I'm not the source for this information, but I have it on fairly good authority that TextEdit in 10.3 can do something pretty amazing.
Hmmm. More like Word's L'il Buddy.?
Apparently TextEdit can open simple Word documents, and retain format and styles, but nothing too complicated -- e.g. .doc files with tables, footnotes, complex formatting, even images.
Yup, we've had this tidbit in other threads in here, and it's way keen...
But it's not yet a Word Killer.
What it *does* mean, hopefully, is that .doc generation/importing has been moved into the Text Engine, which means that *ANY* app dealing with .rtf files should be able to handle .doc as well, which is just phenomenally wonderful.
*AND* it means that some 3rd party can use the engine (and extend it for more functionality), and *MAKE* that Word Killer.
IEEE... the big ol' Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that forms many of the international standards... the one that runs some of the most cutting edge research conferences...
You know, the techie guys.
Guess what they want their documents in for publication now?
Yup, WORD.
Not LaTeX, not PDF, PostScript is 'acceptable, but not preferred'...
You got that right. Goddamn, I can't stand that f'ing program. I use it all the time, and it never, ever seems to do anything right.
But MS might almost agree with the virus analogy. Apple will never be able to offer a 100% compatible solution for the same reason that MS can't: Word is a container format. You can't have a 100% Word clone unless you support "Insert Excel file here". Ok, now you need a 100% Excel clone. And so on and so on. It never ends, really.
And it's not just supporting the format, but supporting all of the bugs. Anybody could make a HTML engine in 1999 that supported all of the standards, but you needed one that was equally as screwed up as Netscape's for pages to look right. So much for standards.
Apple needs to be 98% compatible and 200% better for any kind of Office clone to even be considered. Oh, yeah, they'll need an equally better Windows version as well and it'll have to be damn close to free. I have a MS enterprise license that let's me use all desktop (not server, not developer) products for $40 a seat - Mac or Windows.
Most Word-generated documents i get are in all respects just plain unformated documents, just text, no pics, no tables, no lists, no headers nor footers, no embedded objects and no macros. Just being able to open some of this PC-generated garbage I recieve by mail (some people (PC-lusers) haven't got it in their brains that they actually can write mail in Outlook, but insted have the urge to attach plain Word-documents to otherwise empty mails) will spare me some ugly editing in Hydra/BBEdit/TextEdit just to extract the 10% of a Word-document that actually contains useful information.
Well, for those of us working in more collaborative environments, the tracking/comments features alone make Word an indispensible tool. If an app can't open my Word docs and show me my comments and my tracked changes, it ain't a Word killer.
Well, for those of us working in more collaborative environments, the tracking/comments features alone make Word an indispensible tool. If an app can't open my Word docs and show me my comments and my tracked changes, it ain't a Word killer.
And there we have the viral effect.
If it could import all your Word docs, once, and never use the format again, but still track everything the way you want... would that work?
No, of course not, because someone, somewhere, would insist that "Only Word will do!". Philistines.
Maybe everyone who submits papers to the IEEE should make a pact to submit everything in LaTeX until the organization backs down. After all, they'd be hard up if there were no papers to publish, or only poorer ones.
Much as I hate word, I'd still rather use it and still rather have it be availablefor mac than any other word processor. Appleworks? Don't make me laugh.
It's bad enough that most pc users don't realise that word is available for mac and, site it as a reason for not switching. Imagine how bad it would be if it actually WASN'T available.
Frankly Safari bothered me on this score. Don't get me wrong, it's a great browser and I've been using it as my default since beta 1, but the problem is that it isn't perfectly compatible with every site. IE Mac was pretty bad for compatibility sometimes too, but at least when it was being made by microsoft I figured there was a chance of it vaguely conforming to the (far more common) windows standards.
Now mac and windows have different browsers. Period. Switchers will now have to be saddled with an unfamiliar browser, and Microsoft will no longer be able to narrow the gap between internet rendering on mac and windows, as it's out of their hands. Unless they have access to IE source code, I don't see how Apple can ever do as good a job at this as MS did.
I don't think this is a trend I'd like to see continued frankly.
I'd say that my main bugbear with living in a windows world is having to put up with the (tiny) incompatibilities between office for mac and office for windows. If Apple do something to make this worse I will be most unhappy.
I'm probably going to get flamed out of existance for this, but what about Office 2003? Office on windows is the best thing since sliced bread, but there never seems to be very much parity between Mac and PC versions. My point is that with another new version of Office, and hence Word, everyone knows the file format will change. The format changes with every release of Office. So how can you build in .doc compatability when it is always changing? PDF is a great format to build in because adobe standardizes and publishes it. .doc would be a mess because it is neither standardized or published. I can see something like this becoming a real mess. I say leave the mess of Word at the application level, and let MS deal with it. Face it, as long as MS is playing tricks with their formats, the Mac needs Office. I'm not saying Office on the Mac is good, but it needs to be there.
Office on the PC is great because MS holds all the cards. I'm not oblivious to this, but I'll be the first to say that on their platform MS has made some great apps.
Office on the PC is very strong, but no way would I say it's great. It's a mix of good features and *insanely* annoying features (Office assistants, abysmally confusing "smart" menus...). Its best features are sheer speed and ubiquity. (Although ubiquity is, alas, also its worst feature.)
The problem is Office hasn't had any real competition for years now, and despite some occasionally interesting innovations, like Smart Tags, it shows. Very little has really changed in Office for years now.
Anyway. Would I be correct in saying that Microsoft hasn't radically changed the .doc format for some time now? They used to aggressively alter it to screw over WordPerfect and whatever other competitors they had, but since the competition gave up and/or died, I think it's remained relatively constant...
Frankly Safari bothered me on this score. Don't get me wrong, it's a great browser and I've been using it as my default since beta 1, but the problem is that it isn't perfectly compatible with every site. IE Mac was pretty bad for compatibility sometimes too, but at least when it was being made by microsoft I figured there was a chance of it vaguely conforming to the (far more common) windows standards.
There is no such thing as a Windows standard for browsers. The WC3, which is the standards body for WWW, recognizes HTML4.01 and XHTML1.0 as valid markup for webpages.
The WC3 wants the WWW to operate on this principle of interop:
"Twenty years ago, people bought software that only worked with other software from the same vendor. Today, people have more freedom to choose, and they rightly expect software components to be interchangeable. They also expect to be able to view Web content with their preferred software (graphical desktop browser, speech synthesizer, braille display, car phone...). W3C, a vendor-neutral organization, promotes interoperability by designing and promoting open (non-proprietary) computer languages and protocols that avoid the market fragmentation of the past."
Many website "incompatibilities" are from bad sniffing code, that lock out users of certain browsers. Anyone writing websites that sniff by user-agent rather than DOM attributes is incompetent or lazy or both.
Comments
Originally posted by mlnjr
I'm not the source for this information, but I have it on fairly good authority that TextEdit in 10.3 can do something pretty amazing.
Hmmm. More like Word's L'il Buddy.?
Apparently TextEdit can open simple Word documents, and retain format and styles, but nothing too complicated -- e.g. .doc files with tables, footnotes, complex formatting, even images.
A great start, though. Maybe it'll get better...
But it's not yet a Word Killer.
What it *does* mean, hopefully, is that .doc generation/importing has been moved into the Text Engine, which means that *ANY* app dealing with .rtf files should be able to handle .doc as well, which is just phenomenally wonderful.
*AND* it means that some 3rd party can use the engine (and extend it for more functionality), and *MAKE* that Word Killer.
IEEE... the big ol' Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that forms many of the international standards... the one that runs some of the most cutting edge research conferences...
You know, the techie guys.
Guess what they want their documents in for publication now?
Yup, WORD.
Not LaTeX, not PDF, PostScript is 'acceptable, but not preferred'...
WTF?!?
Word is a virus.
Originally posted by Kickaha
Word is a virus.
You got that right. Goddamn, I can't stand that f'ing program. I use it all the time, and it never, ever seems to do anything right.
But MS might almost agree with the virus analogy. Apple will never be able to offer a 100% compatible solution for the same reason that MS can't: Word is a container format. You can't have a 100% Word clone unless you support "Insert Excel file here". Ok, now you need a 100% Excel clone. And so on and so on. It never ends, really.
And it's not just supporting the format, but supporting all of the bugs. Anybody could make a HTML engine in 1999 that supported all of the standards, but you needed one that was equally as screwed up as Netscape's for pages to look right. So much for standards.
Apple needs to be 98% compatible and 200% better for any kind of Office clone to even be considered. Oh, yeah, they'll need an equally better Windows version as well and it'll have to be damn close to free. I have a MS enterprise license that let's me use all desktop (not server, not developer) products for $40 a seat - Mac or Windows.
Seriously.
I *SO* ripped her a new one for that.
Originally posted by Nonsuch
Well, for those of us working in more collaborative environments, the tracking/comments features alone make Word an indispensible tool. If an app can't open my Word docs and show me my comments and my tracked changes, it ain't a Word killer.
And there we have the viral effect.
If it could import all your Word docs, once, and never use the format again, but still track everything the way you want... would that work?
No, of course not, because someone, somewhere, would insist that "Only Word will do!". Philistines.
Muahahahaha.
Originally posted by Kickaha
If it could import all your Word docs, once, and never use the format again, but still track everything the way you want... would that work?
Sure, as long as it could do likewise with the files everyone else sends me.
It's bad enough that most pc users don't realise that word is available for mac and, site it as a reason for not switching. Imagine how bad it would be if it actually WASN'T available.
Frankly Safari bothered me on this score. Don't get me wrong, it's a great browser and I've been using it as my default since beta 1, but the problem is that it isn't perfectly compatible with every site. IE Mac was pretty bad for compatibility sometimes too, but at least when it was being made by microsoft I figured there was a chance of it vaguely conforming to the (far more common) windows standards.
Now mac and windows have different browsers. Period. Switchers will now have to be saddled with an unfamiliar browser, and Microsoft will no longer be able to narrow the gap between internet rendering on mac and windows, as it's out of their hands. Unless they have access to IE source code, I don't see how Apple can ever do as good a job at this as MS did.
I don't think this is a trend I'd like to see continued frankly.
I'd say that my main bugbear with living in a windows world is having to put up with the (tiny) incompatibilities between office for mac and office for windows. If Apple do something to make this worse I will be most unhappy.
Office on the PC is great because MS holds all the cards. I'm not oblivious to this, but I'll be the first to say that on their platform MS has made some great apps.
The problem is Office hasn't had any real competition for years now, and despite some occasionally interesting innovations, like Smart Tags, it shows. Very little has really changed in Office for years now.
Anyway. Would I be correct in saying that Microsoft hasn't radically changed the .doc format for some time now? They used to aggressively alter it to screw over WordPerfect and whatever other competitors they had, but since the competition gave up and/or died, I think it's remained relatively constant...
Frankly Safari bothered me on this score. Don't get me wrong, it's a great browser and I've been using it as my default since beta 1, but the problem is that it isn't perfectly compatible with every site. IE Mac was pretty bad for compatibility sometimes too, but at least when it was being made by microsoft I figured there was a chance of it vaguely conforming to the (far more common) windows standards.
There is no such thing as a Windows standard for browsers. The WC3, which is the standards body for WWW, recognizes HTML4.01 and XHTML1.0 as valid markup for webpages.
The WC3 wants the WWW to operate on this principle of interop:
"Twenty years ago, people bought software that only worked with other software from the same vendor. Today, people have more freedom to choose, and they rightly expect software components to be interchangeable. They also expect to be able to view Web content with their preferred software (graphical desktop browser, speech synthesizer, braille display, car phone...). W3C, a vendor-neutral organization, promotes interoperability by designing and promoting open (non-proprietary) computer languages and protocols that avoid the market fragmentation of the past."
Many website "incompatibilities" are from bad sniffing code, that lock out users of certain browsers. Anyone writing websites that sniff by user-agent rather than DOM attributes is incompetent or lazy or both.