Sun Joins Mac Open Office Development 171
widhalmt writes "In a blog post, a developer at Sun Microsystems announces that Sun will help with porting Open Office to Mac OS X. The open source office suite is well known on Linux and Windows, but does not have a native version on Mac OS. For a long time Sun did not want to join the development of that port but now they will actively push it."
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazing (Score:4, Interesting)
NeoOffice is not 'native' in a sense... (Score:2, Interesting)
Will they unarchive? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Simple solution: email Steve (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not true! NeoOffice! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll admit, I recently d/led the newest version at work, and it does seem to be an improvement. Still not as fast as a normal app, but not head-bangingly slow.
Improv (Score:4, Interesting)
Having Improv back would be wonderful. The best spreadsheet I've ever used - using Improv made using Excel or other grid based spreadsheets painful.
But then too, there was also this oddball thing called (I think, its been some years) "Advance", I only had a couple weeks to play with a test copy. Very powerful, rather strange. I'd like to have that back to play with too.
Re:Will they unarchive? (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod me off topic... (Score:1, Interesting)
Port it all you want... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I am complimenting Microsoft -- I am sure I'll be flamed for it. But frankly, they make the best office suite, and since theirs is the standard look and feel (although the new Office is a departure), the other guys have to play catchup.
I would love to use OpenOffice, I just hate the look and feel and have always been more comfortable in Microsoft Office.
Won't (and shouldn't) happen (Score:3, Interesting)
OO is very decent office suite on Linux and Windows. So leave it there, where it is working acceptably. I think any effort to take that code base and reconcile it to an acceptable UI and functional level on the Mac will be the definition of a trip down the rabbit hole, taking years to realize and resulting in a UI compromise that annoys users on all platforms.
Time to cut bait on this, accept that it never will be workable on the Mac, and free its development team to focus on improving it in the Lin/Win world. Better to spend development time and effort developing a Mac-specific office suite that uses the various Open*** file formats as its native storage, while providing a real Cocoa-based UI experience that actually integrates into OS X the way Mac users expect an application to. Not that Sun will come within a mile of such an initiative, but it's a great opportunity for frustrated Mac developers looking to solve a real practical problem...
Re:Port it all you want... (Score:1, Interesting)
"new office", do you mind that it is non-standard?
Or is your abuse of the word "standard" indicative that you are
a paid shill (along the lines of "cross-platform" meaning Vista
and xp)?
Re:Not true! NeoOffice! (Score:3, Interesting)
I just timed it with a stopwatch, with nothing else running.
On initial launch, it took 42 seconds to get a usable word processor up on the screen.
However, on repeat launches, it takes only 12 seconds.
Photoshop takes 14 seconds. MS Word takes 6 seconds. 42 is embarrassing, (although at least it's the answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, so it gets some credit there.) 12 seconds isn't so bad. This machine isn't exactly brand-spanking new, but Apple's had a lot of huge speed increases lately. You jump back to G4 machines that aren't all that old, like my Mom's eMac and my girlfriend's G4 iBook, and I wouldn't even want to install NeoOffice, the speed must just be painful.
Also, while the UI is largely a direct copy of Office, some of the places where it deviates constitute the most inane violations of UI design I've ever seen.
All that said, most of the painful slowness is in startup; I've found word processing and spreadsheet to be reasonably snappy once they're open, and the thing is feature competitive with MS Office, with a Cocoa interface, for FREE. All in all it's an amazing bargain and I'm very happy it's around. Still, I wouldn't complain about a Sun developed native build with more snappy, either.
Re:We never used CocoaJava (Score:0, Interesting)
Those whining about performance clearly haven't tried to use the PPC MS Office 2004 on and Intel Mac or they would shut up.
Re:I believe you that Cocoa is not an option. (Score:3, Interesting)
Safari is a wrapper around Webkit. Webkit is a port of KHTML, written in C++, and is the majority of the code in Safari: any Cocoa code is in the "shell" or in what are effectively Cocoa plug-ins. Camino is a similar wrapper, though somewhat simpler, around the Gecko HTML component from Mozilla/Firefox. This is the approach that I mentioned when I talked about using the original application as a support library.
The reason Finder sucks is not simply that it's Carbon, but that it's a mutant crossbreed of the NeXT file browser and the original Classic Finder. Apple really messed up there, the basic approaches to file management in NeXTstep and in Finder are vastly different, and the result of this blending of the two approaches has pleased nobody. Even rewriting it in Cocoa wouldn't help unless they abandoned all the original Finder behaviour (which would really piss off the old-school Mac fans) or abandoned the file-browser behaviour (which would piss off everyone else).
I really think they'd be better off starting fresh with the NeXT file browser, updating the NeXTstep code and making it pretty and Aquafied, and ripping all the Browser behaviour out of Finder completely and making it purely a "classic Finder" implementation.