Re: What Else Are They Experimenting With?

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Re: What Else Are They Experimenting With?
by Michael Collette on Friday 10/Jan/2003, @02:18

> Whether it's future versions will be based on
> KOffice or OpenOffice is a good question

Tough call to be sure. KOffice is probably tons simpler to tweak into an Apple looking application. By default it simply looks nicer, and KWord offers a distinctly different approach from MS Word. It's also far more inline with a publishing application, which is certainly smack dab in the middle of Apple's core market. Just try getting a Quark user to bring up MS Word some time. It makes for some darn entertaining and colorful language.

For all that's going for KOffice, OpenOffice still has significant advantages. It's codebase and stability are quite obviously more mature. The file importing and exporting from MS products is about as good as can be found in any competing application. There is also the usability advantage that OO mimicks MS Office so closely that training needs are reduced.

What may just toss the whole decision over to OO is that it is being actively worked on right now for OSX, where KOffice isn't. Depends on how fast they would want to come to market with an MS Office replacement. If there's no hurry, they may tweak away at KOffice through 2003 for a big announcement in 2004. Whatever happens, it'll make for one heck of a show if they do push MS products off their product line.

Related Links

·   Articles on Konqueror
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Re: What Else Are They Experimenting With?
by zippy on Sunday 19/Jan/2003, @23:40

I actually thought about attempting to take a look at doing the port of Koffice.... How hard can it actually be? There is a native version of QT for the Mac so the widgets are handled out the box with a recompile... the tough part is finding out what are the absolute minimum KDE libs that are needed for Koffice to work. The Fink project has all of them native to Darwin X11... So at the worst you have to run them thru Qmake and compile for Mac. Relink where the apps look for the libraries so they look within the .app bundle instead of the system if needed....

I know I am probably smoking crack... Since I can not remember how to do half that stuff! But I think somebody more skilled then I could knock out a nasty version of it in a couple of weeks tops with the eval release of MacQT 3.1.1.

Might be an interesting thing for someone on the KDE side of the house to do to take advantage of some of the momentum of the safari release.

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Re: What Else Are They Experimenting With?
by Metrol on Tuesday 21/Jan/2003, @02:16

Looks like The Fink Project already has a KOffice package done up.

http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/koffice

BTW, thanks for the "Fink" reference. This is the first that I've heard about it. Looks like they've already managed to get quite a bit done over there.

Personally, I won't be doing much playing with OSX until Quark supports it. When it does, I'll have at least two machines in my marketing department moving on over to it. Most likely I'll keep one box around for myself to play with. It would be just too weird seeing KOffice up in Aqua.

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