StarOffice 8 Beta available For Public Download. At HUP they installed SO 8 beta and grabbed some nice screenshots.
StarOffice 8 Beta Available
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And its very buggy and unstable, at least on my Solaris x86. The new database module is a nice proof of concept but its the worst of the lot. Writer is well…Writer and it works okay. Presentation tends to crash with more than one animation in a slide.
It might be nice when finished but it needs work still.
How did star office’s UI fall so far behind open office’s? It looks terrible compared to any version of open office I’ve seen running on Linux lately.
It looks even worse than the screenshots would lead you to believe. And the splash screen is more a puke yellow green.
I beg to differ, it’s using gtk (on Linux anyway) and just follows whatever theme you are using on your desktop. As for crashing, I have not experienced this myself, but I have only used writer and calc.
Its same as OpenOffice 1.9 beta I’m using. Is a Star Office exact copy of OpenOffice? I dont care about look but in OpenOffice 1.9 I’m still facing lots of problem to open MS Office docs! I wish they would have worked on that first before improving the looks! Open any MS doc, which has some tables, header and images you will find they really neeed to work hard on it.
Anyway rest of the menu and look improvemnts are welcome one. They take you closer to MS – Word! Means less learning curve for new comers.
OpenOffice 2.0 RC1 came out three days ago 🙂
And it now has a database engine, and a Windows or GTK+ native look/feel UI (not sure it if is actually using native widgets, but its pretending to pretty well)
Thrift – on Linux, most OO.o builds use Ximian (i think’s) GUI. OO.o 1.x on Windows or the Mac still looked as ugly as StarOffice does.
MS Doc compatiblity is not limited by the coders working one Star/Open Office but by MSFT.
It’s not like there is a manual for decoding the doc format, or network traffic to monitor(samba)
To me, it just appears to be the same as the openoffice betas/rc, with the addition of some templates and the adabas database.
In _your_opinion_. It’s actually just using the JDS theme in the screenshots, it appears. Sort of reminds me of Ami Pro for some reason (why oh why did MS Word have to become popular–Ami Pro was so much better).
Anyone know if they’ve taken out the ability to make it look like os/2 and MacOS 8-9? I think it was still in StarOffice6, can’t remember if it was in 7. Probably not the most useful feature anymore…
The icon and color hints and stuff are coming along pretty well.
But …. the dialog boxes are not Gnome or HIG and in general the interface still feels too well Office 95’ish in my opinion.
Both StarOffice and OpenOffice are big and slow and unwieldy for daily use imo.
I prefer the combo of Gnumeric and Abiword (since it got table support and some other features) but for really complicated documents I still stick with OpenOffice.
I never fire up Calc. Gnumeric just works.
Really wish criawips (gtk version Presentation tool) would catch some developer traction but looks pretty damn dead in the water.
Its not some C++ hate. I use Firefox after all. No, I just want something quick that has a look and feel that does not make me want to chunk my linux distro CDs out of the damn window.
“Both StarOffice and OpenOffice are big and slow and unwieldy for daily use imo.”
It’s 7+ million lines of portable C/C++ code. Of course it doesn’t perform as well as native unportable proprietary closed MS Office code. I still choose OpenOffice.org/StarOffice. Fancy that.
I took a look at OO.org’s source tree not too long ago…I swear that’s probably the biggest open source project out there. Holy cow, compiling the thing takes _forever_. I guess I’ll stick to pre-built ones from now on.
People don’t give the OO.org folks enough credit to have to understand and manage such a large project.
Toolbars have relief, menu bar doesn’t. Colors for toolbars and menu bar are different. Isn’t it ugly?
gnumeric is nice but lacking so much behind calc.
gnumeric cant even do basic things like splitting a sheet so you can keep totals at the bottom and everything else above.
>> It’s not like there is a manual for decoding the doc format, or network traffic to monitor(samba)
How is having traffic to monitor different from having files to examine?
Admittedly some docs would go a long way, however, if MSFT can’t make Mac Office 100% compatible with Windows Office, I think it is pretty unrealistic to expect 100% compatibility from OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.
As long as open-source software doesn’t improve their GUI such as Firefox, joe user won’t use it. People prefer paying the MS tax and having a good-looking product. It makes sence since these are products that people use every day.
OpenOffice 2.0 RC1 came out three days ago 🙂
Did it? Do you have a link to that?
The point is, why are they trying to look like an Office 2003 rip-off. Don’t they have any individualty?
http://download.openoffice.org/680/
1.9.79 is 2.0 RC1.
1.9.79 is not 2.0 RC1, it is a beta candidate (pre-beta) and will be released as a beta if it is good enough.
Hrm, you’re right. Misread the OO.o page
I’ve been using 1.9.x since 1.9.65 without any problems though. Very stable, feels much faster than 1.1.x, Presenter has really really matured, and they’ve got a Mozilla plugin now.
HI all…
Well, I think it looks just fine on my Linux machine. I like the blue instead of the kinda beige/yellow of StarOffice 7. I have a couple of itty bitty bug issues here and there but none of the “big” things that others are complaining about. I think it’s an advance over SO7 and OOo 1.1.
Maybe I’m just not as picky as some, but I think this is great software…….and the price is right too. And I don’t see anybody commenting about the new OASIS group OpenDocumentFormat which is a GREAT move indeed.
>Admittedly some docs would go a long way, however, if MSFT can’t make Mac Office 100% compatible with Windows Office, I think it is pretty unrealistic to expect 100% compatibility from OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.
Hell the Windows versions can’t even stay compatible with each other. In an office with Office versions ranging from 95 to 2003, documents break all the time. We have to make sure they are all set to the lowest common demominator.
>> I swear that’s probably the biggest open source project out there
It is. Supposedly its the biggest gcc compiled program and that is the reason why it starts up so slow. gcc has problems with huge programs.
As a objective analyst, I think that bad compatibility comes from added features which, not being present in the old software, break a little havoc when the older version opens a file created with the newer.
As a cynical, I think that the main reason of bad compatibility is to force upgrade, which means not only more money, but fidelization, because it strenghtens the idea of the end user that to see a microsoft file you need a microsoft product.
Or, at best, a newer microsoft product.
What a world!
Huh? Didn’t you notice that the look and feel of Office 2003 is a rip off from a KDE theme?
No I did not notice this, how did you get this idea from?
“It’s 7+ million lines of portable C/C++ code. Of course it doesn’t perform as well as native unportable proprietary closed MS Office code. I still choose OpenOffice.org/StarOffice. Fancy that. ”
Yeah, really portable, that’s why we have to wait for a Mac-Version for ever, right? Don’t come now with the X11-Version or the Java one. Firefox is portable and was retrived from a big code mess called Netscape, so it is possible to make portable Code, but Ooo is definatly not a good example of this.
“Yeah, really portable, that’s why we have to wait for a Mac-Version for ever, right?”
Exactly when was Apple’s native GUI APIs in the standard C++ libraries? It takes a lot of work to make a native “proper” Mac OS X application–work that applies to no other platform.