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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: jahc on November 05, 2002, 09:06:58 AM

Title: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: jahc on November 05, 2002, 09:06:58 AM
Amiga Writer! It only needs a bit of work IMO. It does everything I need it to do personally (which isnt much).. and it can load some MS Word documents. Check out the demo on www.haage-partner.com . It runs fast on my Athlon 1.4GHz running WinUAE.. I'm nearly foaming at the mouth at the prospect of a PPC native version for OS 4.0.

Maybe it would be an idea to buy Amiga Writer, or pay Haage&Partner to work on it, like Apple did with Claris Works. Rather than waiting for the market to pick up again. The market wont pick up again until we have key apps which the masses need (such as word processors)..
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: anarchic_teapot on November 05, 2002, 09:41:30 AM
Quote
jahc wrote:
Amiga Writer! It only needs a bit of work IMO. It does everything I need it to do personally (which isnt much)

Lucky you. I couldn't even get it to work, but maybe it's improved drastically since last I tried. Now, in theory I've nothing against any of the Amiga WP programs, in fact I've used excellence! and Wordworth a lot and found them good solid tools, if a little under-featured as other OSes caught up and went past in the fast lane.

OTOH, OpenOffice.org isn't just a word processor. I like it a lot, to the extent I'm considering buying StarOffice, Sun's version with extra features, for my boxen.

Reasons for porting OOo:
- Word processing/spreadsheet/HTML editing capabilities
- Compatible MS Word/Excel
- Available on a number of platforms (reduced learning curve when changing from another system)
- Powerful (not everyone is just going to type a letter)
- People have heard of it (eg French schoolchildren are being taught to use it) , so it's a selling point

Does this help?
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: on November 05, 2002, 10:00:22 AM
What's wrong with Editpad?  :-D

Anyway OO would be nice!  :-)

I wonder if porting it would be hard? Not as hard as Mozilla? :-o
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: jahc on November 05, 2002, 10:46:49 AM
@anarchic_teapot

Hmm okay you bring up some good points. I think Amiga Writer has its place though, for letters, CVs/resumes, course assignments.. But yes you're right, OpenOffice sounds like it has a lot of definate advantages.

Hey, its well known that you have a developer AmigaOne.. I've been wondering for awhile, do you code? Or did you just want to beta test it? :)
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: gnarly on November 05, 2002, 10:49:05 AM
Please lets not start this again! Kronos'll go mental ;-)

Apparently we need ports of GTK and some other dev toolkits first, or something :-)
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: JoNty on November 05, 2002, 12:12:49 PM
"What's wrong with Editpad?"

It uses Classact.
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: anarchic_teapot on November 05, 2002, 12:58:51 PM
Quote
gnarly wrote:

Apparently we need ports of GTK and some other dev toolkits first, or something :-)

We need ports of lots of things, but above all, we need coders! I've got my white bucket, but I don't code. Will betatest for free and configure email and internet access for food, though  :-)
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: on November 05, 2002, 01:33:56 PM
If OO gets ported to Amiga, please see if it's possible to remove the AutoComplete crap!
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: on November 05, 2002, 01:50:30 PM
Quote

anarchic_teapot wrote:

We need ports of lots of things, but above all, we need coders! ....


I am willing to learn how to program in C(++) but the only way to learn is with Windows. Now I know that I can learn C(++) without using any OS extensions, but does anyone know where I can learn the Amiga extensions, to make use of it all. Is that the sort of thing that would be included with the dev kit that Hyperion (I think) are realsing?

I wanna learn how to code (I use to use BBC Basic and Pascal but that was some time ago!) and wanna do it for the Amiga! But I don't know where! Maybe Hyperion could do online lessons!
 :idea:
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: AmigaMac on November 05, 2002, 02:05:30 PM
Well though there are great apps amongst the Amiga for this area, OpenOffice.org's initiative is to offer a cross platform open standard to all major OSes!  We could use this really, for one thing it is based on XML file format standards, which is quickly becoming the standard and MS Office 11 will be supporting XML as well!
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: Desler on November 05, 2002, 02:29:30 PM
@newskool
Heres some links for some free c/c++ tutorials. The first one is for c++ in general. The second is primarily a tutorial to use intuition, dos, graphics and other amiga realted things. Both come with quite a few examples

Thinking in c++ (http://www.mindview.net/Books/DownloadSites)
ACM (http://www.funet.fi/pub/amiga/programming/docs/)

Happy coding. And feel free to check back if you need additional help
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: on November 05, 2002, 02:50:36 PM
@JoNty

Well you could always use ED  ;-)

But the question is: Is ClassAct really so bad?  :-o
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: kd7ota on November 05, 2002, 03:25:50 PM
I just normally use Microsoft Word 2000 for typing. Its just something my brother copied for me! Muahahahh! Microsoft went down 3 points!  ;-) As long as it types and prints, I wont even argue about a word processor.
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: gary_c on November 05, 2002, 03:27:45 PM
Gobe Productive, written by the guys who did the original Claris Works, was the main (maybe the only) commercial hit on BeOS. Later it was also ported to Windows. But still it died in the end, done in by the death of BeOS and dominance of MS Word. Gobe is going to open-source Productive, so it'll be available to anyone who wants to carry it on. And it is a really nifty office suite, not a heavyweight contender like OpenOffice.org, but still very capable for the vast majority of what most people need. (It's actually a lot of fun to use.) And since it's already been ported (and written for portability) the task of bringing it to a new platform should be many times easier than porting something like OpenOffice. Just thought I'd mention it, if people are looking at all the possibilities.

-- gary_c
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: AmigaMac on November 05, 2002, 03:42:28 PM
True, Gobe Productive is a great application, I should know, I own a copy.  It's good to see they're going to open source it, but I would have opted for the MIT over GPL licensing, but it's their call!  Does anyone know where to get ahold of these guys to get the source once it is approved?
Title: Re: Why do we need OpenOffice? When we have..
Post by: JoNty on November 06, 2002, 03:35:29 PM
"Well you could always use ED"

I'd rather not, because it's sh*t. CEd's the text editor for me.