gobeProductive 3.0 Preview When One Workspace Can Equal a Suite Eric Grevstad
Mon 12/3/01 -- Think of gobeProductive 3.0 as a phoenix rising from the flames -- and running into an 800-pound gorilla.
Gobe Software Inc.'s program was without question (almost without competition) the top productivity package for the speedy and stable but less-than-miniscule-market-share BeOS operating system. Now that Be Inc. has fizzled out (and its buyer Palm Inc. has troubles of its own), the Gobe team is moving its suite to Windows -- where the productivity software field has been plowed under, paved, and fenced in by Microsoft Office.
Moreover, while a few different-drummer types do work with something other than Office, many do so for free -- either getting Microsoft's minimal Works suite preinstalled with their home PCs, or downloading Sun's StarOffice or Software602's 602Pro PC Suite. Gobe will sell Productive 3.0 for $125 -- far less than Office XP Standard Edition's $479, but not free. (If you act fast, you can pay just $40 by registering the current public beta-test version, which entitles you to a copy of the official 3.0 release. Fans also note that Gobe's un-XP-like license lets you install the program on all your PCs at home plus one at work.)
Sounds like an awfully long shot? Yes, but it's an intriguing one -- especially when you learn that Productive shares its design concept and development DNA with Apple's integrated program AppleWorks (nee ClarisWorks), no longer officially available for Windows (though Apple offers a Windows version of AppleWorks 6.1 to educational customers and software stores have dusty copies of AppleWorks 5).
That means gobeProductive is a single program, not a bundle of a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, and graphics editor. While word processing, you can simply click an icon and draw a graphics frame -- an imported image, a vector shape such as a starburst or arrow, a box for a headline or quote -- in the middle of your text, which instantly wraps around it. Then do the same to insert a spreadsheet.
Then select any object and bring it to the front or back of your layered layout, or make it partially transparent (any percentage from invisible to opaque), or rotate it anywhere from 0 to 360 degrees. Then zoom in to view your work at 100 percent, page width, full page, or any zoom level from 1 to 6,400 percent (!).
This makes Productive arguably superior to its office-suite rivals not only for seamless workflow, but for desktop publishing or page layout chores like newsletter or brochure production (to be sure, Microsoft's Office XP Professional Special and available-only-from-PC-makers Small Business Editions include Microsoft Publisher).
As a tradeoff, you won't find every advanced feature of Microsoft Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, or StarOffice -- no luxuries like pivoting spreadsheet tables, math equation editors, or automatic index or table-of-contents generation, and no database component akin to Access or Paradox.
And the Beta 2 download posted November 28 exhibited some, well, beta-like behavior in our tests -- the crop function turned images blank, and Productive crashed twice while working with drawings on our Win 2000 desktop PC. We were also annoyed that Productive puts an instance of itself in the Windows Taskbar for every open file, but shuts down altogether instead of offering an empty workspace if you open and then close a single document.
Still, Productive shows real, think-outside-the-box potential compared to ordinary office suites. With today's news so full of inventor Dean Kamen's radical Segway (a.k.a. "Ginger") electric-scooter alternative to automotive transport, we're tempted to think of gobeProductive as a sort of software equivalent.
