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Unix Operating Systems Software BSD

Daemonnews reviews Applixware 120

Posted by Nik from the take-two-office-suites-in-to-the-shower? dept.
The folks over at DaemonNews are running a review of Applixware, the 'Office Productivity Suite'. Featuring all the standard components (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, and so on), it's been available for Linux for a while now. However, this is the first time native binaries have been produced for FreeBSD. Read the review to find out whether it was worth waiting for.
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Daemonnews reviews Applixware More

Daemonnews reviews Applixware

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  • Cloak and Dagger pricing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Apparently Applix makes a killing off of government and big business sales for their Solaris/IRIX/Java/otherunix versions as I've never run across Applixware Office for $99 aside from the Linux/BSD versions. Nor have I found clear, up-front pricing or online ordering for non-Linux/BSD versions. After a long string of messy quotes and option pricing charts, I still only know one thing about getting Applixware on the handful of Suns and SGIs we have at work -- it's going to cost a fortune. -Sigh- Seeing how I'd imagine development for the different versions is rather parallel, it's a shame the Solaris version isn't $99 as well.

  • Wow, anti-freebsd comments (why?) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wow, there seems to be a very large number of anti-freebsd comments. Most of them did not make any sense at first because there is a huge thread starting #9 [slashdot.org] that was cut out and us "normal" folk only get to see partials of the thread. Can anyone explain the anti-freebsd thing to me? Freebsd always seemed nice enough to me.
  • One feature I use all the time in my programming editor is multiple windows into the same edit-buffer. Doing a decent job of this is one thing I do like about MSWord, and doing it wrong (in the last version I tested) is one of the things I hate about (the mis-named) WordPerfect.

    Does the current version of Applixware support this capability?

  • You're right. It wasn't always that way but other than file format and import/export issues, Office 97 and 2000 are very slick. Particularly Word. It's bloated by 1991 standards but it's a very lean and mean application by todays standards. I have used Lotus Word Pro ('word poor') Wordperfect, Star, and numerous others and as WYSIWYG word processors go, Word is among the best. You can come up with "better" tools for a lot of what it does but I can't think of a better product that does what it does. Office is by far MS's best product.


    I'll tell you what sucks more, after using word periodically at work (maybe 10 hours on it over the last year, compared to about 10 hours with other products) I pull up the newest wordperfect for linux and it feels down right primitive in comparison. It's not, wordperfect and word are both very similar in terms of features but there is something that makes word really nice to use. If your machine is fast enough, it's compelling.


    MS has gotten where they are by delivering products quickly, usually shoddy, and then following up with solid products in version x + 1.
    MSIE was that way, Office was that way, VC++ is that way. Even windows is that way. Not that it's solid but it has improved. If the competition makes any mistakes (like wordperfect did in committing to alternative platforms and then never delivering and then killing to projects and then rebirthing them after 3 changes in ownership...) then MS steps in and starts owning the market.


    StarOffice would be my second favorite and it's a full tilt office clone, that's also what frustrates with it, they copied all the good stuff but it's a little rough. It still feels great and is nice to use but the need to do a little more to close the circle and fill it out.


    Hopefully Abiword, KOffice, and GNOME catch up soon.. They will, I'm just impatient, we will beat them, it will just take a while. StarOffice too, but it sounds like they're focused on this java thing more than bulking up their native products... (opensource it sun!)

  • Or, as a wise man once said [wustl.edu]:

    When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
  • As I understand it, when FreeBSD runs a Linux (or SCO, or Solaris, or whatever) binary, in simply loads a different vector table for system calls, therefore, there should be no speed difference between running native versus compatible.
  • what the heck is your problem?
  • So Tom;
    is there a decent introduction/tutorial for troff
    that can get someone up to speed enough to understand what the manpage is saying?

    It is possible for a semi-intelligent person to
    still be somewhat boggled by what troff is supposed to be and how it might be used.

    To the thread,
    As the independent, successful person that you are, you do not have the pleasure of working for someone who won't accept that there are modes of transferring text other than Office97 fast save files. This is a real showstopper in so many places.

    Of course, that's the damage done by ignorance, in the general case.
  • Good docs! I shared them with a colleague who's
    expressed much of the same sentiment about troff and other tools.

    }From the point of view of a touchtypist, and proficient vi user, troff seems to have a reputation for being the utilitarian yet superpowered tool for type and layout (like what vi is for brain-to-fingers efficiency and control).

    Domo arigato, Mr. Christiansen
  • A 224M Postscript file sounds really bad to me too. However, I would be interested to know how big the .ps file would be if we forced Word 2000 to produce it under Windows. I suspect the .ps file on Windows would also be huge.

    Optimizing the size of a Postscript print stream sounds much easier to me than figuring out the undocumented portions of the Office 97 file formats.

    --

    Dave Aiello

  • I think it is clear that Applixware has far more automation potential than Office 97, particularly when combined with the strength of its database interfaces. Sure Office 97 has these features, but putting something really sophisticated together is cludgy at best.

    The $64,000 question has always been file format compatibility. A lot of people really want an alternative office suite to save documents in files that are indistinguishable from Excel 97 and Word 97. For my purposes, Excel 4.0 compatibility is more than enough, but not every potential user of Applixware (or StarOffice or Corel) is going to feel that way.

    IMHO, discussion of file interchangeability with Office 97 would have made this review even better.

    Finally, I read a report from Forrester Research the other day that said that Office 2000 would be a great Web publishing environment for non-technical people, because it is able to maintain formatting through the roundtrip between Office and the Web Server. The key to this, apparently, is the encapsulation of style information in XML.

    If this is truly the case, then it is also going to get a lot easier for competing office suites like Applixware to exchange documents with Office. Similarly, it will make it easier for *nix users like us to get our work done with tools we like.

    (Sorry for the lack of a link to the Forrester report. I think it is one of those that Fortune 500 companies pay big bucks to get access to.)

    --

    Dave Aiello

  • Memory usage! in detail! I wish we could get more info like that in reviews, rather than just going through the features checklist. It actually makes it possible to make an informed decision about the program.

    My informed decision:

    Given the size of the spool files, applix should probably give out vouchers for reductions if you need to buy a new hard drive...
  • I like it when a review is an honest statement of what happened when the product was used. It more helpful than a sales pitch. It gives a better feel for the road ahead.

  • I have a friend at Sun who told me they had to "eat their own dog food" and use Applix in their offices.

    He hated it! I am trying to find the perfect application for my Red Hat system and I have decided thus far to go with Wordperfect.

    Why did my friend hate Applix and what is wrong (or right) with Star Office or Wordperfect (aside from the latter not being a Suite.)
  • I've worked with Applixware under Solaris. It sucks (IMHO and YMMV, of course). For a while it was the only game in town, but even then I found out that I'd rather ftp data files to my PC and then work on them in Excel rather than fire up Applix and try to do stuff under it. I haven't tried Sun's Office yet, but I have a feeling that unless Applix gets really better really fast it is going the way of SCO UNIX.

    Kaa
  • The author claims, for example, that Office 97 is barely runnable on a Pentium-II 266

    That is FUD and bullshit. I run Office 97 on my Pentium (not Pro) 200 with 64Mb of RAM and it's very much usable (after you disable the paperclip, of course).


    Kaa
  • As I said, it's my opinion -- I, personally, disliked it. It is slow and a memory hog, could not do some stuff I needed to do (I don't remember what exactly by now) and had many minor inconveniences. I don't remember details, but I remember a lot of frustration and some disgust.

    Kaa
  • I'm testing office 2000 now for an april rollout. It runs fine on a pentium 90/64Mb RAM. The bloat problems have definitely been addressed to some extent. I dislike m$ in general, but having used applix for a year or so, I would have to say it's buggy and clunky. We even have X on the NT desktops here so it's a real option, but it just doesn't cut it for us.
  • sure it is, but when you have 300 users in 10 states you don't just send 'em a box of cd's. You test on your hardware, configure, tweak and then automatically roll it out to them all.
  • FreeBSD (not sure about Open and Net) does have a Linux binary compatibility layer which is getting better all the time, but it's still a layer that it has to go through. That means increased cost of syscalls and everything else. A native FreeBSD binary of any program will be faster and more stable than the Linux binary running under emulation. I have run StarOffice under FreeBSD, and found it to be a little too unstable for my daily use...not that I use word processors and spreadsheets very much anyway.

  • Microsoft trolls, hoping to sow dissention.
    Actually, I think Microsoft fears *BSD even more than Linux.
  • Due to trademarks and AT&T they cannot *CALL* it UNIX.
    Remember the "UNIX is a trademark of AT&T" at the bottom of technical papers? I have the impression that BSD Unix has generally been superior to AT&T Unix.
  • Superficially, I would agree with you, but as shown in the lawsuit Finding of Fact, Microsoft reacts strongly to perceived threats to its position. With a strong BSD waiting in the wings, Linux is a stronger competitor to Microsoft. I don't think I really believe it, but it is interesting to consider the possibility. ;)
  • [...]
    The Applix executables can be centrally mounted on an NFS-exported disk, and Applixware will look for centrally-located as well as local preference template files. This makes the product a snap to administer, no matter the network size. Contrast this with Windows application administration, and you can make a strong case for significantly reduced administration costs.

    Sometimes I argue about the everreturning issue of Windows/UN?X strengh/weaknesses and it is often said, that SMB/Shortcuts is stronger than NFS/symlinks. But anyone who has tried to manage an Office97 corporate solution knows that this isn't true. NFS mounts are transparent to the applications and symlinks open just like any other files.
    I can see a lot of advantages in managing standard templates, standard doc-vaults, standard configuration with good UNIX praxis, rather than application specific menu hunt-downs and weird-fixes.

  • I just couldn't figure this out:

    Application printing is also very well done

    and then the reviewer goes on to describe a ~500k .DOC file becoming 224MB of data being sent to the printer.

    Where I work, we have a lot of network printers. Those are being served by one of our servers, with queue limits of about 15MB per job. I haven't heard of a single complaint about the size of the queue before. So maybe although the memory requirements of ApplixWare seem modest, this is really unacceptable in our situation. In defense of the reviewer, he says it's "a complex, 10 page graphics-intensive document", but even then, most LaTeX files I've seen that include figures don't produce 100's of MB's of postscript.

    Too bad, I'd really like to see a good Office suite for *nix (and no, StarOffice with its 1min+ startup time and 100MB memory requirements doesn't cut it for me either).

    --Fritti
  • As the BSDs are binary compatible with Linux, isn't StarOffice a viable alternative at zero-cost to the end user?

    This review contains the words "We have been ignored mainly because of the lack of an office suite with word processor and spreadsheet and presentation package." Am I wrong, or is this simply the first BSD-native Office Suite?

    ------
  • > if you're going to start comparing it to MS Office, > you'd better back it up with something that's a good, valid point. I wanna shoot first, Me Me Me! Excel has this stupid limit of 65536 rows in a spreadsheet. Dunno if that's true for Excel 2000, but it's true for Excel 97. It's not that difficult to allow sheets of arbitrary size - see Gnumeric source [gnome.org] for proof. This shows why it's crazy to trust your future with Microsoft - that's something simple which has bugged me since 1993 and they've still not fixed it, and there's f*** all I can do about it.
  • > Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), has done
    > everything that I needed to do quickly, easily, and reliably.

    I guess, then, that you've never wanted a text box where the text gets auto-selected when you click on it. I've seen professional programmers resort to using SendKeys to overcome this.
  • If you use that method, then TAB to the box, it doesn't do anything.
  • > Staroffice for Linux seems to work just
    > fine with 96 MB of RAM. I have noticed
    > problems with 32 or even 64 MB

    If you have enough swap space, it shouldn't even be able to tell the difference - it'd go slowly but it shouldn't be any more unstable.
  • > StarOffice with its 1min+ startup time and 100MB memory requirements

    You are exaggerating there, right? SO50 starts in about 15 sec on my 32MB Cyrix 200
  • You have all kinds of confusions in saying that "All the BSDs are binary compatible with Linux." First of all, you pretend there's one binary format. Second of all, you pretend there's one Linux. Both are wrong. I can promise you that your Slackware x86 binary with x86 instructions and slackware admin and path stuff is completely useless to someone using BSD on a Sparc. There is a lot to think about: machine hardware, kernel syscalls, and normal admin bits. Some of those are sometimes compatible, some of them are not. My Sparc can run Solaris binaries under BSD, but only if they don't expect Solaris sysadmin crud. And then you have the whole problem of different Linux-derived operating systems. I have programs that work find under Redhat's OS but which fail miserably using SuSE's OS, even on the same hardware. Compatibility isn't all it's cracked up to be.
  • I would add that MS Office has never spent "almost an hour to render the document and print it" for a ten page (!) document.
    Neither has troff.
  • Ah, I understand. Rich Stevens used troff. Rich Stevens is dead. Therefore, troff is dead.

    I write letters, articles, resumes, and even books in troff. So do a lot of real programmers. Other people use Latex, and they're real programmers, too.

    Since people use this stuff, and get plenty of real work done with them, they're hardly dead, much though you might wish this were the case, you cowardly bastard.

    I think we should change "Anonymous Coward" to "Cowardly Bastard". If you haven't the testicular fortitude to place a name on a post, don't bother posting.

    Just because the entry cost for power-tools like troff and latex is a double-digit IQ doesn't mean power-tools shouldn't exist. Yes, I realizethat half the populace doesn't measure up to that requirement. Oh well.

    And yes, I remember the first winmenumouse systems. I used the Star system on Dandelions from Xerox long ago, back before Apple stole the interface from them, and before the Evil One stole the interface from Apple. It really pissed me off when I had to leave school and go work in industry and couldn't use the nice Xerox tools, but had to do everything in troff again instead. But I still got my job done.

    And it's not just because I am a programmer. Even secretaries can do this if they have to. Remember that for many years, all the secretaries at Bell Labs used vi and troff for all the corporate documents. Don't underestimate a secretary.

    I'm not saying one should do this. I'm merely saying that one can. Stop expecting everyone to be an idiot.

  • Why would M$ fear the Linuxes less than it fears the BSDs? That doesn't seem to make sense to me. I also doubt that the dissing comes from M$ flagwavers sewing the seeds of sedition and dissent in the Unix ranks. I'd attribute it to internecine rivalry derived from ignorance and malice.

    It would seem that the Linuxes are much more commercially oriented. Look at Corel, Caldera, RedHat, SuSE, and all the rest of them. Sure, BSDs are more used by ISP businesses and other high-tech places filled with Unix professionals, but that's really a completely new place for M$, once where they've not traditionally been very effective (maybe there's not enough room temperature IQs there for them to hoodwink so easily :-). But because the Linuxes are obviously trying to attack M$'s existing business at least in mindshare if not in real dollar amounts (but I bet there's something there, too), I would think that the Linuxes would be much more threatening to M$ than the BSDs.

  • is there a decent introduction/tutorial for troff
    Here's a set of the original documents [uni-duesseldorf.de]. Or just get the BSD 4.4 manuals from ORA/Usenix.
  • I don't have a "console" running right now, but any old tty will do. Why do people keep focusing on "console"? Where did this word even come from? What ever happened to "terminal", or in geekspeak, "tty"? And anyway, slogin gives you a fine pty. It will even tunnel for a "console"-emulating xterm (that's one that snags syslog messages to /dev/console and kernel printf's).

    But come to think of it, ed doesn't even need a tty. It'll run fine over a socket, too, even if isatty() returns false. It's good for automation, and complete desperation, but not a lot else. If you're going to have a staticly linked editor, which of course is a must and many of these silly commerical Linux-based operating systems forget to do this, then you might as well have something more user-friendly, like, oh, I don't know, maybe ex. :-)

  • Lame troll, but it should be pointed out
    that it was NetBSD people who started the development of the compatibility layer.
  • Agreed.
    I've been using Applix Office at home, and I like it a lot. But moving files from home to work, where they have Windows, is tough.

    Actually, it's toughest in the other direction (work to home) because I have to remember to save files in earlier file formats; as usual, I am the weakest link in this chain. What I would really love is one of those programs that seem to grow up around the Mac ecosphere to translate PC files into other files -- even just to plain ol' text would be good if it would help me read it.

    Actually, I have one funny story. Every year I make over 500 holiday cookies in 6 varieties. I was putting together a spreadsheet to calculate the total amounts of each ingredient I needed so that I could do all the shopping at once (when you make this many cookies, efficiency is critical if you want to keep your day job). But my printer was out of ink, so I sneakernetted the file over to another (Windows) machine to print it out. I was able to open the file, but all the numbers in the cells were read in a new format -- scientific notation. I was tickled! I got to shop in scientific notation! (I'm going to publish it on my holiday cookies portion of my website, too).

    That said, one major flaw for me is the non-portability of spreadsheets with certain types of formulas in them between Applix's spreadsheet program and Excel.

    lwilliams
  • I too appreciate an honest review of how software performs under actual usage, but this piece looked just a bit too much like a sales pitch to me. Maybe it had something to do with the price of the package being printed in large red type as only, $99 in the middle of the first paragraph. Overall this just seemed like a too good to be true review. Perhaps I'm just a pessimist but I'd like to hear the problems with the software too.
  • The guy is right, actually. Staroffice for Linux seems to work just fine with 96 MB of RAM. I have noticed problems with 32 or even 64 MB, but 96 seems to be the right measure.

    Sorry for the AC post.


    • That is FUD and bullshit. I run Office 97 on my Pentium (not Pro) 200 with 64Mb of RAM and it's very much usable (after you disable the paperclip, of course).

    Yeah, I don't get it. My wife uses it at home on a Pentium 100 with 48Mb of RAM for light work, letters, organizing tabular data in Excel, reading other's documents, etc. It's not swift, but I would not say it's "unusable".

    The constant hyperbole about how bad MS products you see on /. really tends to discredit /. as a reliable source.

  • Many of my disappointments [with Microsoft Office] would disappear if I were to have chosen a newer computer with more memory, processor speed and disk space.

    So all this article is really saying is that you can run unix on lower spec machines than what is required for Windows and Office 2000.

    Duh! I think we already knew this. It would have been more interesting if the review had compared the features (and cost) on suitably specified machines.

  • Hm, re-re-re-reading the paragraph, it is no longer clear to me if the author talks about his disappointment with Office or Applixware.

    How does Applixware Office compare with Microsoft Office 2000? It depends on your criteria. Although MS Office 2000 is slicker, much of its slickness is in babbling paperclips and drag-and-drop. Many of my disappointments [whith what? grammar suggests Office (last noun used) but the article talks of his disappointments with Applix more than Office] would disappear if I were to have chosen a newer computer with more memory, processor speed and disk space. Applix has many neat features that are IMHO better than Microsoft, and its ability to work well on an obsolete system is a real plus.

    In any case it seems like his "Pentium 150 with 64 megs of RAM" was an insufficient system for either application.

    Does office suites have to be that heavy?

  • Well said. I would add that MS Office has never spent "almost an hour to render the document and print it" for a ten page (!) document. Come on - people may talk of the paperless office but this sort of thing makes it unusable for me.

    Applixware does not seem to be an alternative if my 100 page thesis takes ten hours and 100 GB swap space to print.

    And you thought Microsoft products were bloated.

  • Explain what?

    There's just one guy who has a bad day and keeps
    trolling. We see people like him doing this in every BSD related story.
    (Errm. This isn't really BSD related, except that
    daemonnews did the review.)

    Maybe he's an MSCE and just got fired because his
    company switched from NT to FreeBSD. Ignore his
    comments. He's just a troll.
  • Its nice to see that BSD is getting more mainstream recognition from companies like Applixware. Linux is nice, but BSD shouldn't be left alone like it has been. Hooray for you people at Applix.
  • Serious revenue comes from those other, higher priced, versions. Keep in mind that almost all unix software is that expensive - it's the legacy price level.
  • Professional programmers? It took me about twenty seconds to figure this one out:

    Private Sub Text1_Click()
    Text1.SelStart = 0
    Text1.SelLength = Len(Text1.Text)
    End Sub

    Please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that solve the problem?
  • Well, even this is flamebait ... I use VB/VBA because it's fast, easy, and gets the job done. Yes, it works reliably, if you code it correctly and you maintain a clean system. When a client calls for an application that completes a simple task, you write him a simple product in the least amount of time that it takes. It's called RAD. Just yesterday, someone asked me for a program to quickly extract images from a database, process it, and put it back into the database. Use existing ActiveX components and build a little script around it, and you have a great product that the client loves in just a few hours. It's easy to debug and it's easy to pack up and send to the client. I get frustrated at times working with VB because it isn't a well structured language, but at the same time, it gets the job done.

  • *sigh* (Score:3)

    by cyoon ( 99971 ) on Thursday December 02, 1999 @03:35AM (#1488172)
    ... it's another reviewer of a *Nix in a desperate attempt to try to make it sound much better than a Microsoft product. Hey, if it is genuinely better, then that's great! I'd love to see a great non-Microsoft product just as much as any other Slashdotter ... BUT, if you're going to start comparing it to MS Office, you'd better back it up with something that's a good, valid point.

    The author claims, for example, that Office 97 is barely runnable on a Pentium-II 266. This is way more than enough for most people, especially if you're going to keep the document simple. Maybe it is bloated code, but it's still very responsive on this kind of system. And then raving about Applixware's documentation in hypertext format, when Office has had hypertexted help since at least Office 97, with plenty of examples, tips, and quickie-tutorials.

    MS Office is very slick, but certainly not because of its silly dancing paperclip. It has a lot of features which work the way I expect them to. For example, its on-the-fly spellchecking is an extremely useful feature -- this is hardly something that can be swept under the BSD rug ... Oh, and here's the kicker: Applixware has better OS intergration than Microsoft? Come on ... MS just gets a Finding of Fact issued against it saying that it's too tightly integrating its products together ... and Applixware is better? I've programmed all sorts of stuff in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and it's done everything that I needed to do quickly, easily, and reliably.

    If you're going to review a product and compare it against Microsoft, stick to the real issues. If it's faster and quicker than Microsoft at doing the same stuff (which it probably is), that's great. But don't pick lame points. People are so quick to bash Microsoft these days it's sickening. It's called chauvanism.

  • Don't underestimate. I knew secretaries who almost quit a job because the *management* was going to take away their NBI wordprocessors and give them that "pc thing" with WordPerfect. Some things never change. I don't see a wordprocessor that requires .5 gig for a small document to get very far, even in these more gigs are better days. The win98 box on the lan will never die (see darwin). -d
  • I have Applix for linux. It has a couple of bugs but it's still pretty ok. The main thing that I don't like about it is that they charge for upgrades (it's not cheap either!)

    If you're writing a book, it's great. It allows you to embed index information right into the text and this is what I found most useful from it. I use it to write technical documentation.

  • When I first worked at IBM we used PROFS/VM (pre Lotus Notes). Managers, secretaries and programmers all used BookMaster to write their documentation. This was based on SGML. We had less problems with viewing, printing and formatting than they do now. If someone wanted a copy of your doc, you simply sent them the source.

  • By standard I meant de-facto. I don't use the stuff myself when I can help it, but many many people do.
  • There's two thing's that will make or break this package IMHO.
    • Compatability with 'standard' software such as MS Office.
    • How it compares in terms of features/functionality with similar freeware or open source packages.

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