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KDE Releases Calligra Suite 2.8

Posted by timothy on from the consistently-impressive dept.

It's not just graphics app Krita: user KDE Community writes "The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.8 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. Major new features in this release are comments support in Author and Words, improved Pivot tables in Sheets, improved stability and the ability to open hyperlinks in Kexi. Flow introduces SVG based stencils and as usual there are many new features in Krita including touch screens support and a wraparound painting mode for the creation of textures and tiles." KDE has also just announced the first beta of its Applications and Platform 4.13.

35 comments

  1. It's an Openoffice-like thing by innocent_white_lamb · · Score: 5, Informative

    For other folks who are like me, and are wondering what this thing is, it's apparently an office suite like Openoffice, Libreoffice, etc.

    I've never heard of it up to now, myself.

    --
    If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
    1. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by TyFoN · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's the old KOffice.

      Krita is probably the most usefull of the apps and I've already replaced GIMP with it, however the rest are also slowly maturing :)

    2. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by TuringTest · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Return your geek card (and your low ID at once). Calligra has been talked about many times at Slashdot. It's a fork and renaming of the KOffice suite, the original KDE clone of MS Office.

      --
      Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
    3. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Oh no, 5 stories about this thing on slashdot in several years. That's way too mainstream for me.

    4. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Seriously?!

      The summary has application titles like "Sheets", "Words" and "Office Engine" and people might be at a loss as to what kind of application suite was being discussed ?

      I've seen a lot of strange acronymns and odd titles go past in Slashdot posts of yore (that had one scratching one's head) - but this one is definitely a simple one to work out or even guess at without reaching for Google/DuckDuck, assuming someone hadn't already run into the programs (Krita was mentioned just a short while ago - having a new version available and mentioned as a GIMP replacement).

      Happily you're just informative - a lot of people would have whinged in some way - you can come aagin ;-)

    5. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh, but I'm so hipster that complaining that Calligra is too mainstream is too mainstream for me.

    6. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm so hipster that I use Microsoft Office because Calligra is so mainstream.

    7. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      I hope it doesn't get broken like kmail/akonadi.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    8. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I use Microsoft Office

      You say that, but what do you say about Microsoft's SMM partners trying to bury the other story about Microsoft harvesting Xbox Live user data to target political ads.

      Microsoft is trying to persuade politicians to take out targeted ads on Xbox Live, Skype, MSN and other company platforms as midterm elections begin heating up around the country. To plug the idea, Microsoft officials handed out promotional materials Thursday at CPAC, the annual conference for conservatives.

      It's the latest move by tech companies to seize a piece of the lucrative political ad market. The ads, which would appear on the Xbox Live dashboard and other Microsoft products, combine Microsoft user IDs and other public data to build a profile of Xbox users. Campaigns can then blast ads to selected demographic categories, or to specific congressional districts. And if the campaign brings its own list of voter e-mail addresses, Microsoft can match the additional data with individual customer accounts for even more accurate voter targeting.

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

      Of course, Sashdot will not consider this to be news, because they're paid not to.

    9. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Please ignore the ravings of a lunatic posted above. Nothing like that is happening!

    10. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Please ignore the ravings of a lunatic posted above. Nothing like that is happening!

      Xbox Live political advertisement targeting leverages user data

      http://www.slashgear.com/xbox-...

      Microsoft to target political ads on Xbox Live using player data

      http://dailycaller.com/2014/03...

      Microsoft is getting ready to Scroogle Xbox owners

      http://bgr.com/2014/03/07/micr...

      Microsoft is using your data to target political ads on Xbox Live

      http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

    11. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by ClaraBow · · Score: 1

      Why was it forked? What are the differences between KOffice and Calligra? Just curious to know if someone here has any insight.

    12. Re: It's an Openoffice-like thing by BlueLightning · · Score: 3, Informative

      http://lwn.net/Articles/419822...

    13. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So . . . re-invent the wheel? I don't see the point. Why not put the effort/time/money into improving Libreoffice?

    14. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because Libreoffice was later and was born from proprietary code and ideas of cloning MS Office.

    15. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      KOffice isn't active since the fork happened. So there is more than 3 years of difference.

    16. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by fnj · · Score: 1

      Calligra Flow is definitely the most useful of the apps in the sense of being irreplaceable.

    17. Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing by unixisc · · Score: 1
      Question - how are the apps other than Words and Sheets? In particular, Stage & Kexi - their answers to PowerPoint & Access? They need to get these right as well - then they can focus on making Karbon an alternative to Visio. Anybody used all these other apps? How are they? Here is the full list:
      • Words
      • Sheets
      • Kexi
      • Stage
      • Plan
      • Flow
      • Braindump
      • Krita
      • Karbon

      Karbon & Kexi can use more intuitive names: Krita I recognize is Swedish, so can do. Otherwise, who would guess that Kexi is their database application? Or that Karbon is for vector graphics?

  2. Not horrible. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The original KOffice wasn't of much use for me last time I used it (bias: RedHat 9 or so). I'm looking into this simply for what they're calling Braindump. I wish somebody would look into making something a mobile app like this. I've seen flow chart makers, but nothing you can just write down ideas and draw lines later.

    Sorry for AC, been playing with beta.

  3. Not invented here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    Inkscape, GIMP, LibreOffice and all these apps use GTK! We absolutely must recreate them using Qt!!

    1. Re:Not invented here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      KDE is bloated, GTK is bullshit.
      And both suffer from egomaniac developers.

    2. Re:Not invented here by bumba2014 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      You're comparing apples with oranges. And you can't compare the Qt/KDE group with GTK/Gnome group, totally different people...

    3. Re:Not invented here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      Very similar in how they believe to know it all and disregard user feedback and complains.

    4. Re:Not invented here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      considering the drek people consider 'feedback' these days... hardly surprising.

    5. Re:Not invented here by HiThere · · Score: 2

      Given the way that gtk3 "improved" over gtk2, that's not a bad idea. I would really like to not be dependent upon it, because who knows what garbage they'll make and call gtk4.

      OTOH, most of the KDE Office suite is unusable. This isn't because of the Qt libraries, though. I haven't been able to figure out WHAT their goal is, but its been nearly a decade and they haven't significantly improved. I used to use KMail, but at one point it broke, and other people's comments have dissuaded be from trying it again.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  4. just have to say by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    just have to say FUCK BETA. I just got Bit.

    Headed to soylent.org if i cant turn this shit off.

    1. Re:just have to say by Barsteward · · Score: 1

      oh please fuck off there as soon as possible

      --
      "The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
  5. U like it better... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    On "INVISO-POWER"...

  6. Nasty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    These are horrible on Windows, except for Krita, which is beautiful.

    People complain about ribbons in MS Office, but whoever though up the default UI layout for Words and Sheets should be taken outside and beaten about the head with an IBM Model M keyboard.

    Argue about the UI layer itself all you like, but the interface itself is plain stupid. Most people use a mouse or a touchpad. Having to mouse all the way across a 1080p widescreen to get at common controls is stupid as stupid gets.

    Yes, there's an argument that with limited vertical space, utilising instead otherwise redundant horizontal space sounds like a great idea. But, when all I see is huge swathes of blank space in a main UI element taking up the right-hand 1/6th of the display, I want to bite something.

    I can reposition the control, but the darn thing won't dock to the top because some idiot decided to build the control in such a way to make that impossible.

    Look, I get it, a bunch of people are very clever and made a spreadsheet that does really cool and intricate stuff and is a bit like Excel but not quite as full featured but at least it's free. Wonderful and well done to those people but if you want folk to actually use your software, do some bloody user-interaction testing!

    1. Re:Nasty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But it's open source, so we Linuxbots automatically think it's good.

    2. Re:Nasty by slack_justyb · · Score: 2

      People who complain about having to mouse over to something, loose all nerd cred with me. Shortcut keys were invented for a reason and you just cannot call yourself a hard-core user if you keep touching your mouse.

      Casual users can do, "the mouse-over to the other side of the screen of shame" to pay for their inability to sit down and read a book on how to really use the tool given to you. Not saying I agree with how they have chosen to layout the UI in the Calligra suite, but honestly, at least they haven't f'ed with the shortcut keys since the 2.x series began.

      I will now accept all "get off my lawn" comments to follow.

    3. Re:Nasty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People with poor grammar "loose" credibility and it is difficult to take them seriously.

  7. Android? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Plans to port to Android?

    1. Re:Android? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Calligra has been ported to Android,
      or more accurately Words has been slimmed down and squeezed into Android form.
      https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kde.calligra.coffice
      Previously
      http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/13/03/24/0131205/kdes-calligra-office-suite-for-android-released

  8. Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The more diversified the applications sphere becomes the better!