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IBM releases Lotus Symphony 1.2 with Beta support for Mac OS X

Thursday, November 6, 2008 · 12:05 am · 35 Comments

IBM has released Lotus Symphony release 1.2 which is now available and includes Beta support for the Mac OS X platform in English.

IBM encourages interested users to will take the time to try it out and give them your feedback. IBM expects to have a “Generally Available” version for Mac in all the languages the company supports in Q1 09.

So, what do you get when you combine the standard-bearer for GUI elegance of the Mac OS X with the clean, award winning interface of Lotus Symphony? An unbeatable combination of innovation and simplicity for office productivity applications, designed with users in mind.

The development team has worked hard to ensure that Lotus Symphony not only works on Mac OS X but is optimized to take advantage of elegance of Aqua GUI theme with the innovation and simplicity Mac users have come to expect.

Right now, for Beta, Lotus Symphony on Mac OS X is available in English only. Rest assured, however, we will support all the languages when we move Lotus Symphony support for Mac OS X out of Beta to be generally available.

Now, it’s your turn to do the work. Download it, use it, give us feedback. Your feedback is vital to ensuring that we continue to focus on the right things and ensure that Lotus Symphony delivers the experience you need.

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Comment Feed

35 Comments

1 2 Next »

Anon ID

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 1:29 am · Reply

There doesn’t appear to be an anonymous download option.

NeoOffice and OpenOffice allow for this.

If you’re giving it away ‘at no cost’, then you don’t need to harvest emails addresses.
qka

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 1:40 am · Reply

So use a throw-away e-mail address. Everyone should have several such addresses ready just for cases like this.
NickBob

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 2:06 am · Reply

Free Loyus Improv for OS X!
elgarak

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 2:35 am · Reply

They don’t even verify the email address.

You can make one up and still get a download…

Not that I generally approve of non-anonymous free downloads, it kinda makes sense for a free beta test.
ken1w

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 3:21 am · Reply

Interesting…

There’s only one application window when Symphony is running, and the documents are “tabs” inside that window. So you can have any combination and number of word processing, presentation, and/or spreadsheet tabs inside the overall Symphony window. One or more of the tabs can even be a web browser tab; I don’t know which rendering engine it uses, but it seems competent.

When you close the overall Symphony window, the app quits, like with Disk Utility or System Preferences. Unusual for a productivity app to work this way, but not necessarily bad. The main limitation of this approach is that you can’t view two documents side by side; there may be a way that I don’t see.
MattyG

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 4:37 am · Reply

isn’t it amazing how everything has come full circle? IBM releasing office software, Apple doing really well etc etc

@anonID

simple, give it a fake address, i used blah@blah.com and it accepted it.
neil

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 5:59 am · Reply

looks pretty good – with ms office anyway pretty slow (2008 seems to run faster on an iMac G3 333Mhz than a MacBook) and annoying UI – very much a viable alternative
John Doe

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 7:46 am · Reply

Why download the program anonymous? Those people at IBM have a right to know where their program is.

Signed,
John Doe
anyone@example.com
Cubert

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 7:57 am · Reply

John Doe,
You made me crack a smile, even at this early hour.
Bob

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 8:03 am · Reply

Wouldn’t it have been nice if Lotus had bothered to offer 1-2-3 or Symphony for the Mac when it would have mattered, back when Lotus had 90+% of the spreadsheet/integrated software market, rather than now when they have to give it away for free? Still better 23 years late than never I suppose.

(Yeah I remember Jazz™, but like everyone else, I just don’t care.)
thornnd

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 8:42 am · Reply

@ken1w: I just noticed that Symphony has support for “Plug-Ins”. One such plugin is a document compare tool that will compare two documents side by side and highlight the differences.
s

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 9:02 am · Reply

It is intel only….
MacintoshSoftwareList.com

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 10:04 am · Reply

No love for PPC
@ S

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 10:52 am · Reply

So are the new Macs.

Progress is good for you.

Without carbon dioxide, most life on earth would die out.

Buy a Hummer and live forever.
Spark

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 10:56 am · Reply

@Anon
This is a beta app meant to be used by people willing to provide feedback to the developer. This point is clearly made in the release. If you don’t want to have that type of cooperative dialogue with the developer you should step away and not get involved. At the very least you shouldn’t bitch about leaving your precious email address with the company that just allowed you to download free software.
British Mac Head

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 11:10 am · Reply

Nice of them and all that but I just looked at the screenshots, pretty fugly. I think I’ll stick with iWork.

I don’t need to do crazy number crunching but I like good presentation of my spreadsheets. So Numbers is perfect for me. Keynote, well there is no presentation package better and Pages can make some pretty sweet docs.

Yeah there are a few things I would love to see added to iWork but most of the time it’s great.
Jeff

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 11:10 am · Reply

This product sucks. Its based off of the OpenOffice 1.1 code base. Why use this when you can run OpenOffice.org 3 now?
s

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 11:37 am · Reply

OSX on PPC will be back. Look at the signs
1) Apple buys PAsemi(?)
2) Apple hires ex-IBM VP to lead hardware development of iPhone/iPod.
3) iPhone/iPod today use ARM core, but it could easily run on PPC core. It is after all, just a CPU. For Apple, the change will be just a flick of a compiler switch.
4) License fee for ARM. I believe AIM agreement gives Apple right to fabricate PPC without license fee.
Gabriel

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 11:37 am · Reply

@ Jeff – I believe it’s due to licensing. OpenOffice 1 was dual-licensed to allow for proprietary changes that didn’t have to be returned to the codebase. OpenOffice 2 switched to exclusively using the LGPL. Since Lotus Symphony is closed-source, they’re sticking with the last version of the code from before the switch to LGPL.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openoffice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Industry_Standards_Source_License
s

Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 11:46 am · Reply

@ @S

“Progress is good for you.”
Yes I agree, but my PB is only 4 years old.

“Without carbon dioxide, most life on earth would die out.”
True for approx. 1/2 the species. Unfortunately for the other 1/2, which will die out with too much carbon dioxide.

“Buy a Hummer and live forever.”
I already have a E-150 (now it is stationary most of the time), which is as bad or worse than Hummer, The gas price is forcing me to keep my PB for few more years (which brings me back to first item).