Office Archive

OpenOffice.org 1.1 is released and it brings a lot of new features.

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).

Aaron Hillegass' new book, titled "Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming", is now available in the stores. In the past, we reviewed his previous book "Cocoa Programming for MacOSX" and we got a good idea of Aaron's elegant writing style, descriptive chapters and advanced development under Mac OS X. In this book, he goes down under, teaching us how to handle and develop for the underpinnings of OSX, the core of the OS.

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.

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.

"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.

Gobe Software, the company behind the popular Gobe Productive office suite has re-instated their web presense and published the following short message on their site: "We are currently working on the next version of Gobe Productive, the popular award winning software. Stay tune for more news on products, distributors and resellers."

Recently, some sharp criticism has been displayed against the OS reviews posted on OSNews by third parties. In an effort to make the reviews more substantial, I have put together some guidelines in addition to the generic guidelines OSNews already provides for the readers who want to have their voices heard on this site.

"In eWeek Labs' tests of the second beta of Microsoft's Office 2003, we indeed found it more polished than Office XP in all the expected places, but what will really set Office 2003 apart when it ships this summer is its suitewide integration of XML. This should enable users and enterprises to work with their information in new, more efficient and creative ways." Read the review at eWeek.

As the Microsoft Windows monopoly becomes ever more entrenched, the world seems to be becoming an increasingly more difficult place for a new operating system, or even some that have been around for a long time but have a limited share of the desktop PC market. Proponents of alternative operating systems seem to spend their time alternately griping about Windows' grip on the desktop and asserting that it doesn't matter all that much because they can get their work done with their OS of choice.

In just 3 days beunited.org has been pledged over $10,000.00 by the public and corporate community for the release of Gobe Productive for BeOS (and other platforms). Linux users have also pledged, and beUnited.org encourages more members of the Linux community to participate for the release of the Linux version.

We were the first to inform you about the buyout of gobeProductive 3.x by starter FreeRadicalSoftware (headed also by the Gobe CEO) back in August. One of the ideas was to make gobeProductive GPL (a beta Linux version already exists). Unfortunately, it seems that FreeRadicalSoftware might not succeed in this. Read more for Gobe's and FreeRadical's Scott Lindsey's email in the Gobe user mailing list regarding the status, as it was sent by OSNews readers and GP3 users Chris Rupnik and Greg. Update: Gobe's Tom Hoke comments here and Scott Lindsey comments here.

Just like Blender did a few months ago, Hekkelman Programmatuur are now following the same approach to open their product's sources (development has stopped in the meantime). Pepper 4.x is a programmer's editor, running on Unix/Linux, Mac/X, Windows and it has already a lot of BeOS-specific code to kickstart a BeOS version too (I personally have a BeOS beta of Pepper 3.5 on my hard drive from the times I was beta testing it, a version that was never released). A small team of developers and users are trying to open its source so they have made an offer to Maarten Hekkelman for $11,000 USD and they would appreciate your donations (screenshot of Pepper running under Gentoo Linux).

Here's the latest about what the OpenOffice Project is up to for language support, new platforms and development partnerships.