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OpenOffice.org 2.3 Review
Peace Frog writes passed us a link to an in-depth review of the newest version of OpenOffice. Instead of just the normal bug fixes, 2.3 has added several new features. Examples include: "A bunch of new and enhanced features like restoring the user-defined movement path in Impress and applying better default print settings in Calc. Check the release notes for complete information from OpenOffice.org. A significantly different chart tool. New extensions provided by Sun and other vendors. You will need to run 2.3 for the extensions to work. Read more about the new extensions on the OpenOffice.org web site." The general impression from the review is that the OO team is doing an excellent job of responding to feedback from previous releases.
My blog
To try to change this from simply a troll to a constructive post, why not mention the things they coded wrong this time? I'll start:
* Not having a user definable number of columns (instead sticking with the old 256).
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
OO 2.3 is now powered by energy harvested from Cory Doctorow's ego. Current benchmark's indicate a 50% increase in load-time. Sweet!
The thing that made Microshaft Word the market winner was the integration. Regardless how much developers hate OLE, it did the job. You could take a data object from any other app and throw it in and it kind'a worked. It was not anywhere good enough from the perspective of a professional, but it was enough as far as Joe Average was concerned.
What continues to make OO on non-windows platforms a losing proposition is the lack of such APIs. Even if the GUI and underlying libraries supports them OO continues to do things of its own (not surprising considering Sun's involvement). KDE embedding and full integration, gnome integration, etc. There are present in a very rudimentary fashion. As a result OO continues to be limited to a universe of its own. This hinders both its development and the development of third party aps like Dia. It also at the end of the day puts it firmly into the niche proposition area. Until this is resolved this is exactly where it will belong. Sad...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I think this is unrelated to 2.3, but I was excited to see yesterday that Novell now has an OOXML Translator for OO.o. I was going to have to buy Office 2007 for my fiance soon because she needs to open .docx files that are emailed to her regularly. Now I don't have to bother.
Whatever you say about Novell, I appreciate their work.
No, but it is too bad you have no clue what developing and releasing a project the size of OO involves.
If you had any class whatsoever, you'd be thinking that it is nice that this free project is being improved (not to mention released in the first place), and as such provides you with an opportunity to leverage other people's work to reduce your own workload.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Mod parent up. Ive had the same issues with a company-wide rollout of Thunderbird replacing outlook. While 99% of the people have switched (its been a couple of years now), the #2 question (right behind "where's my calendar?") has been "how do I drag and drop this embedded mpeg movie that I stuck into a powerpoint slide onto my email? nono, in with the words not an attachment." ... as much as that "tight integration" turns the stomache of any IT guy worth half his paycheck, the users expect it even if it doesnt work very well.
I for one appreciate the fact that Open Office is there as an option. It is being run on every system in my home with no complaints. Thanks to all of the people working on it.
OO has a weight problem.
I've always thought that a fork at OO 1.x would be good, as 2.x was where it got really fat.
Well IBM forked at 1.x. It's called Symphony.
But I cannot find any source of any part of Symphony.
This is an apparent violation of the LGPL.
Perhaps they are sending patches to open office, but that does not really satisfy the LGPL. The source of changed LGPL Symphony code must be publicly available.
The parent troll conveniently ignored the fact that OO was a commercial product, sold to sun the subsequently open sourced. OpenOffice.org didn't write the original code, neither did Sun. Marco Börries at 16, dropped out of high school in Germany to establish 1984 to sell Star Office under the corporate name Star Division. The fact that it is still around today and competing with Microsoft is an amazing feat in itself.
So I love OO and have started using it as my primary office suite at home. But it still falls short when it comes to rendering and printing docs and having them look the same as in MS Office.
It's not a huge issue I guess, but it's certainly the reason that I still need to have MS Office installed in a VM. Highly over the top but a necessary step until OO can render stuff faithfully. My wife, for one, will not switch until it displays word docs correctly.
Is this just me having this problem as I never see other people complaining about it.
Is he the hero that will finally liberate us from HypnoToad? My prayers have been ...~~@@~~
ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Personally, I hold out more hope for KOffice, which is built on KParts. If KOffice 2.0 is as good as the developers say it will be, I will be switching.
Palm trees and 8
Come on. From the perspective of the developer, nothing is free. Time has value, if nothing else. One can spend it in ways other than developing software. But to the user, in this case the software is available at no cost, and that is the sense I was using "free" in, as I think you (and everyone else) know very well. The fact that software costs the developer something, and then is given to the end user, is precisely the reason that any reasonable person would see value in, and be positive about, such a transmission of work product.
I certainly would if they gave it to me without charging me money, yes. I might think so anyway, if it saved me more than it cost me.
Heck, I think it is nice when there's a new and/or improved GIMP or Photoshop, and these, each in a different sense, compete for attention with one of my my own sources of income. It isn't all about who makes more money or higher sales / distribution numbers. To a large degree, it is about what benefits the users receive. YMMV, but that's definitely how I see it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Disclaimer: I am one of the founders of NeoOffice.
Being based on OOo 1.x, IBM does not need to release the source code for Symphony. OOo was originally dual licensed both under LGPL and the SISSL license. SISSL allows companies to make completely closed source forks, only providing notice of the original vendor and SISSL license. This license was one of the primary motivating factors for why we forked and created NeoOffice, to prevent companies from making a commercial product whose improvements couldn't be shared back with all the volunteers that had worked to create it.
Closed source forking is also our reason for using full GPL since it guarantees everyone's freedom to access the code. Not even LGPL provides that ability since commercial closed source proprietary code can still be incorporated provided it's in a shared library. Only the full GPL provides enough protections to ensure that everyone must cooperate and that no one can make key parts of the project rely on closed source solutions.
ed
Every release -- even a small point release like this one -- I hope that the OOo developers will add an outline mode to Writer. And every release I'm disappointed. I really like OOo, but this one missing feature keeps me from using it for serious work becuase it makes large document planning and writing production in Writer sloooooow.
And before some n00b who's never written a 200-page document jumps all over me: No, the OOo "Navigator" does not provide an outline mode. It provides something akin to a re-organizable TOC in a floating window, but it doesn't provide the productivity enhancements afforded by inline hierarchical control within the editing window. This is one function that MS Word got right. For example, in Word I can start typing and make a list in normal text, click into "outline mode" and either use a key shortcut or a single click-drag to promote/demote some text to headings (while leaving other items as content), or re-order paragraphs of text or headings. To do the same thing in OOo's Navigator, I need to switch to a different window to reorganize headings, but switch back to the editing window to resume editing content. I also need to switch between two windows to split a heading into two sections, switch back to move it, and switch again to resume composing content -- something I can do with a CR and single mouse-drag in Word.
Word: type, type, drag, type, type, [enter], key-combo, type.
OOo: type, type, switch-window, drag, switch-window, type, type, re-style, switch-window, drag, switch-window, type.
Come on guys, suck up the Not-Invented-Here pride and adopt this one feature that MS got right! Or do it one-better and improve on the similar inline hierarchical editing from FrameMaker+SGML. Or innovate some collapsible tag interface from something like the old HotMeTaL from SoftQuad. (But don't trash the Navigator; it *is* useful for final proofing, just not composition)
-J
I think not...(*poof*)
... I still can't add a word to the dictionary with just one click. Try it for yourself, you'll see. Make a typo, right-click on the word once the squiggly red underline appears. It gives suggestions, and not an "Add" menu -- but a submenu. So me, the uncaring user, just wants to add this to the dictionary. I pick "Add" submenu, then I am faced with a choice. "soffice.dic", "standard.dic" and "sun.dic". Um... what? Why should I care? What happens if I pick the wrong one? Is there a wrong one? Why do I have to make this decision? Screw this, I'm going back to MS Office! (Okay, slight hyperbole with that last.)
Unfortunately, this is a classic example of why open source software designed for mass use needs more contributors familiar with basic usability concepts. This way, end users could spend less time playing with their dics, and more time accomplishing their goals.
Are you kidding me? I've used SO since 5.0 - when it was actually quick and nimble. In a nutshell,
1) It's much slower now - even though they told us they were breaking into components to make it faster - the joke is on you.
2) listening to feedback - yeah - look at their response on basic statistical analysis. Search their bugs for statistics, error bars and regression and you'll see that it's been 5-6 yrs and STILL no ability to put the equation on the chart.
3) They are SO far behind MS it's ridiculous.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not an MS lover by any stretch but I use OO day-to-day and I recently sat down in front of Word 2007 and thought,
1) this will really make it easy for newbies to create nice documents
2) creating nice documents is really easy
3) too bad they won't adopt ODF as they'd clean house with Office '07.
Seriously, I've lost faith/hope in OO. Just look into GO-OO and you'll understand that things move glacially slow with OO development. Maybe IBM's 35 person addition will help but I forsee more pissing contests than actual work getting done.
Vista is a joke but Office '07 is a really nice product because it DOES make it REALLY easy to create nice looking documents. I added a picture to a test.doc that I was working on and was blown away with all the cool things that I could do with the image. In short, really easy to create nice looking documents - Isn't THAT what a good word processor should do???
Anyhow, I've lost faith that Sun will actually listen to the users of their software and, if they do, it'll be after the user has left out of frustration due to waiting.
HUH, you need a little history; Excel did it differently than Visicalc, Smartcalc, THE Spreadsheet, or even Microsoft's own Multiplan. It was intentional on Microsoft's part to break compatibility so you would have difficulty going back to another product. OOo returns to the standard used by all other apps.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
For a 200 pages document, nothing comes near LaTeX.
Incidentally, OOo also allows for the use of Python and other programming languages as well. However, while it might be my lack of Java-ness, it looks to me like the underlying problem is that the OOo API docs are mindbogglingly poorly organized. Say for instance you have an object of type TextCursor, and want to find out quickly what properties and methods such an object has. So you go into OOo's online API documentation and find the entry for TextCursor -- only to discover that you cannot tell what properties and methods this object provides. The docs show what *interfaces* it has, but while this might be exciting in terms of software architecting and discovering how OOo reuses its own code base, it doesn't offer a lot to anyone simply trying to make use of OOo objects. To actually find the methods and properties for any object, you'd have to click through each and every interface listing, which is hardly convenient or easy to use.
I strongly suspect that a reworking of the API documentation would give OOo a big leg up in terms of third party development.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
A historically popular, proprietary piece of BBS software for the IBM PC offered a (very popular) mailbox facility. There were rumours flying around that a future version of the software would allow the BBS sysop to charge for electronic mail messages. Charging would be by the letter; with spaces, digits and punctuation marks specifically excluded. The "elite" users responded by crafting readable messages entirely out of non-chargeable characters in order to demonstrate the absurdity of such a proposal.
Even if the facility was ever incorporated into the software, it was never actually used in real life. It's also worth pointing out that in those days, disassembling and editing binaries was by no means unfeasible.
Meanwhile, a group of immature kids who fancied themselves as "hackers" (at the risk of being called out on a "No True Scotsman" phallacy, a true hacker has more in common with a squatter than a burglar) picked up the wrong end of the stick and displayed their ignorance by continuing to craft messages out of "free" characters. The true elite laugh at them.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
...and for most people that's true too - they don't come near LaTeX either!
/.'ers, but not everyone wants to learn a programming language to be able to create a document.
It might be bizarre to many
Where I'm studying mathematics, we write our postgrad reports, essays, assignments in LaTeX.
;-)
:D (though I somehow slipped in).
Word is inefficient for what I need to do. I reckon more university students should learnify it. Bibliographies, indices, TOCs... what more does one need?
I admit it hasn't got the easiest learning curve, but if you're at a postgraduate level, I assume you've got some brains
Couldn't stand the weather
In OO Calc, type into any cell =10.1 - 10 - 0.1
Do you think you would get zero? No, you get -0.00000000000000036082.
Also, =850*77.1 should give you 1000000 like in Excel 2007, but it gives you 65535.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.