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

Re:What's the point?

[ProfaneBaby]

MS Office is the one piece of software where MS really excels (I'd put Visual Studio a close second, and Exchange a distant third). If the Free Software folks want to challenge MS on that playing field, they're going to NEED to get behind a single product.

Re:Smoking server?

[ProfaneBaby]

The /. effect really kills dynamic sites and those that haven't recompiled Apache 1.3 to support more than 256 connections. There's no problem serving a few hundred simultaneous copies of that movie from a decent server - it's going to get cached in RAM, and bandwidth is almost never the limiting factor (connections and CPU are).

OpenDocument for Spreadsheets

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenDocument sounds great, but is the spreadsheet specification insufficient? Apparently Gnumeric will not be adding support for it[1]. Is KOffice supporting it for spreadsheets?

I want to see an open format for documents, including spreadsheets, so I'm concerned that OpenDocument might not be sufficient.

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/view/mortenw/2005/06/16/0

Re:OpenDocument for Spreadsheets

[dominator]

As Morten points out, their spreadsheet documentation is insufficient to build an implementation around.

However, the Nokia Maemo team will be helping AbiWord and Gnumeric improve their ODT import/export support[1]. For what it's worth, when I've been working on the SXW/ODT import/export in AbiWord, I only sparingly use the official specification, as it's too large and cumbersome to be of great use. It's so much easier to create interesting test cases and map those back to AbiWord's semantics. I imagine that the Nokia guys will be doing something similar when they add better ODT support in Gnumeric.

[1] http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/ 2005/Jun/0276.html

Re:What's the point?

[halltk1983]

How about just a single standard format?
Or what about a standard desktop?
It's diversity that makes linux great. Not that it's free, but that if you don't like something you can change it. You can even publish the change so others who didn't like the difference can use your work and not reinvent the wheel. By giving people choices: KDE/Gnome, Vi/EMacs, Koffice/OOo; you are in fact ensuring that a larger base leaves Microsoft, because you have something that more people like. Not everyone likes everything about one thing, but people change things so people can change it.

An interesting thing to watch

[erroneus]

HTML is supposed to be a "standard" but it's often forgivable when pages render differently from machine to machine and browser to browser. (Forgivable to an extent)

But word processing documents are another matter entirely. People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation. I haven't looked at the specs for this document format (and I do not plan to unless I have a week or more of insomnia) so I don't know how detailed the description is. But now that OO.o and KOffice both support the format, it will be interesting to write something in one and open in the other. My hopes are that whatever I do in one will look identical in the other.

(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...)

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Just Some Guy]

HTML is supposed to be a "standard" but it's often forgivable when pages render differently from machine to machine and browser to browser.

Forgivable? Expected! No one should reasonably think that a page will render the same on IE at 640x480 as Konqueror at 1600x1200. The web is not print; it's a complete different media.

But word processing documents are another matter entirely. People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation.

People who expect word processor documents to be to-the-pixel identical on different machines are on crack. What if the recipient of your document uses a different paper size than you (eg letter vs A4)?

If you need exact positioning, then use a page layout system or language. Getting consistent results from a word processor is simply coincidental, even if that's what usually happens. Chalk it up to luck and plan better next time if it's really important to you.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Karma Farmer]

On different papers, yes, the layouts would be different.

No, it won't. Any sane and sensible page layout program specifies the size of the print area, not the size of the margins. And, if your word processor allows you to set either, it's a pretty good indication that it's intended to be used as a page layout program, not as general purpose text editor.

If other word processors are making the mistake of copying MS Word's broken behaviour on something this simple, I shudder to think what other stupid mistakes the implementors are blindly copying instead of bothering to get right.

Re:What's the point?

[JabberWokky]

You just described the starting point for just about every company, book, product and project ever created. Actually, everything that is created other than the initial invention.

If somebody didn't look at it and say "I can make something slightly better", we'd be reading Slashdot on clay tablets.

--
Evan

Gooey

[BandwidthHog]

After seeing a screen shot or two, Krita suffers from one of the same problems as most other image editing apps: the interface elements are just too large and the open space around them too great. Most people using that type of software spend a lot of time with the interface, and tend to need a whole damn lot of interface on screen at all times; that begs for small, dense, highly visible widgets.

I get the impression that none of the windowing toolkits offer such widgets. Seems that Adobe had to roll their own for Windows and the old Mac OS (just checked Apple's dev tools: there are regular, small and mini sizes available for many things, if not all).

I think just having that look (and the increased efficiency of screen real estate it brings) would go a long way toward legitimizing open source graphics apps among their target audience.

Re:Gooey

[Brandybuck]

All you need is a new Qt theme. Call it "Crunched" or "Sardines" or something. A Qt application can use its own theme, so it doesn't have to installed system wide.

Re:YES!

[killjoe]

Yes I much prefer fantastic and awsome product names like "word" or "money". I mean how can you beat "XP" or "2000". Those are real product names by golly.

I mean how can you not respect a product named after a year or a product whose entire name consists of two letters!.

Just don't be around when XP flips out and kills all those stupid open source names by cutting their heads off for no reason!

Re:What's the point?

[BRonsk]

I think you are mixing everything here. Diversity makes linux marginal. Because My grandma will not be able to help my aunt fix her computer, because she uses a different shell, a different WM, a different flavor of the same thing. What you dislike in Windows ("The same interface and settings for everyone") is what makes it popular. Because most of the people don't care to take time/energy into configuring the damn thing. You do because it's your hobby.

For people (ie: The Mass Market) what is needed is something that will get to the point: editing images, recording a video, etc...

Linux's configurability (as well as UNIX's in general) is what prevent it from getting to the mass market. People and distros are working toward a simpler Linux, but we're far from it yet, and there's so many of them!

People need to be able to interoperate simply. Between two flavors of Linux, it might just be impossible for a non-techy, which makes the entire Linux base highly fragmented. I am pretty sure that I can administer any flavor of Windows out there (from '95 to XP) without great difficulty, because it is so STANDARDIZED. And that's exactly what Linux is missing. User Interface Standard (note as I didn't add an S to standard)

As far as OASIS is concerned, it might be the holy grail of nerds, that might make it no less useless. Until the main Office suite supports it, it will remain marginal. Proof is the de-facto standard is MS's format, and rightly so since they just dominate the market.

Don't get me wrong, I hope this will change. I just don't see OASIS having any part in it. Nerds are too focused on technical perfection and not enough on marketting. People don't give a sh**t about how it works most of the time.

Save it as Word 2k. It will work everywhere.

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

The devs have done a great job, but the UI team needs to some work here, most applications dont give more than 1/4 of working space, rest is filled with large buttons and widgets.

Re:What's the point?

[JabberWokky]

So it's marginal. That doesn't keep me from using it. Not many people drive Ferrari sports cars either... yet you don't hear many people complaining that Ferrari is being prevented from getting to the mass market.

For just about every product there are a wide variety of goods, most of which do not appeal to the buyers of their choice. People who shop for the cheapest processed food cheese slices seldom also shop for aged bleu cheese. And yet both seem to do fine, and most grocers carry both. Is it shocking that there might be people who like Windows and people who like Linux and that they can (*gasp*) coexist? Or even people who like OSX, people who like BSD, people who like Solaris? Some brands will appear and disappear, just like certain brands of cheeses. Others will appear and be too niche for big grocery stores... you'll have to order them from gourmet places.

But you seldom find people who like bleu cheese ranting that bleu cheese should be more like Kraft cheese slices because that "is what prevent[s] it from getting to the mass market". I don't think bleu cheese will ever have the market share of Kraft cheese slices. And I'm okay with that.

--
Evan

Re:KIOslaves are a bad idea

[Just Some Guy]

There are great places for virtual filesystem code

...until you bring in cross-platform compatibility as a requirement. I run KDE on FreeBSD, not Linux, so kernel layers are right out. By the time you go through all the work of making nice, portable virtual filesystem layers, I imagine you'll inevitably end up with something at least as complex as KIO slaves anyway.

Yay, but...

[tacocat]

I applaud the work accomplished with KDE.

but....

At this point in time I think that the capability of OpenOffice is a long ways beyond these guys.. Initially I would say, "why bother", but then that's not the Open Source way. There needs to be competition for every software application even if someone like me judges one to be far superior to the competition.

So I applaud the work accomplished.

Re:KIOslaves are a bad idea

[CableModemSniper]

He's not talking about the idea being bad, he's talking about what level of the OS / Library / Application stack that the VFSs are implemented at. To put it another way, wouldn't it be awesome if you could not only drag the audio files from the cd to a folder in your home directory, but also perform the same action from the command line (using cp) or use GTK based app to edit the audio, etc.

Closed Source Names

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source has its issues but it isn't even close to having the monopoly on unfortunate names.

Let me list your points that also apply to Closed Source companies, their practices, and products.

* Some names are awkward. Too many acronyms, slashes, dashes, lack of spaces, etc.

* Some names are unfortunately close to unreliable or scary words, such as "Internet Explorer" being ironically one leter different than "Internet Exploder".

* Some names sound amateurish. "iLife" is a good example. So is "Punch!" (a home-design architectural suite).

* Many closed source names are just completely non-descriptive, such as "Pro Tools" (music recording software) or "Nero 6: Ultra Edition" (CD/DVD burning software).

* Versions of software get useless "distinctions" such as "Pro" or "Enterprise" applied which don't really describe anything and don't even really imply an obvious hierarchy. Take Intuit's QuickBooks, for example... Tell me the difference between QuickBooks Basic and QuickBooks Easy Start. Hmm? Or The difference between QuickBooks Premiere and QuickBooks Pro. These are current products.

* Some names are inside jokes

* Some names have mutated into greater inexplicability

* Along the lines of KDE's 'k' and Gnome's 'g', there is the infamous "Apple projects start with 'i'".

* Microsoft seems to enjoy the redundant prefix "My ..." on some folders and the equally redundant suffix "... Files" on others, such as "Program Files". This has been their stubborn standard for too many years.

* Some closed-source companies make their software explicitly have a lower-case first letter, violating normal English capitalization rules. iPod, iTunes, and iLife are good examples of this. Other products violate capitalization mid-word, such as VMware (why the lowercase W?!).

* Some closed-source authors also take delight in difficult-to-say names that are complete nonsense, such as "Elibrium Extendia" (a PC-cleaner competitor to Norton, if that wasn't obvious).

what's this got to do with open source?

[rmm4pi8]

1) Yeah, and middle-schoolers still probably laugh about "hard drives" and "floppy drives" too. But, erm, GIMP is a proper noun, not the English word "gimp." So people can get over it.

2) New users will naturally refer to the name of the distribution, most of which are marvelously easy to pronounce.

3-4) If you're confused by this, you're probably not using a CLI mail client. I mean, hello, this is 2005! Also, does "Eudora" just scream email to you? How about "Outlook"?

5) Does "Opera" just scream web-browser to you? Is "Accord" some kind of word for car in your language? Has that hurt Accord sales?

6) Why is this bad?

7) Do they sue you if you capitalize the name by mistake? Do people get confused? If not, then what's the problem?

8) I hear there's this massive commercial website catering mostly to Windows users called news.com.com.