Gobe Productive is a well known and the most important third party application in the BeOS world. It is a powerful Office Suite. Gobe (the same developers who wrote ClarisWorks for Macintosh in the past - now called AppleWorks) is now looking for a larger market than BeOS has to offer, and version 3.0 of Productive will be first published for the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. A Linux version is scheduled for development and release shortly after the Windows one. This is the world's first preview of Gobe Productive 3 (GP3), with lots of screenshots and a good portion of information about the upcoming product (a public beta version should be released in the near future too).Disclaimer: I don't care if you don't find my grammar/spelling appropriate. Honestly, that's the best I can do. I bet you don't speak Greek at all. ;-)
The whole beta package comes in a (just) 7 MB .zip file (beta as of November 1st), but worry not, the final version will be distributed in a CD with lots of extras, like templates, inks, installation manager etc. Extracting this base beta package, only takes 18 MB of hard drive space, and it is all ready to use. When clicking the executable, a nice looking prompt window pops up asking you to choose your new base document (see picture).
Launching of the office suite is pretty fast, around 2 to 3 seconds in my machine which has a SCSI hard drive. Hacking around the files on the GP3 folder, we can find a file, called libbe.dll and in the Translators folder, we find libraries named like PNGTranslator.dll etc. I am sure that BeOS users and developers will recognise these names. Apparently, Gobe has ported a big chunk of the BeOS API over to Windows in order to properly port Productive 3. Not the whole BeOS API have been ported, but surely a big portion of it, the part that Productive is dependant on. Along with the API, services like the image and document translators have been ported as well. A note for non-BeOS users: Translators are system libraries that are reusable by other applications. For example, if you have an PNG Translator you can write an image viewer that will use this translator to read/write PNGs. You don't have to re-invent the wheel by adding your own code for dealing with PNGs. Under BeOS, a lot of translators are installed by default, making the life of both the user and developer easier.
The application suite has been tested on a P-III 450 Mhz, 3Dfx Voodoo3, 512 MB of SDRAM and Windows98SE.
