With
the BeOS on a sudden surge of exposure, applications for the BeOS are maturing,
therefore making the BeOS a more viable option for everyday
use. Every month or two an application is released or updated to a point where
a person would want to use it everyday.
Gobe Productive 2.0 is a major piece of the
BeOS application puzzle, as it remains the only integrated productivity application
suite. If I were to try to measure Productive in comparison to Microsoft Works
or Apple ClarisWorks in basic design and functionality, it would be in the
same league, but it does most everything better. I am just glad Gobe did not
decide to title it BeWorks.
The price is right too. At $80, this software
product offers a high price/performance ratio that makes this software almost
under-priced.
Word Processing
The word processor
is a solid application, with all the basic necessities present. However, I
quickly found that I missed a grammar checker and auto underlining of grammar
and spelling mistakes found in Microsoft Word.
There is multiple undo, which as a person that
changes my mind a lot, comes in very handy. It is very easy to use the format
menu to add columns, align paragraphs, and insert objects. Productive
also supports style sheets for use across multiple documents of the same type,
as well as footnotes, endnotes, and inline objects. Probably
the most interesting feature is the table module. It is extremely versatile;
it reminds me of creating a table in an HTML editor.
Speaking of HTML, word processing documents
can be saved as HTML for immediate export to the web. However, if you have
advanced formatting such as columns or images, they will be lost in the process.
The exported tables were not visually appealing, and all of my nice background
color effects were lost.
Productive is not an HTML editor, but it does
work satisfactory for basic text documents in HTML format. I was curious if
I could open an HTML template in Productive, edit some text, and save the
file without corrupting the template. I had negative results and the page
lost virtually all its formatting.
Productive also supports importing and exporting
of Word documents, but don't expect to see your embedded images to make it
through the process. If your word processing documents are basic, you should
not notice many conversion errors.
All in all, if you are planning on not using
native Productive file formats, the documents must be very basic. However,
if you don't mind saving as the native format, you will be pleased with what
you can do with this word processor.
Spreadsheet
The spreadsheet module
of Productive is well rounded, with all the typical functions added to the
mix. It is easy to use, but works very similar to any other spreadsheet application
out there.
The graphing functions are extremely easy to
use, and it has the usual graphing choices. However, the graphs were choppy
looking with no anti-aliasing. This problem disappointed me as graphs are
supposed to look nice.
An interesting feature is the fact that you
can have layers of spreadsheet tables. I am not sure how it would be beneficial,
but I discovered this feature by accident.
Productive can import and export Excel format
spreadsheets, and I seen no obvious problems with simple spreadsheets. However,
there seems to be some differences in the naming of some functions, so those
will likely cause problems. Importing and exporting graphs will not work,
which was predictable.
Unfortunately, I could not export my spreadsheet
to HTML, which can sometimes come in very handy for publishing data on the
web. This is a feature that will hopefully be added in a later version.
For the most part, you get the basics here
too, enough to get you by without rebooting to Windows, unless you want some
nice-looking graphs.
Graphics
Being a Windows user
for many years, the first thing that came to my mind when I opened up the
graphic module of Productive was Microsoft Paint.
However, digging into it more, I was impressed
by the awesome text and transparency options. I could get some really nice
layering effects using gradients and semi-transparent objects.
However, I immediately noticed the apparent
lack of anti-aliasing. At this point, I was wondering how this could be, all
these advanced features, and no anti-aliasing for charts and graphics. I looked
around in the application preferences, and there was nothing there. Hopefully
this will be fixed in a future version of Productive.
Image Processing
I was pleasantly
surprised by the imaging capability of Productive. It had all the basics,
plus a good assortment of plug-ins. Overall it can keep up with Photoshop
on the basic needs.
As with all other Productive applications,
other modules can be added into the document you are currently working on.
For example, I was able to add a spreadsheet to a JPG image. However, you
must save as a Productive file, otherwise that spreadsheet will disappear.
I not impressed by the JPEG compression capability
of Productive. Even doing a small amount of compression yielded bad pixelation
and distortion. Considering the compression quality of Photoshop and most
other imaging application, I can not be satisfied with anything less.
I noticed right away there were no options
to save as a GIF, or even to open one. Now, I know there is a Compuserv royalty
for the GIF format, but it is not enough to warrant excluding the format.
There is PNG to take its place, and I know that PNG is better, but not many
web browsers support PNG.
Aside from those qualms, there are lots of
good features in the imaging dept.
Presentation
The presentation mode can pretty much be described
as the Graphics module plus frames for doing slides. After making my presentation,
I could let it run in full screen mode, and it worked very well.
I did not see anything for transitions, which
has become a commonplace effect for presentation applications. My slideshow
looks almost unprofessional without these effects.
Documentation
Gobe Productive comes
with a "Getting Started Guide" that is 35 pages long. Most of the booklet
explains the different Productive functions, and how they can be used together.
Now comes the overall point of Gobe Productive,
it is really just one application, not the five that I laid out here. All
functions can be used in any type of document, as it just all works together.
The five applications I have spelled out above are just presets for working
with the different types of documents. In reality, if you use just the Gobe
Productive file format, it is all the same.
Printing Problems
Most BeOS users know
how limited printing options are under BeOS. My printing privileges are limited
to the Binkjet driver for my Hewlett Packard 812C using the parallel port.
Getting a decent printout using this driver is hit-and-miss between applications,
and therefore I could not print with Gobe Productive. The printer would act
like it was beginning to print, but then kill the process. Most likely the
problem is with Binkjet, and not with Productive.
Opinions
and Suggestions for Gobe
Gobe has a very good
start on an integrated office suite, but I believe it could be much better
by offering features that no other office suite currently can match.
The most important idea I would like to put
forth would be super-integration with web technologies such as HTML, XML,
and CSS. This could be accomplished by using Netscape Gecko, an open-source
rendering engine that has already been ported to the BeOS for the Bezilla
(Mozilla) project. This engine can even be used to output code as well as
read it, which would be very useful for use in Productive.
Using Cascading Style Sheets, the look and
layout of the document can be defined very specifically, and the same style
sheet can be used for both HTML and XML documents. CSS would mix very well
with the integrated document types of Productive.
I would like to see HTML support advanced to
support templates and server functions (such as Server-Side Includes). By
not damaging pre-existing code, one can feel free to create a template elsewhere,
and use Productive for adding the raw data. I do not expect Productive to
be a full-fledged HTML editor.
By outputting XML, very structurally defined
documents can be produced that would aid in making a document more useful
and future-proof. By using CSS for to style the documents, it would be useful
to offer an abstracted CSS editor, which would be very easy to accomplish.
Also useful would be the ability to upload over FTP as easy as saving to your
hard drive.
I believe that it would not be much work to
offer this level of web integration with the Gecko technology already present.
What it comes down to is that publishing to the web is going to be the number
one use for productivity applications here very soon, and the sooner Gobe
supports it, the better.
Conclusion
