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Changed, Thanks

Wow, I think this technique should be used in more programs. Hey, it could also be used in games ! Now wait a minute ! We could be onto something big here !

meh ...

It's funny because that doesn't seem like much, but it required a complete overhaul of their drawing architecture.

It's most important for the "Draw" part of the suite.

Replace "far behind Microsoft" with "years of light behind Microsoft", that will be more clear.

But still pretty nice for free (as in beer) software.

For a freebie it's great but I agree if you have the choice I can't see why you'd choose it over MS Office.

It's not that bad, it's not as pretty or as functional as Office 2007 but it does the job just fine and is free I didn't have enough Office licenses to install it on my laptop (it only came with a standard trial version) and instead of paying another ~AUD$200, I just put OpenOffice on there and I can still use Office on the other PCs if I need it, but OpenOffice does a good enough job for me anyway.

until there's a free version that has perfect or great MS office compatibility in the file format, it won't ever be great.

Why would MS want to put nails in it's own coffin?

I'm pretty sure OpenOffice is open source. And having worked along side a free software foundation believer for several months, I'm also fairly certain that the term used in this situation would be is free (as in speech).

It's open-source freeware. 'nuff said.

Nope.

Is it only IE+Windows compatible?
Can you work temporarily offline?

My answer would depend pretty heavily on those questions

Such a product would be great for casual home users, who'd be less likely to care about ads and just want to be able to write their own simple docs and share teehee-mail stuff with friends. Home power-users (which I'd loosely call myself) wouldn't be that interested because OOo probably serves our composition needs, we don't abide ads, we're resourceful when it comes to solving the "sharing" issue, and we have no time (or no trust) for forwarded attachments of a non-business demeanour. Business users (except the smallest and most desperate) won't be comfortable with it because it'd expose the content of their documents to the vendor's servers (that seems to be how these web-office apps generally work anyhow).

..And of course, there are people in all these camps who don't like the idea of their office suite being unavailable when (for the many possible reasons) they don't have net access. That's the single biggest turnoff for me. Actually no it isn't but it's a close 2nd place to "It's Microsoft"

Have you even tried the latest version of Openoffice.org?

Yes I have and in my opinion I still believe the original 5.2 looks more professional. It has to do with the look and feel of the toolbars, toolbar buttons and menubars as well as icon position in the menus. Original 5.2 over all felt like using Office. I don't get the same feeling with the latest. This is just my opiion. What I have noticed though, OOo launches a lot quicker in Ubuntu in VirtualBox than in Windows natively! Perhaps Ubuntu preloads it when it starts up.

Gee. If only there was a way to change the icon's look and positions.

Oh, wait! You can import different icon sets, or even make your own. And moving them around to customize the toolbar positions and such can be done too.

I am an end user. I shouldn't have to do that. Default appearance matters.

Then don't make changes.

Just complain about what you can change.

Makes good sense.

Or if y ou're going to use a free alternative you could just be like everyone else: be grateful of the nonexistant price tag and not care about the UI.

Honestly, there's not much of a difference between them. Sure, the UI's different, but the vast majority of things people do, can be done in both apps.

Ah yes, Java. I remember being curious once, years back, about what sort of classes someone has to take to pursue computer programming in college, and seeing how they're almost always forced to start with Java.

I proceeded to lose all respect for and interest in the field.

It doesn't.

I am a C++ programmer and I can tell you that Java is a very descent language although there are some limitations when comparing to C++. If you want to use the "int" data type as you would use it in C++, you would have to use the "Integer" data type (and nothing wrong with that) + no true multiple inheritance. The only way to use something like multiple inheritance in Java is to extends a class and implement an interface which makes the current class have like two parents. Java has a garbage collector which cleans up memory and this is one of the reasons for being slow. Also, you need the java interpreter which also slows things down. The Java language is really easy to use and learn if you have done C++ before.

If you tell Java is slow to a Java fan boy, you might get insulted by saying it has to do with the way you write your code. Yes this is correct and you can speed things up by properly structuring your code and paying attention on how much memory you allocate, I cannot fully agree with them. No one can convince me you can make Java code as fast as C++.


Last edited by rwx on 03 May 2009 - 10:24