Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Apple's Rumored Office Suite

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the not-much-else-happening-today dept.

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.

9 of 863 comments (clear)

  1. Oh, Please Let It Be So! by American+AC+in+Paris · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The office suite is the lynchpin of practically every single consumer computer setup, with the possible exception of dedicated gaming machines. Apple has been repeatedly demonstrating that they want to give people a computer that "Just Works". The integration between Apple applications and the system is simply amazing.

    Who wouldn't welcome a slick, well-integrated, back-to-basics, consumer-grade office suite to come out of Apple?

    --

    Obliteracy: Words with explosions

    1. Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Interesting
      You have never used Keynote, I take?

      If they can produce Word and Excel equivalents to the level that Keynote demolishes PowerPoint...

      People will be begging them for Windows ports.

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    2. Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! by goates · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yes, because Apple manages to keep the programs separate from each other and the system while still having them work well together. If you want to use a different browser oe email program, go for it. It is pretty easy to remove the ones you don't want.

      On the other hand, removing Outlook Express seems to cripple MSN Messenger, Outlook and who knows what else.

    3. Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! by The+Infamous+Grimace · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?

      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.

      (tig)
      --
      Ignorance and prejudice and fear
      Walk hand in hand
  2. The name is free by browse · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".)

  3. Re:Makes Sense by WillAdams · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Agreed.

    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 .pdf
    - sort
    - &c.

    William

    --
    Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
  4. Re:appleworks by Class+Act+Dynamo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  5. Wonder if this has anything to do with Gobe by Trilobyte · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:AppleWorks isn't dated by macslut · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.