Sorry for that tortured headline, but “interesting” is the best word to describe IBM’s Lotus Symphony productivity suite that has just entered beta for the Mac (it has been available for Linux and Windows for awhile now). Lotus Symphony includes four different applications in one (you interact with each app in the same window): a web browser, IBM Lotus Symphony Documents, IBM Lotus Symphony Presentations, and IBM Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets.
I know what you’re thinking, ‘Great, just what the world needs: another Office productivity suite.’ Worry not, because Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice which means it supports both Microsoft Office formats and those used by OpenOffice, and it’s free (hard to beat that price).
I downloaded Symphony and fiddled with it for a few minutes; the first impression was pretty good. I find the one-window-to-rule-them-all angle to be interesting, and it looks like IBM at least took some time attempting to make Lotus Symphony look like a Mac app. The text rendering isn’t great, and the application itself felt a little slow on my new MacBook Pro, but I think Lotus Symphony has great potential, and did I mention it’s free?
Lotus is resurrecting 'Symphony" from the dustbin of Macintosh history. In 1987 Lotus Symphony was the first productivity suite and it was only available on the Mac. It contained an integrated word processing program (similar to Apple's Macwrite), a spreadsheet program, and a flat file database. Spreadsheets, or data base data could be imbedded into word processing documents and they would change if the their source document was modified. All of this ran on a 512k Mac from a 400k floppy disk.
I still have the original Lotus Symphony running on my old Fat Mac via an Apple 20 meg hard drive. Welcome back Symphony.
Hardly can Lotus Symphony be abscribed as Mac-only: Lotus Symphony was the evolution of Lotus 1-2-3 along the lines of products such as Ashton Tate's Framework, one of the first products that could be called an integrated productivity suite… and it was available for MS-DOS machines with 512KB of memory.