Office Archive

If all goes well, this summer I'll be building a new house. I've owned a few houses before, some of them built in the 1920s and 30s, and full of all the charm and quirks of an old house, and a couple that were pretty new, with the lack of craftsmanship and imagination that's typical in most new construction in the USA today. But this time I'm building a custom home, just to my specifications, so I can have whatever features I want, limited only by my imagination (and budget). I'd like to integrate some home automation features into the house, and include wiring for future expansion.

When you can write nearly perfect versions of PacMan and Space Invaders in your favorite productivity application, you know it's crossed the boundary. Of course, treating cells like pixels and implementing the game by changing the background colors probably wasn't what the Excel developers had in mind, but frankly, that's not much different than what the guys writing the original games had to deal with.

This version supports all known versions of glibc, including the new Native Posix Thread Library (NPTL) interface. This represents a major technical advance for Wine, as glibc instability has been a problem throughout 2003. Support for the Dreamweaver MX Studio was added. Dynamic loading of OpenGL is provided, which allows a much greater range of unsupported applications to run, especially games such as Half-Life. Miscellaneous bugfixes were made for Microsoft Office, Quicken, Visio, and Lotus Notes.

In the spark of the upcoming MS Office, OO.o, KOffice and the recent release of Gnome Office 1.0, Gobe has released a new demo version to their office suite, Gobe Productive, version 3.0.4. However purchasers of the full version haven't seen the actual free upgrade to 3.0.4 from 3.0.3, which fixes a number of bugs (this update has apparently stack in testing for more than a year).

After two years of work, OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (X11) is ready for download by all Mac OS X users. With anti-aliased fonts, to name but one feature, this Golden Master satisfies the needs of professionals and individuals wanting a free, complete, and open-source office suite able to operate in an office environment alongside Windows, Linux, and Solaris machines. Elsewhere, AbiWord 2.0 Beta 1 was released.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall/ Who's the prettiest suite of them all?" Suddenly it seems, the fierce contests to find the most popular computer `Office suite' ? a combo-pack of softwares to perform common tasks like word processing, spread sheeting, presentation and e-mailing ? are to be replayed all over again, a decade after the first shakeout. Read the article at The Hindu. In other office news, Gobe now sells GobeProductive for a low price, while it seems that the new AppleWorks 6.2.7 is available for purchasing. Update: Native Abiword port for Mac OS X abandoned.