Credit Where It's Due

I try to keep up with various open source news, since the software tends to interest me -- a quick look around the blog would tell you as much. So naturally, even though I am a KDE user, I follow Planet GNOME. And as I read it today, I had to laugh as I came across this post. Essentially, the poster is mad that a co-founder of GNOME, who is now working for Novell, has been looking over Excel, and said it was a nice piece of software. The poster now wants to know when Novell is going to stop sucking up to Microsoft.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, Excel is a nice piece of software. I mean, credit where credit is due: Excel hasn't got a lock on the industry by being a poor product. The program runs fast and has a better interface than OSS equivalents (I especially like how Excel will remind me about formula syntax when I type them in). Gnumeric doesn't have all the features Excel does. Open Office comes closer, but although it nominally has some of the same features as Excel, some of them (optimization and conditional formating spring to mind) are not nearly as advanced.

Posts like the one I linked too are worrying, if for no other reason than they show a polarization that doesn't make sense in software. It becomes a war, an 'us-versus-them' mentality where anything produced by the enemy is automatically considered inferior. And by trying to learn from what they did well, you're 'sucking up' rather than improving.

I realise that this is in part due to Novell's current pariah status in the community, but at least part of that status is this idea in the community that anything coming out of Redmond is automatically inferior and damaging. This isn't a healthy attitude. The Linux community needs to start looking at proprietary software and asking why those programs are succeeding, and what we can learn from them. Fact of the matter is, Microsoft's put a lot more effort into finding out what's important for users rather than developers. It's entirely possible that all that testing has resulted in unique insights -- and good software.

Here on the other side of November...

Wow, it's been awhile since my last post. November is project month at university, and since I'm taking business and that means almost every class has a group project. Most of them, naturally enough, are due sometime in November. However, the biggest of them, my Marketing project, has been mostly retired and this has given me something akin to breathing room.

Which is why I'm going to take the opportunity to blog about technology.

Has anyone here seen IBM's Lotus Symphony? My opinion is best summed up by: high hopes. Based on Open Office, the premier office suite available for the Linux desktop, Symphony gives the office suite on Linux more developers, and God willing, a better interface and functionality.

Open Office is a fine product, especially given it's price. But it's not nearly as good as MS Office, especially the 2007 version. This is more of a problem than with other apps, since the fact is people were not typing out documents on Wordpad before switching to Linux. For example, most people have not bought Adobe Illustrator, and therefore an equivalent if less feature-full program being available for free on Linux (Inkscape) is a selling point. But most people have been using some version of MS Office before switching, and therefore the higher cost of that program is considered sunk. So having a less feature-full program available for free becomes a liability, not an asset.

Just looking at the screenshots for Symphony though, it's looking like the interface is improving, and more importantly, moving away from being a simple MS Office clone. Spreadsheets needs some attention: optimization, anyone? Or how's about reminding me about formula syntax as I write them? Also, presentations needs some serious love. The key here it a) make more templates and b) hire decent graphics designers so they're slick. Oh, and would it kill anyone to make a "handouts" layout that includes lines for notes?

More than Symphony, though, I'm looking forward to KDE 4 making an appearance on the Linux desktop. Eventually.

I tried out what they're calling "Release Candidate 1", though the system is clearly not ready for production use. Having said that, I see enormous potential for KDE 4. The widgets, the smooth animations that are scattered throughout the system, the icon theme -- all look very slick and very professional. Assuming some non-KDE technologies can be easily integrated into the system, or ported over for KDE equivalents, I think that the Linux desktop will begin to match or surpass the offerings from private companies, though we'll still lack in 3rd party apps.

The non-KDE technologies I'm thinking of here are PulseAudio, Avant Window Navigator and Compiz Fusion: the most exciting Gnome-based technologies out there. I know Kwin now does compositing, but I'd like the zoom, desktop cube and tab windows features from Compiz (some of the visual flash would be nice too, but not necessary) as I find those rather handy for windows management. As far as AWN goes, it's the best damn dock going. Period. With some KDE-specific plugins, I think it could feel right at home. Finally, I don't know much about PulseAudio, but being able to control sound on an app-by-app basis sounds very, very cool.