In another thread I proposed to e-mail SoftMaker (http://www.softmaker.com/english/) to port their applications to the 770 platform. SoftMaker have two excellent products: the wordprocessor TextMaker and the spreadsheet PlanMaker; both are very multi-platform and compatible with *.doc and *.xls file formats (for some reason people find that important ). They're not free, or even cheap (a bundle of TM and PM costs EUR 69.95 without physical media), but they're very good.

I figured that, in order to give such a request some clout, it would help if we could give SoftMaker an idea about the number of people that would be interested in actually buying their product.

I thought a poll might be in order:

I have also previously asked about a port to the 770, but was met with no interest. Even if gnueric is ported (which, in the 2005 port was bulletproof), the abiword port had problems (not the least of which were no spellcheck or .doc support). I hope that this gets reconciled soon. Thanks for your support of this.

If I was using my 770 for those reasons, I might be interested. However mostly I use it for an ebook reader, network analysis (I do miss some tools from the 2005 software), a web browser and a PDA.

The more and more I've done with my 770 / linux laptop, the more and more I firmly believe in open source. If companies want to start hocking software for the 770, I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time until someone develops something similar under the GPL.

And now, it would seem that we've come full circle. My point is and was that I 'd be perfectly happy with OSS; however, if that is not available, then I was hoping that some commercial entity would step in and fill the need. If someone is porting abiword (especially if it has .doc support and spellcheck), then GREAT! I just don't see any indication that it is currently happening. I hope that I'm wrong.

Just because it's open source doesn't mean it has to be free. Too many people think that.

Look at web desingers, 90% of what they do is open source, but people still pay them to do the work. (way back in the 90s when the web was taking off, the best way to learn HTML was to view source and copy what you liked, cut out what you didn't.)

Quite, quite true. I would add that 'free' software is very rarely free anyway. I have spent far too much time horsing around with GPE Calendar that I would have rather just paid to have functionality

Bump!

(Hehehehe!)

ok, I'll bite.

I did more than I could believe with that old buggy abiword port......just got used to hitting "save" alot.

Now, using Gnumeric, I am teaching myself enough excel to construct my school's detention logs off the Nokia, and, although I am a bit bummed that the gnumeric files have to be thrown on my laptop to be turned into excel files,
me, my Nokia, and my broken thinkoutside stowaway (with spanish characters on the keyboard) can be a powerful office machine.

Yes, I would pay for it....I heard abi is in some stage of something over in the garage, too....

DCarter

I hope people don't misunderstand me: I like Gnumeric and Abiword as well. It's just that I like the SoftMaker offerings a tad more. I use both the general Linux and Windows versions as my day-to-day office applications and they are of an exceptional standard.

I also don´t want to get people´s hopes up too much: I´ve nagged SoftMaker before without success, and as of noy they only have an older version of the wordprocessor available for the Zaurus platform (but it doesn´t rely on th QT libraries, so porting is very likely not impossible).

On the keyboard subject: mine has a German layout, which kinda works. I wonder if somebody sells keyboard overlays for Think Outsides, or if I could make my own.