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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

OpenOffice Beta for Jaguar/X11 Released 37

Posted by pudge from the everyone-please-wait-until-i-finish-downloading-it dept.
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."
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OpenOffice Beta for Jaguar/X11 Released More

OpenOffice Beta for Jaguar/X11 Released

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  • so what? (Score:2, Informative)

    by BigBir3d ( 454486 )
    That is nice and all. IMO, it is hard to get someone to use a 'ugly' windows look-a-like program on OS X when they can use something else that is 'guaranteed' to work that matches the purtiness of OS X. It has also been my experience that the average Mac user is more inclined to pay for something (Office v.X) that works than not pay for something that somewhat works.

    • 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 (Score:2, Interesting)

        by BigBir3d ( 454486 )
        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.
      • Some Windows XP fans were going to write more about why XP is all that, and Macs just aren't any good, but their PCs all crashed, and are stuck on the blue screen of death. They will have to reboot before we will hear from them. Oh well. If it weren't for Macs costing more than PCs. PC would be a dead platform like the Radio Shack TRaSh-80.

    • What is "average"? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Outland Traveller ( 12138 ) on Monday October 14, 2002 @04:52PM (#4448521)
      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!

    • That depends... (Just A Troll) (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If you want an "alternative" office suite for OS X, consider ThinkFree Office [thinkfree.com]. It's not open-source, but it's a working, Aqua-style office suite that's not made by Microsoft. No free downloads, though (it costs $50).

  • Well, um . . that's great and all . . . (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DrHogie ( 8093 ) on Monday October 14, 2002 @02:34PM (#4447155) Homepage Journal
    but how about a version of OpenOffice that runs in OSX natively? I.e. WITHOUT X11?

    I've seen that there is a alpha w/ Aqua support, but I have yet to see a download for it -- is it anywhere?
  • OpenOffice has got to be the ugliest peice of software I have *ever* run on my computer. Word 2.0 for DOS is good compitition as far as looks go.

    I know the point is not looks, it is to get work done. But my god, are you guys *trying* to make it have the ugliest most combersome interface possible? If so, mission accomplished.

    Again, sorry for the troll, but that just had to be said.

    • Re:Somewhat of a troll, but... (Score:5, Funny)

      by kwerle ( 39371 ) <kurt@CircleW.org> on Monday October 14, 2002 @04:48PM (#4448472) Homepage Journal
      I know the point is not looks, it is to get work done. But my god, are you guys *trying* to make it have the ugliest most combersome interface possible? If so, mission accomplished.

      Well, it is trying to compete with Office, so you're probably not far off the mark :-)
      • Dumb remark. Office for OS X is gorgeous. Give the MS Mac guys credit where credit is due... or accept that your opinions of MS are blinded by zealotry.

        (or maybe, just maybe, you really do think Office X is fugly... in which case you merely have bad taste)
        • The OpenOffice project is NOT (I think) inspired by Office X. Rather, it is coming from the PC world to the Mac world. Remember the initial Mac port of Office? People bitched about how horrible it was for months, if not years.

          Personally? Office on the PC is fugly. Office X, *slightly* less so. Man, does it piss me off that I can't do cmd-shift-s in word to do "Save As", which is standard for the platform...
    • Apparently you haven't seen other applications Sun has authored!

      Nothing is more true than the fact Sun has NO CLUE when it comes to human interface design!

      What they should do is port the MODEL to Cocoa then let others write the views and controllers.
      • Let's see, there's um....wait, no, that's command line.

        There's um....wait, no, that's SunOne, which is really iPlanet, which was the Sun/Netscape Alliance, which was Netscape...

        um.... well, the OS installer doesn't suck that bad...assuming you're working from a jumpstart server, and don't need to work interactively.

        [Oh...from experience...you're still better off trying to install it yourself than letting Sun Professional Services do it for you... installed all the applications in /, and configured SIMS to use one large mail partition, without mentioning to us that the SIMS backup program stops when it hits a 2G limit, and that's the only reason we were making our 4hr backup window. [over 300G of data]]
  • The master plan is to port this horrible, horrible program to Quartz, then add Aqua-looking widgets. The result will be an app which is organized and behaves the same as it does now. That is if there is any organization to this interface...

    C'mon people, this is Sun Microsystems we're talking about! Doesn't anybody remember CDE?

    Sun has NO CLUE WHATSOEVER when it comes to human interface design. I mean look at their Swing apps for crissakes! All they do is try to copy current designs, and they aren't even as good at that as Microsoft is!

    The current plan SUCKS and nobody should waste their time propping up these pieces of poop AKA OpenOffice's views, controllers, and 'design' (if you can call it that without offending developers who have actually designed interfaces).

    What we REALLY want are not the views and controllers which are poop, but rather Open Office's MODEL which can import/export Microsoft formats! Port THIS to Cocoa and then create native views and controllers!

    This in turn could be ported back to GNUStep so people trying to use this piece of poop on other platforms don't have to suffer as much.
  • 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...

    • 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.
  • I read comment like "Yes but we need a Native OpenOffice or nothing!" but is there anybody here who undesterstand how all this complicated????

    Try to help!!! not just crying to tell what you need or just something like: "I will continue to use M$ Office because this one is good!"

    Common!

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