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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Upgrades Apple

Friday Mac Release Roundup 75

Posted by pudge from the mmmm-software dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The new RealPlayer 10 beta was released for Mac OS X. It's got a built-in web browser built off Apple's WebKit. This, along with all the Mac-specific UI tweaks, makes for a pretty solid release overall, imho." lucadex writes "Open Office 1.1.2 has been officially released on Mac OS X. This is the first official O.O. upgrade since version 1.0.3." Tom Davies writes "Oracle has released an early adopter's release of 10g for Mac OS X." adamhauner writes "Mozilla.org released final version of Camino 0.8, a Gecko-based browser optimized for Mac OS X with a Cocoa user interface. This version, besides having other new features, also upgrades the Gecko HTML rendering engine from Mozilla 1.0 to Mozilla 1.7."
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Friday Mac Release Roundup More

Friday Mac Release Roundup

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  • OO.o still requires X11 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vandil X ( 636030 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @08:28AM (#9590863)
    As much as I enjoy using OO.o, I really hope an OSX-native version comes out some day.

    A lot of people who install OSX for themselves never get around to installing X11.

    • Re:OO.o still requires X11 (Score:5, Informative)

      by otuz ( 85014 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @09:05AM (#9591041) Homepage
      The native version is postponed to the 2.0 release.
      It will be released in late 2005 or early 2006.

      • Re:OO.o still requires X11 (Score:5, Informative)

        by .com b4 .storm ( 581701 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @11:35AM (#9592316)

        I'd like to point out that there is a semi-native hack for OpenOffice called NeoOffice [planamesa.com]. It wraps OpenOffice in Java, which means you don't need to run X11 first, you can use native key bindings for everything, the system clipboard works properly, and (best of all) the native OS X print system is used.

        Sure, the UI is still an ugly Windows-esque menu-in-the-window scheme, but it's better than nothing. :) I've been using it for my work and school papers, and found it to be as stable as an official OpenOffice build for OS X. It also seems to be a lot faster... initial startup time (because of Java) is as crappy as ever, but once it's running, it's a lot smoother.

        • Re:OO.o still requires X11 (Score:4, Informative)

          by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @04:10PM (#9595237) Homepage Journal
          Just an FYI, the slow startup time isn't actually due to Java. It's still 98% C/C++, and the slow startup time is actually due to inefficiencies in "ucb" and writing out an initial temporary registry database. That step is written in C++ and takes about 3 seconds by itself. Another large chunk of time is spent loading the hundreds of megs of shared libraries, all of which are written in C++.

          The parts of it that are Java are actually on par, if not faster then their X11 equivalents. Feel free to break out Shark and take a look for yourself :)

          ed
          • I have bought pure java office suite (thinkfree) as I got fed-up with OO problems (really, tried and tired)

            It launches faster than X11 OpenOffice or MS Office :) Also made some evil tests while I was on trial, e.g. downloaded 400 page word docs, reformatted them etc, no speed problem while running.

            So, your point must be right. Also if I understand it right (not a developer here) only "fast" launch time will happen when they move to 2.0 , e.g. native so it will be prebinded.

            OO.o people, if you want to imp
    • The NeoOffice/J version of OO is much more OS X integrated than the main OO.o. It is still dependent on x11 but it allows cutting and pasting with other applications outside of x11 and runs much faster. The reason for OO.o's slowness is not x11, it's JAVA. Try out The GIMP in x11 on OS X. It's quite snappy, even on my 400 Mhz G3 PowerBook (Pismo). In fact, it seems faster than Photoshop 7 for some operations. I suppose that it would be better not to depend on x11 because it would allow for a UI more f

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • > NeoOffice/J doesn't need X11.

          I just checked and you're quite right. I was mistaken about that. It has a UI which resembles X11 more than Aqua which is why I thought so.

          > I'm not sure that OO.o's slowness has anything to do
          > with Java or X11, it's just slow. It's slow under Linux
          > and under Windows and was slow when it was StarOffice
          > and had nothing to do with Java. I suspect over time
          > the code is going to be reviewed and this particular
          > issue resolved.

          There's probably m
      • One of the major benefits of 1.1.2 over 1.0.3 is that the speed of the app has improved dramatically. With both 1.0.3 and NeoOffce/J the start up time on my 933 G4 was pushing a minute. With 1.1.2 I can be editing a document from clicking on the icon within about 10 seconds. This is now the same sort of speed as MS Office X on the same machine. While I am also disappointed that we still don't have a proper aqua version of OpenOffice I understand their reasons and once 2.0 comes out for Windows and X11 t

      • There is no Java in OOo (Score:5, Informative)

        by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @04:55PM (#9595637) Homepage Journal
        (Disclaimer: I'm the lead volunteer for OOo Mac OS X)

        There is no Java in OpenOffice.org. It is just horribly inefficient C++. The only time Java is used in OOo Mac OS X is during the build process to validate some XML configuration documents; at runtime it doesn't need Java at all. That's why it's possible to run on DarwinPPC even though you can't compile it on DarwinPPC.

        Remember, it wasn't written by Sun, but by Star Division. It was started back in the mid to early 1990s and was definitely back in the day before the AWT was anywhere near stable or cross platform. It may have even been started before Java, but I'm unsure of the timelines.

        ed
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • There is a version of OpenOffice called NeoOffice/J that uses java to do the rendering, thus eliminating the dependence on X11. However this is a not a native-looking app. It still looks exactly like the X11 version, but runs without X11. So it's not ideal, but it works.

  • Good to see... (Score:3, Informative)

    by plj ( 673710 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @09:02AM (#9591026)
    ...that OOo finally reached 1.1 on Mac, too. It has been pain for me to always print a PostScript file and then throw it to Preview just to get a PDF.

    Btw, does anyone on /. have any suggestions for Windows/Linux/OS X cross platform office suite? We're currently planning to migrating most of our Windows desktop to Linux, but as we have to leave few boxes for specific purposes at least in the beginning, we will need cross-platform compatibility - and we also have Macs, which have to stay, although they need to be upgraded to OS X first.

    OOo just isn't quite there, as I really can't force X11 apps down our Mac users' throats - they just feel way too different, and I haven't been able to find anything else, either. We could use different software for Macs, like we are actually doing now, and wait for OOo's upcoming Aqua-based 2.0 -version, but if anyone here does have better suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them.

    • Here's two options; I haven't tried either (but at one time the Apple Stores were selling ThinkFree office, if that means anything):
      • AbiWord [abisource.com]; appears to require X11, although the pages aren't clear from a skim.
      • ThinkFree Office [thinkfree.com]; java based. I think it might be ok, but only you know if it has the sophistication of features that you need.

        FWIW, a place to look for this sort of stuff is the Apple Products Guide [apple.com] as they'll list pretty much anything that works on the Mac. That means a lot of crap in the h
      • The development version of abiword (2.1.3 at the moment) runs on OS X without X11. The stable branch doesn't have an OS X specific binary - I guess you could probably just build from the standard unix source.
      • I am licensed user for Thinkfree and I am really happy. Especially messing up with Oo.org for days to DISPLAY turkish chars, Thinkfree came with Turkish interface :)

        It integrates system well and launches real fast. You don't need to buy it to try, can use it for 15 days or so, as trialware.

        Hansoft acquired them lately, biggest sw house in South Korea I heard... As I remember early versions of Thinkfree was working inside browser even and knowing how freaky fast lines Koreans have... :) Seems they have a p

    • Re:Good to see... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Quobobo ( 709437 )
      I'm not sure I completely understand (I might be totally off on this), but if you're printing that postscript file from the same Mac, couldn't you just save it as a PDF from the print menu, and bypass the middleman?

      • Re:Good to see... (Score:3, Informative)

        by plj ( 673710 )
        Well, if OOo would be an Aqua app, I could. But OOo as an X11 app has whatever print dialog it has, and no such an option. 1.1.2 should fix this, though, as it is able to create PDFs on its own, although release notes mentioned some limitations in compatibility of those PDFs.
        • Ah, okay. Yeah, I didn't understand, I thought you meant that you were doing this from another app, and now switching to OO because it could do it. Apologies.

  • RealPlayer is actually quite nice (Score:5, Informative)

    by TomorrowPlusX ( 571956 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @09:36AM (#9591244)
    You know, we all here have a tradition of saying nasty things about Real player...

    Well, I want to stand up, stick my neck out, and say "Sorry! You guys seem to have made up for it!"

    As a Cocoa programmer who just doesn't understand why big companies don't dive in and *properly* port their software, I'm impressed that Real has written what seems to be a real, honest-to-god cocoa app. The preferences window is a *real* Mac OS X prefs window. The app behaves like a proper document-based app, where the program won't shut down if you close all the files. And so on, and so on; I'm really impressed.

    And, while I have no idea what it's like on windows ( I haven't touched a windows box in at least a year ), real player is being quite nice about not stealing your file associations, unlike what I remember a few years ago on Win2K. It doesn't hide anything as far as I can tell, and the default associations are not only few, but reasonable.

    Good show, real. I think I'm *finally* going to pay for your product.

    • Re:RealPlayer is actually quite nice (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TomorrowPlusX ( 571956 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @09:44AM (#9591320)
      I want to add something regarding porting software to native mac OS X. Last year I ported a program I've been working on which allows for development of behavioral AI for robots in a relatively nice physics simulated environment. The whole thing isn't that big, about 50 kloc, ( not including the physics engine, which I got from http://ode.sf.net ).

      Anyway, when I ported it from Qt/KDE on linux, I decided to go native, and wrote a full cocoa gui.

      http://home.earthlink.net/~zakariya/files/TooCom pl ex3.png
      [the filename refers to my current project to refactor the gui]

      Not only was it not hard at all, but the overall design of cocoa makes separation of core logic from presentation relatively easy. My simulation, my core APIs and so on were completely unchanged. All I really did was write some new interface code. In fact, Cocoa made it so damn easy my Gui became richer and and order of magnitude more complete.

      My smooth and comfortable experiences doing this make me frustrated when I see shoddily written ports to Mac OS X. Cocoa is like mana from heaven. You get to keep your core C/C++ and just make a binding to the UI. Who can complain about that? Plus you get to use one of the most beautiful procedural languages available ( IMNSHO ) Objective-C.

      Anyway, that's just my 2 cents.
      • I want to add something regarding porting software to native mac OS X. Last year I ported a program I've been working on which allows for development of behavioral AI for robots in a relatively nice physics simulated environmen

        Looks good. Are you planning on making it available to the public? I would be ineterested to check it out on my computer.
      • Since you like Cocoa, you might also want to look at GNUStep on the GNU/Linux and *N*X side of things. It attempts to provide the next-step-after-OpenSTEP UI toolkit, and even brings some of the Cocoa APIs as well.

        Best of all, I hear taking code from it to OS X is just a quick recompile for a native experience, which is always nice. You can see screenshots of a app that does just that here [collaboration-world.com].
    • Slashdot people will kill me or something :)

      I used Realone for Windows back in my XP days, 7 months ago, before my P4 box literally burned and I moved to Mac G5.

      As I was "radiopass" member for listening to Knac.com radio , it became "plus". I really liked it but after all, I thought of privacy people :) Well, they have good reasons to hate it but I am NOT telling stuff about "spyware"

      The "stealing" of file associations exist since, every mmedia app in windows including Quicktime has to mess with evil lit
      • OK, best is to post AFTER you install the app.

        Currently I can't listen to any of those premium radios (acid jazz etc) via RealOne browser itself. It plainly crashes. Also, THANK YOU people calling Real spyware, I can't send crash report to Realone networks like windows version. Or, Omniweb I use here...

        I use Real since 1.0 release, first time I see application crash when I try to access premium content. Only change I remember is, Opensource code...

        Sorry, bit frustrated since can't access to content I pai

  • Camino is fantastic (Score:4, Informative)

    by Lewisham ( 239493 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @09:38AM (#9591262)
    To all those people who, for some reason, seem to enjoy insane load times and lack of real nativity at the Altar of Firefox, please try Camino. It is actually now quicker at rendering than Safari (or at least it appears to human usage), and is written in full Cocoa. Do try it if you're using anything else. If development keeps apace, I don't think even Safari 2 would make me change.

    • Does is support firefox extensions?

      I'm guessing not, even Firefox doesn't support Firefox extensions properly on the Mac side. I wish it did, I so really want to use Firefox instead of Safari, but there's a couple features (that can be added via extensions that don't work on the Mac side) missing that keep me away.

      • Sadly it doesn't. I've found a lot of extensions aren't that great for Firefox anyway. The search box is customizable, and Mike Pinkerton, the lead guy on Camino, is very open to suggestions. *fingers crossed on the always open new windows in new tabs :)*
    • Yay! They actually fixed the tab shortcut problem I complained previously. [slashdot.org]

      Now, when they'd just yet fix the certificate thingy, then I'll switch.

      But what is really cool in Camino compared to Safari is, that it's not metal! ;-)
    • I'll second the "Camino is fantastic statement." I picked up the 0.8 beta a couple weeks ago and I quite like it. I haven't gone back to Safari yet. I've been considering trying Firefox, but I think Camino is just too slick. Great app.

    • Camino 0.8 is hugely good, and better than earlier versions. But one area that it really shines is in processing of Javascript pages.

      I used the BenchJS [24fun.com] benchmark from the 24fun.com [24fun.com] web site to test Safari , Firefox, and Camino on my 12" Powerbook (837Mhz) Here's what I got:

      • Safari (1.2.2) - 171.29 seconds
      • Firefox (0.91) - 132.34 seconds
      • Camino (0.8) - 29.93 seconds

      That's five to six times quicker!

      By comparison:

      • Firefox 0.91 on my Athlon XP2400 based WinXP Pro system took 41.09 seconds
      • MS Explorer 6
      • the safari 1.3 beta is quite a bit faster. my results came out around here:
        Camino 0.8 - 41 sec
        Safari 1.3 preview - 42 sec
        • a less scientific test--if you play poker on pokerroom.com (the only poker place that 'supports' macs by offering a java interface), you'll definitely want camino! it's much faster at loading all that gamblin' stuff up.

          overall though, i still prefer firefox--in part because i am addicted to the 'smoke' theme. i like the simple elegance of it...kinda like the rest of my mac.
      • Hmm. Mozilla 1.7rc1 on Linux 2.6 (2.4 GHz) 111.36 seconds (status bar test climbs 1 by 1)

        Firefox 0.8 OS X 10.3.4 (1.33GHz) 36.08 (but the first test seemed to jump by 100s.)

        Safari 1.2 (same Mac) 44.98 seconds (but there is NO STATUS BAR to update!)

        Camino 0.8 (same Mac) 11.31 seconds (but no red windows, no status bar update)

        Camino is teh Winnar!
  • The Adblock plugin doesn't work in Camino.

    Until that's fixed, it's useless.

    Pity, it looked good.
  • It has a web browser built in? Wasn't Real already bloated enough? Does everything these days need to have a built-in web browser?
    • Built in web browsers don't usually add much to the final weight of the code. Normally they're just linked components to something that already exists in the OS. Most likely Real is embedding a Safari component, much like IE gets embedded on things in the windows world.

    • Its Real for OS X lol, it definately lacked a web browser. I am a radiopass member and I was sick of messing with www browsers (especially, evil IE) to launch a radio.

      I couldn't put radio to favorites even since OSX (thank god) cleared the temp folder... So, radio was cleared too :)

      I had to feedback to Omnigroup for instance to fix the radio links, at v5 beta build, it was displaying a text file since Real sent some strange data to browser... :)

      So, thanks Realnetworks AND Helix Opensource volunteers... I
  • If there is one thing I don't like about Open Office, it is that they don't do much PR/Marketing because it is very difficult to find info on their site about the plan for OS X support.

    Does anyone know the projected timeline for OO.o on OS X, specifically whent eh Carbon version is targeted for release?

    Also, how well does OO.o work with the latest version of MS Office.mac?

    • Does anyone know the projected timeline for OO.o on OS X, specifically whent eh Carbon version is targeted for release?

      Here [openoffice.org] is a timeline.

      Bottomline: Projected OS X native availability of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is currently Q1 2006.

      Yeah, I'm not holding my breath. OSS guys that are projecting 2 years out? Unlike a commercial dev, they are inclined to let RL get in the way. + this article was last updated 8/03, so it's an even further out projection that it is today. So basically, no telling. Unle
    • OOo has a --very-- active marketing project. Just with Mac OS X port... there is nothing to market.

      AFAIK most of the voluneer Carbon guys have quit -- that is probably the biggest need in OOo right now -- carbon developers.

  • Hope Oracle actually ships it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wandazulu ( 265281 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @11:23AM (#9592204)
    I was really burned when Oracle failed to deliver a production quality "we stand behind it" version of 9i for OSX. I had been trying to convince my bosses that OSX could be a real contender for our back-office apps because not only was it an industrial-strength Unix, but that it also had Oracle (which is our DB).

    They said they'd wait till it actually shipped, but it never did. There's a ton of stuff Apple provides with the XServe that we could use (XSan definately springs to mind), but whereas we don't do cool rendering or whatnot, we want the boxes for more mundane, database-driven stuff.

    On this I sort of blame Apple too, they seem to push the XServes as great for scientific or graphics crunching, but seem to neglect the possibility that their hardware could be used for decidely less sexy roles like serving up text-based data to thousands of users. I am *this* close to convincing the powers-that-be that not every Mac has to run Photoshop, but without the database (specifically Oracle), it won't even be considered.
  • A weekly Mac round up is a great idea.

    Kudos, beer and swedish bikini team models are being sent your way.

  • Camino? Use Firefox instead. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bahamat ( 187909 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @12:35PM (#9593026) Homepage
    Ok, I love Aqua. My main gripe about Firefox is that it uses GTK widgets and not native Cocoa widgets.

    I've given both Camino and Safari their due attention and a very fair chance to become my default browser. Safari gets an extra point because I like the brushed metal. Camino gets an extra point because of type-ahead find. But so far nothing beats the AdBlock [mozdev.org] extention for Firefox.

    If could get AdBlock type blocking on Safari I'd finally make the full leap.
  • I downloaded and tried installing the recent OpenOffice.org the other day, but the installation program broke. It virtually finished, got to 'Converting fonts' and then hung. The little progress bars were wibbling away, but nothing was happening - I left it for an hour, hoping it would finish, but nothing happened.

    Anyone else had this problem? What should I do?

    I'm now investigating the latest NeoOffice/J - I've got an older version, and it's pretty good, apart from it being very, very slow. If this one br
  • and download, help Camino. Its the ONLY browser can impress mac average user and its native.

    At least services aren't grayed out, UI is quartz accelerated and the developer is friendly. Of course, its a native thing.

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