It has been said in the past that Linux’s acceptance as a desktop platform — or lack of acceptance for that manner, has been largely based upon the lack of commercial productivity applications.
Enter Applix — which for the past several years has been quietly producing a completely native and highly integrated office suite for Unix platforms. Recently, Applix spun off its applications division as VistaSource, which has released its first product, ApplixWare Office 5.0. While the functionality of ApplixWare Office 5.0 is pretty much the same as their previous versions, version 5.0 has been re-written to take direct advantage of the GTK 1.2.7 toolkit, the native user interface of GNOME. As far as we can tell, this is the first commercial end-user software package to do this. Not only is ApplixWare 5.0 visually appealing as a native GNOME application, but unlike its direct competitors in the Linux office suite business, it’s very resource efficient and fast.
At the Office
ApplixWare 5.0 is composed of six distinct applications: Words, Spreadsheets, Graphics, Presents, Data, and Mail. All of these are tied in by a single ApplixWare Office icon bar, which allows you to open files and import data from a single dialog interface.
In a general sense, all of these applications will provide the average user with most of the functionality they need to get their work done. Power users, on the other hand, will find it handy that ApplixWare Office’s functionality is made highly extensible…
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