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OpenOffice.org to Get Firefox Extensions and More
I_am_Rambi writes "OpenOffice.org is set to get new features including Firefox-like extensions. From the article: 'Second, and I think that although we have no clear road map for this yet (besides, our version naming scheme is going to change once again ), OpenOffice.org and StarOffice shall include the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird and Sunbird (calendaring application) in the future. Besides the inclusion of those two softs inside the office suite, connectors to Sun Calendar Server and Microsoft Exchange will also be developed accordingly.'"
LinuxJournal ran an article on OpenOffice.org Extensions a couple of months ago. They link to the project wiki and summarize a few extensions, including a grammar checker, Wikipedia integration, and a blog posting tool.
Finally, Thunderbird seems to release updates more rapidly than OO.o. Does anyone know how updates will work? Will those who installed it through OO.o immediately get Thunderbird updates? Or will they wait until the next OO.o version bump?
What Open Office really needs is not Firebox plug-in, but a complete code rewrite so that it is not a bloated whale of an application. In its current incarnation, Open Office is not anywhere near an alternative to MS Office except for home users and Open Source / Anti-Microsoft zealots who are willing to ignore critical usability flaws.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Toss in an automatic Term Paper writer extension, and I'm in! Wait, crap, I'm not in school anymore. *sigh* I always felt that I was born a decade too early.
Seriously?
And it only took how many years of people begging for this one feature?
Examples: Gallery import between versions, or the all-time champion outline view -- the longest-lived request with a huge votecount, declared by quite a few professional writers and educators as the show-stopper keeping OpenOffice.org out of their offices and schools. Apparently the team has other priorities.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I was happy to read all of this, but mostly the part about Microsoft Exchange. Some would view all of this as a fight vs Microsoft(Office and otherwise), but that is not a good fight or anyone. Not ignoring Mircosoft Exchange is important for allowing people to actually ditch MS Office. Taking on MS Office itself and not making this a fight vs Microsoft is the smart thing I think. We often see and read about companies looking to take on the whole behemoth instead of just competing in a certain market. Google and Apple seem to the be companies people look at when they talk about bringing down Microsoft.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
However, it's not me -- it's Sun. And for Sun, the deal-breaker is that Evolution is GPL-licensed. The Mozilla license is much more suited to their private-branding model.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
One of these days when they get a great calendar program built into Thunderbird I'll consider migrating from Outlook. As is though, without an excellent calendar I won't really consider it as I need that functionality. And before anybody tries to point this out, no, I don't find any of the current add-ons to be adequate.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
Is anyone else worried about this becoming a gratuitous push to add new features? Why should OOo include Thuderbird? If I want that application, it's not difficult to install the latest version from their own distribution. It seems to me that refining the core functionality and compatibility of the office applications should be a higher priority than bloating it up with unrelated features.
I have used Evolution on Win32. It mostly works and it looks like development binaries are also reasonable. I wouldn't consider it much more alpha than Sunbird. I suspect that other comments on the GPL are the more likely explanation.
... it's kind of like Emacs now?
Ignore this signature. By order.
I quite agree that if your output is primarily text, you're much better off with LaTeX or the like. Gorgeous results without the constant distraction of formatting.
However, there are a lot of professional writers who have to integrate high proportions of graphics into their work, and for them a WYSIWYG tool is quite appropriate. The ability to restructure a document (the big missing feature in the Navigator) is a serious handicap there.
I'm not a professional writer, I just sleep with one.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
So you're telling me that writers, doctors, teachers, students, shop owners and other people who use word processors also need to learn to be programmers before they can dare to suggest that Open Office has usability issues? Come on! I'm just pointing out something that has been pointed out over and over again. It would be nice if Open Office offered a real alternative to MS Office, for many reasons. But the folks who do know how to fix Open Office have to admit that these flaws are a critical roadblock to the adoption of Open Office in a broader context than hobby and fringe users. Smart-assed fanboy comments like "well, why don't YOU write the code" do nothing but alienate the majority of users.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I have no idea what the architecture of open office currently is, but it would be neat to see a more complete plugin architecture like in eclipse. Everything could be a plugin and reduce some of the bloat people seem to complain about. For instance, the spreadsheet and writer could really just be different plugins. I'm sure this is much much easier said than done.
I'm not exactly sure what "more modular and running on tops of frameworks such as Eclipse, Netbeans or Mozilla's XUL" at the end of the article is supposed to mean, but maybe this is what they're getting at?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
probably when you decide to use a -real- UNIX
When will NeoOffice (Mac-native OOo) stop sucking so hard?
About six months after Microsoft discontinues Office for Macintosh.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A new attack vector!
OpenOffice should not have plug-ins. Why copy Microsoft's mistakes.
Well it would help if either of you would go on to describe what you do use and what you do with it. Professional writers and can't even do that?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It seems like this could be a great opportunity, if the XUL adaptation works out, to spread the Mozilla framework! Kudos to OO's asperations, they are certainly in for an undertaking
"Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience."
They don't mean they want to run OO.org *on top of* Eclipse or XUL
They mean they want to re-structure OO.org to be modularly based and run on a GUI framework, *like Eclipse and XUL do*.
what that would mean to gentoo users??
openoffice and the mozilla bros are already update monsters, so i don't really want to know what would happen if they become one....
It's 1999 all over again! I predict similar results to almost ever other OSS project that tries to tackle this type of software. Ie software that never gets past the Alpha stage and a solution that relies on some proprietary connector that only works partly.
btw I realize there are some decent OSS groupware project going but the ratio of mature workable solutions vs projects that get announced with big fanfare, promise ease of use, and full Exchange compatibility is about 1,000 to 1.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
wow so now we have a new way to breach security...... its just like IE,activeX and MSoffice!
and they say OSS is always playing catchup...
"Besides the inclusion of those two softs inside the office suite,"
Surely they mean "these two packages" or "these two applications." You can't have "a soft" (or "a software") any more than you can go buy "a hardware."
"Software" and "hardware" are the same things as "ketchup" and "water" -- collective nouns. Despite fast-food jargon, you don't have "one ketchup" you have "one packet of ketchup;" you have not "one water" but "one glass of water." If you have one ketchup, that might be Heinz; Perrier is one water, Evian is another.
Someone call the Grammar Police, quick!
Is OOo trying to turn into a general distribution of cool software? I hope not. I think they need to stick to the software that they develop and leave the other apps to the other teams.
I also fear that the code base for OpenOffice.org is too heavy and difficult to work with. I foresee a long time when almost nothing will happen while they rewrite the core. This is exactly what happened to Netscape and for the same reason: The code base was so convoluted that it wasn't possible to work with.
Seriously, I think that KOffice is the future of free office suites. It is developing incredibly fast and they have far more apps in the suite already. I read an article at the KDE news site that some students had implemented pretty advanced stuff in just some short Google Summer of Code projects, and I don't believe that could happen for OpenOffice. When they release 2.0, it will run on Windows AND OS X and from then on it's just a matter of more features. Mark my words... You read it here first.
Well it would help if either of you would go on to describe what you do use and what you do with it.
.writing. The words. Formating for printing is a completely seperate thought and physical process and should be treated seperately with tools specialized for the job.
I did that -- when I got the mark. I'll give it another shot, but promise not to hit me.
I favor vim myself, but your milage may vary. The point being that when I am writing I concentrate on . .
Back in the day I was an advocate of the development of WYSIWYG editors. I thrilled when I actually first got to use one. It turns out I was wrong. It happens. I was especially wrong about wanting black on white. That really sucks when you're spending long hours at the monitor. I neglected the fact that paper reflects light and a monitor emits light. Live and learn.
WYSIWYGs add nothing to the writing process, often serve as a distraction and are poor at actual desktop publishing functions.
They have their place; and I use them (in fact I use Open Office), but that place is really for simple letters and such, not for either serious writing or serious printing. A middle of the road "toy" tool for middle of the road "toy" jobs.
Which makes it a reasonable tool for the actual, average job.
KFG
NeoOffice? I think you have misspelled iWork.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I would be in heaven to be able to bring up a google or wikipedia search with the "select-right click" in a document !
I have played with getting people off msoffice and in science there is
this issue called Endnote.
I love XUL/XBL/etc... but find the documentation on the hard parts lacking.
So, why not scrap open office and make a word processor in mozilla and
then create the Endnote plugin.
That would seriously eat the ms$ for all academics could not only get rid of
office but also winblows.
Yes, of course there is still the issue of games...but that is not a factor in the labs
On the other hand, if you want Exchange support in Mozilla, vote for bug 128284.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
They CAN'T bundle firefox with openoffice! The grammar and spelling nazis will die of loneliness!
I'm curious - I know nothing of the way professional writers work but I'd imagine you face different issues to most of us : what do you need?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
In some languages, "soft" is used for software
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
For the people whose text I edit, OO may be adequate. But it's not yet, and maybe never will be, a tool for serious editing. Speaking as a professional writer and editor who has used both the MSWord and the OO outline views, MSWord's outline is orders of magnitude better. I see a measurable difference in productivity when I have to do substantive editing on a document in OO, not just the spelling checks and wording tweaks that some people call editing.
MSWord lets me reveal levels, open and close paragraphs or entire sections full of paragraphs, drag and drop sections, promote and demote sections, and edit text all in the same window. That violates the principle of "don't make the user switch focus when they are in the groove" concept of GUIs. It is the main reason I'm still using Win2000 and MSOffice, and why I am reluctant to recommend OO to anyone who will need to do substantive editing. It's awkward as hell.
The enhancement request for a better outline view - specifically a request to make it work just like MSWord's outline view, has been in the request queue for years and has a lot of comments explaining exactly why it is a good enhancement. Don't tell me, "It's open source, go ahead and do it". If I could have fixed it, I would have fixed it you gits. But, it's easier for me to stay with MSWord than learn to program ... for which the folks in Redmond are undoubtedly grateful.
Similarly, a request for the ability to do overbars on text as easily as underlining has been in the queue for several years, requested by people who write the datasheets for the chips in computers the OO programmers work on. Forget the equation editor, its contents can't be searched or replaced like text.
Why doesn't the OO team (or almost any other FOSS project team take other professionals seriously when they tell you what features they need the mnost? Yes, MSFT is also of the "we'll tell you what you need", but at least they gave me a decent outlining tool ... it's one of the things they got right early on.
I am also in need of good citation support & am a bit of geek about it (I am a co-developer of refbase).
There are a few issues with your post.
An office suite is A LOT more than a bibliographic management system & it would not be a small task to implement it in XUL in Firefox. There have been a number of online word processors & they haven't yet seen great success.
The other thing is that Endnote is not that great of a bibliographic manager & there are more serious attempts to replace it. Zotero for Firefox will be worth watching. The new MS XML format has metadata support for citations. And OO.o has the bibliographic project to add citation support to OO.o. Bruce D'Arcus's blog is worth following.
It is much more important that you don't use a WYSIWYG tool when you've got graphics. You want to be able to say "I don't know what page this is going on, but when it gets there, put it in the upper right corner and cause the text to flow around it seperated by a 10 point border."
Say what? One of the core principals in technical writing is making sure the text and the graphics relate to each other effectively. WYSIWYG is the easiest way to make sure it happens. I've been using WYSIWYG editors to produce user manuals since the mid 1980s, starting with a beta copy of Ventura Publisher 1.0 20 years ago.
If you are having problems with short Word documents that contain pictures, I suggest you RTFM and learn how to use styles to control flow, stop inserting blank lines to force layout, and how to paste in pictures so they are in-line text objects and not floating.
Have you checked out the 2.0 betas of NeoOffice? They are a pretty big improvement over previous versions. Still slow, but OOo is always slow. It's pretty pathetic when running a starting Microsoft Word via Crossover office takes less time that starting OpenOffice Writer.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
I think this is great not in the short time, but in the long run.
What realy is needed is non segmented office suite that has pervasive applicability, pervasive supportability, zero initial investment for single user and free extendability. In fact we need a Eclipse equivalent of a office suite.
recipe for disaster:
Take Massive One Highly Bloated And Slow Open Source Application
Mix well with Second Highly Bloated Open Source Application.
Stir and run.....then wait.....
seriously OOo is way slow an bloated.
Useful yes, but SLOW!
This Is not a good idea, I generally don't like half ass attempts at "Integrating" programs.
either build the Program from the ground up as an API and integrate them fully.
or don't do it at all.
--meh--
Finally someone asks the right question. And the answer is ... it depends. It depends on whether we are writing, editing or doing layout. The choice of tool changes with where we are in the project, what the final output will be, and what the budget supports.
For writing and text-hacking, content shuffling and document restructuring, MSWord is my tool of choice. It gets me to the final draft and through the review cycles. As I said in another post, OO gets in the way when a document needs radical surgery.
The "layout tools", like FrameMaker and Quark Express (I've used them both), suck at text entry and editing, and are they meant to - they are PAGE LAYOUT tools with minimal text editing capabilities. If I know the final output has to be in FrameMaker or Quark, I'll set up MSWord so the style names match and import the final text. Unless someone messes up the styles, the text imports and "wallah" it's laid out. Then there is some pixel tweaking, graphics insertion and it ships.
For the bulk of my work, MSWord is good enough. I'll never win any awards for typography with the user manuals I produce with it, but they are easy to read and most importantly, cheap and easy to produce and maintain.
My sister is running these on her shiny new MacBook (1.8Ghz, 1G), and it starts within 5 seconds. This is compared to about 1 minute on my 12" PB 1Ghz / 768M. I don't know if this is due to better Intel optimizations or what, but it is pretty snappy!
On the other hand, if you want Exchange support in Mozilla, vote for bug 128284.
Chances of this happening is slim to none, unless some funds the 10,000's of man-hours necessary to do this.
It's not just extended MAPI they want to implement since MAPI is an API not a transport protocol. They need to reverse engineer MS's private RPC implemention, on which some private variant of MAPI is used. Good luck to the poor soul tasked to do this.
License-wise, this does not save you anything either, since every exchange CAL comes with an Outlook seat ( it's been a while since I checked this out, so I may be wrong ).
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
You don't have to be a programmer to file a bug report. If you want to complain about the usability of OO (or anything open source), then complain to the people who can actually fix the problems.
I have. I have been ignored. And so have the other non-programmer professionals who have had the same requests for improvement.
so what's the point? Given almost all of business have some sort of collection of Office Macros?
There are a few things they can do to make sure OOo plug-ins don't turn into MS Office VisualBasicScript-type attacks.
1. Make it impossible to embed a plug-in into a document. Even if a document requires a certain plug-in, embedding it for quick installation (or even worse, auto-installing it) would be a very bad thing. The most it should do is pop-up a message reporting what plug-in is missing and link to the trusted site where it can be downloaded (see below).
2. Make it so plug-ins must be signed and/or can only be downloaded from trusted sites (at least by default). Firefox works this way now (sort-of), but it's a little too easy to turn it off.
3. Limit what plug-ins can do (read-only file access, write-access only to certain file-types, no internet connections, etc). Unfortunately, this also limits the usefulness of plug-ins. At a minimum, it should prohibit access to system files.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
An extension system is always a great idea.
But bundling mozilla apps with the OO suite is not. Why not just cooperate to provide compatible API calls? So that if someone has those moziila apps, they can interact well with the OO apps. They could recommend them as OO compatible and provide links for download... but tightly coupling new applications that rely upon entirely different dev platforms goes completely against the whole point of extension systems.
How many widget sets does one suite need? IIRC they use the Java JVM to flesh out their database connectivity and multimedia libraries. Do they use swing or SWT at all? AFAIK The NeoOffice ported the whole interface to Swing to get that Aqua look and feel. Now they're going to add in XUL?
Mozilla is a complete development platform.
Java is a complete development platform.
There's overhead to loading those instead of relying on the OS library directly as the development platform.
You're preachin' to the choir here. A while back my parents wrote a novel, and went to one of those self-publishers. The publisher required that work be submitted in MS Word format. Why, I don't know, but those were the rules.
They also required that you use the margin and indentation controls within Word to control formatting. Sounds like a reasonable rule (to me).
Unfortunately, mom and dad quickly forgot that rule, and thought that as long as it "looked right" on the screen, then it must be OK. They had some paragraphs that used the margin controls, some that used tabs, and some that even used *cringe* a bunch of spaces to control indentation.
Same thing for page breaks. Sometimes they used page breaks, sometimes a bunch of CRLFs!
AAAAAARRRRGGGGHHH!!1!11!11one
Bet you'll never guess who got the happy chore of helping them fix it.
They are talking about writing a sequel. I told them that unless they write it in notepad, I'm not helping.
-melandy
There are binary versions of OO.o and Mozilla in portage. Sunbird is only available as a binary.
Don't tell me, "It's open source, go ahead and do it". If I could have fixed it, I would have fixed it you gits. But, it's easier for me to stay with MSWord than learn to program ... for which the folks in Redmond are undoubtedly grateful.
This quote needs to be hammered into EVERY open source programmers thick skull. Hell, I'll pay to have it tatooed on their damn foreheads.
If everyone involved in all open source projects understood this quote, the open source world would be actually kicking MS's ass up and down across every project and program out there. And we would actually have REALLY useful open source programs, that don't need more excuses than lines of code in the program.
I've posted on numerous occassions about the mistakes in leadership at Sun with regards to StarOffice and Openoffice and the splitting of the packages. Well, it looks like the OO of tomorrow will start looking like the StarOffice of 2000 (Pre-Sun purchase).
Can anyone else say - DOH! The only difference is that the OO of today runs at least 10x SLOWER than the SO of 2000. It's hard to get behind a project that shoots itself in the foot, calf, and thigh so often.
Just imagine what they could have accomplished in the 7 yrs if they left the original interface alone and improved the backend.
Signed code? Signed by whom?
It is very interesting that they choose Mozilla Thunderbird over Evolution, which one would think to be your best choice in an integrated calender, contact, memo, email enviroment like M$ outlook.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
There are already open source implementations of Exchange (both client and server).
Perfect, I missed en email client and yes I missed an calender. Now I have to say that Thunderbird is pretty grown up for an email client, somewhere between outlook express and outlook itself. The Calender though, when I tested it, it surely was still not really that ready. It might need a bit of work to make the perfect calender tool.
Still I applaud it as this will give the office suite so much more completion!
Codefile Defected to another Hexadimal Range refresh your CHAOSTACK.NLM file with a new copy
One of you is vehemently arguing oranges...ORANGES! The other is scolding you for not using apples.
:)
Just give up fighting and let the LaTex nerds have their due. You've got to understand that they firmly believe that their software is ideal for every single possible application out there, instead of just good for a few specific things (i.e. Tex with math formulas is amazing).
Me? It kind of creeps me out to embed symbols in text that's going to be put to a page, because it takes me back to the dark days of using Perfect Writer. WYSIWYG writing is an absolute godsend for me, but I certainly don't use it for everything. I'm a published fiction writer myself, and these days I use FreeMind for fiction writing. I find that it really helps to take me from the brainstorming phases to the first key pages pretty easily. It's an invaluable tool for any kind of writer, and it can be whatever you want it to be--an outlining tool, a planning aid, etc. You might want to check it out.
So bloated software just got bigger?
What does that make it?
Morbidly obese software?
You seem to be combining WYSIWYG and word processors. I think the concept of word processors is broken. If you just want to get words down, use a plain text editor or a specialized novel writing application. If you want to make something presentable, use a page layout application.
But what is wrong with WYSIWYG for page layout? It allows immediate results and easy editing. Even with the best editor set up, you still have to glance up from your HTML/TeX code to see what the document looks like. With WYSIWYG, you are directly editing it. Using something like HTML requires that you read through the code to figure things out instead of just looking at it. I find it hard to connect formatting code with an actual document.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I like this whole idea, with one major caveat: Sunbird is not ready for this. We'd all be using it instead of Evolution if it were. If Sun contributes improvements back to Sunbird like Google does with WINE and other projects, then it's a win-win as far as I'm concerned. But as it stands now, I don't think I want any of applications touching Sunbird.
I understand the myriad of reasons for not using Evolution. It's a great product, but it doesn't run well on non-Unix platforms (ie Windows) and Sunbird does. Also, while Sunbird is immature, Evolution is mature to the point of bloat, and the last thing thing OOo needs is more freaking bloat.
OO is bloated, but let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. It opens all of my MS Office documents flawlessly, and it's free. For that, I can live with bad startup times and spaghetti code under the hood.
You seem to be combining WYSIWYG and word processors.
Open Office as an authoring tool was the context.
I think the concept of word processors is broken. If you just want to get words down, use a plain text editor or a specialized novel writing application. If you want to make something presentable, use a page layout application.
Yes, that's what I said.
But what is wrong with WYSIWYG for page layout?
Nothing, per se, so long as it is a well thought out and implimented page layout tool. It's not something I'm a specialist in though. When a specialist's touch is really needed my text gets passed on to one. I'll note, however, that I haven't used one that acts as a front end for a human readable formating code that gives me code I wouldn't be a bit embaressed about writing myself, that with a bit of exposure you start to "see" in your mind what the code will print like and that the idea of WYSIWYG HTML is a broken concept foisted upon the computer world by dead tree publishers/designers/PR flaks who just couldn't deal with the idea that they didn't have authoritarian control of the output.
KFG
Extensions are nice and all, but OpenOffice needs to be removing java dependancies, not adding them.
The Exchange Connector from Ximian Evolution provides an OWA implementation, right? It may be low, but for outfits looking to migrate to OSS solutions where possible, or true interoperability, but are stuck with Exchange for the time being, it's one option. The connector is open source and should not be discounted as a code base, or if nothing else, a point of reference. So, the tens of thousands of man-hours you're referring to (reverse engineering) is not a necessity.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
OpenOffice.org and StarOffice shall include the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird and Sunbird (calendaring application) in the future
Oh, good. Open Office sure needed to get bigger. ;-)
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I won't argue about graphic layout; this is simply outside my expertise. But for making hypertext documents,
LaTeX+package hyperref+TeX4ht+pdflatex works extremely well and produces nice HTML and PDF documents from
the same source. For the working academic, the ability to take the same material and
format it as a web page, poster, presentation, and a paper is pretty valuable. I know that other packages
can do the same; I've never been very impressed with the quality of the PDF or HTML from Word.
Probably we are agreeing here, except that I wanted to note that there are a whole class of hyperlinked
documents for which LaTeX is a good solution (even ignoring the fact that it is the only thing I really know
how to use)
perhaps the money that you so kindly would spend on this would be better spent *paying someone to write the features you are missing*.
I see that copies of MSOffice (legal surplus inventory) are selling for as low as $10 Cdn on eBay. I think I paid $40 a couple of years ago for the same package. How much programming will that buy?
I think calling it "private-branding" when a company makes public source code proprietary is a bit of a euphemism.
If this decision is really based on Sun's business considerations, then it is a black eye for the OpenOffice project; an open source project should make decisions based on the best interests of its users, not based on the proprietary interests of one of its commercial sponsors. Furthermore, the rest of OpenOffice is GPL, so what's the problem anyway?
As for Sun, they have, of course, gotten away with this sort of thing multiple times. People like to talk about how oh-so-generous Sun's release of Solaris tend to sweep under the rug that Sun's operating system is based on BSD and originally developed with taxpayer funds at Berkeley.
Well, one reason is that for every OpenOffice.org user, there must be 20 or 30 Firefox users.
But another reason is this:
Firefox has a fairly consistent extension architecture, and most people seem to write and share their Firefox extensions in Javascript. Giving developers more options is not such a good idea because it reduces the ability to build on one another's work.
In addition, many platforms with a successful plug-in architecture provide means of managing and downloading plugins from within the application. If that exists in OOo, I have never come across it.
But is Microsoft Outlook secure against malformed messages? (Why do reviewers call it "LookOut!"?) And does it run on operating systems marketed by entities other than Microsoft, such as Mac OS X or Ubuntu Linux?
Take LaTeX and Adobe InDesign and go build a 50 page magazine including five or more graphics on each page,
It is not the job of professional writers to lay out magazine pages. In fact, that's not their job even if they supply the graphical content. And it doesn't make sense for professional writers to use layout software to do their writing.
The people who lay out magazine pages are layout editors. They get the text from the writer, the graphics from the graphic designers and photographers, and then put it all together using layout software.
Yes, I love iWork's spreadsheet program. Oh, wait.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Number one is application availability. In OS X, I can run the native programs that work together better than on any platform I've used. I can run Windows applications via an emulator or crossover. I can run Linux/UNIX application in X11.
Perhaps the reason why you have such a low opinion of Linux/UNIX applications is because you're trying to run them under Apple's X11 server; running applications under Apple's X11 breaks most of the desktop integration (in addition to having really lousy performance). On my Mac, I leave X11 off pretty much all the time because it's so poorly implemented and integrated; when I need to use X11, I use a real Linux system.
Services allow me to customize the functionality of most programs, and share configuration between them. I can use one dictionary and all my apps learn the words. I can reuse my scripts and apply functions to text anywhere with a simple key press.
Linux has hundreds such services built-in, including, among other things, services for spell checking across applications, reformatting text, etc. OS X services provide only a tiny fraction of that functionality, and in a way that is much harder to extend and not particularly convenient to use. OS X tries to imitate some of the "little shared tools" approach pioneered by UNIX, but it doesn't really succeed.
Firewire mode updates. In OS X I can move to my new laptop with a few key presses and a short walk to get some coffee. This includes all my programs, user accounts, files, preferences, Web cookies, authentication keys, etc, including my Windows and Linux software VMs. It is simple and foolproof
It is simple, but unfortunately, it doesn't work completely: some settings and some applications don't make it. After moving from one Mac to another, it usually takes several days until I have figured out all the little missing bits and pieces and reinstalled them.
In any case, it's actually simpler under Linux: if you copy your home directory, all your user-related information is transferred; there is nothing else to copy. There is no user-specific customization on the machine other than the list of applications (which you can transfer with a single command). That's no accident, because traditionally, UNIX and Linux users use the same home directory on many computers simultaneously.
Overall, people like you will never be satisfied with Linux: Linux has all the capabilities you want, you're simply unwilling to learn how it works. That's fine--feel free to use whatever you like--but stop badmouthing platforms you are apparently not very well versed in.
This is a brilliant move on the part of OO, just as with Firefox extensions that we cannot yet dream of are going to become almost essential to our productivity. We won't be able to switch to Microsoft Office even if we want too because our favourite extensions won't work with it.
In the corporate world, Exchange equals three things: email, contacts and calendaring. If OpenOffice is able to offer the same levels of calendering functionality that Exchange does, it will be a severe blow to the Exchange empire. Once there is a *nix equivalent to wireless ActiveSync of calendering information, I think that OpenOffice will be on par and become a more viable route for Linux to make inroads into the monopoly.