW 4 was a thing of integrated beauty). They have shown the ability to put great power in simple packages. iTunes. Garage Band. iPhoto. Personally, I have never liked Word's interface (even on the Mac), but there's not a lot of choice. Bring on a contender with a fresh face, and Word's 20-year-old baggage (elements from 1984 are still there -- where's the fscking Font menu!?) will suddenly look very ugly.
Read Word documents reasonably well. Write them perfectly. All translation leaves something to be desired. I don't believe that it is necessary for a Word contender to be 100% feature compatible with Word. It absolutely needs to get styles, sections, margins, tables, footnotes, endnotes, and graphics right, though. A spreadsheet program needs to duplicate the function set of Excel (though not necessarily the syntax; q.v.) It needs to be 100% right for the features that 80% of the people use. Word won not because of its interface, but because people are locked into its format. Break the format and you break the biggest barrier to alternate office contenders. Perhaps this will require work with Open Office developers. That substep should happen no matter what, if only for the following point.
Make the format an open standard. Let anyone write an app to read or write Apple Office documents. This is the corollary to the point above. Don't give people reasons to fear switching to or from your app. Give them the ability to change their mind. That's a feature; people will buy it.
Don't imitate Office Seriously. Do something new. Give people a jump start on new ideas and possibilities. Make everything wiki-like. Docs on the network should be sharable. Build a Subversion repository into every document or home folder.Extend it to every OS X server. Build on the embeddable parts idea from OpenDoc (and semi-executed in CW). Instead of a spreadsheet program, build a full-featured spreadsheet on top of a robust, professional RAD environment with an open API. Let regular people be developers again (whatever happened to HyperCard?).
Buy Omni Group. Or take notes. Or just give them money to continue developing fantastic software. OmniWeb, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle are all head-of-class programs. Graffle could easily be part of an Office Pro suite. Especially if you can build and take snapshots of SQL tables like Visio.
IBM is building its business on enterprise open source software like Linux. Apple should continue the progress they have made in the direction of doing the same for personal computing apps.
It's a question of scale. Apple doesn't truly integrate its apps; rather, it creates separate apps that work well together and can easily trade info back and forth, yet no single app is required at all. You could replace every Apple app on your OS X system, and the core OS would still operate fine. Even the Finder.
With MS, the apps are portrayed as being necessary to the operation of the OS.
Oh my gawd, you are kidding right, no one on slashdot is really this stupid are they?
1) Remove all of QuickTime off of your precious OSX and see how well finder does QuickTime previews, and other apps like adobe Photoshop or EVEN iMovie import or export QuickTime formats.
Buzz... It will NOT work, just like if you removed Windows Media Codecs and DLLs off your Windows machine. They are SHARED Core libraries that EVEN THE GUI of the OS uses. And yes, even on your precious OSX.
2) There is a difference between the CORE OS and the GUI. I will repeat this once again for the hard of hearing. Win16/Win32/Win64 IS NOT THE WINDOWS NT CORE OS. They are SUBSYSTEM LAYERS. Even NT can run without ANY of these installed on them. NT could run with NO WINDOWS GUI, in fact it does.
3) Explorer can EASILY be replaced in Windows. It has been easy to replace for YEARS AND YEARS. Explorer, just like Finder is NOT NECESSARY for the OS or even the Win32/Win64 GUI to run. Why on earth people would think this is something special or cool or Apple OSX is insane or living in a vacuum.
There are also 25 other things that by removing will bring OSX to a halt or break a ton of applications, just like Windows or any Unix variant that uses shared libraries or resources for the applications.
Why people think that when Microsoft said IE was necessary NOT TO BREAK applications, they somehow assumed this was different than ANY OTHER OS vendor was doing at the time. All OSes use common and shared resources and libraries.
IE was simply a freaking HTML rendering set of technologies, it was NOT the Internet Explorer Browser people always confuse it with.
This is why a third party Windows app back in 1998 could tell Windows to render an HTML page to the screen and Windows would know how and do so in the non-Microsoft application. Just like when an application in OSX or Windows asks the OS to render a Font to the screen, the OS does it for the app, and it don't matter if the Font is Truetype, Opentype or whatever the OS understands. These are NOT different concepts, it is just extending to the OS abilities that were once only in applications. Just like Adobe Font Manager was once needed on Windows and Macs, the OS at the time did not know how to render the font. Now they DO know how to render the font, hence this application's abilities and functionality was brought back to the OS level and provided for use by all applications of Macs and Windows. The same is true of rendering HTML by the OS on Windows, it gave developers a way to use HTML pages without having to write a HTMl rendering engine. And at the time in 1998, a good rendering engine for developers was NOT readily available, and by having that in the Windows OS, saved us developers weeks, and months of work.
It kills me that some of even the top intellectuals here at SlashDot either don't get this, or just don't want to, as it gives them some twisted reason to separate them or what they use from the evil Microsoft.
It wouldn't feel indistinguishable from Cocoa. We've had this debate about Firefox many times. Firefox is the highest quality of app you could expect from that sort of approach - and many Mac users (me included) do not use it because it doesn't 'feel' mac-like.
Any emulating of the native widgets will bring in slight differences that users aren't always aware of consciously (unless they know the OS very well), but will annoy them with the inconsistency. For example, when I press a key I expect my mouse pointer to disappear - that's a system standard. But many apps that weren't written using Apple's frameworks don't do that.
Also, if you just have a translating layer (I'm envisioning something akin to the Aqua look for Java Swing), you'll end up with Aqua controls all clumped up because the positioning wasn't taken into account. Or you'll end up with the preferences option under the Edit menu, because other OSs don't have an app-name menu.
In general, Mac users are far more picky about these things. That's why breaking into the Mac market is hard if you don't put the effort into understanding the philosophy behind the interface. Anyone can do a port of a Windows or X11 app, switching the menus to appear Aqua and changing nothing else - but few Mac users will tolerate it. We require inter-app consistency much more than we do inter-platform consistency within one app. Even Adobe gets slated for some poor interface options in Photoshop that are too geared to the Windows crowd!
An app like Camino is an excellent example. Gecko for rendering (a cross platform library) but a Mac-specific interface. Adium uses gaim as a base library, and adds a Mac interface. These projects work. But when you attempt to port an existing interface, your work will NOT be well received!