The first Windows beta for gobeProductive 3 Office Suite is now released. The download weighs only 5 MB, and it expires on January 15th. gobeProductive 3 includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, vector and raster graphics editors and a presentation tool. A special upgrade price ($40) will be offered to BeOS users, while the full price will be around $125 USD under the Family License (you can freely install the suite to all your home PCs, plus one PC at your workplace). The Linux version is scheduled for the second quarter of 2002. If you encounter bugs in this beta version, let Gobe know about them, by emailing them and make sure you mention the version of Windows, printer driver and your hardware specs (CPU, graphics card etc). OSNews featured a world’s first preview of the office suite just two weeks ago.
First Beta for gobeProductive 3 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Guys and gals, I need your help for a small ‘experiement’.
I would like to narrow down a bug that I keep hitting on GP3 (but Gobe can’t reproduce in their labs) and I would like to know if you have the same problem as I have. IF you do, PLEASE reply and state your FULL hardware specification and your Windows version.
So, the bug is:
Open a SpreadSheet, select some random cells and click on the ‘Text Ink’ icon from the toolbar (just right next to the ’10’ drop down menu). A color palette should appear. Deselect the cells and select some other ones, randomly again. Now, reclick to the ‘Font Ink’.
Do the same thing 3-4 more times.
Does GP3 crash for you? IF yes, please let me help find a pattern that happens on specific hardware and/or software composition. Let me know of your specs.
Thanks!
Eugenia,
Sorry I tried and tried and couldn’t get it to crash
It does not crash on me, though I can’t be sure I’m understanding what you want me to do fully. Should I select a color, leave the palette open?
On a differant note. GP3 is rocking in my mind, its fast and the whole draw stuff where ever you want just plain rules.
Can someone else try saving something as a .pve then .doc then .rtf and see if it crashes
The installation went smoothly, but when I try to start GOBE it hangs during “Initilazing Clipboard”.
for me.
Athlon based Epox 7k??? 256MB Viakx133 SbLive Win98SE
No crashing here either.
The interface is well thought out.
Nice cell merge in spreadsheets and Tables.
Awsome PDF exporting!
I got my pre-order in and hoping for a BeOS version.
The only things I need that are still missing are:
1. A table of Content (TOC) generator.
2. Built-in “math formula” writer.
I also noticed that BeOS allows freely rotating objects with the mouse while Windows requires typing the angle. (Perhaps the final version will have it.)
Congrats to Gobe! Keep up the great work!
ciao
yc
It’s really fast, the Zooming Dialog it’s so quick!!..
But I had immediatly problems that I’ve sent to Gobe, see if it happens to you all:
Steps to reproduce it:
1 – Open a new Graphics document.
2 – Select the Text Graphic Tool
3 – Click anywhere on the empty document.
Then CPU goes to 100% and the application stops responding.
I’ll be using Gobe to write some papers for my Pos-Graduation but I’m a little worried about the crashing/hanging bugs, so where is the auto-save mode??..I’ve search for it but not found it anywhere…
Hmmm, no graphic doc problem here.
The processor does shoot up for a fraction of a second as I create the text box but after that, it’s back to business.
ciao
yc
The Web features are awsome! (Get from Web and Save to Web)
Try ’em out.
I also found the rotate freely tool, It’s now part of the Drawing tool bar.
Gobe should also have a “Rotate” option to rotate freely with a mouse in the transform context menu.
C’mon Palm, Please Release BeOS!
ciao
yc
No crashing here either… except for when I downloaded the Gobe page and tried to edit it..however I couldn’t reproduce the crash.
Too bad I’m not a windows nor linux user cause GP3 really rocks. Does the windowsversion use FreeType? Cause smaller fonts looks a lot better than in GP2 for BeOS
Oh yeah.. and I love to be able to export to pdf.. I really miss that in GP2
Pedro, I can reproduce that bug on this machine too.
Seems to lock Gobe Productive on my machine. See post above for computer spec.
I think I’ve narrowed the problem…I’ve sent it to Gobe:
>When the Text Box is created it adjusts the font size to fit the Box, but
>If the Height of the Text Box is too small then it is selected a Font Size of 0
>( In my case Times New Roman , Font size = 0) that seems to lock everything up.
>To reproduce you only need to create the Text Box by clicking and DON’T >dragging the mouse or create a text box with a very small height.
Awesome beta!!! Too bad there isn’t a BeOS version of GP3
Eugenia- IU can’t get it to crash on my machine. I havn’t found any bugs in it yet…
I really like the fact that it can save files as PDFs
Er, typo. IU should be I
🙁
Do GP2 and GP3 read and write eachothers formats, os is there an addon that would let you do that? I have GP2 and I would like for GP2 and GP3 to work seamlessly together sience there probley won’t be GP3 for BeOS…
Well, Gobe Productive 3 just crashed on me.
After saving a 417 page document as a PDF it crashed
hmm… i should trty that again.
For those that didn’t think there was.
There is a formula editor, I used it allready just start writing a equation in a Cell and a tool bar for it will come up.
Also you can free rotate things. click on your object right click on it, chose transform-> rotate click cancel then grab the edege box of the shape and spin. I think there was a few other ways i got it to go. Belive me you can Free spin them.
Now my question. I want to be able to write a formula in a cell and go like =A1+1 then drag it down the column and have 1 2 3 4 5 asuming A1 = 1 i can do it in excel, I know this thing must do it some how or its going to be worthless. Anyone know how. Doing the formula thing works to get a value of two so the formula part is working but i can’t get it to go down the whole colum.
Yep, very nice. Found a few bugs too. I had the same bug as you Pedro; it is reproducible I think. Try not to click in your canvas after clicking on the Text Graphic Tool(==hang), but rather click&drag a bit so that you get a real text frame. Works for me.
For the rest, it really rocks. Creating PDF’s is really cool. Acrobat is $249, Gobe as a whole suite is half the price!
The Polygon and Bezigon tools are really great. Try creating a Polygon and then use the ReShape tool. Right click on a Polygon point and low and behold you have some ultracool options to smooth the points. It’s really fast to make difficult nice looking shapes!
Rogier
Oops, was busy typing/testing, didn’t notice you found the same solution Pedro.
The problem I mentioed about gobe crashing was just due to me running out of memory… I love being able to save things as PDFs! It’s great!
Brad, I am looking for an equation editor for the word processor that does integral and sigma signs and so on…
Is that what you were refering to in the spread sheet?
ciao
yc
YC yeah i guess so. When you say equation editor are you talking about being able to type in like =A1+2*B3 something like that? thats what i was mainly talking about. The help page has stuff on working with equations.
Far as my problem with being able to paste a equation into many cells at once and get big arrays of data apparently it worked in previous version but is dissabled or something right now. It don’t crash it just doesn’t work when it should. Another person confirmed this problem.
I just tried to import a simple document from Word, and the result was NOT good. Not at all, actually.
Graphics, which was a scaled down logo, took up half the page in Gobe (max size of the logo).
Bullet lists was converted to small text without bullets.
This should be simple to handle, should it not?
No, it isn’t easy to read MS Word. Gobe does it poorly compared to others but it is a difficult task. It’s not a documented format and it changes its spots on every release.
The only cross-platform format at the moment is RTF. However insert images and you’ll bloat that format ten times (easily). I usually just zip a Docbook XML with images and edit that in Abiword (available on every platform).
>Bullet lists was converted to small text without bullets.
It is a *known* limitation. Ms Word Macros are not supported by Productive (and also by many other third party word processors). This is why you won’t be able to see any macro-derived Word document and the form fields will be converted to text.
However your other problem, the .doc image translation, it may be a bug. Please report the full details to GoBe.
That about sums it up. Macros aren’t related to bulleted lists. You only need to support, well, bulleted lists to be able to load a document from another format that has them.
I’ll be curious if the RTF importer/exporter works better than previous versions. A program should really use the same engine for RTF and Word .doc conversion; RTF is essentially the ‘open’ ASCII-only version of the .doc format, and all features in one can be implemented in the other and vice-versa. (I’m not quite sure if this applies to embedded graphics, but it actually might.)
Linking the two would also make writing the Word exporter simpler, in theory.
I found it converted from .doc to .pve very quickly. GP3 opened my word docs quicker than Word does. And there where no misformating. I don’t know that you can expect something to be able to convert a .doc with a graphic in it very easily. I would say thats much differant than just text.
I get visual artifacts when trying to wrap text around an object such as a speech bubble, especially if I just bang madly away on the keyboard.
Better file a bug report.
very nice.
but needs index support.
Mlk
1. Bullets and Lists were a last minute addition to the 3.0 release as such there was not enough time to get the Word translator to support them on import/export.
2. There are many ways in which Word can store images in a .doc – we have added support for many of them. A few however were deferred for a future relase of the translator. In particular Word Art is not supported. Embedded jpgs, wmf, gifs, pngs, etc should work. If you experience problems (like the sizing problem mentioned – that’s a bug – send us the details so it can get fixed for the final release).
3. There is no equation editor part. Next to a database part this is the second most requested new part. We made a start at it and released it couldn’t be finished for the 3.0 schedule.
4. As noted above we don’t support macros in either the program or the translators. So if you wish to create some viral documents you’ll have to stick with Word/Excel.
Thanks for all the kind words,
-Tom Hoke
Gobe Software
Hey Tom! Great work! GP3 is great. I like the idea of their being a database built into GP, but it can wait. It’s seems like it would be hard to do, and I would rather have the exisitngs built in apps (you know, Word Proccesing, Speadsheet… what ever you want to call them) improved and have more features then have a zillion things with just a few features. So, in a nutshell, IMOP the database would be nice – but it can wait.
Tell everyone at gobe to keep up the good work!
GP3 converts my Excel files almost correctly, but refuses to grab the correct color for cells formatted with color. Blue turns up a strange purple. No biggie, it gets everything else correct and color is easy to change.
Maybe it will improve by final.
The requirement for Windows 98 or higher comes down to GP3 using features that only later versions of shell32.dll provide, which means that 98lite installations of Windows 98 will not work because one substitutes the Win95 versions of explorer.exe, shell32.dll and comdlg32.dll for their Win98 counterparts. So I dug through the CAB files on my Win98 install disk and found and substituted (in DOS mode, of course) the Win98 versions of the above files for the Win95 versions in my 98lite installation and GP3 ran fine. [Note: The Win98 version of Windows Explorer is indeed *much* slower than the Win95 version.]
In the forum on gobeProductive two or so weeks ago Ability Office was brought up as another potential lightweight alternative to MS Word. This month’s issue of the UK mag <u>PC Advisor</u> had a CD with the full Ability Office “2001” (i.e., 2000 renamed) on it, so for $6.00 I figured “what the heck”. AO has word processing and spreadsheet programs comparable to their GP3 counterparts, a pretty powerful bitmap editor, a lame drawing program, and a DB program of comparable power to MS Access (it uses the same MS Jet DB engine backend as Access).
At $69 for the full suite it should be worthy of consideration. Here is my problem with it: It is one of those MFC programs that dumps an incredible amount of junk into one’s Registry. By the time I had finished installing the suite and trial run each of the constituent programs my Registry had increased in size by 17 MB, an 8% size increase. The Registry can only take so many hits like this before performance slows, at least on my 4 year old machine. Add the Registry bloat to the 28+ MB of program files, and suddenly it does not look so “lightweight” after all.
In contrast, GP adds only 14.4 MB worth of program files and very little to the Registry – a couple of KB at most – once you remove all the crap that Windows Installer leaves behind from the installation. (This is easy to do, and a manual uninstall of what’s left will be easy when the time comes. There is no loss of functionality in GP3 from deleting the Installer Registry entries.) In fact, given what a elegantly simple and clean installation GP3 itself is I don’t know why gobe went the Windows Installer route at all. The whole installation could be reduced to unzipping a ZIP file into a directory of one’s choosing, and then having the PVE file type associations added when Productive is first run.
Looks great so far! I couldn’t reproduce any of the crashes. The .PDF output is worth it alone. The interface is great. I’m disappointed that the specs say that it will not run on NT machines though. Maybe it will with the installer download. I put my pre-order in. I like to support non-MS software companies, but I don’t want to have to buy Win2K or Xp to run Gobe. Oh well.. it runs good on my 98SE machine.