ZDNet Reviews KOffice 268
Spotted over at dot.kde.org -- this review of KOffice. The review isn't overwhelmingly positive or negative -- seems like a rather balanced picture of both what's up to par, and what's still missing, for mainstream acceptance in the Normal Workplaces of the world.
Awsome (Score:1)
staroffice is java based? huh? (Score:1)
Re:staroffice is java based? huh? (Score:5, Informative)
12. Is StarOffice 5.2 software written in the Java language? Will Sun rewrite the StarOffice suite in Java technology?
StarOffice 5.2 software includes components written in the Java language, and provides the Java Virtual Machine for running software based on Java technology. However, the majority of the StarOffice 5.2 code is written in C++. Sun does not intend to rewrite StarOffice 5.2 in Java technology. The Sun Webtop architecture relies heavily on Java technology for the interaction between the browser-enabled client and the application services running on the portal.
The FAQ can be found here: http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/5.2/f
Re:staroffice is java based? huh? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:staroffice is java based? huh? (Score:1)
... their lame desktop, that is some kind of lame imitation of win95 shell that noone ever said anything positive off
Re:staroffice is java based? huh? (Score:1)
Brilliant journalistic work there, ZDNet (Score:1, Insightful)
And this just in: ZDNet declared Master of Obvious for the third year running.
Link the the *whole* article.... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't you mean... (Score:2)
What in the hell is the postercomment compression filter, and why in the hell does it try to prevent the posting of a hyperlink to a single page version of a three page article? WHAT is Taco smoking?
Cross platform (Score:2, Interesting)
StarOffice kinda sucked with the whole 'desktop' thing, and I was much more eager to use Koffice day to day when necessary. But I've noticed that StarOffice seems further along functionality-wise, and the latest OpenOffice downloads seem to be coming along nicely. They've lost that 'desktop' thing, and the components will all be 'single app' programs - definitely a good move, imo.
Given that the OpenOffice/StarOffice platform seem to be much more cross platform than the KOffice stuff, could we not see some merging of the projects, if only complementary filters to import/export each others' file formats? Maybe this is being planned, but it's not something I've seen touted. What I like about StarOffice the most is the promise of cross-platformness. I can work on my Windows OR Linux machines (maybe Mac too, haven't checked) without worrying about learning new interfaces or file format problems.
Re: filters (Score:2)
Re:Cross Platform (Score:2)
Koffice (Score:1)
As soon as you do, things will look ugly
Blatantly Derivative (Score:1)
Really, it's quite comforting to see the Linux community attempting the Office suite stuff. That's certainly the way that WordPerfect and Lotus really blew chunks!
you need a bit of faith (Score:1)
It's heartbreaking. Fingers crossed it's getting stabler by the checkin.
Yeah but the price is right! (Score:5, Insightful)
K Office: N/C (comes bundled with various distros)
That in itself is an important feature...
Re:Yeah but the price is right! (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, productivity could be a more important issue. Even though KOffice functions a lot like it's counterparts in the non-open source world, there are definite differences. Just getting copy and paste to work right is a chore. And any time you use different software, you need training. Training costs money, so biz people would probably defer to something they know does exactly what they need, even though it costs way too much.
F-bacher
Re:Yeah but the price is right! (Score:2)
If you need just Word, MS Works now includes the full version of Word for just over $100. But it looks like getting Word2002 is going to be expensive. The Upgrade is dirt cheap at $80 but the new user price is $340. That's just for Word2002 according to http://www.microsoft.com/office/word/evaluation/pr icing.htm It's just cheaper to buy Office.
except: (Score:3, Funny)
The import filters work fine if... (Score:2)
Lost productivity time due to malfunctioning import filters
You shouldn't be trying to import a COM serialization (Word's native document format since office97); it'd be almost like trying to import a core snapshot from a program running under debugger control.
How hard is it for Word users to save as text, RTF, or HTML? Most of these free software office suites import HTML and other standardized formats just fine.
Re:Yeah but the price is right! (Score:2, Insightful)
Then again, this is true with all software.
So, the package that you are more efficient with might cost less even if you initially pay more.
Re:Yeah but the price is right! (Score:5, Interesting)
- No Support desk (in the traditional way)
- No books (Koffice in 24 hours, Koffice for dummies etc). How is their secretary ever going to learn this thing ???
- No courses. As with the books... How are their employees going to learn ? Want to take classes on MS-Word ? Open the yellow pages and take your pick.
- Every time a new employee comes to work for the company they have to train that person. Using MS-Office in the company ? 95% of the new employees will know how it works allready... that will save them heaps of money.
Yeah yeah.. I know.. learn through experience, helpfiles, irc etc etc... That is not how businesses work people ! Learning 'the hard way' really is the hard way... It takes a lot of time, and time is money.
A good way is for people to get used to it at home and when a lot of people use it at home, they want to use it at their job as well, which will be less of a problem because they don't have to be trained.
Staroffice/OpenOffice has a better chance than Koffice IMHO, because of the big SUN behind it (which will be trusted by companies more easily) and because it is multi-platform. That way people can use it more easily at home, because most of them will probably run a MS-OS....
But I guess there is a place for both of the suits... Choice is good, and should be encouraged... It will keep office-creators from getting lazy
-
training FUD debunked (Score:2)
There are so many ways this is just wrong. Word processor should require NO training, and other productivity apps should require very little. MS "training" never ends, but right now KDE's applications follow most of the MS input conventions. Anyone familiar with MS junk will pick up KDE in no time, but will be much happier with the better organization. Those that stick with MS are losing time and money everyday fighting an evershifting and ineficient interface.
If you need "training" to work a word processor, the word processor is cumbersome and poorly designed. I taught myself how to use Word Perfect and Word. Word remains an illogical mess with too little user control and too many second rate tools cluttering up disorganized menues. Word Perfect was easier to learn and did most things better. I have not used KWord enough to really comment on all that it can do, but it was not difficult to learn.
The "features" that most MS Word lovers praise as being the most powerful, and certianly require the most training, is second rate and inconstant. Word 2000 breaks previous macros! Word XP will certianly do the same. So there you are, constantly chasing broken junk that never looked quite right. It's worse than VB. Where is the economy?
Re:Yeah but the price is right! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah but the price is right! (Score:2)
Yes, but as Microsoft begins to clamp down on licensing violations, price is suddenly going to become a factor. In a sense, these viable free alternatives have arrived with perfect timing, because now people have someplace else to go.
Price is not an argument... (Score:2, Interesting)
The alternative -- an open office product -- will require training 99% of users at a cost of 1,000 to 2,000 per user for the class plus 2 to 5 working days (add another 1,000 for a low estimate. On this model -- the free product cost about 2,000 to 3,000. Sounds like $600 or so for full MS Office is cheap.
Take it out further -- if you are a 100 person company (user base for office product suite) this means MS Office costs 100 x 600 -- $60,000 plus 5 users out to training (those not already trained) $15,000 -- which means that MS Office cost you $75,000 -- not a small chunk of change. Of course the alternative will cost you $297,000 and the skills are not usefull for your workers in later life.
Of course this all assumes that you will be able to find the training -- not an easy task.
What about the savings in hardware? I'd argue their is little to none now-adays. A business would be foolish to buy less than 500mhz machines which are more than adequate for W2K/XP today. I'm writing this from a 350mhz box and it flies quite nicely with W2K. Kinda slow when running StarOffice under a default X install though (Redhat).
The OS install price and support price are arguably not an issue today either -- most 100 user offices will have at least one mission critical application requiring a windows system -- so your on the hook for licensing anyway (read it carefully...).
Choose an open office product? Risk your job for what appears to be a negative payback in the business world? Why are we advocating this again?
For Power Users - API is key (Score:1)
If you are looking at what the current API resources are for KOffice, click here [koffice.org].
ZDnet confused about StarOffice? (Score:1)
"KOffice does offer some benefits over StarOffice. KOffice is natively compiled for the machine platform on which it is executing, whereas StarOffice is a Java-based application. This means KOffice responds much faster and is less memory-intensive than StarOffice."
Since when is StarOffice based in Java? Yes, it's really slow to load under Linux/FreeBSD, but I'd bet part of this is the same reason that koffice loads somewhat slow (though faster since it's less complex).. the whole GCC C++ runtime mess.
StarOffice seems to load much faster when it's run off Solaris, and I'd be willing to bet part of that is due to the Sun Forte compiler's used. Of course, I'm sure it has plenty of it's own tweaks. Anxiously awaiting StarOffice 6.0
Two Things that will Help... (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Allow reading/saving of documents as *.rtf
Rich text format seems to be the preferred document format among open-source word processors, yet KWord still lacks this feature. Heck, even MS-Word can read and save RTF! Supporting a common document format--instead of just *.kwd and *.txt--is going to be important for interoperability with other OSS office suites and the MS-Office world. Same goes for spreadsheet and presentation graphics file formats.
2) KOffice needs to have provisions for English measurement parameters in KWord and its other products. Yes, the geeks out there can convert to mm, but if you wanna get users off MS-Office, simple features like this will be important.
Re:Two Things that will Help... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Heck, even MS-Word can read and save RTF!"
RTF is a Microsoft format. It's essentially a text version of DOC. Modern versions support the same macro and embedded COM object capabilities that DOC does.
It's true many independant vendors have implemented the Word2 or Word6 version of RTF, but that doesn't make it an open or completely documeted spec by any means.
Your post does highlight the issue that there are no standard formats in the OSS/Unix world, and nor are there 'standard' applications (as MS Office has become on Windows and Mac), and that OSS/Unix users have to fall back to Microsoft formats to interoperate with each other.
Re:Two Things that will Help... (Score:2)
What about HTML with CSS? When fully implemented to CSS2, there's very little a word processor or desktop publishing app couldn't save in this format. Tables, columns, kerning, images, the works! And even better, them things ARE open standards that everyone has bought into.
Along these lines I do have a question for the crowd here. Why XML formatting for a word processor anyway? I can appreciate the need for XML for a spreadsheet, but it seems an app like KWord has far more need for layout and formatting rather than data abstraction.
One of the other things I'd love to see fixed up proper in KWord is it's HTML export and import abilities. They are there, but they're pretty weak at this point. Even still, I'm very impressed with how far KWord has come from the previous versions I've worked with.
CSS2 Paged Media (Score:2)
Does CSS-2 have headers
You mean the logo and ad banner at the top of every web page, or do you mean "headers per page with page numbering"?
footers
Again, the copyright notice at the bottom, or page numbering?
footnotes
HTML can easily do endnotes, and it can also do parenthetical citations, as you see Slashdot already starting to do with the bracketed hostname at the end of a link [like.this].
page-breaks
Manual page breaks cause trouble with the different font metrics of e.g. Times/TNR and Helvetica/Arial fonts from different vendors. The problem of pagination would be better handled by a layout engine that can say "This table must fit on one page" or "Do not break <p> elements such that only one line remains on a page."
As an AC pointed out [slashdot.org], CSS2 Paged Media supports many of the features you mentioned; all you need to do is fund a project to implement it.
line-breaks?
I've always used <br /> to create line breaks in XHTML.
Re:Two Things that will Help... (Score:2)
And it's easily converted to that other UNIX standard: Postscript.
Re:Two Things that will Help... (Score:2)
Given that RTF is a Microsoft proprietary format, and changes with each release of Word, this is not surprising. It's definitely a bad format to try to follow, particularly at this stage in the development of XML, which should make both .rtf and .doc obsolete.
English measurements are millimetres. It's only Americans who still use inches. And, as with other open source projects, if you want it fixed, fix it.
Re:Two Things that will Help... (Score:2)
Right-Click the ruler, and set it to use inches instead of mm. Also, it defaults to inches with the US Letter template (in KWord at least). I don't know if there is a way to set the rulers in all the programs to use inches and stay that way (it does save with the document though) when you make new docs.
Still no exchange klone (Score:3, Interesting)
We had to install citrix clients so our NOC (running solaris on ultra 10's) could access the exchange servers. Even thou we don't use m$ products for our NOC, m$ infiltrated it via exchange.
E-Mail is at least 25% of my job, working on projects around the country, email is my ball and chain to the m$ platform. All documents open fine under StarOffice, but I still have to go back to exchange for my email. So I just run win2k on my laptop, use x-win32 for display, and samba to mount my solaris box and ssh to encrypt it. Basically Merge the two OS's into 1 via network tools.
Re:Still no exchange klone (Score:1)
Re:Still no exchange klone (Score:1)
I have been tempting to have IT forward all my email to my desktop sun box, but I loose the exchange groupware features. Not worth it.
Re:Still no exchange klone (Score:2)
I have been tempting to have IT forward all my email to my desktop sun box, but I loose the exchange groupware features. Not worth it.
I've been testing out CorporateTime from Steltor [steltor.com]. (warning: Flash site.) The server may run on Linux or NT and you can use an internal LDAP server or one you've already got. Mail and shared folders are stored and accessed with an IMAP server (numerous servers supported) and clients are available for Win32, Mac and Linux. There is also a web client and an Outlook service. The API is totally open.
I don't work for Steltor but as I said I've been evaluating the product and am finding it very good. It seems to be priced very similary to Exchange Server and they provide various levels of support. They've been most helpful in the evaluation. The company has been around for about 10 years doing collabrative software but their CorporateTime product seems to be pretty recent.
Re:Still no exchange klone (Score:2)
Just curious here as I'm not immediately familiar with these groupware features. What all does Exchange do that a locally run newsgroup server can't do? From what I've read of it, Exchange sure sounds like a newsgroup server with a pretty interface. How far off is this impression of mine?
Exchange: More than EMail (Score:4, Insightful)
Exchange does something other mail servers don't do. And it does it well.
I was going to say "groupware". But that's a bit of a misnomer. It does have various groupware functionality - but its specifically scheduling that it does well. Other groupware aspects are almost a brief afterthought.
Sure - there are other scheduling competitors out there. But I watched Cisco Systems gravitate towards Exchange despite their heavy investment in a Unix mail infrastructure and the problems a diverse desktop OS user base causes for functionality with Microsoft products (Cisco endorses Win2k, Solaris, and Linux as supported desktop options for their employees).
Its a shame that Exchange forces one to pick up all the usual MS bagage along with an otherwise top tier product.
Re:Still no exchange klone (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever used Exchange? Standard pop3 mail is a very small part of it.
And your comment leads me to believe you haven't worked for a large company and your administration experience has only been on systems where you have complete control over everything (ie, you only do it for yourself or at most a very small network).
You can't just say, "Ok guys, let's ditch Exchange so I don't have to use Windows. I don't care that we'll be switching from a full-featured groupware platform to a simple smtp/pop3 email environment, not to mention staff training, custom programming, hardware, and software investments up to this point going downt he tubes. I just REALLY don't like Windows."
Re:Still no exchange klone (Score:1)
Try Bynari's [bynari.com] Insight Server [bynari.net] which runs on Linux or Sparc and offers a fairly complete server for Outlook clients, and offers a *nix client to boot! You can share calendars, global addressing, etc.
-sid
Re:Still no exchange klone (Score:3, Informative)
Try Bynari's Insight Server which runs on Linux or Sparc and offers a fairly complete server for Outlook clients, and offers a *nix client to boot! You can share calendars, global addressing, etc.
I tried out Bynari about 10 months ago and the installer wiped out my existing MTA and LDAP servers without warning and without any warning in the documentation. After I'd realized this I tried the software out and it still had quite a way to go.
Thanks for mentioning them though; I will evaluate them again. Currently I'm pretty excited about Steltor's CorporateTime [steltor.com] -- Uses an IMAP server and either your existing or an internal LDAP server coupled with their calendaring and scheduling server software. Server runs on Linux or NT; clients for Win32, Linux, Mac and web. Also includes PalmOS, WinCE and an Outlook service. Unlike Bynari, I found Steltor's support very solid and professional. Again, this may have changed with Bynari which is why I am going to re-evaluate them.
Sometimes things don't warrant cloning (Score:1)
It's time for natural selection to take its toll
Re:Sometimes things don't warrant cloning (Score:2)
Re:Still no exchange klone (Score:2)
Good Article (Score:4, Insightful)
Having recently fired up KOffice for the first time since the 1.1 release, I've got to say I'm really happy with where it's going. The team has done a great job on getting component embedding working (although it crashed on me when I started pushing it around a bit) and I really think this will shape up to be an incredibly powerful suite.
Of course, these things don't happen overnight. It took Linux about 8 or 9 years to start gaining more widespread acceptance in the server area. KOffice is a tremendous project, and it'll take a long time to get to the point where it can compete with MS Office. Remember, software like this doesn't just happen overnight, it has to evolve. MS Office has had over a decade to get to where it is. I have a feeling we'll start seeing KOffice as a real alternative to MS in a few years.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wrong review. (Score:2)
Re:Wrong review. (Score:2, Interesting)
No...
They're reviewing it from the point of view of the typical user.
I'm as pro-unix and pro-case-sensitive a guy as they come, and even I wasn't expecting that to be case sensitive. It makes absolutely no sense, unless there are cell rows called 'a' and 'A' (hint: there aren't).
The fact that this is no longer true in current Kspread builds attests to it's pointlessness.
If HTML frames are so good... (Score:2)
frames are a far better layout method!
If HTML frames are so good, why don't popular web sites such as Yahoo!, MSN, AOL.com, ebaY, and Slashdot use them? Those sites mostly use tables or CSS2 instead.
(On the other hand, you might be talking about a different kind of frame. If so, please fill me in instead of calling this comment flaimbait.)
Apps can read MS Office documents if... (Score:2)
An office suite that can't read MS Office documents is just about as useful as a server operating system that can use nothing but floppy disks.
Most office suites can read MS Office documents, but not MS Office documents saved in the proprietary "serialized COM stream" format, which is almost like trying to open another app's files by reading core snapshots. If you save an MS Office document in a standard format such as text, basic RTF, or MHTML (HTML, CSS, and graphics in a single MIME file), free software will import it just fine.
"A server that can read only floppy disks"? Try "a server that can't read Apple II or C=64 floppy disks because they use a different type of modulation." Trying to read Word documents (which are intimately tied to MS COM) is almost like trying to read a hard drive by removing the platters and placing them in another housing (assuming cleanliness).
How to take the VBA out of the VBAer (Score:2)
given that Word has 90% (or whatever..huge %!) market dominance
On the Web, HTML has 99% market dominance. Plain ASCII .txt has five-nines market dominance; the 1e-3% is largely old mainframes still running EBCDIC.
many of these people know VBA
IOW, you're saying "You can take the VBAer out of VBA, but you can't take the VBA out of the VBAer." To show a VBA programmer that VBA/VBS is considered harmful, put her on Windows 9x (95, 98, ME), send her a memo infected with a macro virus, and then send her a VBS that claims to be another memo.
It's really not VBA so much as the lack of good file and memory protection in the host operating system. VB* just makes it too easy to write viruses and trojans, which has earned it the nickname "Virus Builder."
it helps to be able to send and receive office docs that other people can read.
And HTML+CSS2 doesn't meet your requirements why? Is it too hard to ask your clients to save their documents as HTML?
Re:How to take the VBA out of the VBAer (Score:2)
I may be too late in this discussion, but the value of VBA is that it makes it easy to add additional functionality to documents. I use VB in Excel regularly. Think developing a Monte-Carlo simulation module for a forecasting model. Or a dynamic projection module that automatically selects the best projection method (ARIMA, regression, moving average, etc) based on the characteristics of the data. Or an interface to make handling multiple documents and scenarios easy through meta-data (kludgy, but it works as long as you stay within the rules).
This functionality can be embedded in the spreadsheet or DB for additional value. It would be ideal if VB were a properly designed language, but it's not. It may also have huge security holes, but that's not going to stop me using it. I know it's got problems, but I'll continue to use it. There's some serious business value in VBA.
This value may lock me into using MS products, but what other choices do I have given that all my clients run Office? You're dealing with extensive network externalities created through a defacto standard. Until KOffice or StarOffice can parse or convert VBA, they're pushing uphill.
Re:VBA? VBS? Use ECMAScript. (Score:2)
You probably didn't miss something stupid - I probably didn't do it the best way possible. I haven't used ECMAScript in a production sense, only played around with it as a minor part of web development. The sandbox issue I agree with - ECMAScript is much easier to sandbox.
The thing I'm not sure about (and here I'm clearly displaying my ignorance) is what capacity ECMAScript has to pull functionality from other applications. Using IE and VB as an example, I could pull Excel functionality and forms from Office 2000 into IE quite easily using ActiveX or another mechanism. But I'd still be using VB to do it. Can ECMAScript give me an Excel spreadsheet within IE? A lot of the modelling work I do needs to have that spreadsheet functionality. I've had a look through MSDN, but can't find anything beyond the same JScript stuff I used before (dates, simple operators, etc).
I can see that it'd be easier with a DB - build the hooks and display selected structured data in IE. No need for a spreadsheet. I can see forms wouldn't be an issue either - just webify. The simulation stuff would be easy to port, it's the links to the spreadsheet that would be difficult (this example is spread out over 30 sheets with somewhere around 2mil calculations).
Any suggestions? Or links?
Re:Excel spreadsheet == declarative programming (Score:2)
The difficulty is that a large part of the final product is the presentation. Presentation not in terms of flashy stuff, but in terms of conceptually mapping things out. This particular model details a process flow and allows users to test various scenarios by changing different elements of the process. Regarding the "links", I was pretty unclear. Basically, there's a dependence flow, where each cell on a spreadsheet is referenced to cells on previous sheets. It's this dependence flow that the model maps out.
I take your point about the spreadsheet being a poor tool for delivering a program, but the problem is it's a strategic model (one of the main value points being it allows users to quickly scan large amounts of numbers and see changes instantly). Without going into too much detail, a DB wouldn't quite fit as well as a spreadsheet for this particular solution. It would in most others I can think of, but not here.
Something you mentioned that I'm curious about is "plugin that has a DOM". What's an example of such a plugin? I'd actually love to move to a browser interface and dump Excel VBA - one of the problems I've identified for the future is one of technological lock-in - they're stuck using Excel for the life of the Model (probably about 5 - 10 years). A browser interface would solve the issue of platform independence while also allowing a much more flexible approach. Have you got any links about plugins under ECMAScript?
GNU Make isn't just for compiling source code (Score:2)
Basically, there's a dependence flow, where each cell on a spreadsheet is referenced to cells on previous sheets.
The Free Software Foundation has a dependence flow manager that can track dependencies between objects in a filesystem and can call programs to re-create files when the files they depend on have changed. This tool is called GNU Make [gnu.org] and comes with most distributions of a GNU system or a GCC development environment.
I'd actually love to move to a browser interface
And you can with server-side Ruby, Python, Java, or Perl. Simply port your simulation to a compiled or interpreted language, create a makefile to re-run the simulation whenever the input changes, and write CGI programs to coordinate the whole mess into a Web application. If the whole thing runs on one box (as is most often the case for a flat-file app), and that box must run Windows, use the Win32 version of Apache HTTP Server [apache.org], the MinGW [mingw.org] GCC distribution (or Cygwin if your app is GPL compatible), and ActivePerl or ActivePython [activestate.com].
Impressions (Score:4, Interesting)
Many of the issues addressed should be easy to fix. The lack of an automatic spelling checker and a thesauris in KWord, for instance, should be easy fixes. Likewise the case sensitivity in the spreadsheet program, though most UNIX people won't tend to view that sort of issue as a bug. The customer is always right and all that.
On a quick side note, I still prefer TeX/LaTeX over any GUI word processor I've ever run across. I believe our documentation people 'round these parts still use SGML. Not something a normal user will ever look at due to the learning curve, but once you get a set of styles down, you can rattle off any old document you deal with on a regular basis with almost no effort devoted to the formatting of the document -- you just work on the content.
Re:Impressions (Score:3, Insightful)
*nix has this stupid fixation with case too (Score:2)
Re:*nix has this stupid fixation with case too (Score:3, Insightful)
Think internationalization. Presumably the user should be able to name files in his own language. But Unicode case normalization is expensive and complicated. (Of course, you could say that case insensitivity need only apply to ASCII, but then you get called a narrow-minded Anglo-centrist.)
Think access control, and all of the bugs that arise when there is more than one name for a resource. Granted, this is probably a software quality problem, but it is reality.
Overally, case sensitive is much simpler engineering-wise. "Normal users" shouldn't have to type exact filenames anyway, they should be using file dialogs or case-insensitive search tools or something.
Re:*nix has this stupid fixation with case too (Score:2)
That sounds like a good reason to use a unicode file system, and is completely orthogonal to filenames that are case sensitive.
> Overally, case sensitive is much simpler engineering-wise.
You mean, take the lazy solution instead of something more user friendly?
> "Normal users" shouldn't have to type exact filenames anyway, they should be using file dialogs or case-insensitive search tools or something.
Most of the time, I agree, file searching is case insensitive, and it works.
But, you wouldn't happen to do any cross platform development?
Why I asked, is because we have our codebase on a Windows box, ala SourceSafe. The C/C++ compiler (rightly) doesn't care if the file is called "Foo.h" "foo.H" of "FOO.H" (Yes, we don't have a standard naming convention.)
Case does NOT change the meaning of a word. It's purely a cosmetic thing, not functional.
How are other developers getting around the stupid limition that filenames are case sensitive in *nix ? Forcing all filenames to be lowercase?
It's a pain in the @$$ to have to manually edit 5,000 source files. Any tools for automation? Maybe a Perl script that looks for "#include < * >"
Re:*nix has this stupid fixation with case too (Score:2)
Yeah, a unicode file system sounds great, but my point is that it has everything to do with case sensitivity. Case folding of unicode text is complicated and resource intensive [unicode.org]. I don't want my kernel doing it.
It's a pain in the @$$ to have to manually edit 5,000 source files.
Yeah, sucks for you, sorry :-)
So let the user set "short" and "long" names (Score:2)
"Last Tuesday's Financial Report" is much more readable than ... "fr0123.dat"
So call the file fr0123.dat, but design your filesystem to store a piece of metadata "icon_name" that can hold a longer filename. Use the filename for locating directories and files, but also show the icon name in file pickers. fr0123.dat (last Tuesday's financial report) is quick to type-select and easy to read. Several DOS TUI shells did this. Windows almost does this, except it always computes the filename from the icon name.
Re:Impressions (Score:2)
Factual errors in the article ... (Score:2)
Uh
Not even close, ZDNet, but thanks for coming out!
Re:Factual errors in the article ... (Score:2)
The KOffice and M$ Office review wasn't too bad/uneven but 3 paragraphs?
ZiffDavis lacky bought in the buyout by CNet.
IMHO.
LoB
Re:Factual errors in the article ... (Score:2)
KDE question (Score:2, Interesting)
I've never really been one to use a file manager, but after setting my desktop to be my home directory, i've started using the desktop, something i've never done with any wm. The problem is that in order to get into any of the directories, you have to start a file manager konqueror session. Is there a way that the desktop itself could be a simple file manager that would changer directories. An extention to this would be embeding a term in the desktop that would let the desktop be the current directory.
Now that we have gotten a very easy to use gui, i think we should try and move it towards the 'unix way' of doing things. This would appeal the the 'power users' as well as the beginners.
This is major? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Unfortunately, performance of this component proved troublesome. Trying to get the software to compute a basic SUM() function on a range of cells yielded an error. We later found out that, unlike in Excel, function names in KSpread are case-sensitive, so typing "=SUM(A1:A15)" in a cell yields an error while typing "=sum(a1:a15)" does not. This is a major shortcoming for anyone who has ever used another spreadsheet, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro.
Wow, uhhh.. this sounds like a major problem to me. It's pretty easy to get use to (no rocket science behind holding down or not holding down the shift-key), and it would be trivial to fix. And it's open source, so they could just recompile KSpread with it not caring about case-sensitivity. Any novi programmer can do that.
F-bacher
Re:This is major? (Score:1)
To them sum() not adding up (whereas SUM() would) would give the impression that SUM() doesn't work, therefore the spreadsheet is not usable.
Re:This is major? (Score:2)
I assume you meant novice. In which case, does this mean that the KOffice programmers aren't even up to the level of 'novice'? Come on.
Yeah - just tell people to remember to always hit SHIFT before referencing any cell names or functions. But don't hold it down all the time, or ALL your text will be caps, and it'll look like you're shouting.
Isn't this what a computer is supposed to do? Take away the trivial, mundane tasks like figuring out what function I mean whether I type SUM or sum? I'm sure many think this case-insensitivity thing is some sort of Microsoft strike for world domination, but perhaps they do it (and most everyone else did before them too) because it MAKES SENSE. But since when has MAKING SENSE had much to do with most Linux programs anyway, right?
How about you just CODE it to be case insensitive. Since it's so EASY to change (OPEN SOURCE!) any Lunix geek that wants to remember to hit SHIFT when typing certain functions can just change it themselves and recompile the program. Come on - any novice can do it.
StarOffice is written in JAVA? Mr Deignan come on (Score:1)
Do a little research. Just a little. From staroffice faq
Is StarOffice 5.2 software written in the Java language? Will Sun rewrite the StarOffice suite in Java technology?
"... the majority of the StarOffice 5.2 code is written in C++. Sun does not intend to rewrite StarOffice 5.2 in Java technology..."
Java is so slow that everything sun makes is crawls because of it. Mr Deignan believes everything his MS marketing rep. tells him.
Credibility... (Score:2)
Star Office myths (Score:3, Informative)
"KOffice is natively compiled for the machine platform on which it is executing, whereas StarOffice is a Java-based application"
from the StarOffice FAQ:
However, the majority of the StarOffice 5.2 code is written in C++
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/5.2
Why do some many people think StarOffice is written in Java? Is it just because its from Sun?
--
I wish i knew how to get slashot in light mode without having to login
Re:Star Office myths (Score:1)
Re:Star Office myths (Score:2)
It's an excuse for it's lack of speed? ;)
SO5.2 might as well be in Java (Score:5, Interesting)
The OpenOffice development snapshots are definitely peppier, so StarOffice 6.0 should be fine in this regard.. but 5.2.. eek.
Where Java does enter the StarOffice picture is that 5.2 has an open interface that lets you pick a JVM--or install one--to use as yet another macro language. This is a nice touch for all the Unix shops and others that have Java programmers on hand more readily than VBA people. You can use a nice, fast 1.3.x JVM with it, and develop with your existing tools and components. The other nice "Java" feature is SO 5.2's ability to use JDBC throughout for database access instead of native drivers or ODBC. Very useful and very elegantly cross-platform on Sun's part.
And incidentially, the "other" major SO5.2 scripting language is a VB clone, both in syntax and coding environment. SO has a different document object model, so MS Office macros won't run unmodified, but at least VBA skills can carry over. KOffice's use of DCOP for automation allows the use of any available language, potentially doing things one better--but without integration with a development tool as one gets with VBA and StarBasic, it remains at a disadvantage. Maybe bidirectional KOffice-to-KDevelop hooks (for C++) and KOffice-to-Netbeans/Forte (for Java) are a way to go.
Re:Star Office myths (Score:2)
It's because Sun announced back in 1999 that it was going to release a server-side-Java version of StarOffice, called "StarPortal". They never got it off the ground, and StarPortal eventually got folded into Sun WebTop in March of this year.
Clueless "technical" journalists (such as can be found in abundance writing for ZDnet) are frequently unable to distinguish between Java in its two main forms: slow, crappy client-side Java apps/applets and fast, scalable server-side JSP and servlets. The single marketing moniker for all of Sun's J-products is a double-edged sword. Perhaps they should fix this.
Pretty sorry excuse for a review. (Score:3, Informative)
Thats about all there is in the article. If it took the author more than 4 hours to produce this I would be surprised. Fortunately, the geeks can now read this synopsis instead of reading the author's wordy version. This way we will save hundreds of geek hours.
Re:Pretty sorry excuse for a review. (Score:2)
theKompany sells the additional stencil sets. You can buy them at https://www.thekompany.com/products/order/stencil
Advanced Features (Score:2)
On the other hand, spell-checking in real-time is no big deal at all, and also a feature that many of us would just as soon do without.
footprint (Score:2)
how big is MS Office? more than 20 times that size. How much cheaper are embedded devices suitable for running KOffice than MSOffice? How much cheaper are 32 MB flash chips than 256 MB flash chips - a LOT. obviously the WinCE versions of MS Office are smaller than MSOffice pro... but they also lack a lot of the features. perhaps a better comparison is WinCE Office vs. KOffice...
-sam
13 MB! (Score:1)
Optimizing for size can be useful (Score:2)
Some things just become too cheap to meter, and hard drive space is one of them.
If this statement were true, nobody would need gzip. However, last-mile bandwidth has not yet become too cheap to meter. It costs some people $200,000 to get high-speed access [8m.com] because they don't live in an area where the local telecommunication monopolies offer DSL or cable modem service. Ever try downloading the whole set of Windows service packs or a Debian apt-get upgrade over a telephone modem connection billed by the minute (as is the case in e.g. Europe)?
Why MS should be running scared. (Score:3, Insightful)
But the thing is, when you look at how far KOffice has come in how little time, it becomes apparent that it's just a matter of time before it catches up and, provided its leadership isn't content to be "as good as" Office, surpasses Office in features and functionality.
It's the sheer rate of change and speed of development of KOffice that amazes me. In a couple of years, this free alternative to Office will most likely be at least as powerful as MSFT's product, except that it will cost nothing.
Office software is becoming like text editors and browser software: It's something you don't expect to pay for. And if MSFT continues to try to charge people for it, people will move over to the alternatives.
No, it ain't there yet, but look at where it was and where it is now. Look at how short the time was for it to get here.
And just think. Just a few months ago, people were saying that Linux would never be a viable desktop OS. A few who have their heads in the sand still say it. But it is viable now! Even my Dad, who usually lacks the time to learn anything more complicated than instructions written on a sheet of paper that he follows to the letter, could install and get running with KDE under RedHat.
All that's left is a Quicken alternative.
Re:Why MS should be running scared. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why MS should be running scared. (Score:2, Insightful)
A team of Russian, American, Australian, and German programmers are not going to pander to my Canuckian tax laws as well as Quicken will. Perhaps it will end up with (or already has) a plug-in interface or something, so people can do this on their own, but I don't know how many tax-lawyer/programmer/accountant types there are out there in OSS Land.
I hate to say it, but I don't really know if this is open-source area (yet).
--Dan
Re:Why MS should be running scared. (Score:2)
Don't count on it. People in the business world do still expect to pay for their office applications suite. In fact, they're pretty concerned at present about Microsoft's change in licensing policy with Office XP.
But remember that what they think of as "paying" includes support and maintenance costs and the like, as well as any up-front cost. People here often ignore this rather important fact. For example, someone else mentioned using an alternative, which segfaulted and lost them 15 minutes of work because there was no auto-save. If that had been me (or any other one of the guys at work) then that 15 minutes of down time alone would have been enough to justify spending the extra money and buying MS Office.
It's viable for a few people now, and most of them already use it. My old man is also computer literate, and installed Linux on the new PC at home because he's very anti-MS in his feelings, and the kind of person who likes a good tool, even if it takes longer to learn. However, when I sent my mum a couple of zipped PostScript files by e-mail last week, could he print them out for her? No.
He couldn't find where they were saved on the hard disk, because Linux's search facilities weren't intuitive enough. When he did find them, he had trouble opening them. When he finally opened them, he couldn't print them, because he didn't have a Linux driver for his printer (which came supplied with a Windoze driver, of course). That one simple task defeated him, yet on a typical Windoze box it would have taken seconds. And remember, this is someone who has been in the business for years and likes tools like Linux. If he had trouble, you can bet that an awful lot of other people are going to have trouble, too.
Re:Why MS should be running scared. (Score:2)
Wait, you don't believe that? Then if their hours are paid for, and those hours developped Free Software, then that Free Software cost somebody money -- in the long run, it will be you. I'd rather pay a Free Software developer directly (Paypal, etc.) for feature growth (as MySQL and ReiserFS offer, for starters) than just wait for VA Linux to think of a way to get that investment back out of me.
I'm probably never going to buy a VA Linux server, but I'd love to read Slashdot for a long time to come
Re:Why MS should be running scared. (Score:2)
The rest of us, who constitute the vast majority of developers, write software to support hardware, or for internal company purposes.
Read the second page of the review... (Score:2)
-Sean
choosing "KOffice" name is dangerous (Score:2)
I think it would be much better not to claim head-on competition with MS Office. Instead, produce nice, usable, stand-alone applications and think carefully about how to allow people to integrate them.
Re:Bigger fish (Score:2)
Fair, I think .... (Score:2)
A case in point:
Unfortunately, performance of this component proved troublesome. Trying to get the software to compute a basic SUM() function on a range of cells yielded an error. We later found out that, unlike in Excel, function names in KSpread are case-sensitive, so typing "=SUM(A1:A15)" in a cell yields an error while typing "=sum(a1:a15)" does not. This is a major shortcoming for anyone who has ever used another spreadsheet, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro
Maybe this is one piece of criticism KOffice-programmers might want to take to heart. The difference between Excel being case-insensitive and KSpread being case-sensitive is one example of how people programming for a commercial entity take a slightly bigger interest in the needs of ordinary, non-savvy users than Open Source developers. It's a minor point, to be sure, but how often have you heard the myth flaunted that "the computer crashed because I got one comma misplaced"? KOffice, for now, exhibits some of this behavior, while MSOffice, for the most part (day to day tasks) does not. This is not surprising, as M$ probably spends a large amount of time and money on testing on "ordinary users", whereas the KOffice people don't (can't afford to), so I'm not blaming the latter, but rather, urging them to do something with fair bits of consumer feedback like this.
Re:Fair, I think .... (Score:2)
Those who are purists, I guess, think its up to the next person down the food chain to keep errors out of the way; I recently requested that the string functions in glibc which require a non-NULL value should return with an error when called with NULL instead of segmentation faulting. I was told this was non-spec and it would continue to crash if the programmer broke the rules.
Not everyone in the world who writes software has read the C specs. Not everyone who uses a spreadsheet even cares whether computers can be case sensitive or not. What benefit is there for functions in a spreadsheet being case sensitive anyway?
Try Abiword and Gnumeric instead. (Score:2, Informative)
Almost free didn't help SmartSuite (Score:2)
SmartSuite 97 is probably still ahead of KOffice in terms of compatibility and features, plus it actually contained a famous component (Lotus 1-2-3), and it wasn't enough to stop it from sliding into complete obscurity.
KOffice (and StarOffice for that matter) have probably each got another 2 years or so of catching up before they even get close to where the now extict competitors of MS Office were a number of years ago...and being almost free didn't help them back then either.
Re:Not Negative? (Score:1)