While this is good news, it is frustrating that Google has taken so long to recognize how important a first class document editing experience is on Android (particularly for tablets). When I recommend an Android tablet to somebody it is because I tell them "it does more". However it is hard to do that when there is barely a single word processing application available with more functionality than say, Wordpad. Nailing a good all round office experience with seamless integration with Googe Docs could have put Android tablets into a entirely different position in the market than where it is now.
Google Acquires Quickoffice
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: Google Acquires Quickoffice
#42This a Big kill for other Office apps in the Store. Google's dominance and monopoly is killing smaller start-ups and Businesses which isn't good for our community. They acquired Motorola Mobile, and it was a kill for other Android OEM's.
like Samsung? They're killing it. What smaller startups has Google killed with its monopoly? Facebook?
> small
That word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re: Google Acquires Quickoffice
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The backend for Google Docs right now is a patchy patchwork mess that was originally based on OpenOffice (many many years ago). Any reason to believe this is still the case?
User enjo could probably tell you. Although I know nothing of how OpenOffice (or Google Docs) is written, I doubt it. I have been involved with the Word Viewer & Editor component in SharePoint. The requirements of a UI-driven desktop application don't tend to mesh well with a web-based editor. Maybe they did make it work, but wouldn't Google need to publish those changes?
> The requirements of a UI-driven desktop application don't tend to mesh well with a web-based editor
I took it to mean the parsers for file formats (namely Office). That should be pretty similar no matter what the UI is--you need to be able to read and write the file formats.
Re: Google Acquires Quickoffice
#44I'm incredibly excited for the guys at Quickoffice! Its really interesting, I still feel like Quickoffice is my baby (I was the lead architect from 2002-2008). It's actually kind of bittersweet to see the whole thing grown up and headed off to Google. My first startup experience was working in a closet (literally) on the Palm version of Quicksheet as the second development hire. Over the next 6 years we were bought a…
Would you care to elaborate on the "working in a closet" part? :)
Re: Google Acquires Quickoffice
#45OT when did blogspot begin to suck that much? with javascript disabled, I get an empty page. With javascript enabled, I see a stupid animation while I have to wait for something to finish.
I caught it at least as far back as October. It's a fundamental disconnect with providing content. Strangely enough, I ran into it from a HN link. I wrote about it at the time, for what it's worth.
Re: Google Acquires Quickoffice
#46This is a smart move for Google.
QuickOffice is already preinstalled on Amazon kindle fire, and in the near future it will be the defacto office suite for Android tablets.
Re: Google Acquires Quickoffice
#47I'm incredibly excited for the guys at Quickoffice! Its really interesting, I still feel like Quickoffice is my baby (I was the lead architect from 2002-2008). It's actually kind of bittersweet to see the whole thing grown up and headed off to Google. My first startup experience was working in a closet (literally) on the Palm version of Quicksheet as the second development hire. Over the next 6 years we were bought a…
Would you care to elaborate on the "working in a closet" part? :)
It was actually the server room. We had a couple of desktops serving the website and the development staff (two of us) crowded in there to work as well:)
Re: Google Acquires Quickoffice
#48It still amazes me that no-one in the mobile space is addressing the market for editing large, structured documents of the sort you might create in LaTeX. QuickOffice's word processor lacks support for styles, numbered headings, cross-references, bibliographic citations, equations, automatic table/figure numbering, and a table of contents, among other things. These features are a necessity for scientific/technical writing, and it's basically not possible to write something like a PhD thesis or textbook on a tablet today.
I wanted these features enough that I ended up starting my own project to build a word processor for the iPad based on HTML/WebKit designed for producing these kinds of documents. There's still some way to go before it's got all the capabilities I mentioned above, and it doesn't currently support any formats other than HTML, but I already have a lot lot of the structural features plus support for styles working. I have a beta available and there's some info up at http://www.uxproductivity.com/ if anyone's interested in giving it a try.
I'll be very interested to see what Google does with QuickOffice. Google docs is considerably more powerful but still falls short on some of the document structure features of LaTeX and Word. With the rumoured release of MS Office for the iPad later this year, competition could start to heat up a lot.
Re: Google Acquires Quickoffice
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
User enjo could probably tell you. Although I know nothing of how OpenOffice (or Google Docs) is written, I doubt it. I have been involved with the Word Viewer & Editor component in SharePoint. The requirements of a UI-driven desktop application don't tend to mesh well with a web-based editor. Maybe they did make it work, but wouldn't Google need to publish those changes?
> The requirements of a UI-driven desktop application don't tend to mesh well with a web-based editor I took it to mean the parsers for file formats (namely Office). That should be pretty similar no matter what the UI is--you need to be able to read and write the file formats.
Rendering pixels was never the problem.
With gross oversimplification: office had binary formats (Spolsky has written about clever-clog date handling, now forced to collide with ISO). This binary is/was actually a memory dump of the MFC application, a serialisation on FAT block-based file.
Newer formats are complex, because they are almost an automatic transliteration to XML tags to keep backwards compatibility with the status quo. All this means, that it is highly not trivial to read Office formats without being 100% compatible with MFC. Which is not 100% possible -- even for MS itself ...let alone others (ie. competitors). This becomes apparent, when you try to insert a page, paragraph with copy paste into an existing document within Word: sometimes fitting into the existing OO hierarchy will inevitably fail. This is a long standing wont-fix bug, for good technical reasons.
Re: Google Acquires Quickoffice
#50I once used Quickoffice on a Symbian S60 phone. I should say, it's capabilities were pretty impressive. Especially with the meager resources available on those old so-called smart phones. I hope this helps Google build better native Office apps. Obviously, will also be a big addition to their Docs back-end. But it has always puzzled me, with the infinite resources Google has, it still has not been able to develop a s…
Yeah, it's pretty hard. Microsoft's spec (for the OOXML formats) is over 6,000 pages long, and extremely hard to follow by all accounts. And no, that's not a 10-page specification followed by 5,990 pages of examples. The Office apps have incredibly complex functionality, and then factor in decades of revisions, upgrades, overlays, and general complexity creep. Also bear in mind that while Google does have large (not…
Sun did it back to improve StarOffice, though with only a few.