The OpenOffice.org Mac Porting team have announced the first development snapshot of the Aqua version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X. The OpenOffice.org Mac Porting Project aims to port OpenOffice.org to run on Mac OS X natively without X11. OpenOffice.org Aqua requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
OpenOffice.org notes, “All snapshots until we release the a beta product should not be used for production work, as the software may crash and may destroy your data. A backup of all documents used in OpenOffice.org Aqua is recommended.”
There are a number of known issues with the current development snapshot, including (but not limited to):
• You cannot print
• PDF export does not properly work as the text won’t show on the page right
• Starting OpenOffice.org from a shared folder does not work
• Copy and paste does not fully work
• OpenOffice.org will crash after quitting
• Some text is not drawn in places like Impress
• Impress will not recognise multiple monitors
More development snapshots will be coming soon. The X11 version will continue to be tested and distributed until further notice.
More info: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua.html
Alphas are scary. A Flash alpha screwed up my MBP. Never again.
OpenOffice will definitely gain attraction with a native OS X look and feel.
The bugs and risk of data loss will keep me from trying this extensively but once it goes RC I am all for it. So far, OpenOffice worked Ok as substitute for Office. Clearly for our organization Office is feature-bloated but I have yet to encounter users of Office that need more than 50% of its features.
I wish there were known issues with this beta. Who needs to print anyway?
Calling this Aqua is a stretch. The scroll bars look right but the rest looks like standard GTK unix widgets. Toolbars and tabs standout as out of place as does the too dark grey backgrounds.
It does appear to have the menu’s in the right place.
It looks…eh… OK for now
I think I’ll stick with NeoOffice for the time being
Since Neooffice is based on OpenOffice 2.1, and Neo’s BETA is already Aqua, why is this big news?
Has nobody ever used NeoOffice?
jay, it’s big news because this will eventually outperform NeoOffice since it’s not written in Java and will have far better support for OS X standards.
I look forward to this product maturing and getting a nice OS X polished interface.
“WARNING: THIS SOFTWARE MAY CRASH AND MAY DESTROY YOUR DATA DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT”
Ohhh, so it’s like a Windows program.
Does anyone think Neo has a chance after OOo is ready-for-prime-time?
Neo is very slow on my powerbook. I hope when open office is ready for release it will be faster. It would also be nice if they would separate the programs so if I only needed to look at a spreadsheet it would only open that program.
TO: Bobby Skinner
It’s Aqua, but it isn’t Cocoa. It’s the Cocoa look&feel; that many Mac users desire when they talk about Aqua. That UI is written in Carbon, but I have to add: It looks ugly. I hope they do something about the good-old-unix type of look and same goes to the rest of bugginess.
Cocoa doesn’t work that well for cross-platform. You would have to maintain a completely separate code base for Mac OS X. If Macs marketshare would be 65% instead of 6,5%, it might happen.
I’d rather see an all new (not a clone-of-Office-2000) OSS Office app written in Cocoa/Obj-C, supporting ODF, OOXML and MS-Office binary format. Ain’t gonna happen. Open Source folks don’t seem care about innovating – all I see is cloning. Coding and designing usually don’t go hand-in-hand.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t NeoOffice written with the same code as OpenOffice? And its minor use of Java is a quick-n-dirty way to ‘Aqua-fy’ the front end?
NeoOffice doesn’t look too bad. I’ve not spent too much time with it, but choice is good.
Anything that let’s me avoid using my already rarely used copy of Office, is a good thing.
Long Live AppleWorks!
Andy C:
1. NeoOffice is NOT written in Java, its 99% original OpenOffice code, written in C++, with SOME of the 1% written in Java.
2. Plus, ignoring startup, Java is roughly as fast as C++, and has been for several years, depending on the benchmark – ranging from 5% faster to 20% slower.
3. The developer design choices are BY FAR the most significant factor here when it comes to speed. Anybody can make any language slow if they write bad code, you know.
4. In fairness, Java does have a slower startup (measured in seconds, but its improving) and a larger memory footprint, but it isn’t slow once its up and hasn’t been for years.
Try and not confuse slow Java applet startup (which can be slow, measured in tens of seconds sometimes) with general slowness please.
5. I’m delighted with NeoOffice and have been so for years, again. There are some non Aqua’isms but most have been filed away.
And, don’t be alarmed by NeoOffice’s disclaimer regarding bugs – its really stable and bugs are fixed really quickly. I wish they’d lighten up on that disclaimer, by the way.
“”WARNING: THIS SOFTWARE MAY CRASH AND MAY DESTROY YOUR DATA . . .”
Wouldn’t that make it an alpha dog?
NeoOffice works great for me so far. I’ll stay with it.
NeoOffice looks great. I use 2.1 and there were some major performance enhancements in patch #4. I use it everyday and surprisingly, it is more compatible with MS Office for Windows that MS Office for Mac. It is a great replacement for MS Office for Mac.
Something more has to be done about the performance however. It is dog slow and most of that is because of Java. There are a few quirks that annoy like no support for horizontal scrolling for instance. I hope this OO port does better.
i sure hope the neo office team is working on this too, it would be very silly to try pulling this in two different directions
I hate to say it, but MS Office for Mac has a much better interface than anything OpenOffice. And it’s faster too. Since OpenOffice is just copying MS Office anyway, they minus well copy the Mac version and get the better interface.
Apple needs to embrace and support the ODF format and make it a de facto standard in order for everyone to cut the umbilical cord to Microsoft and its proprietary formats.
Ohhh, so it’s like a Windows program.
No, it’s like an “ALPHA”, eg., not even beta yet. Unless you are helping with development, don’t use it. Simple, eh?
…they might as well copy the Mac version and get the better interface.
@tron
“… they minus well ….” What??? minus well??
@tron
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you must be an artist too, ’cause I can’t spell either.