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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.
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...
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
> 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"'
You have all kinds of confusions in saying that "All the BSDs are binary compatible with Linux." First of all, you pretend there's one binary format. Second of all, you pretend there's one Linux. Both are wrong. I can promise you that your Slackware x86 binary with x86 instructions and slackware admin and path stuff is completely useless to someone using BSD on a Sparc. There is a lot to think about: machine hardware, kernel syscalls, and normal admin bits. Some of those are sometimes compatible, some of them are not. My Sparc can run Solaris binaries under BSD, but only if they don't expect Solaris sysadmin crud. And then you have the whole problem of different Linux-derived operating systems. I have programs that work find under Redhat's OS but which fail miserably using SuSE's OS, even on the same hardware. Compatibility isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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
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.
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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.