Ada on the Desktop (was: ACM Ada Letters)

[Marius Amado Alves <amado.alves@netcabo.pt>]

On Fri, 2003-10-31 at 20:59, Nick Roberts wrote:
> Well, I use OpenOffice as well. I click on the icon to start it up, then go 
> and make a cup of tea and feed the cat, and sometimes when I come back it's 
> nearly finished loading.

And mine often goes beserk making me loose work. And has other non-fatal
really stupid bugs. V. 1.0 did not show italics! V. 1.1 solved this but
stopped showing quotation marks! I had to change from Times to some
uncommon font. And it can't be conviced I am not in USA. And Nick is
lucky to have an icon for it. When I click my icon v. 1.0 shows up. To
get v. 1.1 I have to open a terminal and execute "soffice". And to
install v. 1.1 I had to do it three times. And I still wonder if there
are now three installations of it on my system. And...

However--and this is sad--, when compared to Microsof Word, considering
price (Word hi, OpenOffice zero), it still wins.

In Portugal my experience is most people use Microsoft Word but are
(illegally) not paying it.

So I wonder if there is a market in the middle ground: low price (10
eurodollars), 0 bugs, ease of installation.

I have a name for this kind of project: "Ada on the Desktop."