KOffice 1.5 Released 296
ingwa writes to tell us that the KOffice team has released version 1.5 which offers, among other things, default OpenDocument file format, new project planning tool KPlato, professional color support and adjustment layers in Krita and the long awaited Kexi 1.0. From the announcement: "KOffice was the first office suite that announced support for OpenDocument and now the second to announce it as the default file format after OpenOffice.org. This makes KOffice a member of a very select group and will lead to new deployment opportunities. Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that also use OpenDocument."
OpenDocument As Default is Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as they keep giving their software stupid names by sticking a "k" or a "g" on the front of it this software will never appeal to anyone but the Linux zealots (a.k.a. "Power" users).
As long as they keep giving their software stupid names by sticking a "microsoft" or a "i" on the front of it this software will never appeal to anyone but the Windows and Mac OS zealots (a.k.a. "Least Common Denominator" users).
Uh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And you're right, it won't ever happen. Because some people will want some killer feature only KOffice has, and some people will want some feature only OpenOffice has.
Unity? Pah. The whole point of open source is that unity is neither necessary nor (typically) desirable. If you CAN use the same stuff in ANYTHING, ON anything, WHY would you want to use it in only ONE thing?
Re:Congrats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, as long as they're properly compatible - pick the one that suits your personal preference. Or even the right tool for the right task, if one does something well that the other doesn't (or not at all). I'm perfectly happy that Firefox is more popular than Opera (my preference), because if you've built a site to work in one it's 99% sure to work in the other.
If we see competition on features rather than on format and compatibility, nothing is better than that in my opinion. If it isn't clear what I mean by that, let's for the moment assume that one of them offered regex search & replace, and the other did not. The results, before and after are both valid ODF documents - the difference is how you get there. Same with layout, which offers good layout management? Spell check and grammar?
Besides, I think the only way to have a format implemented according to spec is to have at least two implementations. They're sure to run into many of the other's bugs resulting in better standards compliance to benefit all. In short, I don't care if OpenOffice is "leading", I think "local competition" is just as excellent as motivator as the big competition against MS Office.
Re:Congrats... (Score:4, Insightful)
They have many full-time programmers working on it (about 40-50, if I'm not mistaken) and they are doing most of the work.
Sure, openness is good and we have many really cool things as a result of this -- see KDE integration for a very important example -- but Oo.org is hardly the shining example of hobbyists coming together to build a great product.
Actually, KOffice is a far better example for this.
Re:Congrats... (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now I'm using Kubuntu and it's not exactly the world's most stable piece of software; I'd like to use Gnome, but they insist on using Windows-style menubars for everything. It's a crummy design[1] and I don't understand the resistance to having alternatives like KDE does.
[1] If you like it, more power to you; I think they suck and just want a choice, I don't care if you use it or not. The only good argument I've heard in favor of window-top menubars is that they're easier to use with multiple monitors, but really I think Linux could outdo MacOS in this respect and have an application's menubar jump to the top of the screen on which it was located, if people were bothered by this.
Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme (Score:3, Insightful)
Aww, that isn't even a good troll anymore. At least you could take it one step further to the root of the issue and say it'll never appeal to anyone but Linux zealots as long as you need to prefix it with "k" or "g" to indicate what toolkit it uses, which endusers shouldn't have to give a fuck about. If it was just the name it wouldn't be any greater issue than iMacs with iLife, the iUniverse and iEverything.
Re:I still don't get it...... (Score:5, Insightful)
A modern office suite needs to build on top of a really solid foundation in terms of widgets and supporting library.
OpenOffice (and StarOffice before it) chose to design everything from scratch. Every menu, every window, every pixel is hand-drawn by the program itself. They have a very powerful toolkit in VCL which DUPLICATES all that a toolkit should do. They coded all their dialogs from scratch, font handling from scratch, print support from scratch. Skins and themes - from scratch.
Basically, OpenOffice folks wrote half an operating system to make their office suite. Mozilla did something very similar. And then people wonder where the bloat is coming from!
There is another way to write applications. You look around, and see that there is a very very powerful library foundations out there. You get menus for free. Dialogs. Font handling. Network transparency. Buttons. Canvas. Printing. Image input/output. Sound. This set of libraries is called KDE, although you could use GNOME to a similar extent.
Why on Earth should KOffice people reinvent the wheel yet another time, when there is a very powerful library that does all of this already?
If you download OpenOffice.org, in its 300 MB, you download a whole toolkit plus half an operating system in bloat.
If you download KOffice, just download kdelibs while you're at it. You don't need the rest of KDE! Just look at it as another library providing functionality.
We shouldn't go back in time and recode each menu pixel-for-pixel in every single application. StarOffice did this out of legacy reasons and now we're stuck with it. But in this day and age, people use libraries which take care of this stuff, so you can concentrate on functionality.
Re:what i'd like to see.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I certainly hope they don't. KOffice may be one of the very few chances we have to escape the awful bloatwares and clumsywares that are both MS-Office and OpenOffice. I haven't tried KOffice yet, but I sure wish it is very different.
(BTW, TextMaker despite it's drawbacks (not free, not Open Source, proprietary file format) is the only usable Linux/Windows word processor I have seen so far. Before Linux there was Ami Pro, but unfortunately that is long dead)
Re:Mixed Bag (Score:3, Insightful)
(a.k.a where's the patch?)
Re:Large documents (Score:3, Insightful)
I went to Lyx instead. I didn't want to learn pure latex, and lyx worked like a charm, once you got the hang of it's little qirks.
Re:I still don't get it...... (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, a more appropriate comparison is that the OpenOffice codebase includes a subset of the KDE functionality. This "bloat", written to be cross-platform from the outset, is why OpenOffice works on Microsoft Windows now, and KOffice does not.
Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme (Score:2, Insightful)
why kspread sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme (Score:2, Insightful)
Ubuntu _is_ a word indeed. It's Swahili for "humanity".
To quote http://www.learning-org.com/97.05/0042.html [learning-org.com]:
"A literal translation of the word 'ubuntu' would be 'humanity'. Old
dictionaries will show that the word humanity in English had a very rich
meaning: 1 humans collectively, 2 human nature, 3 human quality, 4
educated, 5 civilised, 6 humane and dignified. But as the information
overload increases, the richness of the word has immerged in the ascending
order. The pollution of information leads to the trivialisation of
knowledge. Now only meaning 1 probably survives. However, the word
'ubuntu' still has all six meanings in ascending order of emergent
importance! The deepest or highest meaning of ubuntu is thus to become
humane while behaving with dignity. Let us not pollute and thus trivialise
this word ubuntu!"