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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.
It's about time for a replacement, but I hope the changes made - if the rumor is indeed true - are solid, needed ones rather than an artsy, candied gloss over the previous offering.
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Who wouldn't welcome a slick, well-integrated, back-to-basics, consumer-grade office suite to come out of Apple?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Isn't that the point of an office suite? To have everything you would need. If you don't want bloated go use vi,vim,joe,nano,pico,or abiword, or and mutt,pine,so forth.
The interesting thing is, they already have a simple Word replacement - TextEdit. It case read and write Word files. The only thing it's really missing is table support, which is supposed to be coming in Tiger. With that it can completely replace Word for me.
So I wonder if a full-blown word processor would be a souped-up TextEdit, or base off something else - just like they used KHTML instead of Mozilla as a base for Safari.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It sucked from the get-go, or at least the Mac version did. The Apple ][ version was elite.
I hope Apple writes a winner, I'd love to avoid MS Office in the future.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
I noticed a piece of Mac shareware just released a new version today. The reason? They are dropping their old "iWork" name for a new one. Veddy interestink.
(Note, the piece of shareware is now titled "iBiz".)
a perfectly good office suite (free) already exists? OpenOffice.org has an OSX version.
The rumors are abounding about new apple hardware and software with deep pricing discounts (offering Motion for so cheap) that it makes me believe that this could realistically be a $99 buy which would make it a steal.
If they price it at $199 (the next Apple-logic price point) and a newly rumored $499 PC i'd almost have to go with the PC just to get the software! I'll likely wait untill Tiger either way as there's also a possibility (in my mind) of a package deal with the whole ball of wax.
Ever hear of the uncanny valley? There's something like that going on with Office for Mac. At a glance, it appears to look and behave just like a Mac program should, but somehow... well, it's hard to point to anything specific, but there's something a little off. Popup menus are drawn with custom routines instead of Cocoa. The inline spellchecker doesn't antialias the underline squiggle properly. And so on and so forth. It just makes one queasy.
I'd welcome a productivity suite from Apple.
I just upgraded from Office 98 to Office 2004. What a complete waste of money. Aside from OS X code and antialiased fonts, the new version is less stable, slower, crankier, and festooned even more Microsoft User Interface Atrocities than ever. Six years and 3 versions later, Office has failed to fix most (any?) of the annoyances from the 1998 version. I guess near-100% market share means the company does not have to do anything to charge money for its double-speak "upgrades".
Sorry for the rant.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Agreed.
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Hopefully Apple will take a look at projects like LyX ( http://www.lyx.org ), the ``What You See Is What You Mean'' document processor.
For those who're wondering why Microsoft Office or Open Office aren't ideal --- contrast them with TextEdit.app which:
- is a Cocoa application
- supports all Mac OS X input methods,
- fonts (incl. AAT fonts like Zapfino)
- Unicode
- Services
That last is one of the under-appreciated advantages of Mac OS X. In _any_ Cocoa application (or Carbon app written to support Services) I can:
- Convert case (ALL CAPS to Initial Caps &c.)
- have autocompletion from a user-defined list
- complete a Citation (using Bibdesk)
- typeset a TeX equation and get an in-place
- sort
- &c.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Given that they liked Khtml, I was wonderign about KWord - does it also read and write Word files? I guess they could use code from TextEdit for that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
According to this post from MS themselves, Office 2003 is actually quite cheap.
I would like to see what new features this includes when compared to MS Office or OpenOffice.
Hopefully this will create more competition between these office suites and bring about new features to Office market.
Hopefully Apple will try to use some open standards
Even less bloat and unlike Appleworks and it comes with all copies of OS X.
I disagree. You are correct in one sense: anybody who already uses Microsoft Office (whether at work or at home) for document creation will be more comfortable sticking with something that works exactly like Office.
But I think Apple is going for a different market: casual computer users. I don't necessarily mean just first-time computer users, I mean people who use computers for email, Internet, and instant messaging. How often do casual users need to use an Office suite?
I'll tell you how often: almost never. Since I graduated from college two years ago I have not once used a word processor to create a document. (OK maybe once--I wrote a letter to my grandma.) Most casual users are like me. The only office suite they need is something that lets them view documents that people send them via email. If Apple's office suite can view Microsoft Office documents, that's good enough for home users.
Casual computer users have no need of Microsoft Office as a document creation suite. I think Apple is heading in the right direction for their target market. Apple's suite will not be a replacement for Microsoft Office, but it will be suitable for a large class of users who don't need Microsoft Office.
A PhD statistician I know stores much of has data in excel spreadsheets and then imports it into SAS when necessary. The whole company upgraded to Office XP, and now he has trouble opening some of those spreadsheets. Very annoying.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
I think this is a catch-22. If Microsoft feels threated by an OSX office suite then killing Microsoft Office for OSX would only drive people to use it the alternative more. This would be a poor business move until the development costs for OSX become financially discouraging in relation to sales. Microsoft, after all, is in business of selling software to people who will pay for it.
Bloated is relative. A lot of people accuse Office of being bloated because it comes on a couple of CDs and is installed with a shitload of clipart, fonts and other fancy stuff that people who swim in vi all day don't understand. Others accuse Office of being bloated because it has gradient toolbars with 32bpp icons. Some people think that if they don't use a particular feature then it's useless and should be ripped from the software entirely.
I look at it differently, however. Yes, Office does eat up more hard drive space in a default installation than OpenOffice. However, on average, OpenOffice requires twice as much RAM as Office to simply function. This is true whether or not a document is even loaded. Office programs also load significantly faster than their OpenOffice counterparts. All of this is accomplished despite the fact that Office still provides many more features.
So I guess it depends on your definition of bloated. In my opinion bloated refers to both the executing footprint of the binary as well as it's perceived performance. I don't consider features that I don't use but have little/no bearing on performance to be bloat. I also value RAM significantly more than I value hard drive space as one is significantly more expensive than the other. So, in my opinion, Office is a fairly lean animal, especially when compared to OpenOffice.
I'd be happy if they kept TextEdit, but created an app along these lines:
Simple Interface
Compatible file formats (Text Edit does to this)
A slightly more robust UI (default-on Fonts window, etc)
Support for tables and graphics.
I already use TextEdit for 50% or more of my writing (basically all but academic papers), and if they could keep the simplicity while making it a bit more similar to most people's experience with Word (keep the 20% of features that end up in 99% of the documents), I'd use it for 100% of my documents.
I've also tried the X11 OpenOffice, and a native port to OSX would be nice. that said, having the Windows-centric keystrokes blows.
C'mon, Apple, you can do it!
"The office suite is the lynchpin of practically every single consumer computer setup"
Perhaps the office suite is the "linchpin" for people who use a computer to do work for their job or school, but for the typical "computer consumer", the key apps are email, a browser, and some games, plus maybe something like Quicken. My wife uses the computer every day for email and simple games, and she hasn't used any office suite program in five years. The same is true for her parents and aunt and uncle. Heck, I rarely use office suite apps myself except when I am working on a chapter or some other writing assignment. I rarely do any work at home related to my job, but when I am trying to be "productive" from a learning/hobby perspective, I generally use text editors, gcc, and/or KDevelop.
I know this does not please a lot of the Open Office fans out there, and this is not an attempt at starting a flame war.
I use Microsoft Office at work on the PC, and I know that many others do as well. Having Microsoft Office available for the Mac was the single most important reason that I chose a Mac as a viable computer for home use.
If Apple puts Microsoft in a position where they are competing, Microsoft may well do what they did in the Safari situation and stop developing the product.
No matter how much better an Apple office suite may be, I would see that as being detrimental to the market growth that is inspired by having a document compatible office suite at home.
If Joe Six-pack uses Office at work, he will easily understand that having Office for the Mac as a compatible solution.
Any other solution at home would bring up compatibility questions by default.
Word for OS X isn't slow until you use it to open big complex documents (the ones that TextEdit won't open correctly because they have lots of tables, footnotes, images, a table of contents, etc.). Documents like that barely scroll on my ancient and revered dual 450 MHz G4.
And when they do scroll, they cause Word to crash, about once a day. Makes me feel like I'm running Windows 98 again, except I don't have to reboot afterwards.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I can't really understand why Apple would release Keynote 2 now instead of when Core Image / Video is out. Keynote is one of Job's favorite ways of showing off their new technologies -remember the cube effect?
My guess is that we might see a minor version upgrade of it, but nothing really big until Tiger is released. But, what do I know?
Awhile ago, Apple re-hired much of the team from Gobe, creators of the amazing app Productive for BeOS. Productive was the most tightly-integrated, easy to use, and fast office suite I've ever had the joy to use.
The team that created Productive was also the team behind the original ClarisWorks on the Mac, which too was an amazing feat of integration in a small footprint. Then a different coding team took over, it became AppleWorks, and began to suck royally.
If the team behind Productive is the team behind this rumored office suite, it is going to be one sweet Suite! HA HA HA HA. Seriously, though, they are masters of the art.
I have been trying out the beta version of NeoOffice/J, which is based on OpenOffice 1.1.3, and have found it to be much nicer than the X11 version of OpenOffice.
The main downside is that it is somewhat sluggish on my G4 Powerbook being written in Java (using the Carbon interface). But having access to all of my fonts, and better rendering make up for any speed issues I have noticed.
Hell...I'm new to Mac..and I'm still trying to figure out how to get X to run on OSX...much less X applications. I've to OSX 10.2.8...Most everything I've seen says you need XCode Tools 1.2 or later, but, when I go to that Mac dev. site...it says you have to have Panther to run this version or higher of XCode.
I'm having a hell of a time figuring out how to get open source stuff to run on the Mac..and I'm usually pretty decent at finding info...but, don't seem to have much luck for the mac...(G3 iBook, 800Mhz).
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Although I think you're serious, I really thought your post was sarcastic at first. Access sucks, sucks, sucks. Its slow and doesn't play well with others.
PCs are in every way superior? Faster? Debateable, it seems the same chip that runs on my desktop is used to build one of the worlds more powerful clusters with one of the highest computing scores per processor. Stronger? When's the last time my OS X box was victim to a worm or virus? Oh, right, never. (If you're running Linux maybe you can say the same thing, but then I guess the machines are equally strong.) Cheaper? Some are, some aren't. Apple has a higher initial price point, but similarly configured PCs are pretty closely price to Macs.
As to the choice of UNIX, by your argument Apple could have picked any core. Picking an OS core isn't something you do for marketing reasons, you make Aqua pretty for marketing. The main reason UNIX was picked was for stability and extensibility. With a clean code base Apple has been able to rapidly pump out an array of applications because they've been able to build powerful frameworks that can be used over and over.
The level integration and interoperability of the Office suite is something that most other software vendors aspire to, but few (if any) have achieved.
Microsoft achieves its "integration" by shipping ever more bloated bundles of software. And, yes, other vendors are trying to emulate that, including Apple.
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.
As a sys admin in an advertising department of a huge corporation, I've been trying to move my clients to OS X, but the lack of MAPI support (so my users can run an Outlook client and use the collaboration tools) has made this a pipe dream. Until Apple or MS ports MAPI, my users are stuck at OS 9. LDAP in my company is not an option, and the only other solution is Terminal Services. I wish Apple and Microsoft would clue into this -- I'm sure I'm not the only one with this issue...
I have been looking for a good, easy to use front end to TeX for quite some time. I'd love to use one. It doesn't even need to do much. If it can do hierarchical document creation (outline-based, the one feature that as far as I can tell only Word has) and hierarchical styles I would be there.
I try every new TeX/LaTeX front end that comes out for the Mac. LyX is close, but isn't reliable (for me) and appears to be a one-document application.
Jerry
Plus
Wordperfect does word-counts properly. MS Word's count funciton is buggy.
This matters because certain courts have limits to the length of certain pleadings, breifs etc - and if the count goes over, you loose!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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.
A TeX file created in 1984 would work just as well today as it did then. I'm sure Knuth didn't have to upgrade much software as he edited TAoCP over the decades. LaTeX of course has been around since about 1986 (though there was a version jump at some point which broke things).
So why start over with a non-native office suite...
Just one reason: market share. The only thing they can do to improve the Mac's image in the work place is to have a toolset that works better on Mac and has a large market share.
Businesses are moving to Linux, and there is no good Office tool for Linux (Open Office is the best, but still not professional quality in my opinion). By making whatever the Mac solution is open source, it gains market share and credibility. By making it run better on Mac than on Linux, they sell more Macs. Trying to sell office software means going head-to-head against an entrenched competitor (Microsoft). It is much better to go against a commodity market (PC manufacturers) with a diferentiated product.
The main problem is that most CTOs and CEOs, know that MS Office runs best on Windows. If you make your money using Word and Excel, you don't "risk your job" buying a Mac. Of course that is not really true, but perception is reality here. If you tell them to use TextEdit, it better not just run on Macs!
I wasn't really saying use OpenOffice and make it better for Mac - I'm just saying whatever they do will probably meet strategic objectives (not near term financial objectives) better if it is open source.
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However, if you notice, Apple isn't really an open-source shop. They help open-source, they support open-source, they use open-source, but they don't really open-source their own products. I'm not saying they shouldn't, I'm saying that don't.
However, I do think their profitability would be hurt by, say, open-sourcing all of OSX, iTunes, iPhoto, etc. If I were running Apple, I also wouldn't choose to create an open-source office suite or run an OpenOffice porting project. Like I said, they'd be risking Microsoft withdrawing support of MS Office (as well as quashing other 3rd party developers) by creating a project that they won't be able to sell. I don't think the peripheral benefits would be sufficient.
Again, if I were running Apple, I would sooner create an office suite and port it to Linux and Windows. But I probably wouldn't even do that. Most likely, I would probably make a highly compatable closed-source office suite with open file-formats while throwing some help/support toward the OpenOffice/NeoOffice projects (and the support would include helping them read the Apple file-formats). For Apple's current business model, it makes a lot of sense to cultivate an open-source community, but not a lot of sense to open source your own products.