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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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.