The K Desktop Environment, or KDE, is best known as a user interface and software suite for Linux. But for the past few months a team of developers has been hard at work porting KDE applications to Windows. When we looked at the KDE on Windows project earlier this year, it was still in the early stages and there honestly weren't many applications worth running. Now that's all changed. The problem today isn't that there isn't any software you want to run, the problem is that the applications are still pretty buggy.
A few weeks ago, the developers of KOffice, an open source suit of office applications released KOffice 2.0 Alpha for Windows, Mac, and Linux. In order to install the Windows version, you need to download and run the KDE on Windows installer utility and then select the KDE applications you want to install. To install KOffice, select the package labeled KOffice-msvc. Once it's installed you should be able to access KOffice applications like KWord and KSpread from your Windows Start Menu.
While we were able to get KWord up and running, it did crash periodically. KSpread and several other applications were non-starters. We kept getting error messages telling us that files or components were not found, which is a shame because the whole point of using the KDE on Windows installer utility is to automatically download and install any dependencies necessary to run the software you select.
The Kate and KWrite text editors seem to work pretty smoothly. But applications take a long time to start and are prone to closing unexpectedly. We wouldn't recommend replacing Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org with KOffice on Windows just yet. But KOffice 2.0 is still in Alpha, and the KDE on Windows project is still in the early stages. Perhaps one day this little office suite could konquer the world.
IBM has put the finishing touches on Lotus Symphony, a free Microsoft Office competitor based on OpenOffice.org. The company pushed out version 1.0 of the office suite which has been available as a public beta since last year.
Unlike OpenOffice.org, Lotus Symphony is not open source software. While IBM is providing it for free, Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, which is the last version of OpenOffice.org that had a license allowing developers to modify the code and keep the changes private.
According to Linux.com, IBM hopes to target the enterprise market with this software. The goal is to provide Lotus Symphony as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, while charging $25,000 per year for support. Of course, if you know how to use word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation applications, you probably won't need to spend the money. But you also might not find much in Lotus Symphony that isn't already available in its open source cousin, OpenOffice.org.
So what's new in Lotus Symphony 1? Here are a few highlights:
Critical crash and freezing issues have been fixed
Improved performance when creating new documents, spell checking presentations of spreadsheets, redrawing a presentation page, saving PPT files, and performing other actions
Improved interoperability with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, and SmartSuite documents
Added support for 4 more languages, bringing the total to 28
Lotus Symphony is available for Windows and Linux. While the only supported Linux platforms are SUSE Enterprise Desktop 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, you can install Lotus Symphony on other distributions. You just might run into a few errors here and there.
We mentioned Microsoft TownSquare today, the new offering from Microsoft for internal social networking and document sharing, and we have a screenshot for you to check out.
From what we can see it looks like you get a steady stream of activity based on employee which is really, really cool and helpful, along with an RSS feed to track the activity. From a project management standpoint, this is a huge.
We'll keep an eye out for more info and keep you up to date. Is this something you would want to use at work, or would it creep you out?
Since before the dawn of time, open source projects have forked more often than Lindsay Lohan cheked into rehab. The Mozilla browser is a great example of a successful fork, it was once based on Netscape, but evolved on its own and eventually rendered classic Netscape obsolete. Many -- if not most -- forks disappear into obscurity. We aren't so sure this one will go so quietly.
Go-OO is a fork of OpenOffice that has quite a few impressive features which really ought to be in official OO, but for some reason or another aren't, such as support for OpenXML, better Microsoft Binary support, and Word Perfect Graphics support. It also boasts significantly better start times -- at least on our poorly equipped test machine.
Long story short, this is a fast, lean beast of an office suite with great compatibilty with Microsoft Office. The price is right at $0.00, but as with any community project you are both welcome and encouraged to donate to the developers for their efforts.
Microsoft has announced plans to add support for a several new document formats to Office 2007. The company plans to release Office 2007 SP2 during the first half of 2009, and it will add support for XPS, PDF 1.5, and ODF 1.1 files, among others.
Users will be able to create, open, and edit ODF documents, and save documents as XPS, PDF, or ODF files. The Open Document Format, or ODF is an open source challenger to Microsoft's Office formats. A few years ago the company released an add-on for Microsoft Word that would allow users to open ODF documents. But with the launch of Office 2007 SP2, support for ODF and PDF files will be built right into the applications. No add-ons necessary.
Or you could just use OpenOffice.org today. No waiting until 2009 necessary.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is due out in September. But if you just can't wait that long, today the developers released a beta of the open source office suite. Back in March we took a look at a pre-beta version of OpenOffice.org, but the latest build is a bit more stable. And while we wouldn't recommend replacing the software you use to balance your companies books with a public beta, you can just check it out if you're an office suite geek looking for a rush. We won't judge.
So what's new under the hood? Here are some of the highlights:
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the first version to run on Mac OS X (there are also Linux and Windows versions)
OpenOffice.org Start Center gives you a one stop shop for creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, databases, or templates
Support for collaborative spreadsheet editing
Improved Writer notes features
View multiple Writer pages while editing a document
Improved crop features in Draw and Impress
Support for ODF and MS Office 2007 formats
Keep in mind, this is beta software. So while it will probably work properly 99% of the time, don't blame us if it crashes your system or goes crazy and starts messing up the formatting of that manuscript you've been working on for the last 10 years. In other words, remember to backup your documents, and think twice about using OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta to create or edit really important files.
As predicted almost a year ago, Microsoft has begun offering a free, advertising supported version of Microsoft Works, its office application suite for people too cheap to spring for Office. But it doesn't appear that there's any way to download and install Microsoft Works SE (Sponsored Edition) yourself just yet. Rather, computer makers are starting to install the software on new PCs.
Basically the program works just as well (read that statement however you'd like) as the full version of MS Works, but users will see a small advertisement in the program window, whether they're editing a spreadsheet or text document.
The new version of Works is available to computer makers for free. Of course, OpenOffice.org is also available for free, but you don't see PC makers including that on computers that ship with Windows yet. Works SE isn't available everywhere yet. It's apparently showing up on selected computers in the US, Canada, and a handful of European countries.
Been so busy waiting for your American Airlines flight to actually take off that you haven't had time to catch up on the week's other news? Wait, that doesn't make sense. You've had nothing but time on your hands. Aww, whatever. Here are some of our favorite stories from the past week. No excuses necessary.
We've been expecting Flickr to add a video upload feature to the online photo sharing site for some time now. But we never would have guessed that when it finally arrived, Flickr users would be limited to uploading videos of 90 seconds or less. Flickr's justifying the move by saying the clips should be seen as long photos, not YouTube-style content. But that hasn't stopped Flickr traditionalists from forming and anti-video group and starting a petition asking Flickr to withdraw the feature.
Have a few thousand music files scattered around your hard drive and need a good way to organize them? While iTunes, Windows Media Player, and several other music players will help you edit your music's metadata to add things like artist names and song and album titles, TagScanner is probably the easiest music tagger for Windows we've ever seen. And it's free to boot.
Office suites like Google Docs and Zoho Office have been busy adding offline access to let you access and edit spreadsheets, text, and presentation documents in a web browser whether you're connected to the internet or not. But paying ThinkFree customers have had this ability since last year.
That's because ThinkFree offers two products: an online, web-based office suite and a Microsoft Office-compatible suite for the desktop. Users can synchronize data between the web service and their desktops. But up until this week, users had to pay $50 for access to the desktop software. Now, as expected, ThinkFree has launched a free version of its desktop software.
Now, here's the interesting thing. You don't even need to sign up for an account to download the desktop software. So if you have no need for an online office suit, synchronization, or 1GB of free online storage space for your office documents, you can just treat ThinkFree Office as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, or whatever you've been using. But you will need to sign up for an account since ThinkFree will only save files if you have an account. Files will also automatically be saved to a ThinkFree folder for synchronizing with the web service. If you don't want to synchronize your files with the server, just never login again.
The applications can open and save documents in a variety of formats including Office 97 - 2007, PDF, RTF, and CSV. ThinkFree Write, Calc, and Show also do a great job of opening documents we've created using other applications, recognizing features like notes in our spreadsheets that other free tools like Gnumeric miss.
While we're guessing Microsoft would love to make Windows Mobil customers out of each and every iPhone user, that doesn't mean the company doesn't see a business opportunity in Apple's cellphone. After all, Microsoft has been selling Office software to Mac users for years, so now that Apple has provided an SDK for the iPhone, why not port Office Mobile and other Microsoft applications to the iPhone?
Fortune Magazine reports that a team of Microsoft developers has been poring over the iPhone SDK. While the company still has to determine whether it would make business sense to develop for the iPhone, doing so shouldn't be hard. After all, Apple is licensing Microsoft's ActiveSync and Exchange Server technology to provide push email capabilities.
What Microsoft applications would you like to see for the iPhone? We're going to assume Office Mobile is a given, but what about Windows Live Messenger? What we're really hoping for is Virtual PC 2007, but we're not going to hold our breath.
Google seems to be rolling out improvements to Google Spreadsheets like there's no tomorrow. Or like there's no Microsoft Office tomorrow anyway. When you click the little chart icon in the Google Spreadsheets toolbar, you now get a whole slew of charts and other gadgets to choose from in addition to the pie, bar, and line charts that Google introduced a while back.
The new gadget gallery includes:
Tables and pivot tables
Maps and heatmaps
Google web and image searches for selected values
Organization charts
Users can also create their own custom gadgets using the Google Gadgets API. In non-chart/gadget news, Google has also added the option to receive email notifications when someone changes a spreadsheet, and a variety of other bug fixes and feature enhancements including improved sort, filter, and unique functions.
In case you were rooting for Vista to take over the world, we've got bad news. The agency that takes care of all things technology in regards to education in the U.K., Becta, states in a press release that the upgrade to Vista should be "avoided."
Considering that free and open source operating systems and office suites do things about as well if not better than Microsoft products, especially if price is taken into consideration, this is hardly surprising. Becta stated that a primary reason is incompatibility - Office 2007's lack of support for the ODF format as well as the new Office format (those blasted DOCX files) - which doesn't make it a hot contender.
The release recommends that Vista should be considered an option only if there are any institution-wide ICT provisions being planned. Even so, that doesn't sound too good when you have schools on a budget trying to get the most out of their money. And when it comes to the bottom line, the Microsoft option looks downright grim.
The beginning of a trend? Perhaps. It's hard to beat free.
We're going to go ahead and give Microsoft some points for thinking outside of the box with their latest advertising strategy. The company has posted a series of videos to YouTube highlighting the features of Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Windows Live online services. Considering YouTube is owned by Microsoft arch-nemesis Google, that took some guts. But even more gutsy (or foolish), was the decision to leave the comments open on Microsoft's new YouTube channel.
While Windows may be installed on the vast majority of work and home PCs, it probably won't come as a surprise to you that Microsoft has a few detractors. And they tend to be somewhat vocal in their criticisms. The comment section of the company's YouTube channel kind of reads like a collection of prison letters from Sideshow Bob to Bart Simpson.
We also would have expected Microsoft to post the promotional videos on its own MSN Video site, not YouTube. So overall, the YouTube channel appears to be a way of reaching out to potential customers wherever they may be. And as we're seeing, those potential customers are more than happy to reach back -- even if it's not necessarily in the way Microsoft may have hoped.
The wait is over, DocSyncer is out of beta and open for all to use. This downloadable application allows PC based users of Microsoft Office and Google Docs to seamlessly sync documents.
DocSyncer is a downloadable application that sits on your computer and automatically finds and syncs all of your document files to your Google Docs account. When it's running, it checks all of your documents and syncs them as they are updated to create a solid backup and work anywhere system. Word and Excel based files can be opened directly from the web interface, and there is support for TXT, CSV and RTF formats.
Perhaps one of the coolest features is the 'disconnected' mode. If you are disconnected from the internet, DocSyncer will auto recognize it and load the document locally in the default application without trying to connect to the internet.
We covered Live Documents, the new online office documents competition last month, that is about to make a move to steal some market share aware from Zoho, ThinkFree and Google.
Live Documents has released some screen grabs from its interface, giving a little more insight into what they are all about. The Flash based interfaces do resemble what Microsoft currently has on the market, but add the ability to collaborate. Screenshots include Presentations, Spreadsheets and Documents.
Live Documents does reference Microsoft, and Microsoft's Office applications quite a bit when talking about its own suite, and the look and feel closely resembles what MS offers, so we have to assume that they have relied heavily on Office as a starting point. Is this a bad thing? Not if you're looking to quickly build and sell the business.
We'll have to test Live Documents when it becomes readily available to see what its winning points are, and whether or not it will become a major player in the online office space.
Been so busy waiting for your American Airlines flight to actually take off that you haven't had time to catch up on the week's other news? Wait, that doesn't make sense. You've had nothing but time on your hands. Aww, whatever. Here are some of our favorite stories from the past week. No excuses necessary.
