(no subject)

[roadrunnertwice]

HAHAHAHA HOLY CRAP! I just downloaded NeoOffice for a look-see, because I'm always interested in ambitious open-source replacements for high-profile proprietary software suites, and I thought it would be worth seeing where the OpenOffice project had gotten to since last I saw it. And damned if it wasn't the most aggressively foul software experience I've had in the last six months or more. I think it took about a minute and a half to boot up, and once it got there, I could barely control it. This is a 900 megahertz processor, people, with 384 megs of RAM; I should be able to run a word processor without herniating the poor thing.

Slowness and lag aside, how was it? STILL BAD. It didn't know the proper behavior for command and option when modifying the arrow keys, the mouse wheel barely worked, the interface for using styles was completely brain-dead (it took me FIVE MINUTES to figure out how to modify a style!), the style system itself was really difficult to control (are we not allowed to have span styles? Are paragraph styles the only things that exist? I honestly couldn't tell), and all of the dialogs were really unintuitive and punishing. In the interest of fairness, I'm not going to go into any details on the aesthetics of the interface—it's a work in progress, and irrelevant anyways. But I can't cut it any slack on the usability front—just imagining trying to get any real work done in there made me want to vomit. Oh, and then there's the official Mac OS release of OpenOffice.org: picture the ocean of badness that is NeoOffice, and then picture running it inside X11. No, that wasn't screaming you just heard; someone must be watching TV in the next room.

I think OpenOffice.org is a noble and necessary project, and that the NeoOffice people are an important part of that ecosystem, regardless of the politics going on between the two groups. Nevertheless, there is no fucking way that this product is ready to be used by real people. I've got no idea when or even if it will be.

(I should stipulate that it's entirely possible that OpenOffice is usable on other platforms; like I said, I haven't checked in on it for a year or two. But on the Mac, Microsoft Word crushes OO like a bug. I suppose it's a good thing I'm word processor-averse in the first place.)

Comments

[zqfmbg.livejournal.com]

I've been using oocalc for awhile to keep track of my money. There are obviously better tools for the job out there (like, say, something that isn't a spreadsheet), but for just observing trends and stuff, it works.

[froborr.livejournal.com]

You know, I had a professor who used Dreamweaver for all his word processing, on the grounds that everything you do in a word processor can be done in HTML.

I've considered making that switch for a couple of years, but the problem is that I've been using Word extensively for 12 or 14 years, and at this point it is completely instinctive. As such, using even a really good word processor is painful, because it's just not as obvious to my Word-trained intuition.

Help! I'm trapped in the Office!

[roadrunnertwice]

It's true; I've actually committed myself to doing practically all of my writing in a text editor instead of a word processor, using some minimalistic markup to do things like emphasis and footnotes. More later on the how on the wherefore, since I'm in the middle of a big article about that.

But sometimes (resumés) the formatting is two thirds of the content, which is where you pretty much need something like Word. I was interested to see whether there was a good open-source option for that yet, but yeah... no.

[roadrunnertwice]

As regards Dreamweaver: There's writing, and there's typesetting, and for the latter, it seems to me that one would be better-served to use something slightly more paper-aware than HTML parsers tend to be. I could see using it for composition, but for getting things into a printable state, I would trust a word processor, something like Quark, or the hoary old standby of TeX/LaTeX a whole lot more than Dreamweaver.

But he probably knew a lot more about said program than I ever will, and I've no doubt he made it work.

<3 <3 <3 Quark

[froborr.livejournal.com]

That is all.

[tomax.livejournal.com]

I've got a (probably older) version of the Java/Carbon release (I dislike the inconvenience of X11 apps) and it may run slow, but not nearly THAT bad...
(still the 350 MHz G3 running Panther)

[roadrunnertwice]

Was I exaggerating? I might have been exaggerating. I'm not sure. It certainly FELT as bad as I made it out to be; I pasted about 4000 words into a new document, then started trying to assign and modify styles, and there really was a few seconds of lag between every step of the process.

Could it have actually have gotten worse? This was 2.0a3 I was using, and I think it's that same lineage of Java/Carbon builds...