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Apple iWork Screenshots
applextrent submitted a story with a bunch of screen shots of Apple's new iWork package, including Keynote 2 and Pages, the new Apple word processor. Nothing particularly surprising here.
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"Nothing particularly surprising here."
... slow day then?
Where's the "Stuff that matters"?
Sounds like the submitter basically just submitted a link, so he felt the need to write a short story around it?
Anyway, yes, since it's not in italics, it's from the editor.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Everytime OO.o is updated there's a front page article on it. This isn't an update to an old application, it's a new word processor from Microsoft's only desktop competitor, THAT'S why we're hearing about it.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Some of us care when someone (in this case Apple, in other cases Open Office, or KDE) releases software that challenges the dominant monopolist.
I've seen articles on OpenOffice, AbiWord, and NeoOffice J. This article fits in with that theme.
Do you have a particular anti Apple sentiment that makes this article particularly disturbing to you?
GPL Deconstructed
Also I am a bit surprised that Apple didn't go with an existing software base for their Office suite. It is obvious that what they are doing is a defensive maneouvre against the possibility that MS will drop Apple support for Office, like they did with IE. Apple had to have some non-IE backup plan and they chose to take Konqueror and turn it into Safari. Good choice Apple. But they could have done the same thing with iWorks. There are two code bases they could have picked: the obvious OpenOffice, and also KOffice. Actually KOffice is quite good, considering that it's a "small" project. And if they liked Konqueror then maybe KOffice would have also been appealing to them.
One interesting thing about this is that it is indicating that office software is becoming a commodity. There are currently half a dozen office suites out there (MS Office, iWorks, OOo, SoftMaker, KingSoft, KOffice and probably a few more I'm not remembering right now). I actually hope that iWorks is also ported to Linux, but that seems very very unlikely.
Whatever the next version of office will come out, I think MS will copy some of the features and look and feel (as much as they can and get away with it) of iLife '05.
It looks like Apple did a beautiful job. Now I'm starting to think that getting a MAC would be a good idea.
....predicting gloom and doom again eh? Didnt learn from your iPod errors yet did you?
Why am I not particularily surprised.
I switched to Mac about 3 years ago and really for the first 6 months, Apple Works 6 did just about everything I needed. Then I started getting to where PowerPoint was a must have for presentations and the spreadsheet would export data to excel but not the equations. So I bought Office V.x and frankly was plesantly surpised with an MS product that worked.
I work as a consultant and being able to share information with clients is a must! While we can debate the goods/evils of file formats etc. here in the world of geekdom, in the real world communication is key to me being able to put food on my table.
If apple supported OASIS, all the better, but until people are actually using the format it's not going do very much. It is a chicken or the egg arugement.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Absolutely, Microsoft file formats are the standards. They are a bad standard for many reasons. So people don't like this and what to change it. Getting Apple on board with the new standard would help a lot.
OASIS isn't even finished today! It's just the second draft. So you can't possibly offer any software that is truely using OASIS-Office as a document standard.
Real geeks loved Apple up until about 1982. The Apple II was open and geeks loved it. Steve Jobs closed the Machintosh shut. No information : just plug and live with what we give you was his motto. Apple died when Woz got kicked out and the marketing droids took over. Wanna develop for Apple? Lock-in city: it only works on Apple.
That was the case with classic MacOS. OSX is Unix at the core, supports multiple languages, integrates Java better than most other platform, and much of it is open source. Even if you use the "one true toolit" Coccoa, your code can be portable to Next, GNUStep, OpenStep etc. If you buy Apple, you are buying fluff. It is not the "GUI" pioneer. It is not "the fastest PC". It's closed source GUI is a complete anathema to geeks.
If you buy a linux distro, you are buying fluff. You are not buying a Unix Pioneer, or an Open Source Pioneer. It is not the "fastest OS." Its a rewrite of a platform orginally developed in the 70's in New Jersey.
Apple is for the digital illiterati.
Apparently Linux is for the digital elitist in your eyes.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
It seems to me that Apple has to tread very carefully with an office productivity suite, so as not to piss off Microsoft. Witness the step-by-step introduction of a browser (Safari), presentation app (Keynote), and now a word processor (Pages). The missing pieces of the puzzle of course, are a spreadsheet and database. I'm willing to bet that they're already working on a spreadsheet with the features and capabilities of Improv which I've heard described as the best spreadsheet ever. It's also not a stretch for them to introduce a "Lite" version of FileMaker (which is owned by Apple) as a database module. Users needing more capabilities would be able to upgrade to the full-featured version of FileMaker, in much the same way that they can move from iMovie/iDVD to Final Cut Pro/DVD Studio Pro.
why apple dont you push openoffice more upfront
...what's the word I'm looking for here? Wrong.
Because, from a Mac user's point of view, Open Office is just terrible, terrible software. It isn't even a Mac application. It has to run under X11, a windowing environment that isn't installed by default and that most Mac users will never need or want. It doesn't support Mac givens like drag-and-drop or advanced typography. Hell, it doesn't even support cut and paste!
Put a computer user down in front of Open Office on the Mac, and the response is going to be "This sucks." Apple, understandably, doesn't want anybody to have a reason to say "This sucks" while sitting in front of a Macintosh.
why apple dont you push mozilla more upfront
See the above answer, minus the part about X11. Mozilla (Camaro, Firebird, whatever the hell they're calling themselves this week) just sucks compared to Safari.
why apple dont you push a native and complete workable FTP client more upfront with UTF-8 character set support!!!
What, you mean like Transmit from Panic Software?
If you consider that there are about 35 million Mac users out there, the fraction of them who ever need to use an FTP client is vanishingly small. If all you need to do is download files, the Finder takes care of that for you: FTP URLs are handed off to the Finder. For the one-in-a-thousand who need to upload, Panic has your number.
safari miserably fails to complay with w3c standards
Um? That's
fail to run properly javascript
Again with the wrong.
fail to run properly flash apllications
No, also not true.
I think the problem here might be related to the fact that you haven't got the foggiest idea what you're talking about. I think that might be a part of it.
Mozilla (Camaro, Firebird, whatever the hell they're calling themselves this week) just sucks compared to Safari.
You had me until here; Gecko (the Mozilla rendering engine) is generally regarded as the best rendering engine available. It's not the fastest, mind you, but it's the most developed with regards to web standards. Safari isn't far off, but some of it's quirks can get a bit annoying at times. Just ask Gmail users what they thought of Safari up until about 2 months ago.
As a web developer, I'm generally pretty happy with how Safari renders websites, but I really do wish that Apple had forked Gecko instead of KHTML. Given the popularity of Firefox, the Gecko engine has some serious momentum behind it from web developers; twiddling with a 3rd major rendering engine (KHTML) just adds to testing time. And at this point, Firefox and its brethren run as fast as Safari, even though they're not Cocoa applications.
I know that Apple wants to bring as many applications in house as possible, but as a Mac user, at this point I question the value of Apple continuing to sink resources into its own browser when a clearly equal if not superior peer product exists in Firefox (and even moreso after Firefox 1.1 with Mac-specific tweaks is released). Firefox isn't Cocoa, but not everything has to be, either.