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iWork has no game against Office or WordPerfect - Page 3

post #81 of 101
2/2/06 at 8:15am
Sure, but even Apple stopped using Filemaker some time ago and migrated their applications to 4D internally. And the apps they ship use SQLite, Core Data or even Postgres.
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post #82 of 101
2/2/06 at 8:19am
Quote:
Originally posted by aegisdesign
Sure, but even Apple stopped using Filemaker some time ago and migrated their applications to 4D internally. And the apps they ship use SQLite, Core Data or even Postgres.

Apple has (shipping) applications that use Postgres? Which one's? I'm just curious.
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post #83 of 101
2/2/06 at 8:20am
Quote:
Originally posted by Chris Cuilla
Apple has (shipping) applications that use Postgres? Which one's? I'm just curious.

Apparently Apple Remote Desktop uses a Postgres database.
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post #84 of 101
2/2/06 at 8:21am
Quote:
Originally posted by aegisdesign
Apparently Apple Remote Desktop uses a Postgres database.

Huh. Interesting.
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post #85 of 101
2/2/06 at 8:32am
Quote:
Originally posted by Chris Cuilla
Huh. Interesting.

Apple's development process continues to befuddle me. Each group seems to just do their own thing which is why the whole OS and it's apps are becoming such a hodge-podge of technologies.
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post #86 of 101
2/2/06 at 8:46am
Quote:
Originally posted by aegisdesign
Apple's development process continues to befuddle me. Each group seems to just do their own thing which is why the whole OS and it's apps are becoming such a hodge-podge of technologies.

Hard to control such things in such a big company.

Ultimately (I imagine) what they care about is getting a product out there.

From a software design, architecture, etc. perspective I always hope that things like all of the iLife applications are built using the same underlying frameworks (for a while at least they provably were NOT).

But I have come to realize that ultimately they need to get the product out there (underlying technology be damned).

Not always pretty, but reality.

I actually think Apple is better than most...but not "perfect".
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post #87 of 101
2/2/06 at 10:46am
Quote:
Originally posted by aegisdesign
That's the problem really. Most DBAs and programmers don't consider Filemaker or Access worth doing anything with. Crappy accounting companies who have no programmers worth their job title writing apps in Filemaker or Access VBA aren't worth scraping off the bottom of your foot. Both are the 'Frontpage' of the DB world.

MySQL is the third most deployed database in the world behind Oracle and SQL Server with a market share of over ten times that of Filemaker.

But some of that is nonsense. Filemaker has millions of users. Acess is only larger because it's given away with Office. While MySQL is popular, I doubt very much that it has nearly as many users as you think.

People who like these Open software projects always seem to think that more users use them than really do.

And just because you have come across a bad project or two doesn't mean that what you saw has anything to do with the vast majority of what's out there.

I'm sure that there are quite a few crappy implimentations of MYSQL as well.
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post #88 of 101
2/2/06 at 10:52am
Quote:
Originally posted by 1337_5L4Xx0R
AFA databases, why not just slap a candy-Apple interface on MySQL, which is free, and has lots of corporate and enterprise market penetration? It also plays nice with Apache and PHP, which are included with OS X, and like apache and php, has a huge following and active developer community.

AFA word processors, people actually pay money for them?! I've used (and like) AbiWord, a native OS X app, and NeoOffice/J 1.2 just came out which I imagine is not entirely useless (never used it).

Me, I use TextEdit (in OS X.4 it has standards-compliant html/xhtml transitional/strict export! Cool!) for most things and the free CotEditor for php and html coding.

MYSQL, I believe, is under the GPL license. Anything Apple adds to the program, therefore, must be released to anyone who wants to use it, or modify it further. Apple couldn't even own the interface it added.
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post #89 of 101
2/2/06 at 11:03am
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
But some of that is nonsense. Filemaker has millions of users. Acess is only larger because it's given away with Office. While MySQL is popular, I doubt very much that it has nearly as many users as you think.

People who like these Open software projects always seem to think that more users use them than really do.

The figures came from http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/marketshare/

Take it up with MySQL AB not me.
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post #90 of 101
2/2/06 at 11:07am
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
MYSQL, I believe, is under the GPL license. Anything Apple adds to the program, therefore, must be released to anyone who wants to use it, or modify it further. Apple couldn't even own the interface it added.

If Apple modified the MySQL database engine, then yes, they have to pass back their changes.

However, a GUI interface that let people build databases graphically completely developed by Apple without using any code from MySQL would not fall under the GPL licence. It wouldn't be a derived work or contain any code from MySQL.

Don't confuse the database engine with the GUI front end.
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post #91 of 101
2/2/06 at 11:09am
Quote:
Originally posted by aegisdesign
If Apple modified the MySQL database engine, then yes, they have to pass back their changes.

However, a GUI interface that let people build databases graphically completely developed by Apple without using any code from MySQL would not fall under the GPL licence. It wouldn't be a derived work or contain any code from MySQL.

Don't confuse the database engine with the GUI front end.

Yes, it would. This has happened numerous times. As long as they hook into the product, it's considered to be GPL'd.
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post #92 of 101
2/2/06 at 11:14am
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
Yes, it would. This has happened numerous times. As long as they hook into the product, it's considered to be GPL'd.

No, you're wrong. GPL allows you to release software that calls in to GPL'd code without having to release the code for your application.

As a prime example, Apple took KHTML and KJS from the open source world and modified it, passing back all their changes. They have not and are under no obligation to release the code for Safari.
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post #93 of 101
2/2/06 at 3:27pm
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
Apple couldn't even own the interface it added.


They could own the interace - as they do with Safari, because it's very likely that they would use some Apple-only technology to create the interface and others would have little interest in duplicating that interface.

They would not, however, be able to slap an interface on it and claim the entire software as their own.
'L'enfer, c'est les autres' - JPS
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'L'enfer, c'est les autres' - JPS
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post #94 of 101
2/2/06 at 3:32pm
Quote:
Originally posted by aegisdesign
No, you're wrong. GPL allows you to release software that calls in to GPL'd code without having to release the code for your application.

Only if it's LGPL = Lesser GPL.

Quote:
As a prime example, Apple took KHTML and KJS from the open source world and modified it, passing back all their changes. They have not and are under no obligation to release the code for Safari.

Yes, yes they are. Only if this were true of Safari they wouldn't have to:

Quote:
5. A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a "work that uses the Library". Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.

There was an outcry from KHTML and KJS developers precisely because Apple did a half-baked job of releasing their changes; they did so without any documentation whatsoever to the changes and the developers said that using the code would be much harder than writing new code.

When Apple saw the bad publicity it received - it provided complete documentation. And now they have nightlies and such.
'L'enfer, c'est les autres' - JPS
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'L'enfer, c'est les autres' - JPS
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post #95 of 101
2/2/06 at 7:32pm
Quote:
Originally posted by Gene Clean
Yes, yes they are. Only if this were true of Safari they wouldn't have to:

There was an outcry from KHTML and KJS developers precisely because Apple did a half-baked job of releasing their changes; they did so without any documentation whatsoever to the changes and the developers said that using the code would be much harder than writing new code.

When Apple saw the bad publicity it received - it provided complete documentation. And now they have nightlies and such.

Yes and no.

Apple released code that they modified in KHTML and KJS but they've not released the Safari code. Safari calls two libraries - WebCore and JavaScriptCore which are derived from KHTML and KJS. They've released the source for those but they've not released the source of Safari itself. Since the two libraries are separate they don't have to.

The outcry was because Apple were releasing the bare minimum to comply, ie. any change hey released without explanation. That's not being a good open source citizen but technically it's all you need to do. Part of it was that Apple were moving much much quicker than the KHTML guys so they had no chance in keeping up.

If Apple were to do a database application they could create their own gui front end on top of an open source database engine and not have to release the source of that front end either. It's even less tightly coupled than using the API of some library since the only point of contact from the app to the database engine is via a datasource.

I'd cheer wildly if they released a front end for MySQL. There's some ok front ends like CocoaSQL but nothing quite in the friendly Apple Pages/Keynote sense.
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post #96 of 101
9/2/06 at 10:27am
Quote:
Originally Posted by nagromme

Don't forget that WordPerfect for Mac is free now I recently used it to convert a WP document from a Windows friend. But it needs Classic--or maybe Sheepshaver for Intel Macs.

Or Basilisk. I don't know which works better - some people at the Yahoo WP group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wordperfectmac/) are looking at them. Emulation will affect speed, but the Intel chips are pretty quick . . .
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post #97 of 101
9/2/06 at 10:47am
When Apple came out with iWork I was like what the heck, the name is stupid and the software is virtually useless. Why are they wasting their time on this???
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post #98 of 101
9/2/06 at 11:35am
When I saw that this thread had come back from the dead, I was like, what the heck? Why are they wasting their time on this?
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post #99 of 101
9/3/06 at 7:39pm
Sorry guys but PowerPoint does a lot of things better than Keynote. And vice versa. But you can't just say it's better. In fact, the way it doesn't resize text automatically is HUGELY annoying and almost enough to make me not use it.
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post #100 of 101
9/4/06 at 4:24pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aquatic

Sorry guys but PowerPoint does a lot of things better than Keynote. And vice versa. But you can't just say it's better. In fact, the way it doesn't resize text automatically is HUGELY annoying and almost enough to make me not use it.

Personally I can't stand the way Powerpoint resizes text like that. It breaks the consistency of my presentation, and I have to go back and manually fix it.
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post #101 of 101
9/5/06 at 4:59pm
OT, but very few of you seem to be able to distinguish between dynamically and statically linked binaries.

A Gui for a database would simply be a front end, that, when buttons are clicked, generate SQL statements. There's nothing about that that would need to be GPLed.

Moreover, even if it was GPLed, so what? An app built with Apple's XCode is of little use to M$.
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