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Apple and Gobe Details

Saturday January 18, 2003 9:50 am PST by Arnold Kim
Bob Hearn maintains an interesting site detailing "A Brief History of Clarisworks". In it, he details the origins of Clarisworks and his involvement, back to a small company called StyleWare in the mid 1980's.



Overall, an interesting history to read, but one of the most interesting components relate to the original development team's departure around the time of ClarisWorks 5.0's development. A few of the ClarisWorks developers who left at this time (Scott Holdaway, Scott Lindsey, Carl Grice, Bruce Hammond and Tom Hoke) left to found Gobe software.



After Be's failure, and the subsequent demise of Gobe, it appears Apple did have interest in acquiring Gobe:





    Apple did not in the end acquire Gobe as such, but three of its founders, Scott Holdaway, Scott Lindsey, and Carl Grice, did rejoin Apple as employees when Gobe failed. They won't tell me what they are up to (even off the record!), but whatever it is, it does not involve the Gobe Productive codebase. Nor, I am reasonably sure, does it involve the ClarisWorks / AppleWorks codebase.


Bob Hearn returned to graduate school to study Artificial Intelligence.
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PROZAKY
118 months ago
Is that when the new Power Macs came?
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MOM
118 months ago
I remember once reading something (on MacInTouch, I think) from one of the original authors of ClarisWorks (perhaps it was Hearn) that this person regreted that they didn't lay a better foundation in the software to be able to compete with office. My point is that what this may mean is they are starting from the beginning rather than with old code. MOM
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Token
118 months ago
isn't it possible that they began working with another, tight coded, open source, office or word processor package?

Come to think of it, wasn't there some statements from Sun/Apple that they were or wren't somehow collaborating on openoffice?
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jamilecrire
118 months ago
bob returned to school to study artificial intelligence. Lol, I guess you need to be close to the professors to see how artificial they really are!

Best of luck.
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josepht
118 months ago
With the continuation of Office Party, I think it's going to be a while before we see Apple's equivelent to Microsoft Office. If they ever write such a suite, I hope it will be released with the G5s. I hope I won't have to put anything Microsoft on my G5--if I can get one.
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evanmarx
118 months ago

Originally posted by josepht
With the continuation of Office Party, I think it's going to be a while before we see Apple's equivelent to Microsoft Office. If they ever write such a suite, I hope it will be released with the G5s.


Or with the release of apple's marklar thingy in 1 or 2 years. the more we wait the more apps apple will have under their thumbs to control... even if it means to rewrite the code for intel ...:D
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Marvenp
118 months ago
Does anyone know about or has used OpenOffice? http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/index.html
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PsiFire
118 months ago
Perhaps these people are from where Keynote sprung? I know it's late, and I can't keep my thoughts together to well. But it makes for a logical extrusion that if Apple has these people in their employment, that these same people could possibly be revamping an office suite for Apple.
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MacsRgr8
118 months ago

Originally posted by Marvenp
Does anyone know about or has used OpenOffice? http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/index.html


Yes, it runs on X11 (http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/download/). You will also need the OpenOffice launcher for Apple's X11 (can be found at versiontracker.com).
It works, but its darn ugly... (looks exactly the same as the Linux version).
I hope there will be an "Aqua (Cocoa)" version of it, so that there will be no need to install X11, and that it will look good.
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steve53e
118 months ago
Publish & Subscribe! Why Apple ever removed Publish & Subscribe from AppleWorks 6 and the ability to have/use P&S aware apps in OS-X is beyond me.
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