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Looking At Gobe 192

Posted by Hemos from the checking-it-out dept.
mneptok writes: "OSNews is running a review of a beta version of Gobe Productive, the office productivity suite initially developed for BeOS by the former producers of ClarisWorks. The beta tested by OSNews is for Windows, but a Linux GTK (and that's toolkit only) version is planned for release after the Win32 version ships. A public beta of the Win32 version is imminent. Looks like a nice, affordable 'army knife' office app for Windows users, and a serious contender in the Linux office space." We had some coverage of this a while back,
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Looking At Gobe More

Looking At Gobe

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  • StarOffice 6beta rocks my world (at least, those parts of it that deal with office productivity).

    I've been throwing off the Microsoft yoke in stages - my mail client is eudora lite, my office suite is staroffice, and my browser is k-meleon. Hooray, I guess.

    Don't tell anyone, but I actually save all my wordprocessing docs in RTF. So the program I use doesn't matter all that much, to some extent.
    • A couple of on-topic observations before I get to my real issue:
      1) OSNews is a terrific site. Eugenia is really doing a great job with it.
      2) I've tried GoBe on Be and found it usable, if hardly a replacement for MS Office. But $125? That seems to me to be conceding the don't-want-to-pay market to Sun and they're unlikely to derail Microsoft among people with money to spend.

      And now a completely offtopic question.

      StarOffice 6beta rocks my world (at least, those parts of it that deal with office productivity).

      I've installed the Linux OpenOffice beta (638c) and have a really stupid question: how do I start it? I can't figure out what the executable is, and I haven't found any documentation on the site to answer that. If it installs something in your desktop menu, it doesn't know about WindowMaker.

      • Sorry, i'm running Win2k. Can't help you. 8)
      • If I remember correctly, you have to cd $OPENOFFICEDIR/bin where $OPENOFFICEDIR is the directory you installed it in and then run ./soffice. There should be a better way though...
        • how about setting your path

          export PATH=$PATH:$OPENOFFICEDIR/bin

          or creating a link

          ln -s $OPENOFFICEDIR/bin/soffice /usr/local/bin/staroffice

          or have it start automatically in your .xinitrc?

          or use an icon for your desktop?

      • Re:Personally... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by snarfer ( 168723 )
        That seems to me to be conceding the don't-want-to-pay market

        Ah yes, the valuable "dont-want-to-pay market." They are, of course, the real prize market that most companies shoot for.

        Gobe's price is a THIRD of the Office UPGRADE price!

  • Well.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by k98sven ( 324383 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2001 @06:27PM (#2530363) Journal
    It's always nice to see new linux software, even propritary..

    Still I don't quite see the market. Office people want what they know: MS Office,
    if your not using that, it really doesn't matter what you're using. So why not chose something that doesn't cost 120 bucks, like StarOffice or KOffice?

    Still, I haven't used the software, maybe it IS an OfficeXP killer. My point is: It'd have to be.

    • Re:Well.. (Score:1, Redundant)

      by csbruce ( 39509 )
      Still, I haven't used the software, maybe it IS an OfficeXP killer. My point is: It'd have to be.

      Does OfficeXP have a similar license-validation mechanism to what Windows-XP has? If it does, then OfficeXP will be the OfficeXP killer.
      • Do you also predict Windows XP itself will be a market failure?

        [opinion] Though I won't use it myself, I predict both will be successfull simply because they are some of Microsoft's flagship products and will be 'recomended' (forced upon) many companies who have put all their eggs in the Microsoft basket. [/opinion]

        • Office XP will be bundled with new computers and soon will be the only MS Office suite available to small to medium businesses.

          Large businesses usually have premium Microsoft licenses which permit them among other things to buy an XP license and install 2000...

    • Re:Well.. (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by BrookHarty ( 9119 )
      I was thinking the exact thing, but was wondering if I should even bother posting it. I think its pretty common sense, People dont like change, m$ owns the markets, tech slump, laws against competetion, etc..

      The industry is in a rut, its m$ hardware, m$ OS, and m$ office suite. There are people trying to compete, but with m$ spending millions and new releases every couple months, it seems like an uphill battle. Soon as a new product comes out, M$ has a better product, or a Soon to be released better product.

      Linux companies arnt making the money on support that m$ makes. M$ makes millions each month on support, and school classes alone. Many many companies with better products either go out of business or get bought up, to have its product shelved.

      Really a sad state of affairs, Linux is so powerful, lots of opensource appications, games ported, but still the market is too small to keep in business.

      I think maybe 10 years from now, Linux will be the best OS out, be able to run every application, run on every hardware, do any task. But we will be locked into some subscription model and security system that will lock us into m$.
    • Back in the early 1990's, I was an avid user of ClarisWorks on MacOS. I've always felt it was by far the best office software I've ever used, because it was so well-integrated and simple. The one thing it lacked was a spreadsheet. Today, when I have to use Word (gag), I still long for the ClarisWorks capabilities. If the same people who made ClarisWorks are doing this today, I'd expect this could be some great software. I'd buy it.
      • Actually, ClarisWorks has had a spreadsheet since i can remember.
        ive done several (and i mean several) spreadsheets for school and home in clarisworks, 3.0 i believe at the time, although i might have also done some in 2.x.
        the one thing that ClarisWorks was missing, however, was presentation software.
        Something like powerpoint.
        It had a slide-show feature which worked with the documents you created, but it came nowhere near powerpoint.
        However, even that changed with version 6.0.
        Unfortunately, however, i never was able to get my hands on a copy...
        And Apple stopped developing it for Windows, so i cant try it on my dual celeron either.
      • Yes, it was awesome. I've used ClarisWorks for 10 years. Prior to that, other Claris products for Mac. i.e. MacDraw, MacWrite.

        I remember a friend saying many years ago "In ClarisWorks you can do anything!" And he's right.

        The drawing surface is really a poor man's page layout program. You can set up multiple text boxes where the text will overflow from one box to the next. Set up complex multiple column layouts, and when you edit text in an earlier box, the text "flows" throughout the "linked" text boxes. Setup multiple "chains" of linked textboxes if you wish. Each text box has full word processing features. Wrap text around odd shaped pictures. Draw complex pictures. Paint pictures. (Paint is pixmap based, Draw is vector-object based.) Make slideshows.

        Put spreadsheets into wordprocessing, to form tables. Directly draw or paint inside word processing documents. Even play a QuickTime movie inside of a word processing document. (It prints as a still image.) Spinning logos in letterhead or slideshows.

        In fact, the biggest thing that I thought ClarisWorks lacked was that its pixel manipulation (i.e. Paint) is not more Photoshop like.
    • One thing that sets M$ Office apart from the many others is that it comes with a database included. (Gobe does not have one).

      As much as I dislike M$ policies, Access is still a good low-end database product (does MySQL have an easy-to-use GUI build in??) that is definitely unmatched in any of its rivals.

  • Let's get real ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2001 @06:30PM (#2530371) Homepage
    The Word .doc file format has not yet been mastered, no powerpoint compatibility, poor lettering on Glyphs, no sound or video.

    There's nothing more important in the Office world than compatibility M$ file formats. Which reminds me that the current antitrust settlement doesn't say anything about opening file formats.

    Back to StarOffice & powerpoint viewers (thanks god there's Wine!) ...

    The Raven
    • actually, i was just about to post that whole paragraph..

      For BeOS and Linux this office suite is one of their killer applications that users should be proud of. For Windows users, it still has some features left to be desired when a 'monster' like OfficeXP is already out and about. The Word .doc file format has not yet been mastered, no powerpoint compatibility, poor lettering on Glyphs, no sound or video.

      Uhm.. And this is a serious contender in any market, how? And it's closed-source, so it doesn't do anyone any good as a learning tool, either?

      I'm sorry, but I just don't understand the front-page hype about it. It reminds me a lot of that vector-drawing program for linux that came out a little while and didn't do much other than coredump all over the place..
      • eh, one more: and it costs $125 bux, altho you can install it on all of your home boxen + 1 at work.

        (i'm so not a fan of the wait 2 minutes till you can post again thing.. i'll just sit here. hey, we're /.-style interviewing burning airlines this week on b-side. go post questions. you know you love them. ok, my 2 minutes is up..)

    • While I won't gainsay Eugenia, I'll have to say that I haven't had any problems with Gobe Productive 2.0 (under BeOS) in its export/import capabilities for Microsoft Word. The RTF filter is rather dimwitted (logically, it should be capable of everything the Word filter is, but in practice it definitely isn't), and the HTML export is extremely barebones--although in some ways that's a blessing, since it means I have much less crap to remove when I want to turn it into a real web page.

      I used StarOffice 5.1 under Linux and Windows and it drove me absolutely batshit. I applaud the effort in OpenOffice to fix some of its predecessor's atrocities, but it's still an amazing resource pig.

      Speaking solely for myself, I'll be looking forward to gobeProductive for Windows, and I'll certainly see if I can run the Linux binary at work under FreeBSD. (Yes, bizarrely enough, I use FreeBSD at work and Windows at home these days, although I'm in the process of setting up a Slackware 8 partition on my PC.) I know some people have had good luck with AbiWord, but I'm not one of them; the only open source office application I've liked so far has been Gnumeric. The new Productive release fixes one major hole in previous incarnations (no sections). If they've added the ability to start numbering at pages other than 1, I'll be set. If they start taking advantage of their frames to move toward being a baby desktop publishing program, too, that'd rock. :)

  • You guys... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ekrout ( 139379 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2001 @06:31PM (#2530375) Journal
    You guys should check out Gobe's import/export filters. They actually developed an API that anyone can write to, so if they port the API and the filters over to Our Favorite OS(tm), which they are apparently going to do, then any application can choose to just write to that API and will immediately be able to save or write in any of the proprietary formats that Gobe supports.
  • What I was really hoping to see was Microsoft split up as per Penfield-Jackson's recommendation at which point we would have seen MS-Office for Linux. I've got no issue with Microsoft competing with good products, I just hate to see them use their operating system monopoly to reduce choices (bundling IE) or exclude competitors (not supporting Linux).
  • First i read is 'Globe', and thought "WTF is looking at a Globe got to do with anything?"

    Then i saw the fact that there was no L.
    So is it pronounced GOB, like a gob of glue,
    or maybe GOOB.. like.. GOOBER! haha
    or GO-B?

    Oh well... Good to see some development in the linux office arena. I'm sick of StarOffice, I want Applixware back, and Koffice ain't my cup o'tea either.

    Really, I need something to replace my dad's machine running win98 and MS Works 2000, I'd LOVE to switch him over to SuSE, but he's got tons of old MS Works word processing docs that i'd need to convert, haven't had the best success going to .rtf then to Koffice or StarOffice (mainly cuz some of the stuff dont conver to .rtf well)

    Oh, well, my $.02
    • I want Applixware back

      What happened to ApplixWare? Did they tank? I have a perfectly good retail copy somewhere here... with printed manual...
    • I think it's pronounced 'Go be' as in the command 'Go be productive' implying one is not productive in other office suites *cough*msoffice*cough* so they should go be productive in their software. At least that's how I read it and it made sense to me.
      • Yeah... that's how I always have thought of it. Except, when saying it out loud, it sounds wierd to make it into two words... so I just say "gobe" like "globe" but without the l sound. ;)

        In case you haven't figured that out, it rhymes with these words:

        - globe
        - robe
        - Moby (but without the "ee" sound)
        - etc.
    • It was originally on BeOS, so Gobe is Go Be Productive. Its a pun.
  • This is starting to look really good.

    there is definitely a market for a non MS suite in the hundred dollar range.

    I can remember Claris works, and a number of other similar and excellent products. Not every one wants to spend multiple hundreds of dollars just to write a basic letter.

    Heck I would be very happy with a Lite version of windows and office, half the features for half the price. I kan do witout a spel cheker. or all of the fancier features no one uses. Give me the 20% or 30% that 80% of the people use 90% of the time.

    • If you just want the more common features for an infinitely better price, use Abiword [abisource.com] or another free program. It's got the 90% of features that most people use (except for tables, which should be coming in the next few months).
    • I quite like its simplicity.

      I liked the way all the selection entries in the dropdown font menu appeared in their own fonts.

      About 2 years ago I built a computer for someone & he wanted ClarisWorks for Windows installed, but I couldn't find a downlaod anywhere of it.

      Even old versions or demo versions that you use to get on magazine CDs.
  • Damn, that's cool. Does this require a license from Adobe? I know GPL'd readers exist, but I can't remember ever seeing a program other than Distiller (that is the Adobe PDF program, isn't it?) that writes PDFs...

    I sure as hell don't see it under Word2000's Save As ;)

    • Re:Save as .PDF??? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Teancom ( 13486 )
      Search for ps2pdf, espitopdf, db2pdf, dvi2pdf, html2pdf, a2pdf, even pdf2pdf (for different versions). All free software, or it wouldn't be on my debian box :-)
    • Err... GhostScript will happily write PDF's. Try, for example, the ps2pdf command.

    • I sure as hell don't see it under Word2000's Save As ;)

      But you can get an 'Print to PDF' thingie. You just have to install the Windows version of GhostScript, and some little program they offer on the same site allows you to install it as a printer driver. (it's been a while since used Windows, so I don't remember the details :)

    • All KDE applications can write to PDF, as that is one of the virtual printers that comes with the KDE print system.

      --
      Evan

    • What? KDE has PRINT to PDF, so any KDE program that can print can also produce PDFs. It doesn't require a license from Adobe, and its really cool.

    • Re:Save as .PDF??? (Score:3, Informative)

      by iso ( 87585 )
      No, PDF does not require a license from Adobe. It's a remarkably open file format actually; I'm surprised that it isn't used by open source advocates more often.

      - j

  • Spelling/Grammer Nazis... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Teancom ( 13486 ) <david AT gnuconsulting DOT com> on Tuesday November 06, 2001 @06:32PM (#2530387) Homepage
    "Disclaimer: I don't care if you don't find my grammar/spelling appropriate. Honestly, that's the best I can do. I bet you don't speak Greek at all. ;-)"

    For those of you who don't normally read osnews and Eugenia's reviews, she continually gets crap over her spelling and grammer. Specifically, she gets a lot more whenever they are linked by /. so I'm going to go out on a limb and say its generally /.'ers that are dishing the crap. Well, stop it. I hate to pull out the "you're representing all of us" routine, but its true. Everytime I read an article describing the slavering hordes of fanatical and rude linux users out there, I cringe, knowing that it is almost all directly traceable back to this website. And no, I'm not saying it is CmdrTaco's fault, if it wasn't /., it would be somewhere else. But come on, if you don't have anything nice to say.....

    *off soapbox*

    *ontopic*
    I really liked Gobe Productive when I used BeOS. I even bought a copy. However, I wish they had decided to use qt instead of gtk... It just mesh better with the rest of my desktop. Oh, well.
    • I wish they had decided to use qt instead of gtk
      I believe this would have meant either paying Trolltech or releasing Gobe under the GPL. It's likely that neither option would have worked for them, so they chose GTK.
    • For those of you who don't normally read osnews and Eugenia's reviews, she continually gets crap over her spelling and grammer. Specifically, she gets a lot more whenever they are linked by /. so I'm going to go out on a limb and say its generally /.'ers that are dishing the crap

      <flame> Maybe if she used full featured word processors that have spelling and grammar correction in many languages, she wouldn't have that problem. </flame>

      Really though, doesn't that in-and-of-itself show why MS is still ahead with consumers for product popularity?

      • Anybody who writes a web site in Word has serious issues... ;)

        The sad thing is, because of Microsoft's popularity, people are bound to do just that (and while their spelling and grammar will be fine, they will have much larger problems).

        I won't go into why writing web pages in a word processor is a bad thing. :)
      • <flame> Maybe if she used full featured word processors that have spelling and grammar correction in many languages, she wouldn't have that problem. </flame>
        The problem is that a non-native speaker of language X wouldn't neccessarily know whether or not Word's grammer/spell checker was fucking up or not when editing language X. And yes, I've seen it fuck up a lot. Case in point, I've typed "e.g." before and had it complain that e and g should be capitalized as being the first words in a sentence, and that is a simple special case to check for.
        Really though, doesn't that in-and-of-itself show why MS is still ahead with consumers for product popularity?
        "They don't drink sand becuase they're thirsty. They drink sand becuase they don't know the difference." ~ Michael Douglas's character in _The American President_

        But seriously, flaming someone for poor grammar in a language that's not their native one is really, really, really lame... English is my native language, and I'm sure my grammar and spelling leave somthing to be desired, but that's becuase I don't care enough to check everything. The reviewer is trying above and beyond the call of duty (ever tried to speak a foreign language? if you haven't, don't bother sharing your opinion) to be intelligible, and a such deserves to be applauded, not flamed.

    • ... she continually gets crap over her spelling and grammer.

      Don't you think that learning the basic, grade-school-levels skills like spelling and grammer would be a more appropriate reaction than this whining? If you don't like being accused of bad grammer, learn to use good grammer. If you don't like constructive criticism about your spelling, learn to spell. No, a spelling checker won't help ... did you really want to say affect or effect?

      • Either there is some sarcasm at work here that is too subtle for me, or there's a supreme irony present....

        Say, anyone know much about Automated Transition Grammars? I've been looking into natural language translation that would understand an average slashdot post.
      • Slashdot is really going downhill.


        When a spelling flame, using hate-filled language like "basic grammer skills", gets modded up, you know it's time to find some other site which isn't such an asshole magnet.

    • If her grammar and spelling is bad, and she can't do any better, the least she can do is to get someone else to read it over and fix the mistakes. All paper-based news sources have editors whose job it is to do this. At least the reputable ones do. Some online sources do too. (/. apparently does not.) OSNews should have the same, especially if they know that one of their submitters has a particularly tough time with English.

      But at least she spelled grammar correctly.
  • We need to be able to export our damn documents, too. People often times forget about this, and much of the consequent effort is directed at giving _us_ the ability to read their Office(tm) documents. We're doing OK, though -- S.O. 6beta is sweet.
    • Productive reads and writes Word, Excel. The PowerPoint translator won't be in the coming release, but you'll see that in a later release.
      As well as better WMF support.
  • Where is the logic, on Linux, for using this? Or, for that matter, on Windows?

    At $120 US for the suite, it's not an unreasonable price, but the basic functionality (imitating MS Orifice) is already there for the most part on StarOffice, etc for nothing, and for Windows you'd just buy/pirate OrificeXP.

    Recall that Applixware basically went out of business when the free-use/open source suites came out on Linux. What the hell are these guys gonna do? I feel for them, I really do. If they want to keep this alive they should seriously consider something along the lines of the OpenBeOS/Blue OS/atheOS projects. Sorry... please convince me that I'm wrong.
    • Well, they could always go for the crowd which wants something simpler than MS Office or StarOffice. Apple was very successful with this in AppleWorks. This was originally named ClarisWorks. The people from Gobe were Claris developers. See any connections? :-0
    • Personally? I'd pay $120 for Productive--even if it's only half as good as it sounds. I was a big fan of ClarisWorks for the Macintosh--I preferred it greatly to MS Word due to its simple, elegant design. If Gobe succeeds in bringing a ClarisWorks-like product to the Linux environment, I'd jump at the chance to use it.

      How do the other office suites stack up? StarOffice is a positively huge application (especially for those who need only "light word processing.") KOffice seemed buggy and unimpressive. WordPerfect for Linux has one of the most rauciously flawed font renderers I've ever come across. So... I've had my eye on Gobe for some time--I hope they come through.

      BRx.
  • User Friendly [userfriendly.org]

    CircusLinux [newbreedsoftware.com]

    Koules [paru.cas.cz]


    And the one site we all love dearly.

  • Gobe Productive will be $124.95, with the "Gobe Family License" which allows you to install on every computer in your home plus one installation where you work
    If Microsoft and most other software companies weren't so greedy, this would be a far better way than Windows Product Activation to combat piracy (real, not "casual").
    • This will also mean that people can use the suite at home and bring there work with them to the office. The local OA geek wont be up in arms (as much) if they have a license for a local machine... this will help Gobe put a wedge into business machines - they will be able to have their suite seen by IT types and managment...this is an EXCELLENT idea.

  • License (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tykeal ( 36629 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2001 @06:51PM (#2530486)
    You know for a commercial product to be releasing with such a broad license is just plain cool. I don't care if I don't plan on using it, but the "Family License" giving you the ability / right to install on _all_ your home machines plus one machine at work is awesome. I wish more companies did this.
  • there's Koffice and I'm pretty sure gnome guys won't stop on Gnumeric...

    And the good side is that the two or three suites can share code, leaving to the user to choose based on look and feel and size (more bloat, less bloat...) and as they mature and gain in quality it'll become harder and harder to sell a closed source office suite for Linux and other open source OSes...

    But we must admire these guys efforts. Congratulations Gobe, I hope you sell lots of copies to Win users.

  • Gobe's liscensing terms actually get it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alewando ( 854 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2001 @06:54PM (#2530499)
    For $125, you get a "family liscense" which permits you to install their software on all the computers in your home plus one computer elsewhere (presumably one at work). This demonstrates a surprising amount of prescience on their part.

    The real money for liscensing is in corporate liscensing. The really financially damaging software "piracy" is among corporate (or government agency...) clients. There's not terribly much to gain from having draconian liscensing schemes that prevent multiple parties in a household from having the software installed; one might even argue that there are no economically justifiable reasons from curtailing any installations, but that's another argument.

    Historically, office-suite penetration has occurred from the corporate level down to the private level; that is, people are forced to use software at work and therefore find themselves having to use it at home as well. The corporate market is fairly well saturated by microsoft Office so it'd be suicide for Gobe to fight there first. Far better would be to worm into the home office market, and try to get employees familiar with it so they can demand their employers reconsider.

    By making it almost pleasant to use their product (and for a reasonable price), they get my vote.
    • So buying Gobe means you can use it one your W32, BeOS & Linux partitions.

      Then they can have the 3 versions all on one CD in a crossplatform box. Retailers love that - it makes stocking easy.

      Bit like if you buy the boxed version of BeOS you get both X86 & PPC versions inside it.

      Actually I think the boxed version of ClarisWorks itself came with both Mac & Windows versions in it. You know, like it had compatible with both Macintosh & Windows markings on the box.

    • The real money for liscensing is in corporate liscensing. The really financially damaging software "piracy" is among corporate (or government agency...) clients. There's not terribly much to gain from having draconian liscensing schemes that prevent multiple parties in a household from having the software installed;


      Others might not agree with this statement...

      According to Wired [wired.com], regarding Windows XP:

      Nieman said Product Activation is required for individual users only; corporate and site licenses will be handled separately. Microsoft wants to reduce a form of piracy it calls "casual copying," which is sharing among individual users, claiming the practice is responsible for up to 50 percent of its sales losses.

      Corporate users will get a site license with a unique key required to activate the software, so no registration is required, and if a corporate copy of Windows XP or Office XP is pirated, the source will be traceable via the key, said Nieman.

      I'm with you in that I think that the money is in corporate liscencing. Then again, I don't have any software that anyone would want to buy.
    • ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks) also gets it. Read the AppleWorks (or older ClarisWorks) license. If your employer buys it for you, they also let you install it at home or on your laptop.

      They really seem to get the reality of the way people want to use the licensed product.

      I paid real money for ClarisWorks, many years ago, for my Mac. It was a fantastic investment. Inexpensive upgrades. Reasonable licensing. NO SERIALIZATION nonsense, or copy protection, no mandatory registration, etc. Just try it. When AppleWorks or ClarisWorks is launched for the first time and asks for your name and serial number, just leave it blank and click OK. Yes, really. Try it. It's worked this way for years.

      AppleWorks (and older ClarisWorks) runs on both Mac and Windows -- and serial number is not needed with either. I can say from personal experience.

      They get it with the licensing. Most reasonable people don't mind paying a reasonable price in real money for an outstanding product.

      On a similar note, I think The Kompany also gets it. A long time ago, so did Borland. Ever read Borland's "no nonsense license agreement"? It was in plain english, and readable.

      By contrast MS makes their licensing programs vague. You never can be sure if you're in compliance. Suppose hypothetically, I have 5 workstations that are used by 8 people. Do I need 5 licenses or 8? Well, the only way I've found to correctly interpret MS's licenses is to interpret them in whatever way is most favorable to MS in terms of $$. What if the 5 workstations run the software from a central server. Do I need 5 licenses or 8? And don't even dream about a license that allows you to take your work home with you to your personal computer when using MS. Or to take your personal copy in to the office. What if I have 10 workstations shared by 5 people? Need 5 licenses or 10? What if every engineer has 3 computers in his workspace, why can't I install Product-X on each workstation for convenience? It still only benefits one person. But nooooooooo. You must get 3 seperate MS licenses.

  • When the Linux version is released, it's gonna be great for FreeBSD users like myself. I like to run simple, quick programs. (For example, IceWM as opposed to a desktop environment like GNOME or KDE.) As I recall, Gobe was lean and quick on BeOS. I hope the Linux version is like that too.

    Oh well.

  • BeOS (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MisterPo ( 520698 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2001 @07:01PM (#2530526)
    Gobe is seriously beautiful. I had the last version on BeOS and I found it tricky at first having come from a predominantly MS Office background. But when you get used to it then you realise how well designed the UI is, and how bad MS stuff is :)

    It is also shocking to be reminded off how bad the Linux office productivity stuff is in comparison. Staroffice (5.2 at least) is shockingly bad, and Abiword just looks like MS Wordpad, though I do like GNUmeric. K-Office is nice but still feels unfinished.

    But the most impressive thing about Gobe was its size. Or rather the lack of it. This program is just *so* slick and I will be getting a copy when its finished :)

    Po

  • We have too many solid contenders today. All of which are just not quite solid enough for daily use.

    Register my plea for a kickass application that people will want to migrate to, away from Office.

  • I tried to download the Star Office 6 beta recently, but for some strange reason it tells me that it can't find SOT638MI.DLL (ok, on Win Me, I admit).

    Anyway, I tried to visit StarOffice.com and got the following message:

    StarOffice.com Temporarily Shutdown

    A Power Failure has damaged our main host...

    Will come back soon...

    Is this the right site? Does anyone know what happened?

  • Star Office will support Mac OS X.
    SO drops support.

    Gobe makes an office suite for Be...Be drops off the face of the planet, BeOs wise.

    Gobe wrote the precursor to Appleworks (i.e. claris works) Dropped or Sold? Dunno.

    And for all the slamming I've seen (ok, and done, too) of Microsoft... I've played with the GM of Office for X... all I can say is "wow".

    Silly me for hoping Star Office would get there first and "save me".

    (colorful series of explicatives deleted)...for all of the proclamations that Microsoft does not give the consumer a choice...I have to ask myself now "Do their competitors?"

    I'm dead serious.

    Maybe it is a sign of the times that Microsoft owns Windows and Macintosh computers lock, stock and little/big endian bits, or maybe comptitors have just given up trying altogether.

    Has MS proven "that he who tries to be strong everywhere, ends up being strong nowhere" the phrase wrong?

    Saying there is no competition because 1 player owns the marked is one thing.

    Saying there is no competition because no one is trying at all, is another.

    Someone give me a reality check, please!

    Either I'm missing some critical piece, or I've hit the problem dead on....only thing is I don't know which.

    Help.
    • Gobe wrote the precursor to Appleworks (i.e. claris works) Dropped or Sold? Dunno

      Claris was sprung off from Apple. Claris then ported ClarisWorks to Windows. Claris also bought the popular FileMaker package. Claris was happy. Apple was not.

      Apple joined in Claris again. This was a few months after ClarisWorks 5.0 came out. Some of the Claris developers decided not to work for Apple and left to form Gobe. Apple renamed ClarisWorks to AppleWorks and released a new version. Apple was happy. Gobe was happy.

    • Re:I feel so abandoned... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You're right, and you're right.

      Microsoft does produce good software, sometimes the best in its class and usually "good enough" if not.

      Microsoft also illegally attempts to make sure that nobody else can create products to compete with theirs, or failing that to make sure that nobody could sell these products.

      The fact that any of Microsoft's products would have won in the marketplace anyways does not diminish the fact that Microsoft breaks the law to ensure this happens.

      PS: Does GISBoy refer to Geographical Information Systems? I'm starting to look into that sort of thing. I've tried using Grass, it's a completely unusable piece of crap as far as I can tell. Any good software or docs you can recommend?

  • What's most interesting.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ogerman ( 136333 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2001 @08:28PM (#2530827)
    To me, the most interesting thing about Gobe is that apparently a group of at most 10 seasoned programmers (see picture on their site and some of those guys are the executive team) came up with a high quality MS Office replacement from scratch in a relatively short amount of time. And they did it without any help from the Open Source community. But alas, this post is not another cowardly retreat call to proprietary software. Quite the contrary. The difference is that these guys were paid to work on Gobe full-time until it was production quality. If similar talent could be focused on say.. KOffice or OpenOffice, imagine how fast those projects would move along. Who would pay them? Quite simply, any smart company that is tired of throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a black hole every time MS decides to put out a new version Office. All that's needed is a company or non-profit to organize this effort. A non-profit, of course, may be of greater value to businesses because it'd be a tax write-off.
    • Actually, I'm rather unimpressed by both the GNOME and OpenOffice projects (no not a troll, just a statement of facts ;) but dude, have you seen how fast the KDE guys are going? KDE 2.2.1 finally got me to dump Windows, and KWord is a great Word replacement for almost anything I care to do. Given that KOffice didn't even exist a while ago (it came out with KDE-2!) that's damn impressive.
      • Yep, KOffice is pretty slick. I'm in the middle of converting all of my files from StarOffice to KOffice formats.

        It still has a few features I miss, and I've run into a few annoyances getting the print preview to actually match what comes out of the printer, but overall it's pretty usable for everything I need to do - mostly spreadsheets and typing contracts.

    • Re:What's most interesting.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Klaruz ( 734 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2001 @09:23PM (#2530935)
      I always wondered why the people who want to use opensource don't just support the founding of a non-profit orginization that hires and pays programers to write software for them. Instead of each of 30 companys paying $500,000 on microsoft licenses, and not getting exactly what they want, they each spend $50,000 (3 million can write alot of software if spent wisely) each and gets a tax writeoff.

      you'd have the problem of software designed by committee, but I don't have the exact ideal solution for that right now. perhaps if the org doesn't do exactly what each wants they can hire an in house programer to add a feature of choice.

      this of course needs to be thought about alot, it's just a quick offhand idea floating in my head.

    • Re:What's most interesting.. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      well, in all fairness, GoBe productive was the third office suite they had written (Styleworks GS/AppleWorks GS, then ClarisWorks for mac), so they had experience and an understanding of how they wanted an office suite to work.

      Being paid full time, though? Yes and no. It is their dayjob, but they put up a lot of the capital themselves, and accepted significantly smaller paychecks than they could have gotten had they been working elsewhere or ridden the .com wave.

      emacs and gcc were written by a dedicated individual with talent (regardless of what you think of RMS' bathing habits or politics), so I think what matters most is skill and devotion, 2 things generally lacking in 60% of slashdt readers (the other 40% are skillful, devoted trolls).
    • > And they did it without any help from the Open Source community.

      Guess again. Gobe Productive actually uses Libart for the cool vector rendering. Not only that, but they've contributed some nice patches back, and they've paid for bug-fixing and enhancement work. So I think they do get the Open Source thing.

  • Gobe Productive (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For BeOs users, the migration of Productive from our favourite OS to a Windows platform has been painful as it was symbolic of the demise of BeOs. As a WP/Imaging/Spreadsheeting application, Gobe Productive is very good and has all the functionality everyone needs. Isn't surprising how a small switched on software company such as Gobe can produce a quality item for a reasonable price whilst M$ charges a vastly greater sum for essentially the same thing ? Gobe in the past has been tainted by association with BeOs. There are stories that their approaches to vendors failed as soon as the vendors learned that Gobe was a supplier for a non-M$ OS vendor.

    Unfortunately as long as M$ Word is out there, and M$ uses its customary tricks, the alternative WP programmes will be marginalised. Remember Word Perfect ? It has more owners than I've had hot dinners ! Give Productive a go, use Star Office, try Abi Word, and then maybe Word will be sold at a reasonable price and competition may start to work !

    • Re:Gobe Productive (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've heard rumors GoBE was in negotions to have productive shipped with new computers, but the talks broke down when the assembler learned their MS license might not get renewed. The MS "consent decree" (snicker) might be the best thing that could happen to them.
  • OKay, back in the day there was a lack of office suites.... then programmers said 'let there be office applications' ., not the linux world is plagued with different types of office suites... none of which are 100% ms-word compatible. will this one be different? lets hope, following past trends this one will prolly get its 15 minutes of fame and die off..... so lets count the list:

    1) abiword
    2) staroffice
    3) corel word perfect
    4) kde office suite
    5) Gobe
    6) ...whats next? (er what else am i missing? isnt there an Offix suite or something like that)

    • Re:more office suites? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )
      The problem is that they aren't good office suites. (Don't know about Gobe.)

      I need indexes, tables of contents, style sheets, ...
      StarOffice is getting close. But it's not there yet. KOffice doesn't have any sort of index. AbiWord didn't impress the last time I looked. Applixware hasn't been updated in a few years. Word Perfect doesn't work with recent Linux distributions. KLyx has disappeared from KDE. Etc.

      KOffice and AbiWord have seemed the major hopes, but haven't been very impressive yet. (This weekend I ended up borrowing my wife's computer so I could use MS Word to organize a small collection of poems (with table of contents and index ... I USE!! those features!).

      To be absolutely truthful, at the moment the best word processor on Linux seems to be a combination of a browser and a text editor (write it in html, and then look, to make sure you got it right), but this isn't very appropriate for printed output.
  • What I really, really need is a fully featured MS Access replacement that is cross platform(windows and Linux). It doesn't need to be compatible with Access files, but it needs to be able to connect to MySQL databases.

    Does such a beast exist? If it did we could totally ditch MS completely at my office.

  • I've seen several posts raise questions about Applixware. It's currently published by http://www.vistasource.com [VistaSource], and I think it goes by the name AnyWare Desktop.

    In any event, it's my top pick for a Linux productivity package, and it's reasonably priced (under $100). The user interface is similar to MS Office or StarOffice, but it is more utilitarian (and quicker to navigate). Plus, I think it is available for Windows desktops as well as most flavors of UNIX.
  • With the uproar about XP licensing they may not have been able to pick a better time to release, if it's not delayed that is. I know this won't have the functionality to serve everyone initially, but this is more than enough for those of us who's needs are simple, and if it fares well in the market it should only get better. I'm so fed-up with Office right now (price plus lack of abililty for it to do as I say) that for my needs this may give me a way out. I'm impressed by what I've read so far, enough so that I've pre-order a copy.

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