Even if anonymous submissions were removed, you'd still have the problem of people registering accounts and posting flames, spam, or what have you. This tends to be fairly common now, so I don't imagine it'll do anything but increase.
Not at all true. Other web based forums rely upon a valid E-Mail address that the user must be able to reply from in order to register. One that I know of that remains quite busy has the additional restriction of not allowing you to use free services, such as hotmail or yahoo. With such a system in place, you can actually make those bans stick.
True, even in this case there are ways to get around the system, but it requires a lot more work for the average spammer.
Do we really want some organization telling third-party developers how to achieve binary compatibility?
You are so right. That's why I hate TCP/IP too! We should all just be doing our own thing, work up all our own protocols, and use whatever we feel most comfortable with. Here we are, stuck with only 4 little octets for addressing. We shouldn't be so restricted by "the man" when deciding how we want to browse the web.
While we're at it, why do we have only one mark up language? I want 5 or 6 to choose from at all times so I don't have to deal with things being dictated at me.
Standards are just some way to have "the man" keep us down.
Being that I'm pretty ignorant about Be, and you are apparently the "be-fan", I would have thought that this stuff was right into Be's realm. From what I've read, I thought Be was specifically geared towards this kind of graphics processing that you're talking about.
Honest curiousity going on here, so if this comes off as my attempt at a flame, try reading it again. I too find that NT 4.0 Workstation is the client to beat out there when looking at a stability and software availability stand point. A lot of the structure to Be sounds interesting, but much like with Linux I'd be hard pressed to leave the software base presently supporting NT.
Your message just sent flags off in my head as to what all Be has going for it these days in the way of applications since a lot of what you listed would seem to be into Be's realm of hoped for market share.
The "for kids" impression you're getting seems to be mostly due to the over sized icons used. It's great having all those colors and design, but those icons really need to be about 2/3rds the size of what they are now.
Then these over sized icons get used in the toolbars. What's worse, there's too much space allocated for buttons that are already too big. This gives KSpread this blocky look that an app like Excel doesn't suffer from.
A GUI app only has just so much time on screen to lull a person into the notion that their time spent learning will be worthwhile. Certainly some apps are less affected by this, but I firmly believe that Office apps are heavily impacted. No matter how cool KSpread may turn out to be, the user has to jump this additional hurdle of having this blocky interface show up.
Mind you, Gnome is no better in this regard. In many cases it's actually much worse. Both of these desktops really need to be making better use of the screen real estate.
All griping aside, I'm still very much looking forward to the final release of KDE 2.0. My little 56k modem will be right there with everyone else contributing to the Slashdot effect when it comes out. I'm especially excited to see how Konqueror plays out.
Man, I almost missed this post here. This has been one of those rare times it's been a pleasure to cruise a thread at 0+. A couple of replies here then I think I'll shush up for a bit.
How people think they look using a product can drastically affect their perceived value of it--stupid maybe but true.
Not at all stupid. Functionality is but one aspect of a GUI interface. Look and feel are extremely important. Although I have issues with some of the results, I am quite please that the Gnome and KDE folks are attempting to focus in on this.
The same could be said for KDE of course, which combines a mechanical look with everything-is-too-largeness which makes for clunky, toylike, unprofessional looking desktops. And it's the most sterile, "professional" looking of the all (out of the box)
Yeah, this is a point I didn't address in my original post. Glad to see you did. What is with these huge icon sizes? Do we really need a "start" menu that's got a 1 inch tall button?
The collision of badly proportioned window chrome/decorations plus bloated widgets come together like a bad advertising/marketroid
I don't really blame the folks making themes for these problems. I love the fact that they're trying to push the creative envelope in seeing what works and looks cool. The problem is in what the user can then do to fine tweak a theme via the GUI. Of all the things I could be doing with my time, learning LISP in order to change the color of a button just isn't high on the list.
Although I rather prefer the look of most of the Gnome themes, KDE seems to be heading more into the right direction here. A simple GUI control that allows you to download a theme, then tweak in and out the parts you like or don't. For example, I'm a firm believer in black text on a white background for reading or writing a lot of text. The majority of themes for Gnome would require me to alter code to get this to happen for many of the objects. With KDE, I just pick a theme then tweak on aspects of it right from the control panel to make this happen. It'd be REALLY cool to have this kind of control panel functionality for those cool Gnome themes!
Redhat simply must break down their reluctance to take these matters seriously and hire an outside desgn firm. Apple does this, why not the leading Linux distro ? And I don't mean a failed comic book illustrator, either.
I believe the KDE folks have certain people who work exclusively on graphic design. This is certainly evidenced by the colorful and distinctive icons KDE has. What's lacking still yet is a more comprehensive look at the over all picture of how the window manager presents itself. From the screen shots of KDE 2.0 I've seen, it doesn't look like we're going to see any major changes in this regard just yet.
One of the shoddiest things about the whole office suite is the help system. Microsoft help is the WORST I've ever seen! Besides being way too shallow, it's very difficult to find all but the simplest things.
Too shallow? Way back when Word 2.0 was shipping, MS used to send this 250 page book that went into quite some depth into using this product. That entire book has been digitized into that help system, along with tons of other stuff. You may not have figured out how to get at it, but it's anything but shallow.
WordPerfect is very polished, has menu options in appropriate positions, and DOESN'T HAVE THAT STUPID PAPERCLIP...
I used to hate that paperclip myself. I still don't use it all that much. What changed my mind about this was watching someone new to computers use it. That's it's real purpose in life. For getting a new user up to speed with how to get Word to do it's stuff, that annoying little bugger really works.
All that, and I get the distinct impression I'm replying to someone who has a religious devotion to hating MS. I suppose that's fun and all, but side blinders like that prevent you from seeing some of the bigger picture here. One aspect of this is why Word beat the snot out of WordPerfect back at a time where the market was anything but decided.
What's really cool at this moment in time is that the Linux Office solutions actually have enough momentum going to take on MS Office. Even if it takes a couple of years to do, there's an opportunity here that hasn't existed in many a year. Hunkering down into the "MS Sucks" bunker isn't going to make it happen though.
I've tried Amaya under Linux. It is what it is. A concept work that will probably never see enough polish to go main stream. This isn't a bad thing, or meant to be a knock against it. It's just what it is.
Unfortunately it stresses compliance over everything else. (Heck, by definition how it looks actually *IS* the standard...)
If Mozilla doesn't get out soon, IE is by definition going to be the standard. Ack.
Personally, I'm wondering what some talented soul might be able to do with Konqueror in the way of HTML editing under KDE. Seems like all the components are there to make a first class HTML editor.
Quanta does appear to be heading in the right direction. I'm guessing we'll have a pretty good idea how well it plays out in another 6 months or so.
I don't want to sound mean, but if you want toolbars in your apps, that's your problem.
Not mean, just very self centered. You are living under the assumption that because you don't much care for the UI features that is driving 99% of the OS market right now that it's not relevant.
The fact that this wasn't done so far shows, imho, that most current users don't care much for that.
Does the fact that a decent competitor for Office software then also indicate that there's not much care for that either? By your logic anything that hasn't already been done is by default not cared about.
Perhaps most of them are quite happy with TeX or plain text
Most of whom? A couple of the folks posting here on Slashdot? You mean to tell me that you could even locate somebody who knew what TeX was outside a few Unix users who got introduced to it in college?
Now to dreamweaver: I don't find a lack of such program to be a handicap at all. When I was doing full-time web design on windows, I still used vim.
Have you ever seen Dreamweaver? This ain't Front Page we're talking about here. Sorry, but the fact you spent some significant time learning a text editor for a PDP-11 dumb terminal doesn't impress me all that much.
The problem with GUI html editors is that you can't automate them like you can a good text editor. With vim you get immensely useful things like abbreviations, copy/pasting multiple times, so on. If I need to create 10 links, I create one, copy it, do 10p (paste 10 times) and change the URLs.
Abbreviations and copying and pasting are your ideas of an advanced editor? Typing speeds being equal, I could create 10 pages to each one that you could work out in any text editor with DW. That, and your completely missing the beauty of what makes DW stand out as a great editor. You can leave it and go to a text editor, then come back. Repeat the process all you like, DW doesn't muck up the code!
How about a more reasonable test. Let's take 10 web pages heavily interlinked, and all sitting in the same directory. Make, let's say, 5 sub-directories. Now I'm gonna move 5 of them pages into their respective sub-directories. How long is it going to take you to insure all the links still work with VIM? With DW, it's already done!
I realize that for many people it's a matter of taste to prefer GUI tools, but again, lack of such programs shows that it's not a big deal for most.
Most of who? Last I checked, the VAST majority of web developers far and away prefer either Windows or Mac, regardless of which platform it's actually served off of.
But if you really want it, start coding.
Oh now this is frameable. Is this like the default response to anything lacking on Linux? I promise you this, Bill Gates LOVES that attitude.
Also the development tools for Winders. Actually, I believe MS has been slow to court Adobe, and fix the problems MS platforms have had in printing environments since the DTP market is all that was keeping Apple alive for a while there. Apple dead would have guaranteed a rapid breakup of MSFT years before the current Antitrust action was begun.
The harsh truth here is that Microsoft would have never let Apple die off. Even from the very first Mac, it was Adobe and Microsoft providing the key applications that enabled clicking on them perty pitures to actually do something. Today it's more a matter of insuring that there's at least one other player in the computer platform market.
I haven't tried it under WINE yet, perhaps I'll give it a shot this afternoon.
If you get it to play, be sure to post the results on Wine's site. Last I saw, nobody has been able to get it to work. Due to the file management that Dreamweaver gets into, I doubt that it'll ever Wine it's way across to Linux.
How do we get Macromedia to release this beauty under Linux?
I asked one of their folks when I saw them at the last Internet World. The conversation kinda went like this...
"So, when you coming out with a Linux version?" -blank stare- "Ya know... Linux? It's, like, an operating system and stuff." -definite blinking in the works- "There's a ton of web development being done for Linux, and a lot of web savvy folks that could use Dreamweaver on it." -awkward silence- "Ya know, I think I need to go talk to that booth bunny over there. Thanks for answering my questions."
The only thing I can figure at this point is that they need to be convinced of two things.
1) Is the market big enough for them to invest precious developer resources. 2) Will that market be willing to spend the bucks.
I think initially it was first released on Mac, then with increasing popularity, maybe PC took first priority
If you're talking about Photoshop here, you are absolutely correct. It started out life on the Mac by a couple of fellas, one of which had a dad who was a professional photographer. They originally tried bringing this Photoshop thing to Apple to see if they'd be interested in buying it. They were more interested in some other tid bit of an image editor, so they turned it down. Some time later Adobe decided to take a stab at running with this little imaging app. At the time Adobe was mostly known for their fonts, and more specificly their ability to get fonts to render correctly on laser printers. They saw this Photoshop thing as a way of expanding that laser printer business. Absolutely no clue that what they were buying into would later become their flagship product.
Seems to me that in a lot of ways, Microsoft just out paced the rest of the Office field. I recall how Quattro Pro introduced the world to multiple sheets within a single file, and seperating them with tabs at the bottom. The very next version of Excel had that, a ton of other goodies, and ever increasing integration with it's good buddy Word. I seem to recall a similar fate falling on AmiPro as well.
Looking back on it now I remember the day the war of the Office suites was over. It was Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0, just a little while prior to Windows 95 coming out. For the first time these two apps shared more than data, they now looked very similar to each other. Similar tool bars, menus that were obviously put in sync to eachother. Prior to that point the Office market was very much up for grabs, but afterwards nobody was even talking about any of the other players. MS hit those two outta the park.
As to the rest of your post, it seems that KDE is focusing on the kinds of issues that you're talking about when it comes to interoperability. Just 6 weeks away (as sela has already posted) from seeing how they got their implementation to all play out.
Personally, I think this Gnome office suite is going to go another production cycle before we start seeing any real integration there. At this point it seems we've got seperate applications being bundled together and referred to as a suite. Not a bad thing by any means, but not anything that's going to keep the folks in Redmond up late at night for the moment.
It's not the quality of the output thats in question here though. It's the quality of the input.
The one thing I've always found truly amazing about Word is how it can carry such a wide variety of users. Even for serious documentation work most likely you'll only ever use a fraction of it's functionality. At one point I was actually pretty knowledgable about really getting Word to do all it's stuff, and I probably scratched about 30% of it. At the same time, folks I know don't have much, if any, computer knowledge would much rather start up Word than WordPad.
The interesting part of this really is the user interface aspects. Over the years MS has turned this massively complex and powerful program into a preferred choice for the greenest of the green out there using computers.
Personally, it takes me about 15 minutes of turning off all the auto-correct crapola before Word is usable for me. Even then, I'd rather do my writing in WordPad. The reason I give Word it's praise is because it really has earned it in what was a very competitive market for the top slot. I'm certain there's something to be learned from all this, but damned if I know exactly what it is. Probably why I'm not the multi-billionare:)
No, you're right, you don't know about me. Let me tell you that I've always found anti-government rhetoric a little juvenile, ill-considered and, curiously, American.
The very birth of the United States was founded on not trusting the government in charge. We had extraordinarily good teachers of this practice right from day one. Perhaps it had just a little something to do with the arrogance of the folks who were in charge? Hmmm, probably just me being a little juvenile.
Seems like the other thing you could also do here is write a small download application to pull this in at the time of install if so requested. Like it says, your free to download and install it. There aren't any restrictions to automating this process.
Of course this would have to be a two step process. Step 1 querying a site that a Linux friendly webmaster controls that contains the location of the fonts. Step 2 would be the downloading and installing. If you don't kick step 1 in there, all MS would have to do is change the directory they sit in. If the location is centralized, one update will update all.
Another option may be to get in contact with BitStream, as I believe they are the actual developers of the TT fonts for Windows. If they still own Arial and all them other ones it may play out nicely for them to pass them along to the open source world. Gobs of free advertising for their newer fancier fonts for unloading some of their older ones. Also, they've got server software to push as well, which might also make them friendlier to a Linux kind of approach.
Whatever happens, it sure would be nice to be able to read what I was writing in any of them Linux word processors. Ack!
This one I haven't tried, thought I was aware of it's existance. There were a couple of things that turned me off to TopPage. Not the least of these is IBM. I have a LOT of respect for the bulk of the stuff that IBM does and all. It's just that when it comes to PC software it's kinda like having a seriously shaggy dog in your house. Oh sure, he seems friendly enough, until you find his hair has gotten into everything.
I really do need to try this out though. I sure don't feel comfortable talking ill about an app I haven't even tried out. Still, just the marketing spin I find a little spooky here...
It allows you to create dazzling Web pages without any HTML knowledge or programming skills. You can get everything you need to design, personalize and share your site in an easy-to-use all-in-one package.
Okay, everyone who is having FrontPage flashbacks please raise your hand!
Now to get really nit picky... my favorite tag in the whole wide world from a TopPage generated web page on IBM's site.
<META name="GENERATOR" content="IBM NetObjects TopPage V4.0.3 for Windows">
One of the things that keeps me loyal to Dreamweaver is that Macromedia doesn't try and be a one stop shop for all possible web development needs. It's number one selling point is in the fact that it doesn't muck up the HTML at the code level, enabling you to use other apps. No mention of code treatment can be found on IBM's site.
It may sound silly to worry about how the HTML code gets formatted so long as the page looks pretty in the browser. Of course if the GUI layout work is only just the starting point in developing a dynamic site, the code formatting becomes critical. From what I saw of the HTML code on that site, I don't think this is what I'm looking for.
I do intend to give this a fair try though. I'm just going in a LOT less hopeful than when I downloaded Quanta.
Quanta is definitely aiming at the look of Homesite. It's probably the best of the bunch that I've seen out there. I downloaded a copy a while back, and even sent there folks some feedback. There's a lot of potential in what those folks are doing, but it's still a long way off from being a serious competitor/replacement for HS.
I tried Bluefish out. Even have it still installed on my system. That refresh to get hi-liting was a huge show stopper right there. There's still a LOT more to HomeSite than just the handling of the syntax.
- Integration with IE as an internal browser. Support in place for Mozilla when it's ready as well. - The ability to map local drive paths to domain paths. This is a great time saver for working on dynamic sites. - Bookmarking lines of code for quick key jumping about. - 36 levels of clipboard for copying and pasting. - User definable code snippets. - HTML Entities reference chart. - Page weight calculations. - Ability to save in a Windows or Unix format. - Built in syntax hi-liting for PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, JSP, HTML, JavaScript, and some other stuff I never play with. - Site wide search and replace features.
I could go on for a while here. In fact, I have written up an essay in depth on this subject matter so near and dear to my heart. I intend to stick it somewhere on my web site whenever I get around to fixing it up again. It's just WAY too long a rant for a/. post.
I don't understand how the Apple market (which can't possibly be more than 8-10% of the PC market can get Adobe products (and they get them FIRST!) and linux/unix can't even get releases that are one lousy version behind.
Minor correction here. Apple doesn't get the Adobe products first, Windows does. It wasn't all that long ago I was reading a Mac trade mag complaining about how long it took Adobe to get the Mac version of Acrobat up to speed with the Windows version.
From what I understand of it, most of the Adobe product line is developed on Windows, then ported on over to Mac after the fact. Probably two issues at work here. Windows has one heck of a lot more market share, and the development apps are better.
As for your feeling about GIMP and PS, I can fully appreciate exactly how you feel. After working with PS for a time, it just sortta fits like a glove when ya start it up. GIMP is good stuff, and getting amazingly better all the time, but it just ain't a replacement.
Calendaring functions was not what IMAP was about, nor should it ever be about. IMAP was a means to allow you to maintain your E-Mail up on a server so you could access it from multiple clients.
In all fairness to MS, their reasoning for a proprietary calendaring server was the same reason why both Netscape and Lotus did very similar things with their groupware servers. All these folks were out there making servers and clients for calendaring functions before anyone else got around to standardizing the concept. None of the 3 were really interested in standardizing this because all of them wanted you to be locked in by their respective client.
The really sad part is, we may never see a standardized protocol put in place for calendaring. Since this is more of an Intranet thing that's defined by MIS departments, they don't really care. Folks who don't know what calendaring services do (the vast majority) don't much care. Certainly the folks making the proprietary solutions would much rather tie you into a client-server solution where their stuff is on both sides.
We need a set of standard protocols that anyone can write a server or a client for/with.
There's actually two major RFC's out there with just this kinda stuff in mind. A good long while back I recall reading about them as I was looking into all of what was going into Mozilla. At one point Mozilla had active development going on for a calendaring app that would talk to both of these standard calandaring servers.
Of course they had a few problems with this. The most obvious being that they already had too many cool toys planned to go into Mozilla. The other nasty here is that (to the best of my knowledge) nobody has written a server daemon that actually does the stuff these RFC's were talking about.
There's some good stuff on the drawing boards. Unfortunately that's as far as it's ever gotten.
Oh boy, I can feel the flames licking at this post. Even still, there's a couple of things I've got to say here.
First off, I've tried several times to use both AbiWord and StarOffice to write a simple document. I never could get past a single paragraph. The fonts are just so horribly unreadable as to make using the end product painful. I know it's neither one of those app's fault. Something simply has to be done about how X deal with fonts before Linux is viable for the desktop.
Oh, and I do enjoy reading the "All I want is a text editor", "EMACS is all you ever need", and "TeX rules". I'll give those folks this much credit, the fonts are at least readable there. When it comes right down to it, I fully darn well expect to have tool bars, formatting functions, and all the wiz bangs without having to read some 300 page O'Reily* book. Ack!
(* no offence meant to O'Reily. I've got me a library of them books here)
Moving along here, I've been wondering a little something about the graphical environment in Linux ever since I first got to playing with it. Why are all the icons and window borders so big? Granted, this isn't really a usability thing, but it sure makes those apps look and feel kinda hokey. A good example of this is Gnumeric. Here we've got this pretty darn nice little spreadsheet program that looks like it was put together with children's blocks. Mind you, I only mean to point out Gnumeric as an example. Almost every app running on Gnome, and to a lesser extent KDE, seem to make horrible use of the screen space. It just has a feel of being very blocky. Folks I've shown my Linux setup to have made similar comments as well.
My last bit of a rant here has to do with HTML editors. Why don't we have any decent ones for Linux yet. No, EMACS ain't what I'm talking about either. Most notably over on NT in my mind is Dreamweaver, which aside from being an outstanding GUI for HTML it's also one hell of a site manager. As someone who not only codes the back end of web sites, but also has to do layout and design not having a tool like Dreamweaver around is a serious handicap.
I also have yet to run across anything that approaches the functionality of HomeSite for getting in at the text level. Again, just being a cool text editor doesn't even begin to replace all the stuff that HomeSite has built into it geared specifically for web technologies. Heck, nothing I've seen on Linux even comes close to HS's PHP hi-liting which in and of itself isn't perfect.
I could probably get by for a long while with a less than stellar office suite. What I can't live without is a less than stellar HTML editing suite. There appear to be some interesting prospects on the horizon in development. Maybe some day someone will get enough of this right to actually get me to go closer to full time to Linux. I am watching for it!
I never cease to be amazed how the processes of good government, discloser of policy and consideration of new areas of social importance seem to be set upon by the zealots as "Big Government" sticking noses in where they do not belong.
History is filled with just too many examples to tyrannical behavior of governments to ever simply take for granted the process in which legislation is looked at. In addition, what makes this case interesting is that they were trying to figure out whether or not they should be censoring content due to a "hopelessly antiquated" law.
I do agree with you on the premise that it was great that they had a public discussion of this issue. Where I apparently must fall into the "zealot" camp here is in my inherent distrust of ANY governmental body attempting to stifle the flow of information. Especially when we're talking about Australia and not China, which we have grown to expect tyrannical behavior from. Had this decision gone the other way, the precedent being set for other western nations I find rather uncomfortable.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if anonymous submissions were removed, you'd still have the problem of people registering accounts and posting flames, spam, or what have you. This tends to be fairly common now, so I don't imagine it'll do anything but increase.
Not at all true. Other web based forums rely upon a valid E-Mail address that the user must be able to reply from in order to register. One that I know of that remains quite busy has the additional restriction of not allowing you to use free services, such as hotmail or yahoo. With such a system in place, you can actually make those bans stick.
True, even in this case there are ways to get around the system, but it requires a lot more work for the average spammer.
Do we really want some organization telling third-party developers how to achieve binary compatibility?
You are so right. That's why I hate TCP/IP too! We should all just be doing our own thing, work up all our own protocols, and use whatever we feel most comfortable with. Here we are, stuck with only 4 little octets for addressing. We shouldn't be so restricted by "the man" when deciding how we want to browse the web.
While we're at it, why do we have only one mark up language? I want 5 or 6 to choose from at all times so I don't have to deal with things being dictated at me.
Standards are just some way to have "the man" keep us down.
[Sarcasm:Off]
Well, a story line that didn't suck would have helped just a wee bit as well.
Being that I'm pretty ignorant about Be, and you are apparently the "be-fan", I would have thought that this stuff was right into Be's realm. From what I've read, I thought Be was specifically geared towards this kind of graphics processing that you're talking about.
Honest curiousity going on here, so if this comes off as my attempt at a flame, try reading it again. I too find that NT 4.0 Workstation is the client to beat out there when looking at a stability and software availability stand point. A lot of the structure to Be sounds interesting, but much like with Linux I'd be hard pressed to leave the software base presently supporting NT.
Your message just sent flags off in my head as to what all Be has going for it these days in the way of applications since a lot of what you listed would seem to be into Be's realm of hoped for market share.
The "for kids" impression you're getting seems to be mostly due to the over sized icons used. It's great having all those colors and design, but those icons really need to be about 2/3rds the size of what they are now.
Then these over sized icons get used in the toolbars. What's worse, there's too much space allocated for buttons that are already too big. This gives KSpread this blocky look that an app like Excel doesn't suffer from.
A GUI app only has just so much time on screen to lull a person into the notion that their time spent learning will be worthwhile. Certainly some apps are less affected by this, but I firmly believe that Office apps are heavily impacted. No matter how cool KSpread may turn out to be, the user has to jump this additional hurdle of having this blocky interface show up.
Mind you, Gnome is no better in this regard. In many cases it's actually much worse. Both of these desktops really need to be making better use of the screen real estate.
All griping aside, I'm still very much looking forward to the final release of KDE 2.0. My little 56k modem will be right there with everyone else contributing to the Slashdot effect when it comes out. I'm especially excited to see how Konqueror plays out.
Man, I almost missed this post here. This has been one of those rare times it's been a pleasure to cruise a thread at 0+. A couple of replies here then I think I'll shush up for a bit.
How people think they look using a product can drastically affect their perceived value of it--stupid maybe but true.
Not at all stupid. Functionality is but one aspect of a GUI interface. Look and feel are extremely important. Although I have issues with some of the results, I am quite please that the Gnome and KDE folks are attempting to focus in on this.
The same could be said for KDE of course, which combines a mechanical look with everything-is-too-largeness which makes for clunky, toylike, unprofessional looking desktops. And it's the most sterile, "professional" looking of the all (out of the box)
Yeah, this is a point I didn't address in my original post. Glad to see you did. What is with these huge icon sizes? Do we really need a "start" menu that's got a 1 inch tall button?
The collision of badly proportioned window chrome/decorations plus bloated widgets come together like a bad advertising/marketroid
I don't really blame the folks making themes for these problems. I love the fact that they're trying to push the creative envelope in seeing what works and looks cool. The problem is in what the user can then do to fine tweak a theme via the GUI. Of all the things I could be doing with my time, learning LISP in order to change the color of a button just isn't high on the list.
Although I rather prefer the look of most of the Gnome themes, KDE seems to be heading more into the right direction here. A simple GUI control that allows you to download a theme, then tweak in and out the parts you like or don't. For example, I'm a firm believer in black text on a white background for reading or writing a lot of text. The majority of themes for Gnome would require me to alter code to get this to happen for many of the objects. With KDE, I just pick a theme then tweak on aspects of it right from the control panel to make this happen. It'd be REALLY cool to have this kind of control panel functionality for those cool Gnome themes!
Redhat simply must break down their reluctance to take these matters seriously and hire an outside desgn firm. Apple does this, why not the leading Linux distro ? And I don't mean a failed comic book illustrator, either.
I believe the KDE folks have certain people who work exclusively on graphic design. This is certainly evidenced by the colorful and distinctive icons KDE has. What's lacking still yet is a more comprehensive look at the over all picture of how the window manager presents itself. From the screen shots of KDE 2.0 I've seen, it doesn't look like we're going to see any major changes in this regard just yet.
One of the shoddiest things about the whole office suite is the help system. Microsoft help is the WORST I've ever seen!
Besides being way too shallow, it's very difficult to find all but the simplest things.
Too shallow? Way back when Word 2.0 was shipping, MS used to send this 250 page book that went into quite some depth into using this product. That entire book has been digitized into that help system, along with tons of other stuff. You may not have figured out how to get at it, but it's anything but shallow.
WordPerfect is very polished, has menu options in appropriate positions, and DOESN'T HAVE THAT STUPID PAPERCLIP...
I used to hate that paperclip myself. I still don't use it all that much. What changed my mind about this was watching someone new to computers use it. That's it's real purpose in life. For getting a new user up to speed with how to get Word to do it's stuff, that annoying little bugger really works.
All that, and I get the distinct impression I'm replying to someone who has a religious devotion to hating MS. I suppose that's fun and all, but side blinders like that prevent you from seeing some of the bigger picture here. One aspect of this is why Word beat the snot out of WordPerfect back at a time where the market was anything but decided.
What's really cool at this moment in time is that the Linux Office solutions actually have enough momentum going to take on MS Office. Even if it takes a couple of years to do, there's an opportunity here that hasn't existed in many a year. Hunkering down into the "MS Sucks" bunker isn't going to make it happen though.
I've tried Amaya under Linux. It is what it is. A concept work that will probably never see enough polish to go main stream. This isn't a bad thing, or meant to be a knock against it. It's just what it is.
Unfortunately it stresses compliance over everything else. (Heck, by definition how it looks actually *IS* the standard...)
If Mozilla doesn't get out soon, IE is by definition going to be the standard. Ack.
Personally, I'm wondering what some talented soul might be able to do with Konqueror in the way of HTML editing under KDE. Seems like all the components are there to make a first class HTML editor.
Quanta does appear to be heading in the right direction. I'm guessing we'll have a pretty good idea how well it plays out in another 6 months or so.
I don't want to sound mean, but if you want toolbars in your apps, that's your problem.
Not mean, just very self centered. You are living under the assumption that because you don't much care for the UI features that is driving 99% of the OS market right now that it's not relevant.
The fact that this wasn't done so far shows, imho, that most current users don't care much for that.
Does the fact that a decent competitor for Office software then also indicate that there's not much care for that either? By your logic anything that hasn't already been done is by default not cared about.
Perhaps most of them are quite happy with TeX or plain text
Most of whom? A couple of the folks posting here on Slashdot? You mean to tell me that you could even locate somebody who knew what TeX was outside a few Unix users who got introduced to it in college?
Now to dreamweaver: I don't find a lack of such program to be a handicap at all. When I was doing full-time web design on windows, I still used vim.
Have you ever seen Dreamweaver? This ain't Front Page we're talking about here. Sorry, but the fact you spent some significant time learning a text editor for a PDP-11 dumb terminal doesn't impress me all that much.
The problem with GUI html editors is that you can't automate them like you can a good text editor. With vim you get immensely useful things like abbreviations, copy/pasting multiple times, so on. If I need to create 10 links, I create one, copy it, do 10p (paste 10 times) and change the URLs.
Abbreviations and copying and pasting are your ideas of an advanced editor? Typing speeds being equal, I could create 10 pages to each one that you could work out in any text editor with DW. That, and your completely missing the beauty of what makes DW stand out as a great editor. You can leave it and go to a text editor, then come back. Repeat the process all you like, DW doesn't muck up the code!
How about a more reasonable test. Let's take 10 web pages heavily interlinked, and all sitting in the same directory. Make, let's say, 5 sub-directories. Now I'm gonna move 5 of them pages into their respective sub-directories. How long is it going to take you to insure all the links still work with VIM? With DW, it's already done!
I realize that for many people it's a matter of taste to prefer GUI tools, but again, lack of such programs shows that it's not a big deal for most.
Most of who? Last I checked, the VAST majority of web developers far and away prefer either Windows or Mac, regardless of which platform it's actually served off of.
But if you really want it, start coding.
Oh now this is frameable. Is this like the default response to anything lacking on Linux? I promise you this, Bill Gates LOVES that attitude.
Also the development tools for Winders. Actually, I believe MS has been slow to court Adobe, and fix the problems MS platforms have had in printing environments since the DTP market is all that was keeping Apple alive for a while there. Apple dead would have guaranteed a rapid breakup of MSFT years before the current Antitrust action was begun.
The harsh truth here is that Microsoft would have never let Apple die off. Even from the very first Mac, it was Adobe and Microsoft providing the key applications that enabled clicking on them perty pitures to actually do something. Today it's more a matter of insuring that there's at least one other player in the computer platform market.
I haven't tried it under WINE yet, perhaps I'll give it a shot this afternoon.
If you get it to play, be sure to post the results on Wine's site. Last I saw, nobody has been able to get it to work. Due to the file management that Dreamweaver gets into, I doubt that it'll ever Wine it's way across to Linux.
How do we get Macromedia to release this beauty under Linux?
I asked one of their folks when I saw them at the last Internet World. The conversation kinda went like this...
"So, when you coming out with a Linux version?"
-blank stare-
"Ya know... Linux? It's, like, an operating system and stuff."
-definite blinking in the works-
"There's a ton of web development being done for Linux, and a lot of web savvy folks that could use Dreamweaver on it."
-awkward silence-
"Ya know, I think I need to go talk to that booth bunny over there. Thanks for answering my questions."
The only thing I can figure at this point is that they need to be convinced of two things.
1) Is the market big enough for them to invest precious developer resources.
2) Will that market be willing to spend the bucks.
I know I've sent my share of E-Mails there way.
I think initially it was first released on Mac, then with increasing popularity, maybe PC took first priority
If you're talking about Photoshop here, you are absolutely correct. It started out life on the Mac by a couple of fellas, one of which had a dad who was a professional photographer. They originally tried bringing this Photoshop thing to Apple to see if they'd be interested in buying it. They were more interested in some other tid bit of an image editor, so they turned it down. Some time later Adobe decided to take a stab at running with this little imaging app. At the time Adobe was mostly known for their fonts, and more specificly their ability to get fonts to render correctly on laser printers. They saw this Photoshop thing as a way of expanding that laser printer business. Absolutely no clue that what they were buying into would later become their flagship product.
Seems to me that in a lot of ways, Microsoft just out paced the rest of the Office field. I recall how Quattro Pro introduced the world to multiple sheets within a single file, and seperating them with tabs at the bottom. The very next version of Excel had that, a ton of other goodies, and ever increasing integration with it's good buddy Word. I seem to recall a similar fate falling on AmiPro as well.
Looking back on it now I remember the day the war of the Office suites was over. It was Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0, just a little while prior to Windows 95 coming out. For the first time these two apps shared more than data, they now looked very similar to each other. Similar tool bars, menus that were obviously put in sync to eachother. Prior to that point the Office market was very much up for grabs, but afterwards nobody was even talking about any of the other players. MS hit those two outta the park.
As to the rest of your post, it seems that KDE is focusing on the kinds of issues that you're talking about when it comes to interoperability. Just 6 weeks away (as sela has already posted) from seeing how they got their implementation to all play out.
Personally, I think this Gnome office suite is going to go another production cycle before we start seeing any real integration there. At this point it seems we've got seperate applications being bundled together and referred to as a suite. Not a bad thing by any means, but not anything that's going to keep the folks in Redmond up late at night for the moment.
It's not the quality of the output thats in question here though. It's the quality of the input.
:)
The one thing I've always found truly amazing about Word is how it can carry such a wide variety of users. Even for serious documentation work most likely you'll only ever use a fraction of it's functionality. At one point I was actually pretty knowledgable about really getting Word to do all it's stuff, and I probably scratched about 30% of it. At the same time, folks I know don't have much, if any, computer knowledge would much rather start up Word than WordPad.
The interesting part of this really is the user interface aspects. Over the years MS has turned this massively complex and powerful program into a preferred choice for the greenest of the green out there using computers.
Personally, it takes me about 15 minutes of turning off all the auto-correct crapola before Word is usable for me. Even then, I'd rather do my writing in WordPad. The reason I give Word it's praise is because it really has earned it in what was a very competitive market for the top slot. I'm certain there's something to be learned from all this, but damned if I know exactly what it is. Probably why I'm not the multi-billionare
No, you're right, you don't know about me. Let me tell you that I've always found anti-government rhetoric a little juvenile, ill-considered and, curiously, American.
The very birth of the United States was founded on not trusting the government in charge. We had extraordinarily good teachers of this practice right from day one. Perhaps it had just a little something to do with the arrogance of the folks who were in charge? Hmmm, probably just me being a little juvenile.
Seems like the other thing you could also do here is write a small download application to pull this in at the time of install if so requested. Like it says, your free to download and install it. There aren't any restrictions to automating this process.
Of course this would have to be a two step process. Step 1 querying a site that a Linux friendly webmaster controls that contains the location of the fonts. Step 2 would be the downloading and installing. If you don't kick step 1 in there, all MS would have to do is change the directory they sit in. If the location is centralized, one update will update all.
Another option may be to get in contact with BitStream, as I believe they are the actual developers of the TT fonts for Windows. If they still own Arial and all them other ones it may play out nicely for them to pass them along to the open source world. Gobs of free advertising for their newer fancier fonts for unloading some of their older ones. Also, they've got server software to push as well, which might also make them friendlier to a Linux kind of approach.
Whatever happens, it sure would be nice to be able to read what I was writing in any of them Linux word processors. Ack!
This one I haven't tried, thought I was aware of it's existance. There were a couple of things that turned me off to TopPage. Not the least of these is IBM. I have a LOT of respect for the bulk of the stuff that IBM does and all. It's just that when it comes to PC software it's kinda like having a seriously shaggy dog in your house. Oh sure, he seems friendly enough, until you find his hair has gotten into everything.
I really do need to try this out though. I sure don't feel comfortable talking ill about an app I haven't even tried out. Still, just the marketing spin I find a little spooky here...
It allows you to create dazzling Web pages without any HTML knowledge or programming skills.
You can get everything you need to design, personalize and share your site in an easy-to-use all-in-one package.
Okay, everyone who is having FrontPage flashbacks please raise your hand!
Now to get really nit picky... my favorite tag in the whole wide world from a TopPage generated web page on IBM's site.
<META name="GENERATOR" content="IBM NetObjects TopPage V4.0.3 for Windows">
One of the things that keeps me loyal to Dreamweaver is that Macromedia doesn't try and be a one stop shop for all possible web development needs. It's number one selling point is in the fact that it doesn't muck up the HTML at the code level, enabling you to use other apps. No mention of code treatment can be found on IBM's site.
It may sound silly to worry about how the HTML code gets formatted so long as the page looks pretty in the browser. Of course if the GUI layout work is only just the starting point in developing a dynamic site, the code formatting becomes critical. From what I saw of the HTML code on that site, I don't think this is what I'm looking for.
I do intend to give this a fair try though. I'm just going in a LOT less hopeful than when I downloaded Quanta.
Quanta is definitely aiming at the look of Homesite. It's probably the best of the bunch that I've seen out there. I downloaded a copy a while back, and even sent there folks some feedback. There's a lot of potential in what those folks are doing, but it's still a long way off from being a serious competitor/replacement for HS.
I tried Bluefish out. Even have it still installed on my system. That refresh to get hi-liting was a huge show stopper right there. There's still a LOT more to HomeSite than just the handling of the syntax.
/. post.
- Integration with IE as an internal browser. Support in place for Mozilla when it's ready as well.
- The ability to map local drive paths to domain paths. This is a great time saver for working on dynamic sites.
- Bookmarking lines of code for quick key jumping about.
- 36 levels of clipboard for copying and pasting.
- User definable code snippets.
- HTML Entities reference chart.
- Page weight calculations.
- Ability to save in a Windows or Unix format.
- Built in syntax hi-liting for PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, JSP, HTML, JavaScript, and some other stuff I never play with.
- Site wide search and replace features.
I could go on for a while here. In fact, I have written up an essay in depth on this subject matter so near and dear to my heart. I intend to stick it somewhere on my web site whenever I get around to fixing it up again. It's just WAY too long a rant for a
I don't understand how the Apple market (which can't possibly be more than 8-10% of the PC market can get Adobe products (and they get them FIRST!) and linux/unix can't even get releases that are one lousy version behind.
Minor correction here. Apple doesn't get the Adobe products first, Windows does. It wasn't all that long ago I was reading a Mac trade mag complaining about how long it took Adobe to get the Mac version of Acrobat up to speed with the Windows version.
From what I understand of it, most of the Adobe product line is developed on Windows, then ported on over to Mac after the fact. Probably two issues at work here. Windows has one heck of a lot more market share, and the development apps are better.
As for your feeling about GIMP and PS, I can fully appreciate exactly how you feel. After working with PS for a time, it just sortta fits like a glove when ya start it up. GIMP is good stuff, and getting amazingly better all the time, but it just ain't a replacement.
Calendaring functions was not what IMAP was about, nor should it ever be about. IMAP was a means to allow you to maintain your E-Mail up on a server so you could access it from multiple clients.
In all fairness to MS, their reasoning for a proprietary calendaring server was the same reason why both Netscape and Lotus did very similar things with their groupware servers. All these folks were out there making servers and clients for calendaring functions before anyone else got around to standardizing the concept. None of the 3 were really interested in standardizing this because all of them wanted you to be locked in by their respective client.
The really sad part is, we may never see a standardized protocol put in place for calendaring. Since this is more of an Intranet thing that's defined by MIS departments, they don't really care. Folks who don't know what calendaring services do (the vast majority) don't much care. Certainly the folks making the proprietary solutions would much rather tie you into a client-server solution where their stuff is on both sides.
We need a set of standard protocols that anyone can write a server or a client for/with.
There's actually two major RFC's out there with just this kinda stuff in mind. A good long while back I recall reading about them as I was looking into all of what was going into Mozilla. At one point Mozilla had active development going on for a calendaring app that would talk to both of these standard calandaring servers.
Of course they had a few problems with this. The most obvious being that they already had too many cool toys planned to go into Mozilla. The other nasty here is that (to the best of my knowledge) nobody has written a server daemon that actually does the stuff these RFC's were talking about.
There's some good stuff on the drawing boards. Unfortunately that's as far as it's ever gotten.
Oh boy, I can feel the flames licking at this post. Even still, there's a couple of things I've got to say here.
First off, I've tried several times to use both AbiWord and StarOffice to write a simple document. I never could get past a single paragraph. The fonts are just so horribly unreadable as to make using the end product painful. I know it's neither one of those app's fault. Something simply has to be done about how X deal with fonts before Linux is viable for the desktop.
Oh, and I do enjoy reading the "All I want is a text editor", "EMACS is all you ever need", and "TeX rules". I'll give those folks this much credit, the fonts are at least readable there. When it comes right down to it, I fully darn well expect to have tool bars, formatting functions, and all the wiz bangs without having to read some 300 page O'Reily* book. Ack!
(* no offence meant to O'Reily. I've got me a library of them books here)
Moving along here, I've been wondering a little something about the graphical environment in Linux ever since I first got to playing with it. Why are all the icons and window borders so big? Granted, this isn't really a usability thing, but it sure makes those apps look and feel kinda hokey. A good example of this is Gnumeric. Here we've got this pretty darn nice little spreadsheet program that looks like it was put together with children's blocks. Mind you, I only mean to point out Gnumeric as an example. Almost every app running on Gnome, and to a lesser extent KDE, seem to make horrible use of the screen space. It just has a feel of being very blocky. Folks I've shown my Linux setup to have made similar comments as well.
My last bit of a rant here has to do with HTML editors. Why don't we have any decent ones for Linux yet. No, EMACS ain't what I'm talking about either. Most notably over on NT in my mind is Dreamweaver, which aside from being an outstanding GUI for HTML it's also one hell of a site manager. As someone who not only codes the back end of web sites, but also has to do layout and design not having a tool like Dreamweaver around is a serious handicap.
I also have yet to run across anything that approaches the functionality of HomeSite for getting in at the text level. Again, just being a cool text editor doesn't even begin to replace all the stuff that HomeSite has built into it geared specifically for web technologies. Heck, nothing I've seen on Linux even comes close to HS's PHP hi-liting which in and of itself isn't perfect.
I could probably get by for a long while with a less than stellar office suite. What I can't live without is a less than stellar HTML editing suite. There appear to be some interesting prospects on the horizon in development. Maybe some day someone will get enough of this right to actually get me to go closer to full time to Linux. I am watching for it!
I never cease to be amazed how the processes of good government, discloser of policy and consideration of new areas of social importance seem to be set upon by the zealots as "Big Government" sticking noses in where they do not belong.
History is filled with just too many examples to tyrannical behavior of governments to ever simply take for granted the process in which legislation is looked at. In addition, what makes this case interesting is that they were trying to figure out whether or not they should be censoring content due to a "hopelessly antiquated" law.
I do agree with you on the premise that it was great that they had a public discussion of this issue. Where I apparently must fall into the "zealot" camp here is in my inherent distrust of ANY governmental body attempting to stifle the flow of information. Especially when we're talking about Australia and not China, which we have grown to expect tyrannical behavior from. Had this decision gone the other way, the precedent being set for other western nations I find rather uncomfortable.