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Apple Making a Spreadsheet?
Raleel writes "It appears that apple has trademarked the word "Numbers". Speculation is that it is a new spreadsheet. It makes sense with Keynote, Pages, and Mail." That would sort of fill in the last major hole in their lineup.
Shouldn't this read "Speculation is that it is a new spreadsheet program "?
"Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes."
IIRC, Steve made references to a spreadsheet-in-progress called "Grid". If this thing really is a spreadsheet, it's probably the same project.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
So yeah, you can trademark the word "trademark" in regards to a specific product or market. You could sell TradeMark(tm) cookies, if you liked, or call your car company "trademark". Anyone else selling cookies or cars and using the word trademark in certain ways might be found in violation. On the other hand, I believe common words are considered "weak trademarks" and can be tougher to enforce than made-up words or proper names.
This sig intentionally left justified.
Let's hope Numbers take its inspiration from Lotus Improv.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Obligatory:
Copyright != Trademark
Copyright != Patent
Trademark != Patent
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this", is a magnet for my -1 mod token. I hate to disappoint.
How soon they forget! Visicalc by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston 1979. First spreadsheet program for personal computers on the Apple II. Not invented by M$ (either one -- Viscalc and the Apple II).
They still have AppleWorks. I think it even still ships with every Mac. Hey, check it out, can it really run on Windows?? It appears it can.
It's definitely still useful, though it's rudimentary spreadsheet is probably the weakest link, it's Carbon of course, and badly needs an update... although, now that I mention it, it looks like it has actually bumped a few version numbers since I last looked- interesting, huh?!? It does seem to be in fairly active development for something we'd all written off.
Pages doesn't really replace a word processor, I don't think you'd use it to write a report or something, it's really geared towards making a newsletter with ( somewhat ) fancy graphics or something. It's more of a niche app, like a end-user Illustrator or something.
No, AppleWorks doesn't have half the features of word. Then again, do you use half the features of Word ? It occupies that niche for folks who aren't going to pay for Office. It's $79 new, and though I doubt they sell a lot of copies that way, it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than Office.
Of course, it's entirely possible that Numbers is something different/more than a spreadsheet. Maybe it's a student-version Mathematics package. Maybe it's just a common word Apple thought they could snap up. We won't know until a product is shipped.
Rewind to 1984.
The Macintosh had MacWrite and MacPaint bundled.
Microsoft sold a spreadsheet called Multiplan. The first commercial software for Mac.
Later, came other offerings. (Some of it interesting in concept, such as Helix.)
Eventually, I think by late 1985, thereabout, Microsoft had a new spreadsheet for the Mac called.....
Excel.
It was really great software.
Eventually, Microsoft released a Windows, and a product for it named....
Excel.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
It's not just that it "looks different." It works completely different from other Mac apps.
Menus are per-window instead of universal. Common shortcuts don't work, or do something different. Copy & Paste is spotty, if it works at all. Windows don't obey the same rules as other Mac apps, such as when they take focus. Dialog boxes could come in any number of shapes and sizes, instead of the Mac "slide out" sheet.
It's a major turn-off because folks are used to Mac apps behaving in a consistent manner. Other OSes don't enforce this as strictly, so users tend to expect each app there to have it's ideosynchracies... but on the Mac, folks expect an app to behave itself.
Bad Car Analogy Time: Using OpenOffice via X11 on the Mac is like getting into your car and finding out that, not only is your stereo embedded in the glove compartment instead of the dash, the dial knob doesn't exist and you have to punch in stations by hand, there's no auto-seek function, and the display may show you the time or station or nothing at all depending on which preset you're using.
And if I weren't a student, I would get Star Office for the same price. Fortunately, I am a student, so I can legally download SO for free.
Indeed, all the main players in Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) came out on the Mac before they were released for Windows.
Keynote, their powerpoint replacement, generates XML files for its slideshows. And you can download a long and detailed explanation of the format. I started looking into writing a web application for my school where professors could browse digital photos from the slide library, select the ones they wanted, and have a keynote presentation automatically generated. And make it possible for students to download and generate slideshows, etc. It certainly seems possible, I just never had the time to get past the initial planning stages, and now that I've graduated, I'm not going to do it for them unless someone pays me.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Both Pages & Keynote documents are XML files at their core (they aren't even Zipped like OO) -- although Apple are a little lazy with the documentation at the moment (Keynote v1 is documented on apple.com, v2 isn't yet), it's not that hard to trawl through the XML to grab content & style
<? include ('signature.inc'); ?>
It comes from Mac users who feel a (usually) non-existent speed increase in their machines after they download a patch or updatde to OS X. Also, its common practice to "repair permissions" on OS X as a maintenance chore. People swear that their computers feel "snappier" after doing this. Its mostly all in their head. But hey, whatever makes you happy.
For those who don't know:
DTP = Desktop Publishing
(I'll admit: I had to look it up)
The space unintentionally left unblank.
If I had to choose either Notepad or Quark any time I wanted to create a text document, I'd be an unhappy camper.
That's why I'm saying Pages is so brilliant. It's not Quark, but it's the same class of program, scaled down to the Word level of functionality.
The way I see it, the text editor paradigm works up to the feature level of text-only documents with varied font faces and sizes, alignments and justifications, line spacings, even margins and pages sizes.... so long as it's all just text.
Once you want to start adding tables and graphics and working with master pages and the like, it's time to change paradigms and act like you're doing what you real are doing: basic page layout. You're not just editing text anymore, and trying to make a fancy text editor do things other than edit text is a bad idea.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Well, even you don't seem to remember that it was not an Apple product. It was the killer application for Apple II, but it was produced by Visicorp.
Those who don't know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it.
Well, I was involved with this on a number of levels and can say there was no announcement. What happened was a slip up and spin control. The original article contained quotes that were taken from the end of an interview with Tony Siress on a completely different topic. He was mostly talking about OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X. Note the quote that was interpreted as being the "announcement" of a cooperation:
"I don't want to sell StarOffice for OS X," Siress said. "I want Apple to bundle it. I'll give them the code. I'd love it if I could get the team at Apple to do joint development and they distribute it at no cost--that it's their product. Nobody makes a product more beautiful on Apple than Apple."
Does that sound like a product and bundling announcement? Hell no. It was Tony going off on what he'd "like" to happen, that he'd "like" to have a partnership with Apple and a bundling deal. It never existed. The StarOffice team that he was talking about was the one that existed under Patrick Luby back in 2000 prior to when Sun open sourced the failed remnants of the Mac port.
It also turns out that by this time Patrick had already been working on NeoOffice/J and, being a former Sun employee and manager of the Mac port, he was beginning to show early versions of his application to people within Sun. This is one of the projects that was mentioned by Sun managers as the Java port, even though it wasn't even a Sun project. Tony himself referenced NeoOffice/J's ancestor in his interview.
Tony later explained the mixup to the OOo community, which was later picked up by the press. He was talking out his ass and made my life hell for a whole week.
CNet was embarassed, of course, since they essentially now looked like fools by "breaking" completly false information. So they ran a counter-argument story that had longer quotes from the interview. The Quartz version that he's referring to was the Quartz porting work I had been doing in OpenOffice.org. The Java version he's referring to was the early work by Patrick. It even had some quotes from a Sun PR person confirming that Tony said what he had said. Sun PR sacrificed Tony to maintain a working relationship with CNet (apparently there had been a Sun PR person involved with the original interview but they hadn't stopped Tony from making off-topic comments).
The key point you'll see in that "refutation" article that makes it known he's full of it is the quote on laptops at the bottom. He mentions Apple wanting to sell Sun PowerBooks. His "contact" at Apple was a sales rep who was trying to sell laptops, not an engineer!
After that fun blunder, Tony never really was allowed to speak to the press again, particularly on StarOffice related issues.
Conspiracy theorists love making a big deal out of this up until this day (witness the parent), but in the end it was all a bunch of bull caused by an eager manager and an overexuberant reporter "breaking" a supposed story without doing any fact checking to confirm the horseshit coming out of the manager's mouth.
The good thing was that it pissed me and Dan off so much we created the NeoOffice project (NeoOffice/C) to prove it could be done. Eventually Patrick was convinced to open source the code Tony referred to and thus NeoOffice/J was born. Bad thing is it wrecked any chance of Sun or Apple actually providing OpenOffice.org engineering support since the PR n
Pretty much. A fancy text editor. Where word falls flat on it's face is if you want to do things with graphics, or advanced multi-column newspaper-style layout, where different columns are different heights and widths. Page layout, like you said, is a problem with Word. If you just want text, paragraph layout, that kind of thing, it's about as feature-rich as you could ask for, if a bit difficult to use for all of the features.
What does a word processor do that Pages does not?
I'm going to let MacWorld handle that one :
"So do some of the GUI features in OS X work like OpenDoc or OLE?"
No, there's nothing really like that on OS X at the system level. The text editing functionality in many applications is based on classes provided by the Cocoa framework, so you get "the same" text editing experience, by way of all the shared code.
But you don't have the situation of one application being responsible for drawing/editing content inside another application. Each approach obviously has advantages and disadvantages. It certainly would be possible to build a framework for doing that, but it's not something that Apple has put any effort into lately.
-Mark
I don't think I'm explaining this very well, but do you see what I'm getting at? It's a bigger issue than proximity. I realize that various window managers in unix probably are perfectly capable of treating applications in a more Mac-like manner while putting the menubar in the window, but to me it just makes it feel too Windowsish, which spills over into other issues besides the menu bar.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Seriously, I used Entourage for a long time because of the Exchange support (MS's email server which really reallly sucks ass big time). After I stopped using the stupid exchange features (because I left the company where I had that account), I finally dumped Entourage forever, and now only use Mail
Go hug some trees.
Apple has a text editor already - TextEdit. It's pervasive across the OS X system, and technically I'm using it right now in this Safari text box.
No you're not. Technically you're using an instance of NSTextView which just happens to be used by TextEdit.app (you can confirm this by deleting TextEdit.app and observing that Safari will still let you type into HTML forms).
Pages is a page layout program that calls on TextEdit (I presume)
Calls on the AppKit libraries which contain all the stuff that makes NSTextViews function, actually.
It is by using the AppKit classes that all MacOS X applications get stuff, that should be standard in all (non-lightweight) GUI toolkits, like spell checking in any text box or text entry field (unless the UI design specifically disabled it). This is also why "foreign" programs such as FireFox are not as nice to use on MacOS X, nifty features such as system wide spell-checking are not available.
I can't understand why other GUI toolkits don't offer similar functionality. Ii also irritates me when I see a website that implements spell-checking instead of leaving it to the users browser/GUI.