• 2 Posts
  • 107 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 21st, 2024

help-circle



  • LibreOffice is okay for some stuff, but shows its limitations pretty quickly once you use it for more serious tasks.

    • Writer is the best of the suite and has deleted comments for me several times without ability to recover.
    • The spreadsheet is a toy compared to Excel spreadsheets used in pretty much any business.
    • The presentation software produces ugly results by default.

    The only things LibreOffice has going for it, is the price and that the UI doesn’t change. LibreOffice has no good mobile apps.

    Better alternatives to Microsoft Office are Google Docs etc. and Apple’s iWork suite. Both have good compatibility with Microsoft’s files and run great on mobile.

    Google has ease of use, easy sharing and collaboration. Apple’s iWork has great usability and features and produces beautiful results by default. The suite comes free with every Apple device. Google Docs is free to use as well.

    That’s of course ignoring the workhorse called Outlook. You can kind of approach its features with a handful of other applications, but won’t reach the same functionality.

    LibreOffice has one unique application in its suite: Base local database. Microsoft Access and FileMaker used to very popular, but faded into the background over the last decade.















  • Early Swift was very slow to compile and start. The debugger was nonfunctional.

    Otherwise it was pretty usable. Especially since it got to leverage the huge libraries written for Objective-C.

    Which meant it lacked some basic collection types. A Swift native Set was introduced with Swift 3 IIRC. Before that you had to bridge back and forth between Swift and Objective-C. Sometimes leading to unexpected behavior at runtime.

    In Objective-C if an object reference was nil, you could send it messages (call methods) without a problem. Swift however did away with this. Optionals had to be explicitly unwrapped. So if the annotations weren’t correct, Swift code would crash at runtime where Objective-C would have been fine. Lots of bugs related to that existed.

    Swift peaked around version 4. Since then, they have been adding kitchen sink features and lots of complexity to feel smart.

    I still would have preferred an Objective-C 3.0. Chris Lattner was a C++ guy and never really understood Objective-C culture and strengths.