Re: [mac] Mac OSX project

[Shaun McDonald]

Hello Tony,


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On 6 Jun 2007, at 01:07, Tony Webster @ RED wrote:

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Hello




sole distributor of Apple computers into New Zealand schools.

I am the GM of Renaissance Education Division in New Zealand and are the

Great

Recently the New Zealand government made the decision to not supply

have been made aware of NeoOffice, however it has a number of
limitations particularly in the high end spread sheeting functions.



This morning I spoke to the open office rep in NZ, Graham Lauder who
told me that there is a project underway to develop and deploy an Aqua
version of Open Office for Mac OS X.

Microsoft Office for classroom Apple computers in New Zealand. This has been greeted negatively by many NZ schools and the government has asked us to help them in sourcing an alternative product for NZ classrooms. We

There is a stable version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X, however it requires X11. The aqua version is only at an alpha stage, and is available for testing now.

I have a number of questions



1.      When is it expected to be due for release

We have just released the first aqua development snapshot.
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/news/2007/20070605firstaqua.html

As the vast majority of the developers are volunteers, it can be a little difficult with planning. Also we don't know exactly how much work there is still to do. We are aiming for a beta release towards the end of the year. With a final stable release in the first half of 2008. Further development will continue to improve the OpenOffice.org experience on Mac OS X after the stable release.

2.      Will it provide high end spreadsheeting options including
macros, graphing functions (trend lines)

In terms of graphing functions you may be interested in:
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/new_chart_module_is_integrated
and
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/06/the_new_openoff.html


OpenOffice.org already has its own BASIC scripting macro language.

It will include all the same features as OpenOffice.org on other platforms. which explains a bit about the new chart tool which is coming in ooo 2.3.

3.      Would we be able to test the release versions as they come out.

We create regular milestones of the X11 version that are available from
ftp://ooopackages.good-day.net:21/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/
These are always available for testing.

The aqua builds will be coming as new features are added and bugs are quashed. With more developers, these features will be implemented and bugs fixed a lot faster.

This is a high priority for us as the schools have to have Mac for
Office removed by the end of the year and we need a viable alternative
well before then so we can train schools on the use

[...]

Shaun

There are a number of schools that are already using the X11 version of OpenOffice.org successfully.

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