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Daemonnews reviews Applixware
The folks over at DaemonNews are running a review of Applixware, the 'Office Productivity Suite'. Featuring all the standard components (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, and so on), it's been available for Linux for a while now. However, this is the first time native binaries have been produced for FreeBSD. Read the review to find out whether it was worth waiting for.
You mean you people want to use a wysiwyg word processor instead of ED?
.
.... who dares deny ed!!
::::::: OPENBSD FOR LIFE, LIBERTY and SECURITY ::::::
You're nuts, with quality sessions such as these:
ed file
i
ed rocks and you know it!
w
q
...that Applix does not try to follow the likes of Microsoft or Stardivision/Sun and "add features" to no end. Sure, I have oodles of small complaints about Applixware, but it's the lesser of many evils and does my job rather well. The interface is simple, yet powerful. Disk and memory requirements are better than that of the competition. And it looks, works, and feels about as well as an office suite can get (IMHO).
My only valid complaint at this time is price: why are the Solaris and IRIX versions so blasted more expensive than the Linux version? I have linux boxes at both work and home, but 90% of my computing time is either on my Indigo2 or Ultra at work or my Indy at home. If the non-Linux versions were $99 as well, I'd snatch up 3 copies right away!
Yes you can run Star Office 5 for FreeBSD
Check out:
FreeBSDRocks.com's StarOffice 5 Installation How-To
Sounds like you are the crackhead, you flaming fireball.
"FreeBSD has such a hard time getting apps that they have to try and emulate everyone elses environment."
So what? Would you like FreeBSD to stop their port production of nearly 3,000 ports? Does thou dare deny the unix revolution?
subject says it all you hood
I use Applix on a 300 MHz K6-2 and also notice the redraw with every character typed. I got used to it after awhile, though it would be nice to have that changed. Perhaps it's just me, but something just feels 'right' and 'better' about using vanilla fvwm and Applix. I'll never go back to Windows (at least for Office).
Wow, what is your gripe with Linux? Linux is no Windows. Just because some dude insulted your OS does not mean you have go and insult a the user base you think the dude is from.
Office is slick looking, has the buzzwords, and really, isn't all that bad. Yet there's just something about it that gets me. It's most likely politics mixed with Microsoft's endless "throw more software at the problem" way of dealing with current user interface limitations. Sure, Applix is nothing new, but it's a better implementation of current technology. Rather than throwing in assistants and in-your-face "features", Applix choose to make a strong product. Rather than trying to BE office (*cough* staroffice *cough*), they instead made a very un*x-looking product that fits in with our existing environment. The Applix team strives to have broad platform support (visit their website) and even has a nifty java implementation for thin-client systems (Applix AnyWhere). All in all, aside from some pricing issues and a few parts of the interface that need to be "cleaned up", Applix is a great solution for those of us that don't want Office.
Several products for FreeBSD have already died because of lack of support. Time will tell if this one will die too. FreeBSD's user base is small, and of our meager numbers even fewer are willing to pay for an office suite. At Freebsdcon one of the speakers said that Walnut Creek paid to have it ported. So it might survive under FreeBSD as an OEM product with support paid for by Walnut Creek. Only about 300 people showed up for Freebsdcon, and if every one of us bought a copy, the money tendered couldn't even pay the salary of a maintenance programmer.
Well, if you took time from complaining you could maybe first learn how to turn off the bold- but html gurus are hard to find. Second of all, some of the emulation projects are just stalling development. Everybody is trying to use Wine but Wine is not even alpha quality. If the system they are trying to emulate is open source then the port should be quick and easy but if it is closed then forget the port. Imagine the kind of good apps *nix could have if all the wine people had been making native *nix programs for all these years instead of keeping some pipe dread (wow, I closed bold) alive to feed to the weak minded.
I realize that those complex BSD people do not value Linux but it should be in with windows. Linux is a good OS and really is just as good as FreeBSD.
Your little comment does not prove anything.
I am trying to have a English variant added to my school. I trying to get my college to see ebonics as a foreign language so that I do not have to take espanol. So yes I have taken a english class you little weasel boy.
With ebonics, one does not have to concern one's self with the mechanics of the language. I figure that it would be hard for a homey to fail ebonics any way.
That be one honky killer idea that popped out of you head. I be able to pass any Ebonics class without even being in the place where they be teaching it. I be hafing to bogee now to go and slap up da bitch now.
ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed!
Let us declare Jihad against all those vi/emacs/pico/jed/Nedit/GUI-editor/WYSIWYG scum! Let them convert or DIE!
How about an honest review with some real-world screenshots. Not the scaled-down promo things that Applix shows off, but actual modules in use, settings/preference panels, etc.
Yes, to confirm your observation Mozilla is very fast. I like to make html files with all my porn pics in them and netscape takes over ten minutes to load but mozilla is like half a minute. Just keep in mind that my html is well over ten megs.
I tried this between two slow computers (486/66).
Applixware ran fine off the local disk, but
it took FOREVER to start on the remote machine.
Once started, it was ok, but starting another
app (i.e. spreadsheet doc) also took a long
time. I think this has to do with Linux NFS
performance (this was with an older kernel)
and the fact that applixware uses
a zillion little files.
But it does work. Just check performance
before you send out that quote to migrate
a 100-seat office!
I like Applixware a lot. Use it all the time.
-- cary
Why don't you go set your self on fire you stupid moderator.
With such words as "yikes" any good computing peoples do not be needing your services (even billy gates).
You obviously didn't read the article very closely. And you've never had to maintain a large stack of MS-Office installations. Horror doesn't begin to describe it.
As a fella that is considering (and wanting) Applix for IRIX and Solaris, I'm curious as to what makes you say that? The linux version seems to work fine for me. Have you run across some major bugs or shortcomings?
Heh, reminds me of the Rainbow Six demo... along the lines of 3000 files. Why on earth don't developers do something along the lines of a "quake pak file" if they really like all of 'em little files. Another reason why I don't like most office suites, messy and nutty instalation.
Why did you tell us that. You could of just said that mozilla loads large files a lot faster than the present communicator. Did you feel like you had to drop in the magic "p" work to be glorified?
FreeBSD native ports of Linux binaries have two advantages: 1. In order to get ported, some portability issues and real life bugs get fixed. 2. By the time the ports gets done, the current version of the software has had many updates. Both make this software have excellent quality IMHO.
How about i piss all over myself and thereby putting out any remains of a fire then you do your part of the bargain.
Yes, just to confirm, Mozilla does indeed run very fast when compiled for FreeBSD.
I was floored when I saw the memory usage charts. No kidding, I'd love to see such description on future reviews.
Perhaps you are the one in need of a few lessons in the language of English.
The guy is right, actually. Staroffice for Linux seems to work just fine with 96 MB of RAM. I have noticed problems with 32 or even 64 MB, but 96 seems to be the right measure.
What is ebonics? Is it what we old people called jive?
Because freebsd sucks and freebsd binaries would be the end of freebsd
Slashdot does not seem to agree with my opinion but decide for yourself, go here and just please be fair.
OHHHH YEAH :)
Brothers (and sisers?) let us proclaim *THE* editor for UNIX and praise it.
OK everyone, go type "ed" in the console NOW
(and don't gimme this konsole junk, I mean a REAL console).
Now, alas, you have seen the power of ed. Do *I* need to see a screenful of the text? Hell no!! We are programmers aren't we? There is no reason to print out the lines, we already know the code and what it says byte for byte.
Throw down your EMACS (eighty million megs and constantly swapping), your VI (virtually immense), and your GUI junk...
multi-media yes
... NO
Multi-user
You stupid lamers and your os war. If you rememeber- smart people can use a bad os just as well as a dumb person can use a good os. Any OS is need of any help you can add.
Wow, you people are willing to gripe about anything. Do you intentionally feed the fire making the comment moderated and in process making your comments a big mess?
That article is full of FUD. Our "family" computer is a 486dx at 50 Mhz. Other than having an above average video card, it is nothing special. My kids and my wife use Office 97 on it under Windows 95 all the time with no problems. It isn't particularly slow or fast, just mediocre. But text editing and printing up homework assignments, and writing letters it is perfectly fine. The spreadsheet is usable. The whole setup works fine for our needs. So don't believe those BSD zealots when they spout their usual lies. And by the way, we bought our full copy of Office 97 on the grey market for $70. I've seen copies selling for as low as $50. It is a full legal "professional" version.
Wine is not BSD development but it runs on it so okay- I can give you some ground. I can see your argument that Wine is holding back things from in *nix (perhaps games) but the reason for such a project is to make one app that can give you access to the apps you want.
Well I am only one man
why is my comment (which is below) flamebait?
FreeBSD is stupid. BSD is a ancient system that a group slaps a name infront of and expects to be cool geeks. Well, I am not falling for it- they are bad geeks.
I do have a rather impressive thread though.
I thought Office 2000 was already out.
That is rather interesting. Could you maybe keep us posted on what happens?
Is that somekind of trick to get your comment in the non-flamebait section? I guess it is working. Just a rule, it is not nice to be negative towards anything other than microsoft. If you follow that rule you could quite possibly avoid such labels as flamebait. Wow, show me again- it is so big (your thread)
You seem to be a human flamebait machine my little friend. Why do you insist on such making such a stir?
94
93
95
96
97
98
99
is /. 100 compliant?
troff is dead. HTH.
is this dude a troll- make it official
If you're going to
/sbin every time you have to upgrade glibc.
have a staticly linked editor, which of course is a must and many of these silly commerical
Linux-based operating systems forget to do this,
Let me give you a clue, since you need one. Editors aren't statically linked on commercial OSes because the commercial OSes are supported. You don't want to force your customer to download all of
Tom, don't be a moron. I'm not a programmer. I'm a molecular biologist. There is no reason on earth I should even bother to learn troff (though I do know it)--WYSIWYG clearly makes more sense for what I do.
Given that, the lack of office software for Unix is a problem. There's still no really good presentations package (Star Office is usable, but not very good), there's no acceptable spreadsheet, and printing issues for graphics are still a major drawback.
I did some checking and apparently a Solaris licence for for Applixware Office runs about $650 per seat.
Well, there is WordPerfect 5.1, there is LyX, I suppose that you could run Word Star on DOSEMU if you really felt like it.
Perhaps I am just tired and cranky, but why do you really need a WYSIWYG editor? Just set your rules and never touch them. Defaults work for me. One of the main reasons that I chuckled at the ed fanatic above is that he/she had some good points. I have done a lot in vi for a long time. I am fast in it. LaTeX is not that hard, and I can crank it out to ps very quickly. I did most of my damned grad school on a Thinkpad without ever venturing inside X and I don't think that I suffered. This was the UT Austin Business School -- the alternative was NT. Weight the options, man.
And, sir, I think that you mean a *three* digit IQ. Remember, 15 points a standard deviation, mean at 100 or so (depends on population), people with IQs of 70 aren't really able to take care of themselves, so I hope that you meant 100, not 10.
bsd rules!!! linux sux!!!
tR0lLiN'
I use Ms office in my home pc, a p100 32 mb and it works very well. As a matter of fact, it is possible to run word, excel, and powerpoint at the same time. All the apps are loaded very fast and i know that ms loads lots of dll at boot time, but who cares about that. VBA is quite good and it's very easy to debug code. Ms office is feature bloated but it doesnt require lots of system resources. I wish unix had an office suit as good as win has.
Apparently Applix makes a killing off of government and big business sales for their Solaris/IRIX/Java/otherunix versions as I've never run across Applixware Office for $99 aside from the Linux/BSD versions. Nor have I found clear, up-front pricing or online ordering for non-Linux/BSD versions. After a long string of messy quotes and option pricing charts, I still only know one thing about getting Applixware on the handful of Suns and SGIs we have at work -- it's going to cost a fortune. -Sigh- Seeing how I'd imagine development for the different versions is rather parallel, it's a shame the Solaris version isn't $99 as well.
Wow, there seems to be a very large number of anti-freebsd comments. Most of them did not make any sense at first because there is a huge thread starting #9 that was cut out and us "normal" folk only get to see partials of the thread. Can anyone explain the anti-freebsd thing to me? Freebsd always seemed nice enough to me.
Does the current version of Applixware support this capability?
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I'll tell you what sucks more, after using word periodically at work (maybe 10 hours on it over the last year, compared to about 10 hours with other products) I pull up the newest wordperfect for linux and it feels down right primitive in comparison. It's not, wordperfect and word are both very similar in terms of features but there is something that makes word really nice to use. If your machine is fast enough, it's compelling.
MS has gotten where they are by delivering products quickly, usually shoddy, and then following up with solid products in version x + 1.
MSIE was that way, Office was that way, VC++ is that way. Even windows is that way. Not that it's solid but it has improved. If the competition makes any mistakes (like wordperfect did in committing to alternative platforms and then never delivering and then killing to projects and then rebirthing them after 3 changes in ownership...) then MS steps in and starts owning the market.
StarOffice would be my second favorite and it's a full tilt office clone, that's also what frustrates with it, they copied all the good stuff but it's a little rough. It still feels great and is nice to use but the need to do a little more to close the circle and fill it out.
Hopefully Abiword, KOffice, and GNOME catch up soon.. They will, I'm just impatient, we will beat them, it will just take a while. StarOffice too, but it sounds like they're focused on this java thing more than bulking up their native products... (opensource it sun!)
Or, as a wise man once said:
As I understand it, when FreeBSD runs a Linux (or SCO, or Solaris, or whatever) binary, in simply loads a different vector table for system calls, therefore, there should be no speed difference between running native versus compatible.
So Tom;
is there a decent introduction/tutorial for troff
that can get someone up to speed enough to understand what the manpage is saying?
It is possible for a semi-intelligent person to
still be somewhat boggled by what troff is supposed to be and how it might be used.
To the thread,
As the independent, successful person that you are, you do not have the pleasure of working for someone who won't accept that there are modes of transferring text other than Office97 fast save files. This is a real showstopper in so many places.
Of course, that's the damage done by ignorance, in the general case.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Good docs! I shared them with a colleague who's
expressed much of the same sentiment about troff and other tools.
}From the point of view of a touchtypist, and proficient vi user, troff seems to have a reputation for being the utilitarian yet superpowered tool for type and layout (like what vi is for brain-to-fingers efficiency and control).
Domo arigato, Mr. Christiansen
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Optimizing the size of a Postscript print stream sounds much easier to me than figuring out the undocumented portions of the Office 97 file formats.
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
The $64,000 question has always been file format compatibility. A lot of people really want an alternative office suite to save documents in files that are indistinguishable from Excel 97 and Word 97. For my purposes, Excel 4.0 compatibility is more than enough, but not every potential user of Applixware (or StarOffice or Corel) is going to feel that way.
IMHO, discussion of file interchangeability with Office 97 would have made this review even better.
Finally, I read a report from Forrester Research the other day that said that Office 2000 would be a great Web publishing environment for non-technical people, because it is able to maintain formatting through the roundtrip between Office and the Web Server. The key to this, apparently, is the encapsulation of style information in XML.
If this is truly the case, then it is also going to get a lot easier for competing office suites like Applixware to exchange documents with Office. Similarly, it will make it easier for *nix users like us to get our work done with tools we like.
(Sorry for the lack of a link to the Forrester report. I think it is one of those that Fortune 500 companies pay big bucks to get access to.)
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
Memory usage! in detail! I wish we could get more info like that in reviews, rather than just going through the features checklist. It actually makes it possible to make an informed decision about the program.
My informed decision:
Given the size of the spool files, applix should probably give out vouchers for reductions if you need to buy a new hard drive...
I like it when a review is an honest statement of what happened when the product was used. It more helpful than a sales pitch. It gives a better feel for the road ahead.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
I've worked with Applixware under Solaris. It sucks (IMHO and YMMV, of course). For a while it was the only game in town, but even then I found out that I'd rather ftp data files to my PC and then work on them in Excel rather than fire up Applix and try to do stuff under it. I haven't tried Sun's Office yet, but I have a feeling that unless Applix gets really better really fast it is going the way of SCO UNIX.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The author claims, for example, that Office 97 is barely runnable on a Pentium-II 266
That is FUD and bullshit. I run Office 97 on my Pentium (not Pro) 200 with 64Mb of RAM and it's very much usable (after you disable the paperclip, of course).
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I'm testing office 2000 now for an april rollout. It runs fine on a pentium 90/64Mb RAM. The bloat problems have definitely been addressed to some extent. I dislike m$ in general, but having used applix for a year or so, I would have to say it's buggy and clunky. We even have X on the NT desktops here so it's a real option, but it just doesn't cut it for us.
sure it is, but when you have 300 users in 10 states you don't just send 'em a box of cd's. You test on your hardware, configure, tweak and then automatically roll it out to them all.
FreeBSD (not sure about Open and Net) does have a Linux binary compatibility layer which is getting better all the time, but it's still a layer that it has to go through. That means increased cost of syscalls and everything else. A native FreeBSD binary of any program will be faster and more stable than the Linux binary running under emulation. I have run StarOffice under FreeBSD, and found it to be a little too unstable for my daily use...not that I use word processors and spreadsheets very much anyway.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Due to trademarks and AT&T they cannot *CALL* it UNIX.
Remember the "UNIX is a trademark of AT&T" at the bottom of technical papers? I have the impression that BSD Unix has generally been superior to AT&T Unix.
Superficially, I would agree with you, but as shown in the lawsuit Finding of Fact, Microsoft reacts strongly to perceived threats to its position. With a strong BSD waiting in the wings, Linux is a stronger competitor to Microsoft. I don't think I really believe it, but it is interesting to consider the possibility. ;)
Sometimes I argue about the everreturning issue of Windows/UN?X strengh/weaknesses and it is often said, that SMB/Shortcuts is stronger than NFS/symlinks. But anyone who has tried to manage an Office97 corporate solution knows that this isn't true. NFS mounts are transparent to the applications and symlinks open just like any other files.
I can see a lot of advantages in managing standard templates, standard doc-vaults, standard configuration with good UNIX praxis, rather than application specific menu hunt-downs and weird-fixes.
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
I just couldn't figure this out:
.DOC file becoming 224MB of data being sent to the printer.
Application printing is also very well done
and then the reviewer goes on to describe a ~500k
Where I work, we have a lot of network printers. Those are being served by one of our servers, with queue limits of about 15MB per job. I haven't heard of a single complaint about the size of the queue before. So maybe although the memory requirements of ApplixWare seem modest, this is really unacceptable in our situation. In defense of the reviewer, he says it's "a complex, 10 page graphics-intensive document", but even then, most LaTeX files I've seen that include figures don't produce 100's of MB's of postscript.
Too bad, I'd really like to see a good Office suite for *nix (and no, StarOffice with its 1min+ startup time and 100MB memory requirements doesn't cut it for me either).
--Fritti
As the BSDs are binary compatible with Linux, isn't StarOffice a viable alternative at zero-cost to the end user?
This review contains the words "We have been ignored mainly because of the lack of an office suite with word processor and spreadsheet and presentation package." Am I wrong, or is this simply the first BSD-native Office Suite?
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
> if you're going to start comparing it to MS Office, > you'd better back it up with something that's a good, valid point. I wanna shoot first, Me Me Me! Excel has this stupid limit of 65536 rows in a spreadsheet. Dunno if that's true for Excel 2000, but it's true for Excel 97. It's not that difficult to allow sheets of arbitrary size - see Gnumeric source for proof. This shows why it's crazy to trust your future with Microsoft - that's something simple which has bugged me since 1993 and they've still not fixed it, and there's f*** all I can do about it.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
> Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), has done
> everything that I needed to do quickly, easily, and reliably.
I guess, then, that you've never wanted a text box where the text gets auto-selected when you click on it. I've seen professional programmers resort to using SendKeys to overcome this.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
If you use that method, then TAB to the box, it doesn't do anything.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
> Staroffice for Linux seems to work just
> fine with 96 MB of RAM. I have noticed
> problems with 32 or even 64 MB
If you have enough swap space, it shouldn't even be able to tell the difference - it'd go slowly but it shouldn't be any more unstable.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
> StarOffice with its 1min+ startup time and 100MB memory requirements
You are exaggerating there, right? SO50 starts in about 15 sec on my 32MB Cyrix 200
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I write letters, articles, resumes, and even books in troff. So do a lot of real programmers. Other people use Latex, and they're real programmers, too.
Since people use this stuff, and get plenty of real work done with them, they're hardly dead, much though you might wish this were the case, you cowardly bastard.
I think we should change "Anonymous Coward" to "Cowardly Bastard". If you haven't the testicular fortitude to place a name on a post, don't bother posting.
Just because the entry cost for power-tools like troff and latex is a double-digit IQ doesn't mean power-tools shouldn't exist. Yes, I realizethat half the populace doesn't measure up to that requirement. Oh well.
And yes, I remember the first winmenumouse systems. I used the Star system on Dandelions from Xerox long ago, back before Apple stole the interface from them, and before the Evil One stole the interface from Apple. It really pissed me off when I had to leave school and go work in industry and couldn't use the nice Xerox tools, but had to do everything in troff again instead. But I still got my job done.
And it's not just because I am a programmer. Even secretaries can do this if they have to. Remember that for many years, all the secretaries at Bell Labs used vi and troff for all the corporate documents. Don't underestimate a secretary.
I'm not saying one should do this. I'm merely saying that one can. Stop expecting everyone to be an idiot.
It would seem that the Linuxes are much more commercially oriented. Look at Corel, Caldera, RedHat, SuSE, and all the rest of them. Sure, BSDs are more used by ISP businesses and other high-tech places filled with Unix professionals, but that's really a completely new place for M$, once where they've not traditionally been very effective (maybe there's not enough room temperature IQs there for them to hoodwink so easily :-). But because the Linuxes are obviously trying to attack M$'s existing business at least in mindshare if not in real dollar amounts (but I bet there's something there, too), I would think that the Linuxes would be much more threatening to M$ than the BSDs.
But come to think of it, ed doesn't even need a tty. It'll run fine over a socket, too, even if isatty() returns false. It's good for automation, and complete desperation, but not a lot else. If you're going to have a staticly linked editor, which of course is a must and many of these silly commerical Linux-based operating systems forget to do this, then you might as well have something more user-friendly, like, oh, I don't know, maybe ex. :-)
Agreed.
I've been using Applix Office at home, and I like it a lot. But moving files from home to work, where they have Windows, is tough.
Actually, it's toughest in the other direction (work to home) because I have to remember to save files in earlier file formats; as usual, I am the weakest link in this chain. What I would really love is one of those programs that seem to grow up around the Mac ecosphere to translate PC files into other files -- even just to plain ol' text would be good if it would help me read it.
Actually, I have one funny story. Every year I make over 500 holiday cookies in 6 varieties. I was putting together a spreadsheet to calculate the total amounts of each ingredient I needed so that I could do all the shopping at once (when you make this many cookies, efficiency is critical if you want to keep your day job). But my printer was out of ink, so I sneakernetted the file over to another (Windows) machine to print it out. I was able to open the file, but all the numbers in the cells were read in a new format -- scientific notation. I was tickled! I got to shop in scientific notation! (I'm going to publish it on my holiday cookies portion of my website, too).
That said, one major flaw for me is the non-portability of spreadsheets with certain types of formulas in them between Applix's spreadsheet program and Excel.
lwilliams
The guy is right, actually. Staroffice for Linux seems to work just fine with 96 MB of RAM. I have noticed problems with 32 or even 64 MB, but 96 seems to be the right measure.
Sorry for the AC post.
Sigged!
Yeah, I don't get it. My wife uses it at home on a Pentium 100 with 48Mb of RAM for light work, letters, organizing tabular data in Excel, reading other's documents, etc. It's not swift, but I would not say it's "unusable".
The constant hyperbole about how bad MS products you see on /. really tends to discredit /. as a reliable source.
So all this article is really saying is that you can run unix on lower spec machines than what is required for Windows and Office 2000.
Duh! I think we already knew this. It would have been more interesting if the review had compared the features (and cost) on suitably specified machines.
Hi!
Well said. I would add that MS Office has never spent "almost an hour to render the document and print it" for a ten page (!) document. Come on - people may talk of the paperless office but this sort of thing makes it unusable for me.
Applixware does not seem to be an alternative if my 100 page thesis takes ten hours and 100 GB swap space to print.
And you thought Microsoft products were bloated.
Hi!
Its nice to see that BSD is getting more mainstream recognition from companies like Applixware. Linux is nice, but BSD shouldn't be left alone like it has been. Hooray for you people at Applix.
Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for the change to take effect. Reboot now? [ OK ]
Serious revenue comes from those other, higher priced, versions. Keep in mind that almost all unix software is that expensive - it's the legacy price level.
Well, even this is flamebait ... I use VB/VBA because it's fast, easy, and gets the job done. Yes, it works reliably, if you code it correctly and you maintain a clean system. When a client calls for an application that completes a simple task, you write him a simple product in the least amount of time that it takes. It's called RAD. Just yesterday, someone asked me for a program to quickly extract images from a database, process it, and put it back into the database. Use existing ActiveX components and build a little script around it, and you have a great product that the client loves in just a few hours. It's easy to debug and it's easy to pack up and send to the client. I get frustrated at times working with VB because it isn't a well structured language, but at the same time, it gets the job done.
The author claims, for example, that Office 97 is barely runnable on a Pentium-II 266. This is way more than enough for most people, especially if you're going to keep the document simple. Maybe it is bloated code, but it's still very responsive on this kind of system. And then raving about Applixware's documentation in hypertext format, when Office has had hypertexted help since at least Office 97, with plenty of examples, tips, and quickie-tutorials.
MS Office is very slick, but certainly not because of its silly dancing paperclip. It has a lot of features which work the way I expect them to. For example, its on-the-fly spellchecking is an extremely useful feature -- this is hardly something that can be swept under the BSD rug ... Oh, and here's the kicker: Applixware has better OS intergration than Microsoft? Come on ... MS just gets a Finding of Fact issued against it saying that it's too tightly integrating its products together ... and Applixware is better? I've programmed all sorts of stuff in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and it's done everything that I needed to do quickly, easily, and reliably.
If you're going to review a product and compare it against Microsoft, stick to the real issues. If it's faster and quicker than Microsoft at doing the same stuff (which it probably is), that's great. But don't pick lame points. People are so quick to bash Microsoft these days it's sickening. It's called chauvanism.
I have Applix for linux. It has a couple of bugs but it's still pretty ok. The main thing that I don't like about it is that they charge for upgrades (it's not cheap either!)
If you're writing a book, it's great. It allows you to embed index information right into the text and this is what I found most useful from it. I use it to write technical documentation.
Fish! LipHo
By standard I meant de-facto. I don't use the stuff myself when I can help it, but many many people do.