The well known reviewer Walter S. Mossberg (WSJ) reviews the gobeProductive 3 Office Suite (the world exclusive Preview was hosted at OSNews two months ago). WSJ’s review seems to be a fair one overall, even if he missed a couple of good points like the PDF exporting and the all-in-one document format that is featured in GP3. In related news, there is a new GP3 demo coming out in 1-2 days from now (version 3.0.2) and you will be able to test run the suite yourselves. If you already have decided to buy the application and support Gobe, the price is now lowered at $75 USD, which is a steal, considering the fact that its Family License allows you to install it in all your home computers, plus one at your workplace.
Walter S. Mossberg Reviews gobeProductive 3
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I wish I had the cash right now to spend $75 for this truly great piece of software. Unfortunately I blew it on OfficeXP before I knew Gobe for Windows was actually going to exist. I was a 2.0 owner Gobe please know that I am going to buy your product eventually and will recommend it to everyone until then!
We going to see a 3.0 for BeOS, perhaps??
Not likely.
Its too bad that Gobe didnt shake the three long enough to get rid of all those import/export bugs. IMO that is the biggest problem with this suite. I bought the suite, and use it somewhat, but I am afraid I have to reinstall Office just to get my timeslips in Excel working properly.
Boy do I hate that… :/
Yeah right,
They probably JUST escaped going under by ABANDONING the BeOS Platform and focusing on Window$/Linux development. How many copies were actually bought by the Be Community? Probably not nearly enough to profit much, if any with, such a GREAT product on the best platform. Happened with all big developers on BeOS platform. What happened to the BEST mail client I have EVER used (and I swear I have seen them ALL!) called “Mail-It”? They stopped with release 3 I believe because lack of sales. HOW? The Be community in whole bitched and moaned about stagnant development and Be not gaining much ground and not enough people put their $$ (meaning SUPPORT!) behind it.
I BOUGHT Gobe2, Mail-It, Opera 3.62 and other little apps. Not to mention EVERY relase of BeOS since 3 and would have kept on paying for every release coming. And how it is time to face the Reaper BeOS is 99.9 gone for good. And the projects to try and “replace” BeOs are junk and worthless. OpenBeOS? Please. Instead of moving forward and having BeINC continue to improve BeOS as fast as they were, we get a group of people trying to reinvent the wheel. All that effort to reproduce what was once allready done. By the time that is complete, it will be hopelessly way behind Mac OS X and probably even Windows will have caught up with it. Although both could NEVER be as good or have as much potential I truely believe…
Gobe Productive is an excellent desktop publishing app. Its an average Word Processor / Spreadsheet app / Presentation tool / Image manipulator, but it shines as a DeskTop Publishing App. Walter got that right. Competing against M$Word is suicide, thats why Gobe focus on DTP. Smart move.
PS – I received GP3 yesterday. Sweet.
[/i]and the all-in-one document format that is featured in GP3[/i]
From the article:
“GobeProductive also uses a single basic interface and a single file format for all of its
documents, whether they are word-processor, spreadsheet, presentation or graphics
files.”
Just being pedantic
PP
anonymous you have provided a flame in true <a href=http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/16048.html>Register… style.
You should feel proud of this accomplishment – not everyone is capable of such twaddle
From the review:
> Some of this success was due to mistakes by competitors and some to
> Microsoft’s trademark bare-knuckles business tactics.
Whoops. That must be a typo. He must’ve meant brass-knuckles business tactics. Hmm.. or maybe roll-o-dimes business tactics. Not sure.
When I tried the beta, I couldn’t read my BeOS Gobe files in windows. Have they fixed that?
I think that complaining about GP3’s inability to import/export MS format docs is more than a bit obvious – can anyone name one application that does it flawlessly? It is, of course, an unfortunate fact of life that MS has taken a huge amount of the world’s data hostage, and that communicating in those formats is necessary for an office suite to be considered useful (are you listening, DOJ?). But on its own merits, GP3 does a pretty fine job, bugs notwithstanding.
Personally, I wanted them to squash more bugs before releasing, in order to minimize reviewers’ public whinings (buggy software?? Whoever heard of such a thing?!?) – but I guess they had their reasons, and I am still pretty happy with the product I received.
I had the beta, and it was pathetic. There wasn’t even a way to center text. It was worthless. By the way, an office suite is worthless unless it has excellent import/export for M$ Word docs.
My $0.02
Nate: have you tried adding an extension (.pve) to your BeOS files? That seemed to fix the problem for me.
j: Pathetic troll attempt.
I find that the two things I’ve booted most into Win2k for lately have been gobeProductive and the new personalStudio beta. I’ve tried others but these two seem like the best thought out proggies for their price range. Nice job on both of them.
Big Al: It wasn’t a troll. Think about the features of gobeProductive for Windows Beta versus the features of StarOffice or M$ Office. That is like comparing… vi to AbiWord. gobeProductive may be good for some uses, but it’s not for mine. First, I am constantly sending and receiving Word documents. Next, the single thing I do most is take notes. I use Word’s bullet-list maker, which allows me to make a beautiful outline. gobeProductive simply fails for both those uses.
Outlines are SO important. I would be happy with a word processor JUST for making outlines.
My $0.02
Saying you couldn’t center text was absurd and pretty trollish…
… and sounds like a troll, chances are pretty good that it *is* a troll
Is there anyplace that tells what was updated with the 3.0.2 update. I checked the gobe website but could not find it.
Thankyou.
No app does flawless import/export, but some do it better than others. I have to import Excel files a lot. StarOffice has no problem with it, but GP3 has serious formatting problems, and most of those don’t show up until printing. Which bring up another issue; where is the print preview? If I had seen what GP3 was about to do to those spreadsheets, I wouldn’t have printed out those pages of large ink blobs. For now I create new docs in GP3, but import using StarOffice.
First thing I did when I received it is put it into my BeBox looking for a ‘hidden’ BFS partition. Nothin…:-( Anyway, it’s great for Windows. I curse at MSword all day at work, with all the wiz-bang features that are supposed to save time, which end up wasting time. It’s nice to get back to a suite that offers a very clean, easy to use, intuitive design. The pdf output is worth it’s price alone to me. I also try to support smaller software firms like Gobe.
Doug and others,
Well it was certainly not the review we would have most liked. We were judged mostly on the merits of our file translation fidelity and found wanting. Sadly this seemed to be the most important aspect of the review, comparing us to Office instead of examining what value the app itself provides.
Well *news break* we’re not ever going to be Office (and we’re not trying to be). We’d be crazy to think that a team of a dozen with limited financing could produce what dozens of fully staffed Microsoft teams with nearly unlimited financing could produce. Ok. Maybe we are a little crazy.
We don’t want to be all of Office – we just want to help people do things an easier way.
However, I firmly believe that with each release we’ve significantly improved the product (yes including the translators) and are continuing to create a product that fits the needs of modest generalist users.
Doug: – page view == print preview. It should print just like what you see. If you’re getting some kind of print bugs (blobs) please send us the info. We did have a few printing problems that were fixed post-beta before ship. (mostly because users with different equipment were kind enough to let us know about them).
Egil: – you bought it. Help us continue to improve it. If you are running into translation problems PLEASE send us samples and let us know what you are seeing. We know we don’t support Charts in Excel (not something we hide) and we know that we don’t support importing features we don’t have (pivot tables, Word Art, etc). It is very helpful for us to know what you’re running into. You’ve joined the community of our users – unlike very large companies we still care about our users one individual at a time.
Nate: you should be able to read any of our old BeOS files.
j (aka troll): There wasn’t even a way to center text. – Ok see that little button near the middle of the word processing ribbon. Looks like some centered lines. Select the text you want to center and click it. PS: this works the same way as Word. I thought I’d tell you or you would be suprised to find out that center text doesn’t work in Word either.
Greg: thanks for the kind words. Our spirits could use them today.
>Well it was certainly not the review we would have most liked. We were judged mostly on the merits of our file translation fidelity and found wanting. Sadly this seemed to be the most important aspect of the review, comparing us to Office instead of examining what value the app itself provides. Well *news break* we’re not ever going to be Office (and we’re not trying to be).
<P>
Tom,<BR>
in all honesty and respect,<BR>
*news break*!<BR>
Creating an office suite, it will get you compared to Office, want it or not. Office has 99% of the office suites in this ugly and painful world and when a user is switching to an alternative suite, importing/exporting Office formats that the rest of the world can read, is more important than even having .pve. I hate to break to you, but people will always compare to Office, there is no way around it for the kind of application you decided to develop. It is the nature of your application that will get you compared to Office every single time. So, from this point of view, MSJ’s review, was fair and honest.
My only problems with the review was the non-mentioning of the PDF and HTML exporting and maybe the all-in-one document feature (which a reviewer easily can decide to not mention it because Office can do that too – even if the technical merits behind it are different for the two suites, a user cannot see the difference and the reviews are FOR the users). I have emailed Mr Mossberg (who was very kind to timely reply back) so he knows about my gripe regarding the non-mentioning of the PDF exporting.
But speaking as a person who also runs a news site and writes reviews every so often, and also as a friend and supporter of Gobe, I am telling you: do not even think that there is going to be a SINGLE review out there that it won’t compare you to Office. Impossible.
Only my preview was not so much comparable to Office simply because:
1. I don’t use Office so I have no idea what to compare.
2. I am a fellow developer and I know Gobe’s technical details to make me stick to the point of what GP3 can do or what can’t do.
But don’t expect the same from other reviewers.
I gave an intelligent, observant comment about the software. In the beta, you could not center text. There is nothing wrong with stating facts. Whether you _want_ the facts to be true is your own problem. BePeople often are “insecure” about their software….
J – stop being a trolling moron. I happen to have the Gobe Beta and centering is definitely there as I just used it. Before you troll please think – it really isnt worth the bother.
Doug: – page view == print preview. It should print just like what you see. If you’re getting some kind of print bugs (blobs) please send us the info. We did have a few printing problems that were fixed post-beta before ship. (mostly because users with different equipment were kind enough to let us know about them).
For docs created in GP3, there is no problem. For the Excel docs I mentioned, greatly enlarged characters would be a better description than “blob.” I get character fragments enlarged to several inches high, and several excess pages of it. Very strange that this only shows up on the printer. These files are full of character and cell formatting, and I’m sure that makes it much worse. If you like I’ll print out another copy and fax it to you. Sorry I didn’t discover this while you were still in beta.
GP3 is a great start and I use it for everything I can. I don’t use MS Office, but I get stuck with a lot of Office documents from contract clients. If I have a choice I ask them for RTF instead of DOC.
J,
Yes you could center the text. I used every beta from the first day. It worked. I did a whole paper using the betas and use many many of the features. Even for a beta it worked very well. I did not have any inport export issues. I have been using it to open word and excel files with zero problems. All the bugs that I reported far as I can tell were fixed. Thank you Ben for responding to my emails that probly were confusing. But in the end the bugs got fixed. I hope Gobe has a long future and can’t wait to see what comes nexted.
These are but two great features. No, it is not “Office” but it’s not $400 dollars for each PC in my home either. Yes, it will be compared to “Office” and import/export is important, but it still is a a solid application.
Tom, you guys did a great job on it. Is there room for some improvements… sure, but you guys put a heck of a good product out for a great price. It’s the FIRST Release on Windows… sheesh.
I would buy it all over again. (Yes, I got the Pre-release price, but would pay the full price in heart-beat.)
Greg
Realisticly, the fact is that Word and Excel documents are part of our every day lives, especially when we deal with other people and companies. We have .doc documents floating around all the time here at my work. We even have some word e-mails. I don’t use word to write my stuff (usually wordpad of hand-written HTML), but I need to read word all the time. When I got the form for my interview here, it was in word format, and advanced enough that my Word 97 could barely read it (And Wordpad couldn’t read it at all).
That’s Microsoft’s “Fire and Motion” strategy http://joel.editthispage.com/articles/fog0000000339.html“>on . Their competitors spend so much time catching up with their format that Office always has the edge, feature-wise.
As Mossberg said, there’s a problem with exporting. With an application that has a fairly different philosophy from Office, your end up not being able to properly export to http://joel.editthispage.com/articles/fog0000000052.html“>the . As long as you don’t have import *and* export working properly, you’re screwed.
Finally, there’s always the risk of http://joel.editthispage.com/articles/fog0000000020.html“>missin… . For any executive, importing/exporting powerpoint is a must-have. For others, it’ll be another small feature (like, some arcane image format). Problem is that “this feature” is different for each one of us. And so on…
While comparing to Office is indeed unavoidable, gobeProductive is really positioned more in line with the “Works” series of programs. Yes, the import and export features with Word could be better; I’m noting a few quirks now in that (which I’ll send in when I figure out a good way to document them–some of them have to do with the rather unique approach Productive has to styles, I suspect).
Speaking of Works-type programs, the one thing that gP is closest to is–not surprisingly–AppleWorks. I’ve gathered there’s still animosity directed at Cupertino from the Gobe guys, but I would really, really, REALLY like to see an OS X native version of Productive released. Given all the ire the changes in AppleWorks 6 earned Apple, introducing a competitor advertised as “from the original creators of AppleWorks” could go over quite well. And I suspect I’m not alone in having a Windows desktop machine and a PowerMac laptop.
Don’t get me wrong I expect we’ll be compared. But I would like something more than just a comparison in the review. Some additional discussion of our feature set, target audience, whatever – in addition to the inevitable comparison would have been nice.
-Tom
Gobe to MS Office is like vi to AbiWord? Don’t you mean AbiWord to vi? Or Office + Gobe + AbiWord < vi?
Hi Tom,
I have sent you guys samples allready, I did it in the beta 1 release, it wasnt working properly in beta 2, so I resent it and gave you guys another notice about it, and it wasnt fixed in beta 3, so I sent another notice to you guys about this.
Its still not fixed, and I still havent got a reply from you.
Also, I dont see why you dont set up a simple forum @ your site to take care of these events, its MUCH better for us “users” of Productive to be able to see what kind of problems others have been into and read the fixes there, than to have to ask you the same things over and over and… you get my point!
I’m not a trolling moron… I don’t know what beta you had, but when I checked it out, centering was definitely not there.
And, yes, gobe:Word :: vi:AbiWord. The point is that vi has significantly less features. Thought that was obvious.
Before you all call me a trolling moron, compare _that_ software to StarOffice or Microsoft Office. BTW, I also hate Microsoft, but M$ Office is the best available.
The article is essentially correct and fair. It is a step forward for Gobe in the press.
Gobe can do very well if they can capture a small portion of the Windows market for homes and graphic artists / desktop publishers. Perhaps the OEMs will take notice.
Gobe now has very strong foundation in Windows, Linux and BeOS. It will only get better from here. I’ll keep praying for a 3.x release for BeOS.
Congrats to Gobe for being reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
ciao
yc
Hi J – I tested this on the first (and later) Windows betas released, you must have got an early alpha release for the Sun UltraSparc, oh – wait.. there was no version for the UltraSparc…
Not sure what version you are referring to then…
Everyone seems to think that MS Formats are a certain standard, but there is no specification for these formats! No specs, no standard. That’s how I see it.
People should learn to stick to formats that are specified. If someone cannot do that the document isn’t worth reading.
You can distribute quality documents in PDF quite well, actually much better than any word document. That’s why I’m still interested in seeing Gobe Productive 3.0 …
About MS Office being great:
I really hate applications that “think” they are more intelligent than their users!
Once I edited a document at work and set a word to boldface. Suddenly that single word appeard in the the table of contents and it took quite a while to get it out of there and still have the boldface style.
Somehow adding boldface led to the word having the same style as a heading and Word must have thought “uh, that must be a heading, let’s add that to the table of contents”.
That’s what I call *stupid* software and not *intelligent* one!
Where’s the detailed Gobe file format specification? (I’d prefer source, because it can’t lie, but I’ll take a spec) I don’t see one. That means you’d be putting your data much more at risk by keeping it in Gobe’s format than by choosing Office. If Gobe go out of business then in five years you’ll have trouble finding a way to read those files. Sad but true.
[I don’t know about Word because frankly I don’t care for word processors of any kind, my experience with MS Office formats is solely with XLS]
Microsoft’s own documentation for XLS is better than most file format specifications, public or otherwise. The 10% of Excel which is undocumented or incorrectly documented is less than essential for loading most files, and generally centers on hidden optimisations which would likely be different for some other spreadsheet.
The Open Office project has extensive documentation which shows where Microsoft were wrong (deliberately or simply because of a typo) and I would say that from the two sets of documentation you COULD write a decent import filter, but of course Gobe have very limited resources.
Here’s an executive summary: An Excel file is a BIFF stream (wrapped in the moderately well documented MS OLE structured storage in later versions) which consists of many (type, length, data) blocks. Most such blocks are documented, a few are slightly mysterious, and some are simply arcane.
The HUGE problem with importing XLS is that you must make the same assumptions in your software as Microsoft make in theirs. If you choose to do something different because the Microsoft way is stupid, or because your way is easier on your preferred platform/ compiler/ toolkit, then Excel files will become incrementally harder to load in your software.
This bites Microsoft too (I’m sure they regret the 1900 vs 1904 date thing for example) so don’t imagine that you’re alone in cursing this archaic file format, there must be Microsoft engineers pulling their hair out too. Transitioning to an XML format seems promising, but might take until the end of the decade.
I’ve used gP3 for my laptop computer at work and for my desktop computer at home since I got the cd in the mail. And…I love it. Sure, I’m having to tweak the imported word docs for layout and such, but overall it’s been faster and easier to work with than “that-other-app”.
Now…if I could just get the following I’d be one happy camper:
* gP3 for BeOS
* command-line options (imagine multiple converts of doc’s to PDF or PVE)
* Palm version/viewer
I like Gobe Productive, but honestly don’t see it capuring much market share on Windows, where Office is flat-out the standard. So I think their portability goal is a good one.
However, why Linux? I mean, probably half of Linux users are using it because of the open-source philosophy, so they’ll never put down money for closed-source software. And then there’s the deluge of imperfect but free word processors and other office utilities available for the system. Most notably, as much as many of us (including myself) consider Linux on the desktop to be a joke at this time, there’s quite a bit of money and effort being poored into StarOffice. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s got many of the features of Microsoft Office, and is free, to boot. So where’s the market? A small group of DTP-ish Linux guys who want to pay for closed-source software? Seems nonexistant to me.
However, look at the Macintosh. You have a bunch of schools and home users who were using ClarisWorks for the longest time. Now, though, Appleworks is fairly mediocre, and Apple doesn’t really seem to be developing it any more, now that they have Office available and their iApps to worry about (at least, that’s the way it seems, given how incomplete the current version of Appleworks is). Plus, the Mac community seems more open to buying lesser-known software than people on other platforms, and not to mention that many Mac users loved Clarisworks. So why not make Gobe Productive for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X? With the OS X version, you’ll get newer Mac owners, possibly people who will buy the new iMac and whatnot, and with OS 9, you’ll provide an upgrade for schools and other groups who don’t have the computing power or support structure to move to OS X. Not to mention that the number of desktop Mac users is much greater than desktop Linux users, and that Mac people tend to be more into DTP, anyway.
Seems like a no-brainer to me…
I sent in my coupon for GP3 for Linux today. This is an app that could make Linux more popular with the non-geek crowd. I hope is is a true Linux app and not something drunk on WINE. Maybe WINE apps can work, but I got gun-shy after Corel’s trash heap they called Photo-Paint for Linux.
Yes, Mac has between 2 and 20 times the desktop user base depending on who you believe. It does seem like the logical place to go next.
“OpenBeOS? Please. Instead of moving forward and having BeINC continue to improve BeOS as fast as they were, we get a group of people trying to reinvent the wheel…”
I would like to give an example of just such a thing succeeding. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. All of these were “reinvented” in order to remove from them the AT&T owned BSD source. Once that task was accomplished, they were able to distribute what is rapidly becoming one of my favorite OSes.
I liked BeOS and purchased several versions of it. I also bought BeProductive since version 1.0 (up to and including 3.0 for Windows and Linux, when it comes out). I would like to see an OpenBeOS project succeed by removing the Palm owned source and making it freely available to everyone. I would also like to see a project like this improve upon several of the BeOS quirks that irritated me.
Since “reinventing the wheel” has proved successful with BSD, I think, and really hope it will, it can be just as successful with BeOS.