[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Needless to say that it is a very important for me to be able to work with documents that i create across all of these systems, which sad to say OOo is falling short with on the Mac platform.
I will say this - OOo on Mac, the "official" port, the X11 port, is not installable for the end user, and it really has some problems as far as usability and appearance.
However, NeoOffice/J, which is based on OOo (Patrick has the copyright to it) and is now mentioned on the OOo for Mac webpage, is *awesome*. It's everything OOo on Mac should be. It runs natively - no stupid dependencies, like X11. It's aquafied - so it *looks* like a Mac program. It doesn't require a 3rd party program to be up and running, so it uses less RAM and processor speed than the X11-OOo. And it's far less likely to crash, as I had experienced with the X11 port, for the simple fact, the more stuff you have to have open to get a program to work - the more things can go wrong.
NeoOffice/J is *THE* answer for Mac OS X users. You can get it here:
http://www.neooffice.org/
It's free, and free. Both meanings. No cost, and no restrictions. It's GPL.
With the lack of viable office suites for the Mac there is a huge opportunity at the moment for OOo on this platform, and i am sure that this new user base would be of incredible wealth to the OOo project and its efforts.
There are several office suites for Mac OS X. MS Office 2004, of course. OOo/Neo. AbiWord. AppleWorks. ThinkFree Office. iWork (Pages and Keynote). iText and LightWayText. TeX. Not many are as visible as they should be, perhaps, but they are out there.
Basically, though, you are right. If someone has a Mac - they most likely have MS Office of some sort. If the user is completely against MS - then they probably just have AppleWorks, and maybe now iWork. OOo really could make some inroads if it would just promote NeoOffice/J, or even adopt a Neo-style approach. Some seem to think that X11 is the way to go. I cannot for the life of me understand why embedding yourself into another program that most end users don't use, understand, or like, is better than seamlessly integrating with the OS.
I know Sun isn't too interested in Mac for some reason. In fact, they don't port StarOffice to Mac at all. Apparently, they don't think OOo-X11 + extras would sell.
-Chad Smith
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