After reading an interesting article on NewsForge by Roblimo about the
adoption
of Linux after the new 'MacTel' (macs on intel) become available. I
wonder what
will this mean for the OSX users of OOo / NeoOffice J.
It may make the porting effort easier, but not being a technician I
can't really say.
the flip side, on the Mac-Land is a bit different since Mac uses their
own word
processing tool and many people will be deciding between MSO for macs
AND
AppleWorks, FileMaker, KeyNote, Mariner, Mellel, Nisus writer, etc.
AppleWorks probably won't exist for many more years, it will probably
be replaced by Keynotes/Pages. It still lacks a DB tool but that will
come soon I am sure (especially with Tiger's new functions).
Mariner, Mellel, Nisus are RTF based word processors and if they don't
make the move to XML (the new MS Office format is based on XML) they
won't make it, incidentally, if they make the MS Office Open File
Format move, they have no reason not to support OpenDocument too. I can
bet that by the time Office 12 is released, most of those apps will
have OD/MSOOF support.
Pages file format is already XML based so I suppose OD support is going
to be easy.
Right now (and with the above factors in mind) there are only few
chances that an X11 based OOo makes it on OSX. X11 does not allow for
access to a lot of OSX features and unless Apple works a lot on that it
probably will never do. Maybe it is not a problem. But leaving OOo on
X11 give it a geeky look that a lot of users are not ready for.
One of the way for OOo to be a valid Office platform on OSX is to also
work on the Cocoa side of things.
I don't know anything about the Windows side of the world, but even if
I don't use any of the above mentioned applications (Mellel etc, I've
tried them all though) they are already valid alternatives on the word
processor front. Even TextEdit (Tiger version) is a good replacement
for Word for people who don't need too complex documents (images,
tables etc supported).
I think the only point left to OOo/NeoOffice is that they support the
_whole_ range of sx*/od* document formats.
Jean-Christophe Helary
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