Read more about Koffice 1.3 Beta 2 here. On another note, Ximian has a nice presentation on the changes and planned changes for OO.org here.
Koffice 1.3 Beta 2 Released — OO.org Changes
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
From a commercial standpoint it’s ofcourse perfectly understandable what Ximian did to OOo. I’m a tad sad about the VFS integration though. I’m sure it’s nice and all that, but I’m a KDE user, I like KIO Slaves! Isn’t there a Kimian about? :{
Ofcourse I’ll have to ask the one question for KOffice; is Kword reaching the level of “usable but ignore the little glitches” yet? Last time I fired it up, granted it was 1.2, I managed to take it down within 5 minutes while just clicking around. And then another thing, how’s KOffice’s documentation?
Forgot to include hyperlinks. I’ll do it next time.
I dont know about KWord, but KSpread crashed on me 3 times in the last month. I have to be careful and make sure I save often. Good thing I only need it for one spreadsheet. I always thought the crashes happened becase I have a bad MB. Anyhow, I hope they keep working on koffice, it’s a pretty good suite.
Thought KOffice’s PDF import filter is not perfectly layout-wise, it worked nice for me for text and images when trying.
Shouldn’t it read like above? They didn’t change the original OO.o and it is unknown how many of their changes will be adopted for OO.o 1.2.
The Ximian changes to OO.o are a nice improvement from the vanilla offering on linux, but someone, somewhere, needs to port it to GTK2 the way Mozilla has been with Galeon/Epiphany etc. The problems with the current Ximian OO.o app are:
Doesn’t use the standard GTK file and print dialogs
UI doesn’t fully utilise the GTK theme
Doesn’t fit in with HIGified Gnome apps
I know Michael Meeks says OO.o is too big an app to use the HIG fully but it is still a very good guide which has generally been adopted by all of the major Gnome projects and should ideally be followed by a GTK port of OO.o wherever possible.
Another problem is the VFS integration. This doesn’t allow you to browse files on an NFS/Samba share in OO.o, only open files from within Nautilus or by typing the full path in the OO.o file dialog. Obviously this would be solved by a full GTK port when the new dialogs come out in 2.6.
Unfortunately the GTK port is a big job so I don’t see it happening any time soon unless companies like Sun/Redhat push it forward. I do agree in general that OO.o should be adopted as the Gnome Office app suite, but then I haven’t used Abiword/GNUmeric for some time. Perhaps Abiword etc. could be used as playgrounds for new ideas before folding the successful ones into the OO.o project? There is certainly too much spreading of programmer resources between these apps but then a lot of the work is voluntary, so who am I to tell these developers what to do?
Overall, it’s a step in the right direction, but not as big a step as is needed.
Merging Abiword into OOo would be like asking Perl to merge it’s ideas into PHP I’m afraid…
Well, I’m not a C/C++ man so I apologise if I sound like a complete idiot, but surely the core concepts/code structures could in some way be used to add new features once they are tested and approved.
I’ve moved scripts from Perl to PHP (and even Javascript/HTML to Java) in the past and, although you can’t exactly just copy and paste it can save doing a complete re-write. After all, when it comes down to it virtually all programs resolve down to a bunch of statements and most language syntax is fairly similar for this sort of thing.
But then again I may be wrong :o)
I was more aiming at “religious” problems
your forgiven.
Ah … Religion! The only thing (except old age) to cause more death and human misery than the Motor car.
I see where you’re coming from now =|:-)
You hit the nail, or atleast one nail on the head though. Atleast for me. It’s a shame to see all this functionality spread amongst all sorts of projects. At the same time, it’s great to have so much projects trying to be the best. Just tears you apart, doesn’t it
.
As a small business, I would want 1 flavor of applications. Because of Kopete instability I’ve been ‘forced’ to use GAIM for the past few months. I don’t like that. I want KDE applications with all the advantages that come from using KDE!
As a KDE user, I would like to see KOffice more stable (or usable, that’d do) so I could change it in for OpenOffice. I think Ximian did a wise thing here. If someone would to make OOo KIOSlave [1] and KPart [2] able, I’d instantly forget about KOffice. The speed I can live with.
[1] KIO Slave: Like Gnome VFS, but for KDE: let’s you access all sorts of filesystems (fish:/, smb:/ etc.)
[2] KParts: Reusable KDE Parts. Like the file dialog. Which I happen to love.
“It’s a shame to see all this functionality spread amongst all sorts of projects. At the same time, it’s great to have so much projects trying to be the best. Just tears you apart, doesn’t it
.”
In general I think that the number of competing open source projects is great for choice and should be encouraged. I’m not saying that the Abiword etc. projects should be closed, in fact one of the strengths of open source is that you probably couldn’t close a project even if you wanted to – it would just spring back up with another group of programmers at the wheel. But I do think the “official” Gnome Office project should choose one project or the other and focus their attention on it.
“As a small business, I would want 1 flavor of applications. Because of Kopete instability I’ve been ‘forced’ to use GAIM for the past few months. I don’t like that. I want KDE applications with all the advantages that come from using KDE!”
I agree. It’s great when I get the chance to show off my Gnome desktop with all the GTK2 apps looking their best. They also tend to make me more productive as everything’s “where it should be”. This has to be the advantage of projects like mozilla. They’ve made it modular so you can use the Gecko rendering engine to do the real work and add a GUI around it in your chosen toolkit. If only all major projects were made this way!
“If someone would to make OOo KIOSlave [1] and KPart [2] able, I’d instantly forget about KOffice. The speed I can live with.”
Precisely! If the OO.o project could be developed in a similar way to the mozilla project you could have a common base for all sorts of native apps which are fully file compatible, regardless of GUI toolkits and OS. This is definitely the way to go IMHO.
Personally, I would love to see KDE and Gnome guys adopt OpenOffice as the official suite for both.
It frees up other people to work more on the desktop aspects and refinement of the API’s of both GUI’s.
I am amazed at the size of OpenOffice.
The source is truly a monster. 🙂
What is more, I thought OpenOffice was already a GTK app.
???
I guess it is just a XtIntrnisics port then ???
I guess I should actually look and read the source to answer those questions instead of just sitting back in awe of the whole thing.
🙂
-gc
It feels like Ximian thinks it owns OpenOffice. It seems they want making a Gnome application from OpenOffice, and I do not like that.
As I see it, Gnome has Goffice, KDE has KOffice and OpenOffice is neutral. Then I read this: “Gnome is willing to throw away some of their ‘pride’ (…) in the acceptance of OpenOffice (…) instead of Gnome Office. This speaks for good business(…)” Translated: “Despite hard work, GnomeOffice never becomes a good suite of programs so let’s steal OpenOffice”
But actually, OOo typesetting is bad. Just divide a text in two columns and see what I mean. Luckily there is also TeX, which is great. And I hope KSpread 1.3 will be stable enough to use.
It seems (very regrettably) that QT/KDE apps are starting to get upstaged by GTK/Gnome programs. I for one would *love* to see KOffice mature into the premier office suite for KDE users. And it seems to be headed in that direction. I agree with the ‘eye candy’ position: while I don’t use Gnome, I have to admit that Gnome running Gnome apps looks really sharp. Likewise, KDE with native KDE apps is just gorgeous. And let’s face it: looks matter. That’s why we gobble up Gnome and KDE. And that’s why Windows and MacOS became so popular. (Appologies to all you minimalists out there.)
But I really wanna know what interest Ximian has with OOo. Are they planning a fork? Or a takeover? I don’t understand why they just don’t pour their programming resources into making GnomeOffice a better suite of apps, rather than gloming onto OpenOffice’s success.
Just my five cents.
I’d say Ximian is going after OpenOffice because it probably has a bigger userbase. After all, Ximian isn’t an altruistic firm which thinks about the bigger good. It has to make money. Money comes from having people use your software. OpenOffice has users. Users want an desktop they can use for (amongst others) writing documents. Ximian provides
I don’t quite understand why they’d want to ditch AbiWord (which is part of GnomeOffice, right?) because from what I hear about it, it’s a lovely application.
The most important reason for me wanting KDE applications on my KDE desktop is unified functionality. I don’t WANT to learn about how GNOME works, because I know KDE and I like it. Imagine wanting to save a file over FISH. I can do this easily in KDE. Heck, I can even bookmark a FISH link in the file dialog. Perhaps GNOME can do it to, but I’d have to figure it out. That’s the issue. I don’t have motivation (or time) to figure it out.
Yes Abiword is great application and it may seem strange to ditch it, but OpenOffice is developpe by many more developper than GnomeOffice (Sun people, Openoffice people and now Ximian people)…
And for KDE V.S. Gnome: You have the same attitude then windows users who do not want to change just because it need a little bit of effort. I”m using Gnome and KDE (okay I prefer gnome but…) and I love bot, it’s a big task to try both desktop.
I think I might get modded down for this…
But it does seem sad that another company can take years
of hard work put in by Sun/Star, make some – albeit – nice
UI changes, and sell it off as an “improved” product.
Makes me wonder if any company would ever consider selling
their core product as Open Souce.
Okay, time to mod me down for being OT, I guess
– Xalan
Aside from certain technical problems, it’s also a big frustration to use apps from both DE’s. That has little to do with wether GNOME or KDE is your preference. If you have GNOME and KDE “has the shit going on”, it’s really annoying to leave your known functionality in GNOME behind and use KDE’s. It’s different. Difference or inconsistency [ as Eugenia will agree to ] is baaad ( not to mention enormously irritating ) in a DE.
I’m indeed unwilling to invest a little effort. That’s because ” I shouldn’t have to “. Don’t get me wrong. I could easily start using GNOME applications. It’s not that I’m not capable of doing it. I’ve been using Linux for the past 5 or 6 years with window managers going from Windowmaker to Blackbox to GNOME to KDE and distro’s from Redhat to Slackware, Debian and Gentoo. I’ve been around. That’s just not the issue.
But I guess I’m getting to far into imflamable terrority and just a taaaaaaad offtopic now, so I’ll tone it down a bit..
Please do notice that I’m by no means trying to put GNOME down. It could be just as well the other way around and still be terribly annoying.
But it does seem sad that another company can take years
of hard work put in by Sun/Star, make some – albeit – nice
UI changes, and sell it off as an “improved” product.
—
The good thing about this is that someone else could just as well do it to Ximian. Well, with everything besides the gorguous art anyway.
Out of topic:
Ah … Religion! The only thing (except old age) to cause more death and human misery than the Motor car.
Well, “religion is ineherent to human-kind” condition (Carl Yunger on a letter to S. Freud) since the pre-historic funerals and rituals and it traverse all human cultures from egipcians to himalaians to south america aztech cultures.
……
I like koffice much more than OO.org. I use 1.2.1 without major stability issues when I have to write fax covers or other elaborated documents here.
Plus, koffice produces good .pdf with graphics (for me, at least) if you choose “print to pdf”, a la Adobe “Acrobat PDF writer”.
Don’t know about OO.org, I heard they will have a pdf converter on the next version of OO.org (1.2 ?). You can use the same method but with worst resultes than koffice on Linx.
To be honest, ~70% of the time I use Microsoft office 2k
but that’s because windows is already up.
Granted, I don’t use those apps a lot but I have 1.2.1 (on KDE 3.1.2) and I haven’t seen any of them bomb out. I use FreeBSD and always build everything locally from ports, including QT and KDE. Perhaps binary packages (which I expect most people to use with Linux) don’t work as well?
I wouldn’t mind seeing OO.o being the main office app for Linux with both a Gnome and KDE version. Then work on filters and things could be shared between them.
But I really wanna know what interest Ximian has with OOo. Are they planning a fork? Or a takeover? I don’t understand why they just don’t pour their programming resources into making GnomeOffice a better suite of apps, rather than gloming onto OpenOffice’s success.
Like with .NET and Miguel’s Folly (Mono), Ximian has to piggyback on someone else’s code. They can’t put their efforts into making GNOME and its associated apps world beaters; they have to glom on somebody else. I’m beginning to think there is a waste of energy and talent taking place there.
1. It makes buisness sense.. An office suite is important to the enterprise market that Ximian seems to want to push into.
2. GNOME is Sun’s desktop. GNOME is Ximian’s desktop. It makes sense for them to continue to push OOo into a more gnome-ish solution (complete with GNOME HIG-type things that don’t fit into KDE very well)
koffice is good, but needs some polish and Office compatablity (same problem plauging gnome-office such as ).. a lot more of the missing features are there in 1.3 that made 1.2 unsable (for me)… I think koffice 2.0 will be a rad product. Parts of StarOffice have been around for nearly 14 years now, it’s amazing how the koffice and abiword people have done in such a short time.
I like koffice much more than OO.org. I use 1.2.1 without major stability issues when I have to write fax covers or other elaborated documents here.
Plus, koffice produces good .pdf with graphics (for me, at least) if you choose “print to pdf”, a la Adobe “Acrobat PDF writer”.
Don’t know about OO.org, I heard they will have a pdf converter on the next version of OO.org (1.2 ?). You can use the same method but with worst resultes than koffice on Linx.
—
The PDF printer in OpenOffice ( I think I run 1.0.1 ) works just fine. I use it to print PDFs for my customers almost daily.
Not off topic at all (as far as I am concerned). The company I work for does work for Sun. We ended up getting one copy of StarOffice to install on a comp to convert documents for use with M$ Office.
Since then I have tried out OpenOffice as a replacement (I have used it at home, but my home usage patterns do not match that of buisiness). We found one sticking point: the print dialog for presentations in OO.o only allows you to print one slide per page, whereas in StarOffice it allows up to six. We may well end up buying copies of StarOffice for everyone at some point just because of that.
The point being Sun has in a way put some minor changes into OO.o, fonts (which we don’t use), a database (which we are never going to touch), and a few random little features. Sun sells that.
It sounds like Ximian’s value added is actually more impressive from our point of view, but we are going to stick to StarOffice until it prints six slides per page.
Sun has nothing to lose and everything to gain by having a wider addoption of OO.o. The only thing I would be concerned about if I were sun would be having M$ Office formats set as default. I wonder if either company would be interested in a Ximian branded StarOffice.
I really want to like OOo but sadly I can’t get on with it. The most basic functionality I require (word count on selection) doesn’t exist yet, (there seems to be a macro work around though), and their template management just seems bizarrely complex. I just can’t get my head round how it is all supposed to work.
Koffice on the other hand does everything brilliantly. For me, it’s stable, I write long documents, with complex layouts (multiple frames, multiple images), it exports perfectly to PDF. Has a spell checker that works, has word count on selection, has great funtionality and it enjoyable to use (it looks spanking gorgeous). Whereas Ooo looks a bit naff to me and it’sn’t enjoyable to use.
I’d like to see Ooo become more modular though, making it easier to download certain applications as you want them. I never need a spreadsheet app, nor make much use out of the presentation tool, yet still have to download the whole suite, (same is true of minor upgrades, download 70mb files to go from 1.02 to 1.03)
G
As far as the current versions of OOo go there is a closer working link with KDE. OOo 1.0 takes the KDE windows background colour and will use it in Gnome and other GTK environments.
OOo 1.1Beta will take the KDE background colour in KDE but maintain is default colour in Gnome.
OOo when Sun first open sourced it was officially supposed to become the Gnome office suite – I guess because of Sun’s support for Gnome.
Koffice on the other hand does everything brilliantly. For me, it’s stable, I write long documents, with complex layouts (multiple frames, multiple images), it exports perfectly to PDF. Has a spell checker that works, has word count on selection, has great funtionality and it enjoyable to use (it looks spanking gorgeous). Whereas Ooo looks a bit naff to me and it’sn’t enjoyable to use.
—
So how come I can’t look around in KWord for 5 minutes and crash it ? I’ve heard many other people complain.. Tell us man! WHAT IS YOUR SECRET! 😉
I’m a KDE user, and KOffice is nice, but I really wish the developers would get over their prejudices and include proper import/export for MS Office documents like OpenOffice/StarOffice.
My sole complaint with OpenOffice would have to be how slow it is at startup. The comment re speed in the Win4Lin 5 review (faster to boot into Win98 and run MS Office than start OO!) was quite telling. One has to assume they are working on it.