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Google "Office" Released
pumpknhd writes "Looks like Google has finally integrated Writely and spreadsheets into Google "Docs & Spreadsheets". Writely.com now redirects to this new location. The design has also changed to match the look of other Google services." The more "applications" I try forcing into a tabbed web MDI model under a Mac, the more clumsy it gets. They aren't in my Dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through. Issues like this really frustrate me as I find myself wanting to use more web2.0 ajaxy fancy pants programs.
PDF is open and adobe threaten to sue because if you could read and write pdf in office who would buy stuff from adobe? It was about competion not about owning pdf.
I bolded the word that has caused Adobe to sue Microsoft. My question is simple, doesn't Google face the same kind of lawsuit?
Adobe is suing because Microsoft is trying to create a new format that is embedded as part of the system. This was discussed many times in the previous discussion of the lawsuit. Both this app and OpenOffice have PDF exporting support. As you pointed out, there are PDF creators that are freely available.
Remember, Adobe opened the PDF standard so people could do this. (At least, I do believe that has how it went.) Like I said, it is not PDF creation that has Adobe pissed at Microsoft, it is their new, PDF-esque format.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Adobe holds the patents, but they'll license without royalties as long as you conform to the standard... and as long as they can't find a good reason not to. Of course, the minute they try to, the world will move to a free open format pretty quickly.
I don't know the details of the MS case - did MS do it without permission, maybe?
Meta will eat itself
I tried importing a simple excel spreadsheet, and it didn't work :-(
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Ahhh, but NeXT was a license-holder for Display PostScript, which PDF is a descendent of.
No Google does not face any lawsuit, since the patents surrounding the PDF format are licensed royalty free by Adobe to anyone implementing a PDF writer or reader. The potential lawsuit your link refers to concerned antitrust issues, not IP issues.
CTRL + Page Up and CTRL + Page Down will move you left & right thru the tabs in Firefox; just like gnome terminal. The one snag with firefox is if there is a text entry box that grabs your cusor.
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
I believe spreadsheet wrecker would be a better name. I imported a very simple spreadsheet that I use to track my ink and toner for the company I work for and then exported it back out as an .xls.
It has columns for printer brand, model, location, ink or toner type, ink/toner model number, price, and how many I need to order the next time I do. Very simple spreadsheet.
It stripped the price column of it's "currency" setting and changed it to "general".
It broke the simple "price times quantity" formulas.
It resized the columns and made them too small to display the numbers.
This app is nowhere near ready to be considered an actual spreadsheet. Proof of concept maybe, but I can't see myself ever using it for anything useful. I can't imagine how much damage it would do to a more complex spreadsheet.
CTRL-Tab and CTRL-SHIFT-Tab do the same thing. Or you could use CTRL-[1-9] to switch directly to tabs 1 through 9.
This guy's the limit!
That sounds like a limitation of AJAX.
AJAX-based applications really start to suffer from performance problems (when used on typical American broadband connections) when the amount of data involved exceeds about 650 KB. For an application like a word processor or a spreadsheet, where the data must be continually be updated between the client and the server on each change, even 500 KB is pushing it.
Don't forget that some overhead comes from AJAX itself. It takes bandwidth transmit the XML data that encapsulates the XML-RPC AJAX request. So while 650 KB is the practical limit of a request, it's plausible that 150 KB of that is being used to cover the XML overhead, thus reducing the amount available for actual data down to about 500 KB.
... a freebie printer driver on Windows that creates PDFs as well. It works fantastic, the PDF Creator conveniently distributed on the fantastic OpenCD.
OpenOffice.org has features for keeping your bibliography in a database. Much work is being done in this area to improve functionality and useability, including importing existing BibTeX data.
My blog
So while I was fooling around with this, I couldn't help but notice that it has the option of saving to a Portable Document Format (PDF) which, according to Wikipedia is: a file format proprietary to Adobe Systems for representing two-dimensional documents in a device independent and resolution independent fixed-layout document format.
Umm, maybe you should look for more than one source. Wikipedia has a lot of slant on various topics, including this one. The truth is PDF is a trademarked term that refers to a standard format maintained for Adobe and which they provide both open licensing, documentation, and patent protection. In all practical terms, it is an open standard and certain versions of it are ISO certified standards. There are both open and closed source, free and commercial implementations of it and none have ever had any legal problems.
I bolded the word that has caused Adobe to sue Microsoft. My question is simple, doesn't Google face the same kind of lawsuit?
Microsoft was not sued for implementing the open PDF standard. They were sued for anti-competative bundling of tools that just happen to use that format. Google could be in trouble for the same thing, if they acquired a monopoly in some market and tied the PDF generation tools to that monopolized product.
Really causes one to wonder how 'free' something is when it comes to standards.
Yeah this is a concern, if you only read marketing blurbs.
Now we'll just have to wait and see if Adobe begins to sue everyone who wants this functionality in their application.
No we don't. People have been doing just that for many years without issue.
A lot of people I talk to regard PDF as an 'open' standard when the only part that's free is the ability to decode it--not encode it.
Please stop repeating this nonsense. It is misinformation plain and simple as you'd know if you even read the Wikipedia page you link to. Anyone can code programs that read and write PDF, provided they call it PDF. What they can't do is take the code and make a new format based on PDF, but that does not follow the standard as they would no longer have patent protection from Adobe, much like every other open standard.
Agreed, an API would be great. In the mean time, tinyMCE might be a nice alternative. http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/
Vista still ships with MS' PDF-esque format, just not PDF.
Yes, and Adobe is still trying to get the courts to do something about it.
Adobe was concerned built-in PDF-authoring in Vista would kill sales of Acrobat Pro, so they threatened to sue MS for "abusing" its monopoly status.
Adobe complained that both the PDF authoring tools and the XPS authoring tools would kill sales of Acrobat Pro despite not being the better product.
That is the whole point of antirust law, to ensure competition. If MS makes and sells better portable document tools and format, or even PDF generation tools great, there is nothing Adobe can do about it. It is when MS makes an inferior product, but takes over the market anyway by using their Windows or Office domination to do so that Adobe complains. And they should complain and so should we. Capitalism is great for the innovation and competition. This removes that from the market and results in a de-facto winner, despite no innovation and results in yet another market with MS dominating and basically no progress happening.
"The more "applications" I try forcing into a tabbed web MDI model under a mac, the more clumsy it gets. They aren't in my dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through. Issues like this really frusterate me as I find myself wanting to use more web20 ajaxy fancy pants programs."
Duh. Apple+Tab = applications. Apple+~ = application windows. I personally find this 2-level hierachy much better for working with data than the Windows-inspired "everything is a Window". I also like that I can quickly hide applications I'm not interested in (Apple+H), or merely minimize some Windows (which do get stuck in the dock, Apple+M). The only bad thing is that I haven't found a way to pull minimized windows out of the dock with the keyboard.
For quickly getting between windows in an application when I'm not sure of the order, I just press the Expose key for all application windows (suddenly, all my TextEdit windows are on the screen, waiting for me to pick one!). I can do this for all applications and their windows with a different Expose shortcut.
Between the Expose graphical picking, having a distinction between "another application" and "another window in this application", I find the MacOS X ui richer and more comprehensive than the usual point'n'ook GUI interface that exists under KMW or MS Windows. It's easy to pick up, and I'm missing it so much when I go to my KDE desktop that I'm tempted to write a patch to KMW to make it act more Mac-like.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
LaTeX's objective is not to be WYSIWYG, and it is considered a feature that the user does not have to care about the layout, let me say that LaTeX seems to be better at generating layout for my documents than I am.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
As a writer, I have well-formatted documents I use in OpenOffice. They are 8.5x11 inches, with 1 inch margins, and headers on every page. The body text is double-spaced, while the front-page manuscript headers are single-spaced.
I lost ALL of that formatting with the test upload of a document. For writers who need properly formatted manuscripts, this is definitely a no-go. I'll have to wait until they can do proper headers and page layouts.
Here is another tool that acts as a printer driver. I've installed it on all our workstations at work, and everybody loves it.
CutePDF
Dark Reflection
Let's say you have a five-hundred-fold bibliography: how are you going to port it between publishable papers if not in BibTeX
Endnote? It's basically the Windows/Mac GUI version of BibTeX. Granted it's not open source, but Word + Endnote is pretty much the standard among all journals except those in CS/Math/Physics. Most journals outside those fields won't even accept LaTeX/BibTex (and yes, I've tried submitting LaTeX to such places like Journal of Bacteriology)