Chad Smith wrote:
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.
I just installed an x11 version of the 2.0 preview release which uses an installer put together by Eric Bachard and some other people. At the moment its only a proof of concept for a future 2.0 installer, however the installation was seamless and i would be hard picked to find any faults in it. If your interested in the progress of this you can keep track of what's going on by subscribing to the [email protected] mailing list.
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.
I have been using NeoOffice/J for some time now, and i completely agree about its stability improvements over previous x11 versions. However i am always concerned when the project is not part of the rest of the collective efforts of its larger project, i have read about the reasons behind this and while i do agree with the concerns that these developers have i think more should be done to resolve this issue and make NeoOffice/J a part of the OOo development collective as soon as is humanly possible.
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.
I am sorry for the misunderstanding i wasn't entirely clear... besides wanting a full featured office suite, by which i mean at the very least, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and possibly a database... a la OOo 2.0 :) In addition to wanting a full featured office suite i think its of huge significance the fact that there be an open source alternative, which supports the multiple platforms, at least the major ones of which Mac's are obviously one. In my mind none of the Mac alternatives that you have mentioned offer anywhere near the kind of feature set that OOo offers, and the one which does (MS Office 2004) is again IMHO a bloated piece of junk made for little kids that like shiny things. There are definitely too many people that still think the entire Mac community are stupid mouse clicking people with no idea, the truth of the matter being that due to OS X's Unix underpinnings there are a lot of Unix/Linux savvy Mac users about, particularly in the university setting as i understand it (this is how i got started with Mac's).
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.
I recall reading somewhere that this is in fact because Sun is fearful that by offering their office suite on the Mac it would promote the further use of Mac servers and so undermine their own efforts to sell their own servers. Not so sure about the validity of that statement though, has anyone else heard of anything regarding this?
Im still wondering if there is anyone who can shed some light on how these other projects i have mentioned (NetBeans, Eclipse, Firefox, jEdit, etc...) are able to produce software that will run on a multitude of platforms with very little if any code rewriting. Now i'm by no means bagging out the work being done on OOo, i'm just wondering if there are any approaches that could be adopted to help make everything more seamless, does anyone here have anything to say in this regard?
Kind regards, Cameron Wood...
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