The second beta of the promising office suite gobeProductive 3 has been released. The Windows download file only weighs 6.3 MB and it includes further bug fixes and some new features. Remember to send bug reports to Gobe by stating your software and hardware setup along with a explanatory description of the bug. In related news, OpenOffice 6 Build 641b has also been released for Windows (47 MB), SPARC Solaris (68 MB) and Linux (75 MB).
gobeProductive Beta 2 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Downloaded this, and tried it out. Just like the BE version, only a little slower. Oh well, good to have it on windows, and a real alternative to the bloated office systems out there. I’m in.
I can’t select polish font. On standard polish windoze there are 3 types of “Times New Roman” font (and most other have polish version too), but in GP3 for windoze i can’t select font “version”. There is only one “Arial”, one “Times New Roman” etc. And that one isn’t polish.
Well some of the bugs i found are gone, others are now much more consistant, and some features are still jsut missing. But hey clicking the large “T” button no longer equals instant lock up. I managed to do a whole paper in it and i must say even in beta 1 state it was no more of a pain than Word, and those who saw my paper thought it looked great, Go Gobe
Great job for an alternative office suite. I liked the atention to design/detail on the samples. I was really impressed with all that you can do. Although I was a little throwned off by the interface (very different to MSOffice) I enjoyed using it. I’ll keep trying it. Heck, I might even buy it.
It isn’t close to Microsoft Office, no. But Gobe Productive on BeOS gave me strong senses of deja vu from my days using MacWrite II on a Macintosh IIci. Not only was the interface the same, there were some, ah, “misfeatures” that were identical–typing at the beginning of a long document was extremely sluggish (this seemed to go away in Productive 2), and it didn’t do full justification correctlly when you use characters you typed with the OPTION key, like typographer’s (“smart”) quotes and em dashes.
Yes, I reported that latter one as a bug in Productive 2 for BeOS. I haven’t tried it in GP3 yet.
you need to try it before you can say it isn’t close to office. Far as i’m concerned its better.
The new OpenOffice Build is available for Solaris on x86, too. And it runs. If you install Sun’s recommended patch set.
GP3 is building a strong foundation on which refinements can be done later. PDF and Web output look great! The user interface and part integration is excellent!
The foundation to potentially have all MS Office features and GP specific features are there. Auto spellcheck for example is there for words but not yet for grammatical/spelling errors in a sentence.
All I am missing now is a table of content (TOC) generator and a module to write special characters for math equations.
ciao
yc
Then again, who really gives a crap about efficiency any more? If there were intelligent consumers and businesses out there concerned with efficiency instead of status quo, the industry wouldn’t be the pile of scum that it is.
I wish Gobe great fortune. It is the only way I will be able to purchase Productive 3.0 for BeOS (the only OS I feel like using).
“Then again, who really gives a crap about efficiency any more? If there were intelligent consumers and businesses out there concerned with efficiency instead of status quo”
41 megs of hard drive space is worth about 10 cents these days. That’s worth what, about 10 seconds of your average employee’s time in terms of wages? If that other program allows an employee to do even one thing in a more efficient manner, businesses will have saved lots of money by installing the bigger program. There are many more kind of efficiency than storage space, and as it turns out, storage space is one of the least important kinds of efficiency there is, thanks to the incredibly cheap prices of hard drives.
“you need to try it before you can say it isn’t close to office. Far as i’m concerned its better.”
I’ve tried it and I like many things about it, but it lacks many of the features and much of the sophistication of MS Office (even little things, like being able to customize the toolbars and whatnot). For me, “it’s not made by MS” is not a good reason to consider it better.
While GP3 does not have all the features of MS Word,(i.e. TOC and math formula editor), it beats MS Word in other ways. It has better, more seamless parts integration via the Drawing Tool Bars. Ever try to embed a transparent spreadsheet or chart part in a word processing document or vice versa? GP3 simply does it better! It has buit-in image processing, PDF export. The same document can contain multiple root sheets/documents via the “View->Tool Bar->Sheet” menu. GP3 currently has most of the MS-Word features sitting on a better foundation plus it offers many unique page layout features that MS Word does not offer.
ciao
yc
I have tested beta 1 and submitted many bug reports. I now have beta 2, which is much more stable, has many bugs fixed, but others are coming up. The PDF and HTML export is 1st class, and the newly added chart module (check the 3D bar charts!) is awesome.
There are still a couple of UI idiosyncracies (not all dialog boxes have a live preview and can be floated), and features like borders/shading on paragraphs are still missing.
The missing TOC/Index generation that Yves talked about would be a nice add-on.
All in all, a superb first attempt, and I urge all of you to beta test and send bugs to [email protected]. The better the Windows/Linux version, the more successful Gobe will be, and that means the more likely the chances we’ll see GP3 for BeOS.
Moved from Beta One to Beta Two. Haven’t experienced any real problems in either one (yet), but Beta Two does _feel_ a bit more responsive. I haven’t hit the word processor with my final test, being able to edit an entire novel (500 pages) on it. However, it can at least handle a document that runs 63 pages.
Er, Brad, GP3 is not a competitor to MS Office. GP3 doesn’t have a database app.
GP3 is designed for the person who lives and dies by their word processor, and wants the ablity to easily add non-text to a document.
While bkakes rightly points out 3.5″ IDE HDs have gotten very cheap, corresponding price drops have not appeared in other segments of the storage market. Laptop HDs are still a little pricey, while chip based storage (PCMCIA cards and drives) still has a very high cost per Meg. With what I’m doing now, space is a consideration.
GP3 _and_ Ability Office make for a worthy competitor to MS Office. The combined price of GP3 and Ability Office is less than the cost of MS Word alone, and take less than 50 MB. For comparison, MS Word and Lotus WordPro each weigh in around 80MB. The one MS Office app I use, Access, is a real Jabba at 110MB. Lotus Approach (database) tips in around the same.
GP3 must get an equation editor. Ability Office as well.
The question I have is regarding GP3 and PDF export. I create a document and export it as a PDF file. When I open the newly created PDF file, the text is _very_ light, as if I printed something out when the cartridge was running dry.
The behavior appears to be font dependant. My preferred font is Courier New 12 pt. If I switch to Arial, the problem lessens. I’ve yet to find a font that looks as good as an exported PDF file as when I originally created it. No, I don’t own Acrobat, side I can’t do a side by side conversion comparison. However, PDFs that I haven’t created look fine. I’m not a font monster kind of guy, so could someone please explain this too me?
Disk space may be cheap, but it isn’t free, especially since you cannot buy it by the megabyte. Also, just having a few extra gigs available doesn’t mean I MUST fill them with bloatware. GB3 is just what the market needed. Good grief, I can create PDF files! This program is a jewel.