Apple's Spreadsheet Application: Lasso

[Butters]

(.)(.)

(British in-joke)

hehe

 

[iMikeT]

I hope this actually happens.

 

[marco114]

I develop in Lasso

I use OmniPilot's Lasso: http://www.omnipilot.com/

And I'm quite pissed at Apple for using a name for an existing product. It will most definitely cause customer confusion. Both deal with data and manipulation and storage of data and numbers. This is bad news.

If they use the name as the product, I am 100% positive that OmniPilot will have a good case on it's hands.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

I use OmniPilot's Lasso: http://www.omnipilot.com/

And I'm quite pissed at Apple for using a name for an existing product. It will most definitely cause customer confusion. Both deal with data and manipulation and storage of data and numbers. This is bad news.

If they use the name as the product, I am 100% positive that OmniPilot will have a good case on it's hands.

Repeat after me: CODENAME for a NON-EXISTING PRODUCT!

 

[dernhelm]

I'm sure "Lasso" will be great, after all, Apple's calculator works flawlessly.

Apple has a calculator?

 

[furious]

(.)(.)

(British in-joke)

5318008 upside down! upside down!

 

[Hattig]

And in Perl, you can run this directly from Mac OS X Terminal:

perl -e '$j = 0.2; $k = 6; for ($i = 0; $i < 30; $i++) { $j = $k * $j - 1; print $j . " "; }'

It is just one of a handful of ways that show that if you don't think when you program a function then you can end up with something that doesn't work simply because of limitations within floating point units within computers today. One solution is to use decimal mathematics for decimal numbers (the other being to think about your algorithm to increase numerical accuracy). This is quite slow (relatively) on processors without decimal hardware, however the forthcoming Power6 does incorporate a decimal mathematics unit, that can handle 36 digit numbers according to the new IEEE 754R standard:

http://www.tecchannel.de/imgserver/bdb/350900/350948/E7C7E6358A45FECA368A6D5724976899_1000x700.jpg

Java includes a decimal mathematics class:

import java.math.BigDecimal;

public class Decimal
{
public static void main(String [] args)
{
BigDecimal b1 = new BigDecimal("0.2");
BigDecimal b2 = new BigDecimal("6.0");
BigDecimal one = new BigDecimal("1.0");
for (int i = 0; i < 30; i++)
{
b1.multiply(b2);
b1.subtract(one);
System.out.println(b1 + " ");
}
}
}

The output of this is consistently 0.2. It's a big more longwinded in Java but that's because there is no base type for decimals, unlike integers and doubles.

 

[MrSmith]

5318008 upside down! upside down!

Just realized: it should be 5378008

 

[Hattig]

Just realized: it should be 5378008

By 'upside down' he means rotated 180 degrees, as if it was typed on a calculator display which was then viewed upside down.

 

[MrSmith]

By 'upside down' he means rotated 180 degrees, as if it was typed on a calculator display which was then viewed upside down.

I know...

 

[furious]

I know...

1 represent the i

i before e except after c

 

[mi5moav]

LASSOO THE BOOBIES

7, 1, 0, decimal point, 7, 7, 3, 4, 5. Turn your lasso spread sheet upside down.

what about all the hexadecimal options?

 

[MrSmith]

1 represent the i

i before e except after c

Apologies. I was thinking of 55378008.

 

[ziwi]

Charts does sound like a better name, but perhaps they are a little light in the graphical representation of numbers to pull off such a name. Lasso does not hold any math properties as a name for me...I wonder what the final name will be.

 

[Yannick]

Wow! NeoOffice loses it at line 20. Even with parentheses like this: '=(A1*6)-1'

Try with =ROUND(A1;1)*6-1 and the problem is gone.

 

[Yannick]

yes and no

Why use OpenOffice on a Mac? NeoOffice Aqua is the way to go on a Mac.

Personally, I use both "OpenOffice.org 2.0.3" and "NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua beta 3" (based on OOo 2.0.3). Both have advantages and limitations.

NeoOffice's advantages:
- it uses native fonts (OOo uses fondu to extract the fonts and be able to use them, which duplicates them. Furthermore, when you want to use the document with Neo or OOo on windows, a 1 full page document may appear on 2 pages with 1 or 2 lines on the top of the second)
- it is more Mac friendly

OpenOffice.org for Mac using X11 has also some advantages:
- it opens quicker (I ran test on both on my PB G4 15" 1.5 GHz 1.5 GB RAM: OOo opens in 26 secondes the first time when even X11 is not launched, then OOo reopens in 6 secondes. Neo opens in 32 secondes the first time, then in 14 secondes after it has been closed)
- it uses less memory (OOo+X11: 87.15 MB real memory and 736.68 virtual. Neo: 218.35 MB real memory and 997.63 virtual)
- presentations transitions are way better handled than Neo (generally OOo tends to be faster than Neo, maybe due to this Java dependance?)
- it is the official OpenOffice.org, more up-to-date, is QAed, and the future of it doesn't rely only on two persons (as committed as they are, they are only human) but on a team.

NeoOffice is more "aquafied" than OpenOffice.org which needs X11 right now, so a lot of people prefers it over OpenOffice.org. But in a few months OpenOffice.org for Mac should go native (an alpha version is expected in Jan or Feb).

It is indeed too bad that there are two separate projects, wasting in a sense time, energy and donations. It is the result of licence differences, technical approach differences, and miscommunication.

 

[jobberwacky]

Try with =ROUND(A1;1)*6-1 and the problem is gone.

That's true. But which spreadsheet user is aware of this? This should be resolved by the app, not by the user.

 

[biggerbearbrian]

Wow! NeoOffice loses it at line 20. Even with parentheses like this: '=(A1*6)-1'

Actually, if you change the decimal place in Excel to 7, it begins to lose it at row 12

 

[IJ Reilly]

There are still two problems:

1) While Pages and Keynote may be exported to Word and Powerpoint, it is not flawless. When working with word documents and presentations small changes may not matter significantly, but when dealing with numbers, there is ZERO room for error.

2) Pages and Keynote (and it seems the "Lasso") are all targeted at the non-experienced computer user. Unfortunately, for the most part, that is the exact opposite audience who use spreadsheets.

Oy veh. Do I ever dislike hearing remarks like this.

1) As has been pointed out probably a hundred times before, document exchange even between different versions of Word is not "flawless."

2) While you're at it, you might as well say that the Mac is "targeted at the non-experienced computer user." A lot of people do, you know. That's what you get for making it easier to use, right?

 

[Yannick]

That's true. But which spreadsheet user is aware of this? This should be resolved by the app, not by the user.

You are totally right. And by the way, every user should be aware that computers don't know much about numbers. Computers are limited, they have a limit on the integers they can handle. So, only with integers they miss an infinite quantity of numbers. Then when you start looking at rational and irrational numbers, you realize that computers knows pretty much nothing. The actual probability to pick up any real number (rational or irrational) who exists and to have it known by the computer is 0. In other words, it's a little bit like the computer knows about the trees of one garden when you have on earth so much more trees in all the forrests. Still, computers are great tools, and help us calculate things which would take hundred of years without them.

 

[~Shard~]

Good news, let's hope these rumors are true. This would help round out the iWork suite even more, and I may actually consider purchasing it if this is the case. For now, I'll hang onto my Office v.X though...

 

[Daringescape]

No good if its as slow as pages

Pages on my G4 ibook and even on my G5 dual 2ghz with a gig of ram is ridiculously slow - like molasses. If this spreadsheet program is this slow I will never use it.

 

[digitalbiker]

Pages on my G4 ibook and even on my G5 dual 2ghz with a gig of ram is ridiculously slow - like molasses. If this spreadsheet program is this slow I will never use it.

I will give double emphasis on that!!

I tried to produce a nice document in pages for a set of astronomical objects in a viewing manual. It is roughly 55 pages long and includes 110 different figures.

It was an absolute nightmare to put together! I spent days locking, unlocking, moving, re-organizing, trying to get pages to do some of the simplest of tasks properly.

In the end, I have a nice looking document that takes literally 5 mins to open, 10 secs to scroll a page, and I am afraid to touch it, to edit it, as it might "explode" if I do.

I have a PB G4 17in. 1.67Ghz, 1 GB ram.

I really know that most of the people here are mac fanatics when they actually endorse "Pages". It is the slowest, worst, piece of cr*p Apple ever produced. I have the UB iWork 06 version now and it still sucks!

I like keynote but it still lags in presentation features behind powerpoint. It is also a problem to interact with the 99% of business users out there who use PP. I know that it exports to PP and I know it goes to pdf, QT, etc. But you have to actually perform these operations with an actual group of business users to realize the probelms it presents.

9 times out of 10, exporting to PP screws up everything but the most elemental of slide shows. QT exports don't quite look presentation quality, are dificult to interactivily control, and generate huge files that are difficult to email.Exporting to PDF, makes static slides, and is more for printing than for presentation. There is no free Keynote client for windows and mac users like there is for PP.

All in all, iwork , (still a cheap name), is not ready for primetime. It is OK to experiment with, play with, and to generate simple documents. But it is not any kind of a replacement for the professional who works in an integrated MS office environment.

 

[Uragon]

First, there's a reason why it's iWorks, it's not i(t)Works, 'I' means 'you' have to work it out. Second, if 'lasso', still doens't work well, well you have something to hang around your ........

Over and above, I welcome the good rumour...

 

[IJ Reilly]

I really know that most of the people here are mac fanatics when they actually endorse "Pages". It is the slowest, worst, piece of cr*p Apple ever produced. I have the UB iWork 06 version now and it still sucks!

Not everyone agrees, do they? Many Mac "fanatics" prefer Word. This one prefers Pages.