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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)."
Yay!
Now we only have to wait til 2020 for MS to release MS Office with support for Oasis, que it's compatibility all around us!
All of the momentum and best coders are behind OpenOffice. Does the market really need a KO?
Sooner or later you would think that people are going to realize that the vast, vast majority of users can do without MS Office and its $400 price tag. I hope that it's sooner!
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
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...)
Not a rumor ;)
QT 4 announcment
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.
put the what in the where?
On OSDir.com.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
At the maintainer of Krita I can say with confidence that you are right. That's where the name came from. I can't say I'm happy with it, though...
But Krita has always had trouble with naming. KImageShop, the first name was obviously unsuitable. The next name, Krayon, was nuked by the well-known German law shark von Gravenreuth. Kandinsky (my favourite) was mooted, but Krita was chosen -- years before my involvement in Krita.
But three names is enough, I'm not going for another rename!
Boudewijn Rempt
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.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Actually, a lot of software in the open source world has really unfortunate names. Yes, those marketers may be a pain in the ass at work, but they do generally produce names that people can deal with.
Nobody demands that people take their volunteer work and then name it something that's maximally useful and no fun for them, but there are some times when it's quite regrettable that people have made choices.
* A good amount of open source and Unixy software is potentially offensive. The GIMP is a very obvious example. Some cultures have a problem with the GNOME startup foot. I've had the phrase "I'll go finger her and find out" elicit a few chuckles. When someone sees the phrase "spawning 50 children...killing children...warning, zombie child present", sure, it makes sense to people who do Unix, but it definitely weirds out some other folks.
* Some names are awkward. GNU/Linux is awkward, and is not going to catch on, ever (Stallman would be better off pushing for "GNUix" or something else). "umount" may be shorter than "unmount", but I doubt the typing savings are worth the confusion caused over the years...same goes for "passwd".
* Some names sound amateurish. "MySQL" is a good example.
* Some names are homonyms. "lynx" was already a pun, and then the "links" browser's name made life much more annoying for text-based browser users. "pyne" and "pine" are similar.
* Some names are inside jokes that then become incomprehensible and confusing to people who lack knowledge of 30 years of computing history. The "elm" email reader spawned "pine", "balsa", and "mahogany". Good luck explaining to someone why they type "mahogany" to read their email. The "more" text pager (which stuck the text "More" at the bottom of each screen, allowing the user to hit enter to see another line of text) was replaced by the "less" text pager -- "less is more" was probably uproariously funny when the code first started being produced, but is now just another barrier for the new Unix user.
* Some names have mutated into greater inexplicability. The "dillo" lightweight GTK web browser (aside from the unfortunate similarity to the English word "dildo") comes from "Armadillo".
* There is the infamous "GNOME projects start with 'g', KDE projects with 'k'". At one point, X11 applications went through this same growing phase with "x". GNOME seems to have thankfully stopped doing this, though the KDE folks *still* do this occasionally. Python-based applications frequently have a "py" prefix.
* Some authors (perhaps due to a fear that packagers will rename their software to make its name more difficult to type) make their software explicitly have a lower-case first letter, violating normal English capitalization rules. "xine" is a good example of this.
* Some authors take delight in difficult-to-say names. Depressingly, I'm writing this on a website called "slashdot.org".
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
...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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?