KOffice 2.0.0 Now Open For Firefox-Like Extensions 165
jakeb writes "After a massive three-year development effort KOffice 2.0.0 has been released (packages for Kubuntu are available) aiming to be a lightweight, cross-platform office suite that supports third-party apps and extensions. With its new design (everything, including the core components, is a module) and bindings, you don't need to know C++ to hack on KOffice, as extensions can be written in Python or Java, among others. TechWorld has an interview with KOffice marketing coordinator Inge Wallin about the vision for an easy-to-use office suite that supports click-to-install extensions like Firefox. Will this be the key to KOffice rising above all other free office suites? The KOffice devs think so. An online repository of extensions, templates, and content for KOffice? I like the sound of that."
"aiming to be ... cross-platform" (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't bother saying anything about KOffice or any other Office product becoming popular until it can be installed on Windows with a setup.exe or an MSI.
Most of us here love Linux and/or BSD, but no office suite is going anywhere without a fully functional, easy to use Windows version.
Re:KDE 4.0 once again... (Score:5, Interesting)
It varies from project to project. KDE/Qt and GNOME/Gtk tend to use .0.0 to designate the initial release following a major break in compatibility (in the case of the aforementioned projects, this refers to API/ABI compatibility). Generally, the larger the breakage, the rougher the .0.0 release will be. The x.0.0 means "Ok, from now on, we'll maintain compatibility until x+1.0.0" and carries little information with regard to actual quality.
With other projects - Firefox for example - the major version seems to get bumped pretty often and I'm not really sure what the criteria are, but generally with Firefox one can assume that x.0.0 will be "better" than x-1.a.b.
Re:"aiming to be ... cross-platform" (Score:3, Interesting)
Replying to myself as I went searching after noticing that article claims that the KDE team has a windows installer that includes KOffice. It would be nice if the KOffice site mentioned this.
Even on the KDE site, it looks like they are pretty far from making this into something that's truly cross-platform. All Windows versions are considered "unstable" and very little work is being done on a Mac version.
Good luck to them in their efforts.
If they really want to take off, they NEED to focus on a good working Windows version, because on the desktop, getting 1% of the Windows market is better than getting 50% of the linux market.
Oh FSM more extensions (Score:4, Interesting)
What's with this obsession people seem to have with extensions all of a suddenly. I don't want to manage a pile of extensions all the time I want all the core functionality built in. I don't care too much about bloat, memory is dirt cheap and even the lowest spec (desktop) machine I would ever use now is more than a match for a full on office suite. I can't help feeling this is yet another situation where choice and configurability is being touted as a good thing when actually it's a problem because there is simply too much of it.
IMHO the worst feature of Firefox is extensions. It's great that you can tailor it to your own needs but the constant updates (colourful tabs I'm looking at you) drive me round the bend and a fresh install on a machine means half an hour finding and downloading all those extensions again. Perhaps it would be more acceptable if there was a way of just indicating that updates should be automatically installed and providing a simple list of extensions to install on first execution.
The other problem I find with extensions is the way they break package managers. Hopefully as KOffice is a core package there will be some common sense applied. If you look at the Eclipse packages some extensions are packaged but most aren't pretty much defeating the whole point of using the distro package repository (and they are horribly out of date).
Finally! (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been waiting for the Firefox extensions idea to spread to other software since it came out!
Sadly I have no time, to realize my dream, of re-implementing the coolest UI features of Lotus WordPro in KOffice. (Eg. InfoBox, but with keyboard-only control. [To minimize the keyboard-mouse switches, but maximize the usability trough showing what's available.])