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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.
A blog like any other.
Who wouldn't welcome a slick, well-integrated, back-to-basics, consumer-grade office suite to come out of Apple?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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".)
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.
It is a prefectly free office suite, but not perfectly good. The X version of OpenOffice.org requires the use of Apple's implementation of XFree86, not ideal from Apple's perspective. There is a version (NeoOffice/J) that I use and does not require X, but OpenOffice.org is mostly a copy of Microsoft Office and doesn't do a lot to really give the user a better experience. Yes, OpenOffice.org has tended to behave better than MS Office, but the interface is still filed will too many menus, and worse, too many badly placed menus and menu options. The big problem with office suites is that you have so many options and no one really stopped to think how to organize them, they just threw more and more stuff on the Tools and Format and Edit menus until you couldn't find a damn think you were looking for.
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.
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.
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'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!
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.
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.
Absolutely!!! When ClarisWorks came out, I was at a major university. This application was awesome and incredibly useful not only for students with new computers, but I remember refurbishing many older Macs that people had been pretty much throwing away (or selling for like $50). An old SE Mac and ClarisWorks was pretty cheap and worked very well for students to use in their own rooms instead of fighting for access in the labs. The thought that you could run that puppy off a floppy disk was truly amazing...it was damn efficient code and contained unique features - many still not found elsewhere. Unfortunately it *is* incredibly dated. For those who can't relate to software age in years, you could put it this way...the last time AppleWorks was updated was just after the last major update to Windows! That's friggin' embarrassing.
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.