I was a big fan of GobeProductive when it came out in 1998, way ahead of its time back then.
However, it’s more that it has a lot of nostalgia going for it, but it’s 2014, time has moved on, and I think there are now better alternatives in the end, where CalligraOffice has the most similar spirit I think (everyhing is lightweight, live, approachable, easy to use, and has a modern, task centric look&feel), at least looking at the current office solutions landscape:
KOffice/now Calligra has a Pages-inspired and modern, lightweight UI but needs some more work on that imho, also tends to crash here and there, but has decent OpenDocument support and is *very* fast and comparably small.
LibreOffice is so bloated and has long standing bugs, just like MSOffice (which seriously improved over LibreOffice since the 2010 version, I must say) and the new Renaissance UI is still not there, but it is the most comprehensive free office suite out there.
Softmaker Office is quite impressive and fast, but I didn't have enough time to really work with it, also it's not free but a port may be possible under similar conditions as for GoBe, and the code as well as feature set is more than up to date
there's Papyrus, but only the authoring tool "Papyrus Autor" is left of it, but that seems pretty impressive and would be cool to have on Haiku (as a creative OS:)
So from what I gathered, a modern version of Calligra suite on top of Qt5/KDE5 seems quite feasible, as KDE5 is - as someone noticed - very modularized and modern, so porting should be easier.
As for translators, I think they’d still make a lot of sense, but only in a functional, practical way, translating office documents to text for indexing and searching, and for generating thumbnails for a preview in Tracker. So this would combine both ideas, extracting text content and generating images, in a useful way imho.
But we can use the excellent POI library for that, no need to port GoBe here.
There is a free (as in beer) version of Softmaker Office available FWIW. It is essentially the previous version. Get it at http://freeoffice.com/ But you don’t get the source code, so it doesn’t help much.
Wouldnt be it less time & resource consuming if we make the same approach that kaliber (from TILTOS) did? Just port x server and needed components to create some kind of compatibility layer for heavy linux apps to haiku? tiltos package could come with hpkg package
No. X11 will never be the way to go, as it’s dying. (But a Wayland compatibility layer might eventually be a possibility.)
As for an office suite: Calligra looks pretty easy to port as it already runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, and Mac and we already have the major dependencies (Qt, LCMS, libpng) leaving only the KDElibs which are pretty easy and have been ported before. I’ll take a crack at it and see how far I get.
Given that KOffice development is practically dead in the water, I like the idea of picking up the project, porting it to Haiku and then developing it to be a viable competitor to the ‘big 2’. There was a version someone managed to get working on one of the early alphas, compatibility has broken since then though.
KOffice has been forked as Calligra, and there is very active development going on with it. And as I’ve already said, I’m working on porting it.
As for writing an office suite: I don’t think any time should be wasted on development of non-native office suites within the Haiku project. If you want to develop a Qt-based office, I’m sure the Calligra community will welcome you.
awesome, glad I could get you hooked on it:)
Do you have a blog or something where we can eagerly follow your progress?
Being a developer myself, I’d be very keen on joining your effort, but being a freshly baked father at the same time, I can only offer some help in doing research and testing for now, I’m afraid…
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I was already working on a Calligra port before you posted here
As for progress, all my work is going to https://bitbucket.org/haikuports/haikuports and when I’m done, pre-built packages will appear in HaikuDepot. I’ve satisfied all of Calligra’s dependencies except for KDElibs, and all of KDElibs’ dependencies but 3 libraries (LibAttica, DBusMenuQt, and something else I’m forgetting). Once KDElibs appears there, you can expect Calligra soon after
KDE-apps.org is a third party site and a bit clunky, it’s better to get stuff from http://kde.org directly.
No, you can’t assume that. Calligra requires very few things actually (Qt, KDELibs, LCMS, and some other things that are already ported). Other apps could require many more things that we don’t have (e.g. one of the things Kdenlive needs is MLT, which isn’t a KDE lib at all).
It will take far more than my skill level to do anything with this, but the source code for MS Word for Windows 1.1a has been made available for non-commercial purposes.
It will take far more than my skill level to do anything with this, but the source code for MS Word for Windows 1.1a has been made available for non-commercial purposes.
Yes, I’ve managed to port all of KDE’s dependencies (all ~15 of them, whew) and get those uploaded to HaikuDepot. I also created a KDE recipe that builds. However, when you try to run any of the binaries that are created, you get a bunch of linker errors and they don’t start. I haven’t found a way to fix that, so I can’t go any further.
If anyone wants to have a go at fixing that, you can shoot me a PM on here or on IRC and I’ll be happy to provide the info necessary to get started.
It will take far more than my skill level to do anything with this, but the source code for MS Word for Windows 1.1a has been made available for non-commercial purposes.
There’s an entire codebase to be ripped apart and inspected, and all people can think about is “let’s not port the whole thing”? No wonder this community is spinning its wheels going nowhere the way it is …
Maybe there is still code for spellchecking in there that can be used and adapted. Maybe there is code on how to … Oh, never mind, let’s just keep on having this conversation for another ten years.
There’s an entire codebase to be ripped apart and inspected, and all people can think about is “let’s not port the whole thing”? No wonder this community is spinning its wheels going nowhere the way it is …[/quote]
I dont want to sound rude, but this is ridiculous!
and again i dont want to sound rude, but… Spellchecking from 1991, seriously?
Take a look at www.abiword.org instead (didnt we had a port of this?)
There’s an entire codebase to be ripped apart and inspected, and all people can think about is “let’s not port the whole thing”? No wonder this community is spinning its wheels going nowhere the way it is …
Maybe there is still code for spellchecking in there that can be used and adapted. Maybe there is code on how to … Oh, never mind, let’s just keep on having this conversation for another ten years.[/quote]
I appreciate your zealousness for building stuff for Haiku. All antique software issuses aside (hey - some of the old stuff was pretty good!) - I had a look at the licence on computerhistory.com. Yes - it is non commercial. It also says you may not distribute the software. You have to get it from an MS source, and you may not distribute any derivatives.
Sorry - it’s computerhistory.org. They do give you the right to distribute up to fifty lines for “illustrative purposes” - but fair use would probably give you that anyway.
I don’t think MS ever really gives anything away “for nutin”
