KOffice 2.0, The Vision (KDE.News) [LWN.net]

KOffice 2.0, The Vision (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 6, 2006 19:00 UTC (Tue) by cantsin (guest, #4420)
Parent article: KOffice 2.0, The Vision (KDE.News)

Not wanting to sound negative, but those groundbreaking features are basically what MS Office is doing since more than one decade. The usefulness of those embedded components could be debated, too, because they turn office suites into poor man's DTP programs that produce typographically horrible output. (Therefore, it could be debated whether triangular shapes of embedded objects really create an advantage or rather playgrounds for poor taste.) While it's upon the KOffice developers to do with their code what they want, I still wished KOffice development would focus more on creating a stable, reliable, but compared to OOo still lean application suite that is 100% ODF compliant, in the same way Konqueror is a nice alternative to the Mozilla browsers. I'm afraid with the current development focus, KOffice will stay a developer's toy, but never become a real productivity workhorse application.

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KOffice 2.0, The Vision (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 6, 2006 20:34 UTC (Tue) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

I'm not so worried... I'd rather have the KOffice guys going a little
crazy than just trying to build an OOo that doesn't suck the life out of
your computer. From looking at the discussion on the dot, it seems that
the functionality, while similar to OLE is different and better.

In any case, I could point to a lot of times when people worried about
what direction some big KDE component was taking (often people saying
'why are you wasting your time'). One of the biggest ones I remember was
the crowd that thought KHTML was useless and should be replaced with
Gecko. I can't even begin to tell you how awesomely pleased I am that
they didn't submit to that pressure (however large or small it may have
been).

That doesn't mean everything KDE is a magical success, but I have to say
that as a project I trust these guys to take some creative freedom...

KOffice 2.0, The Vision (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 6, 2006 21:22 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

The current version of KOffice can do exactly what Ms Office can do: embed
documents in other documents. The contents of those embedded documents are
solitary things, and the documents are whole documents. You get a
spreadsheet in a text document. What we're trying to achieve is a more
fine-grained embedding: a spreadsheet _cell_ inline in a text column in an
image connected to a diagram shape.

KOffice 2.0, The Vision (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 7, 2006 4:42 UTC (Wed) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]

> I still wished KOffice development would focus more on creating a
> stable, reliable, but compared to OOo still lean application suite that
> is 100% ODF compliant

this and the goals outlined in the vision document are not mutually
exclusive.

in fact, from i've seen this may actually help to that end by enabling
more code to be shared. right now there are different text formatting
systems, different canvas implementations, different (or in most koffice
apps, no) colour management features, etc...

this road they are on looks like it will really help more code sharing to
happen on the library level. that means smaller total binary sizes, fewer
bugs (more people using and working on the code) and greater consistency.
it also means that features (like colour management or application
automation) that have been going into some of the more actively developed
apps (like krita and kexi) will find there way into more applications.

it's still really early days to know for sure what this will all shake out
to, but i do think this is a positive direction.