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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Aqua OpenOffice for Mac OS X 61

Posted by pudge from the aqua-licious dept.
rhetland writes "An article on O'Reilly network discusses the new port of OpenOffice to Mac OS X. The public beta, due out next week, will be posted on the OpenOffice Mac site. I have been waiting for this for months, and can hardly wait."
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Aqua OpenOffice for Mac OS X More

Aqua OpenOffice for Mac OS X

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  • Now I can hopefully migrate the last of out machines from any microisoft code. $ months ago we got the go ahead for open source (after a 2 year battle) and now this!

  • great, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mkoz ( 323688 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @06:32PM (#4390572)
    This is great news, but consider what this really means. What we really want & need, a fully native version, is still someway off. The subtext is the more people who can help the faster and better off we will be.
    MAK

  • Finally (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by soapvox ( 573037 )
    No more Microshaft stuff on my beautiful OS X!!!! I can't wait to use the beta, just wish I could do more than just beta test, but you do what you can, I hope all OS X programmers help out this project where they can!
  • With an Aqua version of Open Office soon available, and Open Office shipping as default install on Red Hat 8.0, are we seeing a dominant #2 player in the Office Suite market?
    • Believe it or not/sadly enough Word Perfect/Perfect Office is still chugging along. Dell is shipping it instead of M$ Works on low end machines and it has it's fanatical adherents. We even proposed on a project where the final, complicated, should-be-done in Quark or InDesign report has to be in an editable WP file!

  • A Sweet Suite Situation (Score:4, Informative)

    by Big Sean O ( 317186 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @07:06PM (#4390794)
    Things are looking up for Mac users. Soon we will have three office productivity suites running in Aqua.

    1. Microsoft Office. Probably not coincidentally, it's being sold for 1/2 price when you buy a new Mac.
    2. AppleWorks. Which is almost as free as in beer, since it comes bundled with your new Mac.
    3. and now OpenOffice.org.


    Lots of people would say that having three different suites is a bad thing, but I don't think so anymore:

    1. XML file formats: Both MS Office and Open Office have documented XML-based file specifications. This will make it possible for open source conversion stylesheets. Sure, there will be translation glitches, but the open nature of the file specification will make all types of conversion of content possible.
    2. Variety of Tools. Some people like vi. Some people like emacs. Some people like BBEdit. Same for Office Suites. My wife has AppleWorks and MS Office, but she likes AppleWorks better. Me, I don't care what WP program I use, but I get really fussy when I can't use Excel. Too much finger memory built up.
    3. Evolution. Like the varied Mozilla projects, lots of choices and experimentation is good. The more open code out there, the more new breakthrough projects built on the back of giants.

    • Actually, AppleWorks is only bundled with i(Book|Mac)s. Power(Book|Mac)s don't, though they come with other neat goodies like GraphicConverter.

    • Re:A Sweet Suite Situation (Score:2, Interesting)

      by weo ( 7251 )
      Aaaah but you forget the OTHER office application.

      KOffice run well on OSX using fink or the other linux@OSX distributions. I can't wait for KDE 3.1 to run on OSX.

      OSX+OS(kde+gnu+gnome+X....) = ME+:)

      on a side note I want linksys to make a a box with exportable X session or VNC session running linux. The only difference from what they sell now and what I'm talking about is a harddrive and a beefier processor. I'ld pay for a linux applience for 100bucks.

      weo

      • Re:A Sweet Suite Situation (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        OSX+OS(kde+gnu+gnome+X....)

        I can't wait to see the Beowolf cluster you're going to need to run this puppy.

      • While it's nice to have a lot of UNIX apps available for the Macintosh, many, especially those requiring the installation of an XWindow-For-Aqua solution, are for the *NIX tinkerer. This describes a demographic that Apple certainly wants to keep happy, but not one the one that will make Apple the market share they want.

        For that, they need Aqua apps that "Just Work"(tm). Simple to install (or uninstall), laid out in an expected manner. Possibly expandable through CLI-level tweaking of scripts, but working out of the box.

        Though I'm constantly happy to see OS/X offering the more-or-less best of both worlds. Definitely the better-than-anyone-else of both worlds. And I'm downright giddy that OpenOffice is embracing the OS and philosophy.
    • There is also ThinkFree Office. Haven't used it but it has been getting good reviews: http://www.thinkfree.com/

  • read the weblog more closely... (Score:4, Informative)

    by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @07:07PM (#4390797) Homepage Journal
    X11 is going beta next week, not aqua. the aqua version is still in the planning stages.

  • It's not Aqua yet (Score:4, Informative)

    by l-ascorbic ( 200822 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @07:36PM (#4390950)
    The article says:
    Next week, public beta of the X11 release for Darwin 6, Mac OS X 10.2.

    This is still the X11 version. Sure, it'll be nice to try it, but it won't have Mac look and feel, and certainly won't obey the Human Interface Guidelines yet. It seems that the Aqua demo was of NeoOffice [neooffice.org], which is just a proof of concept for developers, not a real distribution.

    NeoOffice is a mildly functional prototype office suite used for exploring technologies for use in OpenOffice.org. It is not a distribution and not in active development. It is a sandbox for testing out potentially unstable and ugly technologies that are not appropriate for a maintainable source base.

    Looks like there's a lot more work to be done...

    • dead link! (Score:2, Informative)

      by soullessbastard ( 596494 )
      The link above should be http://www.neooffice.org [neooffice.org].
    • IANADeveloper but...
      This is still the X11 version. Sure, it'll be nice to try it, but it won't have Mac look and feel, and certainly won't obey the Human Interface Guidelines yet.
      I know the Apple HIG are meant to guide people developing Macintosh software, but why don't more developer's use them to help when designing GUI based software regardless of the platform?

      IMHO, Apple knows what they are talking about when it comes designing an interface, so the HIG seem to be a great resource for anyone to use.So, any of you programmers for windows and *nix pay any attention to them?

      A lot of people talk about trying to get linux on the desktop and how to do it...call me crazy but perhaps if developers kept the HIG in mind it would push things forward quite a bit as far as linux usability goes...

      note: I am not saying the HIG must be followed to the letter but it seems like it would be a great starting point for developers of any GUI based software...

      Any thoughts on this? Can the HIG be a valuable resource for anyone?

      • Re:OT, but I'm curious... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdevers.cis@usouthal@edu> on Saturday October 05, 2002 @03:18PM (#4394104) Homepage Journal
        The principle that you're getting at is a sound one, and I don't object to it. That said though, I don't agree that the Aqua HIG document should be taken as the canonical reference for development on any platform. Rather, the Aqua HIG is a pretty good implementation of a more abstract general idea, but in other contexts different implementations of the idea can make more sense. For example, why should Windows developers try to adhere to the Mac user interface guidelines when Microsoft already publishers The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design: An Application Design Guide [amazon.com], which would be far more appropriate for Windows developers.

        The thing is, user interface standards are, I think everyone would agree, generally a good thing. But different platforms have different ideas about what the standards should be. Any particular standard isn't necessarily better or worse than any of the others as long as it's consistent, logical, and easily learned. And as long as one standard is consistent & logical & so on, it's more of a problem to try to impose another systems consistent, logical framework. So for example the Aqua guidelines suggest how to arrange menus, what functionality should be in each one, how to arrange dialog windows, keystrokes to adhere to, etc. The Windows guidelines make different recommendations in each of these areas. The goal should be to adapt to the local system, so that users don't have to adapt to whatever platform the software was developed on.

        The shambling train wreck here is Linux and X11, where the best you can hope for is some particular toolkits suggested but generally half thought out HIG standard. The best you can hope for is what Gnome or KDE offers, but still you as a user can't assume that all applications you use are going to adhere to one, the other, or even any standard. Everyone just makes up their own damn standard and the user has no choice but to wrestle them all down. Here, maybe it *would* make some sense to bring in ideas from the Aqua guidelines, or for that matter the Windows guidelines, the classic Mac guidelines, or hell anything else -- just pick *anything* and implement it *consistently*. But of course this has never happened and at this point I don't expect it to ever come together, short of a miracle in say RedHat's effort to merge KDE & Gnome. More power to 'em I say.

        Anyway, I think what you really want is for someone to approach this as a true & complete discipline, just as programming & QA & administration are all disciplines. We need system designers that understand general UI theory (including general design principles, user testing & feedback schemes, etc) as well as specific implementations of the general theory as seen in e.g. Aqua, Windows, web design [Jakob Nielsen type stuff], etc. But in the end this all just has to be source material, and short of adopting someone else's standards full out -- that'll never happen -- in the end a cohesive Linux/X11 UI standard needs to emerge. Gnome & KDE & similar projects will play into this of course, but even those aren't fleshed out enough and the pointless rift between the two projects doesn't help things anyway. As long as there continues not to be a well thought out Linux/X11 HIG document that is widely referred to & implemented, using Linux will continue to be a painful experience for average [read: non-geek] users.

        But then we all know that already, don't we?

        • The Aqua HI Guidelines fall short in my opinion. There are a lot of things which it doesn't address.

          For example the behavior of NSLayoutManager still doesn't follow Mac conventions for selecting text. Also the behavior of commands like "Save" and "Revert" change depending if the file primitive you're using is an FSRef or POSIX file path.

          As for OpenOffice I warn that the absolute WORST interface is one which looks like a Mac but doesn't behave like a Mac.
          • Well, yes. Subjectively -- I'm no HI expert, just an interested amateur -- the Aqua guidelines seem much less polished & refined than the old Mac ones did a decade or more ago. Among the things that need to be cleaned up & made more coherent & cohesive are the various Mac vs. BSD artifacts: file paths, standard line endings, etc. My hope is that, as OSX & Aqua evolve, things will improve & get better standardized, but we'll see what happens.

            But yeah, foreign interfaces are a plague that should almost always be avoided. Note how Photoshop & family are a dream on Macs, but IMO have never really fit in on PCs. Note how Microsoft adapted Office & Internet Explorer to the Mac from their original Windows versions, and for that matter Palm Desktop. Note how "cross platform" applications like Lotus Notes just looks, well, awful on every platform I've seen it on, and for that matter, most any GUI application written in Java/AWT or TCL/TK. Yuck!

            Like I think I said in the earlier post, the only application I can think of where it brings the same interface to every platform and still works is Gvim -- but if you're the sort of person that's using Gvim then you probably aren't looking for aesthetics or goo menu layouts in the first place :)

            So anyway, IMO the best thing the OpenOffice people can do is come up with a native Aqua/Cocoa interface to their software engine, much as the Chimera people have done with Gecko. The interface can & should draw from the Aqua guidelines if possible, but as Anarkhos says, getting the look but not the feel could be even worse than staying as an X11 app. IMO, anyway...

            • Well I've brought up the two issues I mentioned back in the Rhapsody days, and again when the preliminary Aqua HI Guidelines were released. Nothing has happened except in OS X 10.1 NSDocument behaves a bit better, as if it uses an FSRef internally.

              The "standard line endings" issue was resolved a long time ago, at least as much as it'll ever be. Carbon uses CR, Cocoa and UNIX use LF, Windows uses CRLF, and we're moving to XML so this is all moot anyway. The issue I had is when a mouse gesture in MacOS or Carbon apps behaves one way (the superior way) and Cocoa apps behave another way (the crazy doesn't-make-any-logical-sense way).

              Ironically Swing apps behave the Carbon way when it comes to text selection. I suspect this is because the MRJ people modified their Swing to Toolbox binding for Carbon rather than any high-level decision to do it this way. The problem with Cocoa however seems to me to be due to old NeXT people who won't let go of their crappy HI.

              Anyway if you want any of these issues fixed you have to bitch to Apple about them, because Apple clearly is not taking the initiative.

  • Aqua Would be nice. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @08:33PM (#4391204)
    Although I have open office for OS X in X11. It makes it a real hassle to run. I usually end up running Appleworks except for open office. Although I would prefer to use Open Office then Apple Works but it takes a while for XDarwin to start up which in most cases gets in the way. And the fact the interface is differnt from the rest of the application on the Mac so it effect my productivity because I have to adjust my way of thinking to switch to apps.

  • open source becomes free source (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    hmm...interesting subtext: openoffice.org is released under the LGPL [fsf.org] and SISSL [openoffice.org] which allow for closed source extensions to the source base and commercialization. According to the next to last NeoOffice [neooffice.org] FAQ entry [neooffice.org] the prototype is under the full GPL [fsf.org] license and Sun employees know they can't use its source code [openoffice.org] directly.

    Is this the first salvo in a free source vs. open source war?

  • hope it works... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have Open Office 1.0 running on my OS X machine, but it is so buggy that it is unusable. I hope the new version works better. An aqua version would be awesome; I don't mind running XF86 in rootless mode, but an aqua version would make the whole experience more seamless.

    for now, I use TextEdit which comes with OS X. It is very stable and usable, though not too good at advanced formatting. And why of why does everybody have to use .doc format anyway. it is such a piece of crap and there are major privacy issues with it...don't beleive me? open up a .doc with BBEdit or something...

    • Forget TextEdit, I use BBEdit for all my word processing. I have no need in the least for the fancy formatting crap that you get in most office applications. It'd be nice to get some free regular office software (I don't use AppleWorks, you think only MS Office uses proprietary formats?) for those rare occasions when I need something more than BBEdit, but not having it is more a nuisance than a problem.
    • I can't stand TextEdit. You can't move/rename open files (or host directories/non-root volumes) without TextEdit freaking out.
  • I've been using Open Office for a while now and it's great. Not quite as polished as commercial apps but certainly nothing to laugh at.

    The only problem I've experienced so far is that after a certain size (haven't quite narrowed it down yet) Open Office refuses to open a file. This isn't any wierd file, just a simple plaintext file, yet for some reason Open Office won't open it. It opens fine under other programs, but not OO. Has anyone else come across this problem or does anyone know how to fix it?
  • Note that the beta release is for Darwin, which means you need an X server running on OS X to use it. This really isn't worth much to OS X users until the Aqua part comes along.

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