OpenOffice Beta for Jaguar/X11 Released

kaldari writes "After great work by the development contributors and astounding help from the new testing team, the X11 build is now stable enough for beta testing to begin! This build can run both on DarwinPPC 6.0 and higher and also Mac OS X 10.2 and higher with help from other open source projects. For more info, check out the OpenOffice site."

One Step at a Time

[BobTheJanitor]

It has also been my experience that the average Mac user is more inclined to pay for something that works than not pay for something that somewhat works.

Well, /.ers aren't, for the most part, average Mac users. It may not look have Apple's look & feel, but I think it's certainly a step in the right direction, and those of us who use Macs and support open-sourced software would do well to either use it if we feel so inclined, or wait until its look & feel improves rather than belittling it.

Re:One Step at a Time

[BigBir3d]

I am so sorry. I must have confused the idea of everyone using something like OpenOffice instead of MSOffice as a goal of OpenOffice's. My bad.

What is "average"?

[Outland Traveller]

It may very well be that the "average" Mac user is changing. Ever since OS X, I and other *nix folk have been enthusiasticly adopting the platform alongside our usual assortment of Linux/BSDs workstations. No GUI on the market can currently match OS X. The system is an absolute dream to work on, and for my budget the 14" ibook is the laptop of choice.

From this point of view, it is a great thing that I can now use OpenOffice.org on all my platforms!

Chimera for OpenOffice? File formats are the key

[EricHsu]

To be fair, I don't agree with the assessments that OpenOffice is so awful a program. The current OS X beta is definitely not for the typical user. It's a sluggish X11 app. But it works, and it (mostly) decodes Office apps and does (mostly) the same things. On a PC I find it's quite comparable to Office 2000, and maybe even XP, except for some of the more exotic features. It's pretty speedy and is a reasonable drop-in replacement.

When it's free from X11, that will be a good step, but it's probably true that it will always feel like a port, even if it's got native drawn widgets.

What we dream about is a Chimera for OpenOffice. To spell it out: Mozilla has brilliant ideas (maybe too many of them), but the key is that the engine decodes most HTML/Jscript found in the wild. However, for Mac users it looks and feels like a port, even with the beautiful Navzilla skin. So, Chimera jumps in, keeping the standards-loving Gecko engine, but adding a beautiful Cocoa front-end.

But I think this is only a fantasy for OO. The OO.org folks explain their choice of porting strategy by saying there isn't good separation between the display code and the rest of it, so we can't hope to bolt on a sweet Cocoa/Aqua front-end.

Maybe in the short term the best we can hope for is a damned good Cocoa MS Office file translator based on OO. After all, the most important thing about OO is that it reads and saves MS Office documents. The only reason I need Office is to read other people's files. I don't use 99% of the bloaty features they have. I wish I could use a simpler word processor, like Mariner Write or Nisus (is it still alive?).

Maybe seamless translation to MS Office is possible a lot sooner than 2004 (OO's native widget due date). Let me dream...

Re:Chimera for OpenOffice? File formats are the ke

[Lissst]

You said that the team says there isn't a good seperation of the display code and everything else. Maybe this would be a good time to modify the existing software and seperate that out. Then it should be quite simple to build a native OS X GUI instead of kludging another GUI into the existing codebase. For me, I would be content with an ugly user interface using X11 for the next year or two while the core OpenOffice code is modularized a little more. Then when the GUI for OS X is built, we would know that it wasn't a hack, but a good port that will be native to OS X.