Harold Fuchs wrote:
On 19/05/2008 18:09, mike scott wrote:
<snip>
>From what's been said, MSO users expect their office suite to provide
a bunch of applications related more by needing common databases than
by having any code in common. To what extent does this mean the
"office app" becomes a mini-operating system?
Not really at all, as evidenced by the fact that MS Office runs on Macs
and, from what I've heard, is better on a Mac than on a Windows PC.
And should it be allowed to?
MS Office on a Mac (in my wifes experience) was a pain. File formats
are just slightly different enough from Windows to be a real problem.
OOo solved those problems for the company. Allowed work between Linux,
Mac and Windows.
Is it not the function of the nominal OS (be it windows or linux) to
coordinate disparate applications?
No. Not in this context. The OS has no control over applications' UIs -
things like the allocation of function keys to functions is no concern
of the OS. It has no control over the use of shared files, like
dictionaries or address books. And so on. The reason it has no control
of these things is that it is not and *should not be* aware of them.
The OS should be aware of everything and this is a problem that MS is
now trying to deal with. UAC in Vista is a pain because over the years
the OS let the applications do what they wanted. Now the applications
cannot and is is upsetting the users with UAC announcements. "Allow or
disallow?"
The desktop/GUI runs on top of the OS and then it provides the
integration that is required but still through the OS. No application
should be able to run within only the desktop server domain for security
purposes.
And is it not a waste of programming effort to duplicate any of that
functionality?
Who's talking about duplicating functionality? If anything I'm talking
about making the code more modular so that the modules can be used in
more places. For example, the spell checking "module" in OOo could get
used by the mail-creation program. Of course this would be simplified by
having a common document model which in turn would lead to a common
document editing module which is again in the right direction.
There is a common document model for email. It is called "plain text."
It works in all email programs that I have every tried in over ten
years. Small in size and easy to read/parse over a bloated HTML or
other formatted file format. If you look at man formatted mail
messages, you will see that there is a plain text message as well. My
mail program only shows the plain text part.
Linux is modular and this is the correct direction. If I want to email
a document from Writer, I just click on the email button and it uses
Thunderbird.
FWIW, we have people that use Word to create their emails and then they
come as attachments and I have to save them and then open them in a
different application. This doesn't happen with text messages.
I actually prefer StarDict over OOo's spell checker. More tools in a
simple package. I would love the ability to use this in all my
applications. For this I would be very supportive of modular programming.
--
Robin Laing
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