Apple and Gobe Details

[MacRumors]

Bob Hearn maintains an interesting site detailing "A Brief History of Clarisworks". In it, he details the origins of Clarisworks and his involvement, back to a small company called StyleWare in the mid 1980's.

Overall, an interesting history to read, but one of the most interesting components relate to the original development team's departure around the time of ClarisWorks 5.0's development. A few of the ClarisWorks developers who left at this time (Scott Holdaway, Scott Lindsey, Carl Grice, Bruce Hammond and Tom Hoke) left to found Gobe software.

After Be's failure, and the subsequent demise of Gobe, it appears Apple did have interest in acquiring Gobe:

Apple did not in the end acquire Gobe as such, but three of its founders, Scott Holdaway, Scott Lindsey, and Carl Grice, did rejoin Apple as employees when Gobe failed. They won't tell me what they are up to (even off the record!), but whatever it is, it does not involve the Gobe Productive codebase. Nor, I am reasonably sure, does it involve the ClarisWorks / AppleWorks codebase.

Bob Hearn returned to graduate school to study Artificial Intelligence.

[PROZAKY]

Is that when the new Power Macs came?

[MOM]

I remember once reading something (on MacInTouch, I think) from one of the original authors of ClarisWorks (perhaps it was Hearn) that this person regreted that they didn't lay a better foundation in the software to be able to compete with office. My point is that what this may mean is they are starting from the beginning rather than with old code. MOM

[Token]

isn't it possible that they began working with another, tight coded, open source, office or word processor package?

Come to think of it, wasn't there some statements from Sun/Apple that they were or wren't somehow collaborating on openoffice?

[jamilecrire]

bob returned to school to study artificial intelligence. Lol, I guess you need to be close to the professors to see how artificial they really are!

Best of luck.

[josepht]

With the continuation of Office Party, I think it's going to be a while before we see Apple's equivelent to Microsoft Office. If they ever write such a suite, I hope it will be released with the G5s. I hope I won't have to put anything Microsoft on my G5--if I can get one.

[evanmarx]

Originally posted by josepht
With the continuation of Office Party, I think it's going to be a while before we see Apple's equivelent to Microsoft Office. If they ever write such a suite, I hope it will be released with the G5s.

Or with the release of apple's marklar thingy in 1 or 2 years. the more we wait the more apps apple will have under their thumbs to control... even if it means to rewrite the code for intel ...

[Marvenp]

Does anyone know about or has used OpenOffice? http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/index.html

[PsiFire]

Perhaps these people are from where Keynote sprung? I know it's late, and I can't keep my thoughts together to well. But it makes for a logical extrusion that if Apple has these people in their employment, that these same people could possibly be revamping an office suite for Apple.

[MacsRgr8]

Originally posted by Marvenp
Does anyone know about or has used OpenOffice? http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/index.html

Yes, it runs on X11 (http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/download/). You will also need the OpenOffice launcher for Apple's X11 (can be found at versiontracker.com).
It works, but its darn ugly... (looks exactly the same as the Linux version).
I hope there will be an "Aqua (Cocoa)" version of it, so that there will be no need to install X11, and that it will look good.

[steve53e]

Publish & Subscribe! Why Apple ever removed Publish & Subscribe from AppleWorks 6 and the ability to have/use P&S aware apps in OS-X is beyond me.

[macmax]

would someone explain , like a child , x11 to me , please.

What can o really do with it, how?

Thank u very much.hehheheh

[jettredmont]

Originally posted by macmax
would someone explain , like a child , x11 to me , please.

What can o really do with it, how?

Thank u very much.hehheheh

X11 is the Unix X-windows windowing system. X11 defines a back-end server and front-end client type of system which allows the application being run to run on a different computer than the monitor it is being shown on. However, in the more usual sense it is the foundation of most GUI-enabled UNIX apps.

X11 is not the same as KDE or GNOME, which are "Desktop Managers", or the various "WIndow Managers" one can use in Linux (KDE is technically a DM and a WM; GNOME uses another app for the WM while it handles the desktop). It is also not the same as th underlying toolkits (Qt for KDE and GTK form Gnome). However, these graphical toolkits and window managers and desktop managers all sit upon X11 and generally assume its services are present.

With a good X11 implimentation, you can recompile and run most UNIX apps out of the box. However, the caveat is that until Apple's X11, all previous X11 implementations failed to take advantage of Quartz and Aqua, and thus looked quite foreign amongst native apps. Even with Apple's X11 system, you'll find a definite barrier between your native apps and X11 apps.

KHTML, the basis of Safari, was based on the Qt toolkit services of KDE. To make Safari a native app instead of an X11 app, Apple had to write a replacement Qt library of sorts, replacing Qt's X11 calls with Quartz calls. This is a significant body of work (according to a letter to the KHTML team, the majority of Apple's work on Safari), and IMHO gives hope for future work (it would be nice to be able to use Qt services wth nothing more than a recompile on OS X without having to pay TrollTech $1,500 per developer per product for non-X11 use of the library!) This forms the WebCore package, if I recall correctly.

So, what can you do with X11? Run your Linux or Solaris apps with little more than a recompile of the source code. However, note that they won't look and feel like OS X apps; they will continue to look like Linux apps. From an end-user's POV, X11 is useless until you have an app that needs it. At which point, of course, it becomes necessary until you find a replacement for that app that runs natively

[beatle888]

Originally posted by jettredmont


without having to pay TrollTech

thats an aweful term. reminds me of how the
superrich families of america stand on the
shoulders of the middle class and in return
ridicule them.

.

[IJ Reilly]

I spent some time talking to the OpenOffice.org people at their booth at MacWorld. They were showing a proof-of-concept of an Aqua OO, but it was very slow and buggy. They said it could take two years to get it all running properly. I pressed on the question of how much support they were getting from Apple. Apparently, not a lot. They have Apple's cooperation, and a dedicated contact person, but nobody within the mother ship is working on code -- that's all been left to the open source cadre.

I'm beginning to think there's some truth to the Sun/StarOffice rumors. The official responses to this rumor list time it surfaced seemed kind of coy. This is a natural area of cooperation between Apple and Sun -- and you can bet if this project is happening, we won't spot a glimmer until Steve pulls the wraps off at MacWorld.

[ibjoshua]

Originally posted by IJ Reilly
This is a natural area of cooperation between Apple and Sun -- and you can bet if this project is happening, we won't spot a glimmer until Steve pulls the wraps off at MacWorld.

That's right. Apple's extreme secretiveness is great for fueling rumour sites but it's not very helpful for the open source community. From what I've read on the Konqueror site they were a bit gob-smacked when Apple logged a years worth of changes in one go. I'd hate to see the Open Ofice bods face the same thing. Does anyone know if they're under the same type of licence?

i_b_joshua

[jettredmont]

Originally posted by beatle888

thats an aweful term. reminds me of how the
superrich families of america stand on the
shoulders of the middle class and in return
ridicule them.

.

I assume "TrollTech" is the term you are referring to.

Awful or not, it is the name of the organization which produces the Qt windowing toolkit. Personally, I agree that it's a bad choice for a company name, but apparently they didn't consult me before registering it.

[seishino]

Originally posted by Marvenp
Does anyone know about or has used OpenOffice? http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/index.html

I've used OpenOffice under Linux and Windows, and I'm sad to say it is no ClarisWorks. ClarisWorks was responsive, small, fast, and visually uncluttered. OpenOffice is about as large as Microsoft Office, about as responsive as Microsoft Office, and a little more buggy than Microsoft Office. It's still better than MS Office, of course, because Microsoft doesn't own your documents, but it is not the poetry that was ClarisWorks.

Sadly, there seems to be the perception that size and slowness are a sign of the gravity of what a program is accomplishing, not simply as unnecessary fat to be trimmed. Price, too, seems to be the defining factor in the judgement of quality, as it is in too many things in capitalist cultures. ClarisWorks is a 3,000 dollar Porche in an age of SUV's.

Good luck Bob! I hope your AI research leads to a much improved version of Clippy.

[Kid Red]

Originally posted by josepht
With the continuation of Office Party, I think it's going to be a while before we see Apple's equivelent to Microsoft Office. If they ever write such a suite, I hope it will be released with the G5s. I hope I won't have to put anything Microsoft on my G5--if I can get one.

Why do you think it would be awhile? They were working on Safari for a year now and no one knew. They have been working on Keynote and no one knew. They've had those Gobe programmers for how long now? How long since an AppleWorks update? I don't see why it can't come out at MWNY if it's ready.

[rmac]

1. Using OpenOffice on the Mac with Apple's X11, I agree it seems ugly, slow and bloated. But I also brought up Konquerer too, and I'd say the same thing for that. But the awesome people at Apple made Safari sleek, streamlined and fast. Whose to say they can't do the same with OpenOffice? (yes, technically we're talking about KHTML here, not Konquerer, but both use KHTML for the rendering).

2. The idea of using XML for documents sounds intriguing. With Sun and Corel coming to agreements on such a format, and with OpenOffice there for anyone else who wants to adopt the same, there finally appears to be a format that will give Microsoft's proprietary formats a run for their money. Here's an interesting article on this: The Register: Sun Presents XML Office Challenge. Steve Jobs mentioned Keynote being able to take in XML and incorporate the information into a presentation. Furthermore, Apple's been using XML for a while now in things like preference files and in things like iTunes and iPhoto.

3. When it comes to open source office products, it seems that the presentation software is always a big hole (like using Powerpoint from 5-10 years ago). But with Keynote, this is no longer a problem.

4. This is my opinion, but I think that the KDE programs look decent running in X11. Kspread and Kword could also be starting points for Excel and Word equivalents. Then again, I'm not very demanding on either of these applications, so their may be huge feature holes that I just haven't noticed. Personally I'd hope that Apple goes with the XML document standard no matter what they use.

[allpar]

I think some credit for finding this site should go to TidBits, no?