KOffice 1.4 Released

An anonymous reader writes "The KDE Project today announced the immediate release of KOffice 1.4 for Linux and Unix operating systems. This release is a large step towards embracing the OASIS OpenDocument file format which has become an approved standard for office file formats. This format is also used by the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0, thus providing high interoperability. New applications in the 1.4 release: Krita - a pixel based image manipulation application (screenshots, movie) and Kexi - an integrated data management application (screenshots)."

Comments

mirror of video

[Anonymous Coward]

http://qartis.com/krita.avi

I thought so, too.

[imsabbel]

Until i read (and verified) that just about nobody outside sun does anything for openoffice.
Of the core group, only 4 are not sun employees, so there is nothing like e.g. the kernel or kde.

Krita...

[Jugalator]

Krita is swedish for "chalk"... Maybe more languages too, I don't know.
It's probably behind the name anyway.

Re:Expect More Interest

[JabberWokky]

However, it's not as if the FLOSS community is hunky-dory about Qt; see the old Harmony project for more on that.

That was before Qt was GPLed. It's now completely Free Software (with caps). When Qt 4.0 is released, rumor has it that the Windows version will be GPLed as well.

--
Evan

Re:MS Office

[JabberWokky]

Interestingly, KOffice was hampered a bit by the fact that Oasis doesn't address some of the file types that KOffice uses. When possible, they used them, but until OO.o 2.0 is out, there's no final standard, and even then there will be no standard for some file formats. Hopefully the OASIS format specs will distance themselves a bit from OO.o in order to provide useful specifications for a wider set of applications than ones that line up against OO.o.

--
Evan

Re:What's the point?

[Just Some Guy]

But OpenOffice is painful for me to use in an otherwise KDE-only desktop. For starters, it doesn't use KIO slaves, so I can't open files fish sftp:// fish://, or webdav:// from remote hosts. That and a million other small things (like load time) make KWord much more pleasant for me in daily usage.

I'm glad we have two strong, popular office suites that don't compete for resources -- that is, KDE folks probably have little interest in hacking OpenOffice and vice versa. Now that they'll be sharing a common file format, it'll be nice to be able to pick the right tool for a particular job and know that users can still view the results in their environment of choice.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[delire]

(With OO.o being cross-platform and all, why would KOffice be used? I gave up on AbiWord in favor of OO.o for that very reason...)

For what very reason?

Re:Expect More Interest

[bhalo05]

Not a rumor ;)

QT 4 announcment

Kexi is awesome

[bhsx]

Kexi is a really exciting addition to KOffice. I've had my eye on it for a long time. The beta build process was a real bear; but I even got a few versions built. It was snappy and probably even easier to use than Access. You can search /. for a post from a couple years ago with me bitching about needing an Access replacement; with Kexi and Base (OO.o) we now have two! Awesome.

Re:YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

Krita isn't a stupid name if you're Swedish, and I highly suspect some of the authors are (I haven't checked). Krita means 'chalk' in Swedish.

Now go troll somewhere else.

Re:Expect More Interest

[bhalo05]

Kexi can already work under Windows. http://www.kexi-project.org/about.html Give it time...

more screenshots

[Karma Sucks]

On OSDir.com.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

OOO now can use native widgets.
Try the 1.9m* snapshots. Feels a LOT snappier.

Re:The end of data

[mrchaotica]

What the heck are you talking about? The entire point of OASIS is to fix that problem by creating a standard format!

Not to mention the fact that OASIS is ASCII, just with markup and gzipped.

Re:Krap

[nutshell42]

Now apart from the fact that KDE isn't galone GNU/with MS-the iStupid ePrefixes, unless your package manager has a really strange layout, the apps starting with k should be sorted alphabetically by their second (and third, etc) letters so instead of finding the right app among 20000+ packages you only have to search for it in the 6000 kpackages.

So, say I want a KDE photo app...... Kphoto? Klab? Kimp? It seriously limits the availability of an average user to find your program if you tenuously manage to link a witty 'K-name' from a name that describes your app correctly.

There are more or less 3 categories:

• Apps that use K-description as their name (Kedit, Kcalc, etc) - easy to find
• Apps using a name describing their function but the C at the beginning of the name is replaced with a K - easy to find
• Apps using a non-descript name with some nifty use of a K somewhere in the name - not necessarily easy to find or apparent but it isn't worse than non-descript names for non-KDE applications either (why should Konqueror be any worse than Nautilus or Safari?)

Actually the fact that most KDE applications start with a K makes it easier to find the application you're looking for because at least you know that a K-something pkg probably doesn't contain some obscure database backend. When I was new to linux the X in front of X-apps was a great help and I don't see why new users now shouldn't think the same about K-apps and G-apps

Re:Not toolkit, design

[vurian]

It's not "they" who would do this -- it's me... Anyway, the all elements in one panel was the situation when I took up maintainership, and it proved to be limiting. Not extensible, and not configurable by the user. Besides, it took up just a much space as the current configuration: about 200 pixels width and the whole window's height. The next version of Krita will allow users to drag the tabs inside the dockers to other dockers, meaning that if you want to have everything in one window, you can do that. Boudewijn Rempt

Re:No Windows version?

[m50d]

It's in the works for when Qt4 is out, KDE4 is going to run natively on windows. Look how long it took OOo to get native support for OSX.