OpenOffice.org 2.3 Review 227
Peace Frog writes passed us a link to an in-depth review of the newest version of OpenOffice. Instead of just the normal bug fixes, 2.3 has added several new features. Examples include: "A bunch of new and enhanced features like restoring the user-defined movement path in Impress and applying better default print settings in Calc. Check the release notes for complete information from OpenOffice.org. A significantly different chart tool. New extensions provided by Sun and other vendors. You will need to run 2.3 for the extensions to work. Read more about the new extensions on the OpenOffice.org web site." The general impression from the review is that the OO team is doing an excellent job of responding to feedback from previous releases.
I've always wondered (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:New version, huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Surely the use of native widgets would make cross platform apps much harder to develop...
That said, could they write a cross platform back end, and then a frontend for each supported system?
OO speed. Where is IBM Symphony source (LGPL)? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've always thought that a fork at OO 1.x would be good, as 2.x was where it got really fat.
Well IBM forked at 1.x. It's called Symphony.
But I cannot find any source of any part of Symphony.
This is an apparent violation of the LGPL.
Perhaps they are sending patches to open office, but that does not really satisfy the LGPL. The source of changed LGPL Symphony code must be publicly available.
Incompatible rendering (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a huge issue I guess, but it's certainly the reason that I still need to have MS Office installed in a VM. Highly over the top but a necessary step until OO can render stuff faithfully. My wife, for one, will not switch until it displays word docs correctly.
Is this just me having this problem as I never see other people complaining about it.
Re:Integration to 3rd party still nearly inexistan (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I hold out more hope for KOffice, which is built on KParts. If KOffice 2.0 is as good as the developers say it will be, I will be switching.
more self promotion and lies (Score:4, Interesting)
1) It's much slower now - even though they told us they were breaking into components to make it faster - the joke is on you.
2) listening to feedback - yeah - look at their response on basic statistical analysis. Search their bugs for statistics, error bars and regression and you'll see that it's been 5-6 yrs and STILL no ability to put the equation on the chart.
3) They are SO far behind MS it's ridiculous.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not an MS lover by any stretch but I use OO day-to-day and I recently sat down in front of Word 2007 and thought,
1) this will really make it easy for newbies to create nice documents
2) creating nice documents is really easy
3) too bad they won't adopt ODF as they'd clean house with Office '07.
Seriously, I've lost faith/hope in OO. Just look into GO-OO and you'll understand that things move glacially slow with OO development. Maybe IBM's 35 person addition will help but I forsee more pissing contests than actual work getting done.
Vista is a joke but Office '07 is a really nice product because it DOES make it REALLY easy to create nice looking documents. I added a picture to a test.doc that I was working on and was blown away with all the cool things that I could do with the image. In short, really easy to create nice looking documents - Isn't THAT what a good word processor should do???
Anyhow, I've lost faith that Sun will actually listen to the users of their software and, if they do, it'll be after the user has left out of frustration due to waiting.
Re:what does this have to do with linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
A historically popular, proprietary piece of BBS software for the IBM PC offered a (very popular) mailbox facility. There were rumours flying around that a future version of the software would allow the BBS sysop to charge for electronic mail messages. Charging would be by the letter; with spaces, digits and punctuation marks specifically excluded. The "elite" users responded by crafting readable messages entirely out of non-chargeable characters in order to demonstrate the absurdity of such a proposal.
Even if the facility was ever incorporated into the software, it was never actually used in real life. It's also worth pointing out that in those days, disassembling and editing binaries was by no means unfeasible.
Meanwhile, a group of immature kids who fancied themselves as "hackers" (at the risk of being called out on a "No True Scotsman" phallacy, a true hacker has more in common with a squatter than a burglar) picked up the wrong end of the stick and displayed their ignorance by continuing to craft messages out of "free" characters. The true elite laugh at them.
Re:OOXML Support (Score:3, Interesting)
If it works, that isn't a huge problem, since you can just keep a Windows box connected to your mail server and have it automatically translate incoming documents.
One more bug (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you think you would get zero? No, you get -0.00000000000000036082.
Also, =850*77.1 should give you 1000000 like in Excel 2007, but it gives you 65535.