EIOffice 2004 vs. MS Office 2003 478
ryen writes "Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore able to run on both Windows and Linux. EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? Flexbeta has the review." That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.
Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)
Heh. Not anymore.
Ack, even I'm getting tired of the "we slashdotted your site" jokes.
Re:Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)
E-I E-I EIOffice.
And that server got slashdotted.
E-I E-I EIOffice.
With a packet dropped here...and a packet dropped there...
(why? why hurt?)
Re:Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)
El Office Grando.
Re:Slashdotted (Score:3, Funny)
A small part of my brain that is normally kept in solitary confinement made the link between EI and EIOffice initially, and somewhere from there I thought that this would have something to do with outsourcing and "Canadian" jobs moving overseas.
I'm comforted to discover that the scariest thing in this article is an office suite coded in J
Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Interesting)
hehe, what about all the other platforms there's a JVM for? Like, uh, OS X? Solaris?
How myopic.
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Funny)
You're forgeting the Java moto. "Write once, run once, mabey twice, three times if your lucky".
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Funny)
--
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Interesting)
So long as you stay away from any native calls, Java code is VERY portable across JVMs (including across systems). GUIs do tend to have some problems, but I tend to avoid pure Java GUIs anyway, due to latency issues (which tend to rear their ugly heads more often in live trading scenarios). If I plan sufficiently, keeping my core infrastructure/business logic in pure Java, using JNI sparingly, and write all of my GUIs in QT/GTK, I have no problems with porting.
So why bother with Java at all? (I can picture you asking the question, so I may as well answer it.) Simple: I find it soooooo much easier to write good code in Java than C/C++. While I've heard some denounce Java's framework classes as a messy C++ superset, I disagree. It's easy to use, well documented (java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/ may be all you ever need) and easy to refactor. Combine that with a kick-ass tool like IDEA (www.intellij.com) and you have my personal dream environment for development.
From my POV, so long as you keep GUI issues out of the equation, Java is as close to the perfect development environment I'm likely to get. I work in a setting where I can keep my business logic and infrastructure pretty well removed from the GUI level. This makes things easy for me. YMMV.
Taft
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Insightful)
The sufficiently complex applications *I* have written in Java -- including a mass mail server and a database migration utility -- have worked just FINE on every arbitrary Java installation I've seen. I wrote them on a PC, moved them to a Sun server , and still run them on my Mac. The trick is to write them in pure Java...no native libraries, and when you need a file separator, get it from Preferences...don't assume / (or \, or : for that matter)!
Now, the difference between Java and GLIB/GDK/GTK is that you only need ONE binary. That's one less thing to worry about supporting...one less thing to have to TEST everywhere. Furthermore, I've rarely seen a Java UI crash unexpectedly. GTK crashes all the time on "beta" systems...like Windows.
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:3, Interesting)
Well duh! The same can be said for PURE C. The OP's point (I think) was that the promise of write once, run anywhere is a myth. After various tweaks have been made in your code to ensure it runs correctly on all your targets (hmm, should that even be necessary?) you can have a single "binary", but most times you have to have some non-portable script to run the damn thing because of various environment issues related to platform. Ever notice when you download larg
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:3, Interesting)
With Java, the "platform" stays the same no matter where you install it. The underlying code that the platform runs is differenct everywhere, but you don't have to worry about that. The JIT compiler optimizes what you w
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:3, Insightful)
Can you fathom the difference in complexity between testing something once, and testing it on N platforms? Generally speaking, if I have a java program I've compiled that will run on a Windows system, it will run everywhere else I could run it. That means I only have to test it once -- how many times -- once before giving it to the QA team. Now, they'll do their blast testing on their own systems...and very rarely will I have a p
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:3, Insightful)
So thats why this office suite has two downloads one for windows, and one for linux. Same thing with other java software like limewire. Or I goto www.java.com [java.com] and half the featured applications only run on windows or have multiple binaries for different operation systems. Thats really portable.
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:3, Informative)
Read a book like "Java Performance Tuning." The main reason Java UIs seem slow is that developers are using them in a very sloppy fashion. If you do it right...preload your graphics class, pool and reuse objects where possible and handle refreshes on your own, your UI can be jetspeed. Check out Jalbum or Eclipse or any of the hundreds of really fast Java programs out there and you'll see what I mean.
If you wrote a GUI in any other language and expected it to refresh every object in th
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:3, Informative)
I've written many client-side Java applications that make use of audio, networking, data storage, etc. that work identically between Linux and Windows in binary form. Java portability (JVM bugs notwithstanding) has been 99%, with JVM bugs accounting for the 1% incompability since they caused subtle runtime differences.
I stopped writing Jav
Inconsistant (Score:3, Insightful)
You admit you find Java a waste of time, yet state that the parent was evenhanded. How do you know?
Unlike either of you I have written Java GUI apps that run on a variety of platforms (including the old Oracle Network Computer). It's really
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of Blues Brothers:
"What kind of music do you usually have here?"
"Oh, we got both kinds. We got Country *and* Western!"
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:3, Informative)
"Support for Macintosh OS X and Solaris is in development [evermoresw.com]" -- bottom of the page.
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:2, Insightful)
And if you can't write a java app that runs as good on Windows as it does on Linux, Solaris, OS X, etc, then no wonder you use "regular languages" (pshaw!)
I wouldn't let you program my garage door opener.
Easy to make C/C++ application fast? WOW! (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you use C/C++ your application will be easy to make fast, no matter what you're doing.
This is a very silly claim, at least as bad as the one you were responding to, that if an application is written in C/C++ it will be easy to make fast.
Then why do we have so many very-poorly-performing native applications out there.
I have seen enough cases where a well-designed Java app outperforms by an order of magnitude a poorly-designed C++ app.
I am all for using C/C++ where it is appropriate, but C/C++ is no magic silver bullet when it comes to performance any more than Java is. In either language, if you have carefully-constructed libraries, porting can be quite straitforward and if you have a design that plays to the strengths of the platform, performance can be reasonable. Performance and portability are always a matter of design. It does not just happen as a result of choice of platform.
Re:Easy to make C/C++ application fast? WOW! (Score:3, Interesting)
True, but the lion's share of this overhead is paid for once during startup. One of the lessons of windows is that people are willing to wait extra time for something to start as long as it works well once started.
If you mean overhead in terms of memory footprint.. Medium to large java apps chew up about the same resources as their C/C++ counterparts.
And there isn't anything you can do about it.
Partially true. You can tweak the JVM paramet
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Informative)
well, you see, Java really isn't that portable.
I have worked since 1998 on Java software with a focus on UI and portability. Although OS X has never been on my radar, I have worked extensively on other people's code when it was "working fine in windows" but partially or completely broken in Solaris (later Linux as servers migrating over).
All the compatibility problems broke down to one of three problems:
1) Solaris patching. I don't know if Sun has fixed this, but patching of Solaris and patching of Java to work on Solaris was a true nightmare. The Solaris JVM was awful (was, I haven't touched it since 1.3 so I like to think it is all better now).
2) Hardcoding of directory separator characters instead of using File.separatorChar
3) Fonts. The UI issues on the Unix variants for early Java were huge. Swing didn't hardly fix anything because the underlying problem was truly hideous fonts. To the best of my knowledge, 1.4 has completely fixed this problem.
To the best of my knowledge #1 and #3 are fixed now. #2 is something you usually only see from recent grads or people new to Java programming.
I can't remember the last time anything I wrote in Java and packaged as a jar had trouble working in Windows or Linux. Certainly has not happened since 1.4 came out.
I've worked recently with C/C++ code and experienced C/C++ portability fun between platforms. The code was used for reading a writing DNA chromatogram format files. Worked perfectly in Solaris. Wrote out 4 gigabyte blank files in Linux in the odd circumstance when it would actually run at all. The problem turned out to be endian handling. This problem doesn't occur in Java, however in C/C++ when you simply tell the machine to write out blocks of memory (that happen to be data structures) the resulting byte order is whatever the machine natively uses. The IO routines don't know if one piece is a double, another a long and yet another a short.
Java is really portable. It's also quite fast. Nearly all complaints about Java's speed these days come from Swing, which is really caused by an overdesign of Swing (from a design stand point, Swing is very, very nice. Unfortunately what makes it nice also makes it quite slow)
Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:4, Informative)
I'd like to believe that was true, but my experience has been that even experienced programmers tend to do something like:
* write code to load in hunk of data from file
* write more code assuming data has been loaded correctly.
* test to make sure data and code using it is functioning according to requirements
* move on to next problem
Unless "works on big, little and mixed endian" is in the requirements (and it usually isn't) the naive approach is usually taken, even by programmers with 15 years of experience. Making sure the code is endian neutral often means replacing 1 line with 10-50.
Someone mentioned on Slashdot that the Windows API can accept either a forward or back slash, but I don't personally know.
I'm not sure that's correct. I just tried opening a file from notepad and a command prompt and mixing slash directions. I'm sure there are some windows api functions that are okay we whichever slash you use, but I would expect widgets that use that underlying API to mirror that insensitivity.
Writing portable code in C, C++, or Java requires that the programmer know how to do it.
"know how to do it" in Java boils down to maybe 1 or 2 rules of thumb. In C and C++, the issues from Java exist (e.g. path separator), but so do others (e.g. endianness). It is easier to write cross platform code in Java.
It's about Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Until there is something 10x more superior than
Re:It's about Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, however...
Ex: Many claim Ogg is a superior format to AAC, MP3, WMA and others, however the fact that it is not supported by as many pieces of software and hardware limit its use. The reason that MP3, a format which many claim is inferior to nearly everything continues to thrive is because an MP3 works nearly everywhere, just as a
Re:It's about Standards (Score:4, Insightful)
If Microsoft gives away 10 million copies of Office 2005 XPNTME, they will still break even, because another 10 million will need to be able to read and revise the data.
Re:It's about Standards PERCEPTION (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's about Standards (Score:3, Informative)
Wish there actually were some.
Re:It's about Standards (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure you can. If it's any of the versions written in the past 5 years. And if I save it as an older version, SANS cool new features, the past 10 years. Which means hundreds of millions of computers can open that document
That makes it a standard. Not an open standard, but a standard just the same. In fact, the reason most people would give for why they use Office is that it's an "Industry Standard."
Lots of closed sta
Re:It's about Standards (Score:2)
[ala grumpy old man]
Standards? We don't need no stinkin' standards.
Why, when I was your age we only had
Probably more obvious
one word (Score:2)
Re:one word (Score:3, Funny)
Summary of Slashdot comments (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Great another competitor, we should support it
2) Its in Java it will suck
3) Java sucks
4) It should be in Perl
5) It should be in C
6) I use vi and troff.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Summary of Slashdot comments (Score:4, Funny)
10) vi? Sorry, I think you mean Emacs.
Re:Summary of Slashdot comments (Score:2)
7. Bad pun or wordplay based on the name...
such as "EE I EE I OH"...
Re:Summary of Slashdot comments (Score:3, Interesting)
in my opinion there are too many office products to compete with MS. they need to work together, especially a common save file format.
we have
IMHO they should work together to come with an open format common for all office programs, eg, something like
i know each support other formats, but sometimes there is a feature or two difference, leads to incompatibilities
just my $.02
Re:Summary of Slashdot comments (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Summary of Slashdot comments (Score:2)
How about: groan, another competitor that will claim to be somehow better than Open Office, but actually lags in enough areas to make it not worth it. I'm sorry, but Open Office has mindshare. In my opinion, it has even eclipsed Star Office. It's what I select by default for any Linux install. It's what I installed on my wife's Windows box when she insisted that we copy MS Office from a friend rather than pay for it. For all I know, she might think I
It looks interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Its hard to put down $150 without seeing if it will actually open up my spreadsheet and documents.
The review had an eval copy, but no such animal on the web site. Too bad; Do you have to wait for a warez copy to figure out if its worth buying? Makes me think they have something to hide.
Believe it or not, I think real Excel compatibility is the hardest to achieve because there are so many different macros (VB Script), charting features, and other goodies in Excel that its easy to get "locked in".
Re:It looks interesting (Score:2)
"Java Warez: Turning 0-day warez into 7-day warez before it even finishes loading"
sorry, mandatory Java bashing. Parent AC has a good point. I want to try it out first. If there is too much lag in response time when I type, I get really frustrated. A lot of IDE's i've tried have some lag. For instance, Netbeans IDE also written in Java.
If the wordprocessor has the same lag, i'd throw it away in a heartbeat.
Re:It looks interesting (Score:3, Informative)
The only difference can be seen after the chart is created. The bars in EIOffice's chart are grouped together, where in Excel's chart the bars are not close together. I tried editing the spacing between the bars in EIOffice by changing the gap width of each bar, but the chart was at an angle where the
Re:It looks interesting (Score:5, Informative)
A chinese page, click the links in the table.
you won't believe it is a Java software.
Re:It looks interesting (Score:3, Informative)
linux:
http://soft.66169.com/dl.php?id=1032591&cknum=7 4 81 &svr=1
http://www.evermoresw.com/download/eioffic e2003_fo r_linux.tar.gz
windows:
http://hlbr.onlinedown.net/down/EIO200 3_for_Win.ex e
http://crc.onlinedown.net/down/EIO2003_for_Win. exe
And for other platform, I heard some people simply unpack the tar ball and run the jar files, i had never tried personally, so I don't warrantee it
And then poof it was gone! (Score:2)
The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the big clincher for me would be how it interprets MS-Word shapes and drawings, as that's the only problem I've ever had with OpenOffice.
EIOffice? (Score:3, Funny)
as in... (Score:2, Insightful)
Java? (Score:2, Insightful)
but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office?
No, not as long as Openoffice is kicking ass!!!
Re:Java? (Score:5, Interesting)
They can actually be quite fast and responsive, if written correctly. I run eclipse on my PIII500Mhz on Fedora Core 1 and it runs very nicely. Some changes coming down the line in Java 1.5 might actually make it even more responsive, for some things even faster than typical C++ applications (the run-time optimizer cannot easily be duplicated in statically compiled languages.)
Re:Java? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Eclipse doesn't use the standard Java GUI library (Swing), and uses the IBM developed SWT, so it takes more than just coding the app "correctly".
The standard Java GUI can be written to be fast and responsive without using SWT however. Just check out the IntelliJ IDE.
http://www.intellij.com
I used it exclusively for my Java development, until I switched to Eclipse because of cost. Swing development can be tricky and responsive apps become harder to develop with it. Good thing thread programming is so easy with Java, because with Swing, you'll need to use it plenty.
-B
Re:Java? (Score:3, Interesting)
The question is then, does anyone actually know how to write Java correctly?
Every once in awhile I figure I'll give Java another chance and try running a Java app. Every one I've ever seen runs like a three legged dog. Based on comments I've seen I get the impression that the runtimes vary widely, and those who are claiming how great it runs must be using something other than what I'm running-- in which case they are rather out of touch with their users. I don't know that in fact this is the problem, as
Re:Java? (Score:3, Informative)
ohh... E I Office. (Score:2)
Good idea though...seems like Java is really trying to bitchslap MS as often as they can.
Better than OLE? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it good enough to never need OLE?
And yet it still has the fatal flaw of no database program.
Build an office suite with a file based database with a GUI and then you can start to attack the MS Access component of MS Office. Until then, you're replicating Star-Office and OpenOffice for some reason (and then trying to sell it for $149 USD on top of that).
Re:Better than OLE? (Score:3, Insightful)
If one was going to make such a thing, SQLite [sqlite.org] would be a good starting point. It has some flaws that need ironing but it is much faster than Access and is under public domain.
Swing? SWT? (Score:2)
Re:Swing? SWT? (Score:4, Informative)
get this out of the way (Score:5, Funny)
Sticking with OO.o (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sticking with OpenOffice.org for now. Just MHO.
Bad Name (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bad Name (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bad Name (Score:3, Funny)
Runs in Java on Windows (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Runs in Java on Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Screenshot cashe (Score:2, Redundant)
http://freecache.org/http://www.evermoresw.com/
It's becoming a cliche, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand the motivation behind designing office suites to look like Office clones, window managers to look like Windows clones, etc.: the idea is that people switching from MS products will find it easier to get used to the new software if it looks like what they're used to. But I really think this is a fundamentally flawed line of reasoning, for two reasons.
1. No one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. You may expend endless blood, toil, tears, and sweat trying to clone $MS_PRODUCT down to the last widget, but you'll never get it exactly right. And if you try to lull users into feeling like they're using $MS_PRODUCT
2. Microsoft interfaces may be the "standard," but they're not the best. In almost every market niche I can think of, there's some product that's faster, more powerful, and/or easier to use than whatever Microsoft is pushing. If you're going to copy something, copy something better than Windows, Office, IE, ad nauseam -- or better yet, start with the best as a baseline and innovate from there.
Re:It's becoming a cliche, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Many times people just want something better not different. I want a better government not a different one and so on and so forth.
Re:It's becoming a cliche, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
The good news is that the "winner" in the computer world is hardly ever the guy with the best product. Instead the folks that win generally end up being the folks with the cheapest product that is "good enough." If usability or innovation mattered then the early Macintoshes would have destroyed their DOS based PC competitors. The problem is that most people aren't really willing to pay extra for innovation or usability. They simply want something that will get the job done at the lowest price.
Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Free Software doesn't innovate or anything like that. In the long run the ability to take existing software and innovate on top of it (instead of starting from scratch) is going to be a huge win for hackers everywhere. Once OpenOffice.org (or whatever) becomes wide spread then all sorts of cool things are going to be possible just because anyone with a crazy idea as to how office suites should work will actually be able to try those ideas out. Most of these ideas will be crap, but the wider range of ideas will still almost certainly be a net win. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has been lifting ideas from other software developers and implementing then in Windows and Office for years. You would be hard pressed to point to a single major feature that Microsoft actually pioneered.
Microsoft has made a living by being "good enough" and less expensive, and for years the dominated the desktop despite the fact that Windows (and DOS before that) were pathetic knockoffs of other people's innovation. Now Windows is finally getting to be pretty good, but Linux is cheaper, and for an increasingly large group of people it is becoming "good enough."
Re:It's becoming a cliche, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
From their whitepaper...
Still looks like MSoffice: :( (Score:3, Interesting)
Does that mean that it sucks as much as MSoffice?
My main complaint with MSoffice is that the UI was apparently designed by lunatics. A free, open-source clone of MSoffice is a start, but it will still suck just to be backward compatible. Why doesn't someone put together an office suite that transcends this junky interface?
To their credit, it looks like they've improved on MSoffice in some details, but as long as their goal is still be look/feel compatible with MSoffice, it doesn't make me excited.
Text Mirror (Score:3, Informative)
Five pages compressed into 1 post, lots of pics that I never saw so I think the italics stand for captions.
EIOffice 2004 Vs MS Office 2003 - Page 1
.doc. This and the fact that EIOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office shows that huge efforts were placed to attract MS Office users into switching. Other file formats that EIOffice can save and open are PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel, rich text format, html and txt format.
Posted by Team Flexbeta on 26 May 2004 (28566 views) Rating: 4.94 EIOffice 2004 looks so much like MS Office 2003 that you wouldn't have a hard time getting used to the graphic interface once you get started with it. Coded in Java, EIOffice features a word processor, a spreadsheet application and a presentation graphics application. All three applications look and behave similar to MS Office's applications; Word, Excel and PowerPoint. EIOffice is able to edit and save MS Office file formats as well as a few other formats we will discover soon.
Word Processor
[qksrv.net]
From the screenshot it is clear how EIOffice's word processing suit looks extremely similar to MS Word. The order and shape of the icons are not the only similarities, so is the labeling. For example, the tabs, File, Edit, View, Insert, and Format are all labeled just like in MS Word and in the same exact order. The word processor offers many features such as spell checking, password protecting document, tracking changes and a thesaurus. There is a nice feature which lets you transform the document you are currently working on into a presentation. Though the transformation isn't 100% the way I wanted it to be, a few editing here and there molded the document into a nifty presentation.
EIOffice 2004 Word Processor and MS Word
Another feature which EIOffice 2004 carries is its ability to suggest the entire word you are typing before you finish typing it. For example, when typing the word "feature", by the time the letters "fea" are typed, EIOffice suggest that the word you are trying to type is indeed "feature" and highlights the word for you. A simple enter on the keyboard accepts the word.
The spell checker in EIOffice 2004 works very well though the suggestions are not as relevant as that of MS Office 2003. Using the misspelled word - woship, EIOffice 2004's suggestions were Yoshi, wish, wash, midship and welsh. The same misspelled word in MS Word brought up the correct suggestion: worship or worships. I don't have any idea why EIOffice 2004 suggested Yoshi as a possible correction to the misspelled word. Unfortunately, EIOffice does not offer grammar checking like MS Office does.
Mispelled word in EIOffice 2004
There is a nice application bar floating on the upper part of the current document which enables fast switching from one office application to another. With a simple click of the mouse I was able to toggle between the word processor, the spreadsheet application, and the presentation graphics creator. This is made possible because EIOffice is one application which bundles the three previously mentioned applications.
Switching Application Bar
EIOffice 2004 is able to open and save MS Word file format,
EIOffice also features a nice scientific editor which includes many scientific figures, shapes and symbols. The figures include diodes, transistors, and capacitors. There are also chemistry symbols such as chemical reaction formulas and atomic structures. Apart from the typical math functions and figures, EIOffice also includes curve functions such as the exponent function and the sinusoid curve.
Science Editor in EIOffice 2004
Presentation Graphics
My one wish for them: file formats (Score:4, Insightful)
My one complaint about EIoffice is the file formats. The last thing we need is yet another file format. OpenOffice/StarOffice, KOffice*, TextMaker*, and Abiword can all save documents in StarOffice format (* these two will have that feature in their next release). We have a rule here at SteamyMobile that you can use whatever office suite you want, so long as it uses the StarOffice format, meaning that in the future, when document search and indexing programs are released, they will all be able to use the same format. If EIOffice could that, we would use it too.
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mobile porn [steamymobile.com]
Icon (Score:2)
El Office (Score:5, Funny)
Re:El Office (Score:3, Funny)
Interface is copyrightable? (Score:5, Interesting)
Corel? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Corel? (Score:4, Informative)
They were having to create the UI from scratch, and there were some very basic things not portable i.e. font sizes in AWT (given in pixels on PC and in points in Mac).
But by far the worst performance problem reported by a majority of people testing it was that people were demoing it as a browser applet and thought the download time (mostly over modems at the time) was part of the startup time of the program.
The Java word processing engine was much faster and more reliable (due to redesign) than the C/C++ version of WordPerfect at the time on the same machine.
I suspect it was also suffering from poor garbage collection and other JVM problems.
And no one understood the great modularity and pluggability that had been designed into it, due to political problems at Corel, who could never figure out a business model for it.
Color me stupid ... (Score:2, Funny)
Language Indifference (Score:5, Interesting)
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in? For some reason, the Evermore Software folks are attempting to use this as a marketing bullet point (it's the first point on their web page, even), when Joe User really just wants to know why it's better than MS Office.
I write Java to pay the bills, and as such I'm a big supporter of the platform. But users just don't care. In fact because of the Microsoft FUD machine, saying it's Java might even be a turn-off to quasi-technical people. I once had a government purchasing manager say "Java? We're moving away from that because Microsoft no longer supports it." Idiotic yes, but to paraphrase Forrest Gump: Customer is as Customer does.
Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have. You can sell it to anybody. But from the customer standpoint it simply doesn't matter.
it could matter (Score:3, Interesting)
If you think that, you aren't going to compete on any platform. When I run something on Linux, I expect that it integrates tightly with the Linux operating system. None of the cross-platform dreck that has come out of Sun (OpenOffice, Java), does that--they all treat Linux as a second class citizen and ignore Linux key bindings, user interface conventions, et
support for EIOffice (Score:2, Funny)
Andele andele mami, E.I. E.I.
OFF-IIIIIIIIIIICE! What's happenin now?
Andele andele mami, E.I. E.I.
OFF-IIIIIIIIIIICE! If the head right, Nelly there ery'night
google cache (Score:2)
I can't tell... (Score:3, Interesting)
I would dearly love to have one suite that would run on Linux, Windows and Macs, *and* interchange documents with reasonably current MSO products. I can't tell if this one meets those criteria, other than not supporting Macs. Sadly, they aren't alone, there.
OOO does OK at supportoing the MSO standards, but isn't there, yet. ABIword and Gnumeric are great apps, but don't interchange docs that well (my fallback is simply to have apps on all three platforms that interchange documents).
Then there's the nightmare of scheduling software, but that's another issue.
BTW, neither the review nor the EIO site exhibited
No real place for this (Score:4, Interesting)
While I am not the biggest fan of OpenOffice (disclaimer I have tried OO and deinstalled it in favor of MS Office- flame away)I would use it in a second over this thing because OO is free and OO really does have some nice features.
Did anyone else notice this bit? (Score:3, Interesting)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer
* Sun HotJava
* Netscape Navigator Platforms Tested Linux
* Microsoft Windows 98
* Microsoft Windows ME Microsoft Windows NT
* Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows XP "
For one, half of those are OSes, not browswers. For two...well, IE is there. Not Firefox, Opera, etc. This just makes me wonder.
Like Poe's "The Raven" (Score:4, Funny)
Quoth the server, "Nevermore." =)
Re:Like Poe's "The Raven" (Score:3, Funny)
Over many a strange and spurious p0rn-site of "hot XXX galore",
While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour,
"Tis not possible," I muttered, "give me back my free hardcore!"
Quote the server, "404."
When will office-clones makers learn! (Score:4, Insightful)
Even powerpoint is almost a non-issue
How about Access/Excel...
So for any clone, ask these questions
Yes, but does it run crystal reports?
Yes, but does it run access (.db7) and have access-like switchboards off of which MANY soho businesses live? [Dentists, doctors, small mom & pops..] The JET engine may suck, but its the de-facto standard for mom and pops.
Yes, but do the macros they use at every major investment bank and packages like XLMiner work?
When there is a suitable ACCESS replacement for small business and something that runs crystal reports and data mining packages like XLMiner run, Microsoft is in trouble.
That last 10% of features will keep many major institutions around until near the bitter end.
competes with? (Score:5, Insightful)
The advantages of MS Office are:
The advantages of OpenOffice are:
What the heck are the advantages of EIOffice?
So, WTF?
It's from China... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now I know slash is full of good 'ol Mickysoft haters, but do we realy want to be celibrating a product from a country that's eyeing our technology jobs probably more so than India? It hasn't started yet, but most people agree that off-shoring develpment jobs to mainland China will happen soon. And this is basicaly their proof of concept that they can do it.
So, maybe its for the best not to give these guys any more publicity then they allready have.
Re:It's from China... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Corel Office for Java? (Score:2)
Re:Corel Office for Java? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Do Java Apps still feel "creepy" and slow. (Score:4, Funny)
Yes.