10.2, Okito and the office alternative...

[uoba]

Now that 10.2 is out I am to ditch Office X when I reinstall on my work machine today/tomorrow... but, Word documents and equivalent are the only sticky point.

Anyway, to keep the momentum going with this idea (pioneered by our very own fryke), I checked out his excellent Cocoa Office pages --> http://mac.fryke.com/cocoaoffice/ (... thnx fryke), and followed the link to Okito Composer pages.

They have been busy Come September, they will release a Free, Lite, and Pro version, with Word doc compatibility and much more.

Sooo, Apple's new 10.2 Address Book, Mail, iCal (September), Okito Composer are going to form the basis of my day-to-day administration.

Has anyone really got into Mail on 10.2 yet, can it be more thoroughly organised? (As compared to Entourage)

Anyway, let's have a discussion about the new pros and cons thanks to 10.2...

[uoba]

By the way... if you pre-order Okito Pro you get it for $39 instead of $79 when it comes out, which is what I've done!

[fryke]

I don't want to calm this down before it starts, but Word-compatibility will not be in the first release of Okito Composer, afaik. It's planned for an updated before the end of the year - and still unclear whether or not Composer will be able to read and write or only read Word files. (But if you send .rtf files to MS Word people, they can still read them just fine.)

Mail.app has definitely grown up in Mac OS X 10.2. I have been an Entourage X user in the past, but I have switched to Mail (looking forward to iCal) entirely now. It seems a tad slow right now - I hope an update will fix this - but its feature set is quite up to par right now. I wish it had better Mailing List management (or better/more rules) and I wish it had a button to view my answer to a mail or my mail that the answer is to (excuse my English here). But other than that, Mail.app is certainly a good alternative to Entourage X. iCal looks (from the beta) like a very, very good replacement, too - and its integration with Mail will be as good or better than the integrated solution we know from Entourage.

If someone who uses Excel can try (or has tried) Mesa3 or another Cocoa competitor, I'd be glad to hear comments on how it is different, how good a competitor it is, and most importantly: What are the advantages of using a Cocoa alternative to Excel (other than that it's Cocoa and not MS).

[fryke]

http://okito.net/composer/gallery/ shows screenshots of the forthcoming 1.0 release. Right now you can still get 0.4d for getting a feel how this is going to work, but there seem to be some nice interface changes in the works, too.

[uoba]

Doh... I just realised after placing my order for Okito, those little asterix denoting that those features may not be ready for v1.0... but what the hell. I don't mind waiting because it's such as promising app.

[phillryu]

I've been looking around for this app this entire day... can anyone send me it?

[serpicolugnut]

Hmmm. Okito is no longer in development. It was bought up by Nisus, and it's developer was added to the Nisus Writer team. The first cocoa version of Nisus Writer, with the enhancements added from the Okito purchase shoud be out in the next couple of months...

http://nisus.com/products/NisusWriter/SneakPeek/

[phillryu]

Heh yes, but I was wondering if anyone had the beta that I could try out now... it is really impossible to find online.