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Disclaimer: I am a developer for Mac OS X OpenOffice.org and a founder of the NeoOffice project.

Just the fact that you can import and export doesn't exactly mean it's 100% compatible. Heck, even Office v.X/2004 isn't 100% compatible with Windows Office generated files. One of the strengths of OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice is the accuracy of their import and export filters.

I wouldn't suspect Pages would be successful converting Word documents that have embedded Excel spreadsheets and charts those that go trapesing off to do database queries with macros. I suspect Pages would convert them to tatters.

While Pages may be sufficient for doing the basics of letter writing and entry-level document preparation, many of the more complex business level documents still will require Microsoft Office or an equivalent alternative. Office may be bloatware, but that doesn't prevent people from finding a way to use all of those features and then complaining when they don't work in another product. That makes true document compatibility a difficult task that can't fully be addrsesed by a word processing application alone.

ed

Music - XMMS (WinAMP on Windows), is there even a comparison to Windows Media Player here?

WinAMP ist not FOSS. It's a free (beer) closed source app.
Both are just a joke comparing to iTunes.

Video - MPlayer, it even runs without X Window. Can Windows Media Player run video in MS-DOS?

What kind of argument is this? Who cares about DOS? WMP is OK when you install the missing codecs. (I prefer VLC though)

Web Browser - Mozilla FireFox. Internet Exploder doesn't even compare.

And Opera? Firefox is also my favourite browser, but Opera has many interesting features that you can't find anywhere else. Opera is commercial or free (beer) software, but not FOSS.

File Browsing - Nautilus, Konqueror. They crash 100% less of the time that Windows Explorer crashes.

What are you doing with Explorer? I didn't see it crash the last couple of... er... years.

And no annoyingly built-in Internet Explorer that's available even if I denied access to iexplore.exe (which I do on spyware-infested clients' computers).

How about blocking Explorer.exe and deleting iexplore.exe? (That's what I do when I have do mess with Windows.)

And let's not mention the horrid Mac OS X versions of MS Office.

Yeah, MS Office:mac is sooo bad when compared against GNUmeric and OpenOffice. OK, GNUmeric and OpenOffice only run in an X-Window, don't support drag&drop, looks ugly-as-hell, etc. while MS Office supports all that stuff. Wow, GNUmeric and OpenOffice are soooo superior.....
(BTW: Yes, I know about NeoOffice/J - it's my main Office suite. But NeoOffice is != OpenOffice)
Abiword compares to Wordpad, not Word (or OpenOffice Writer).

Instant Messenger - Well, GAIM may be missing some features of proprietary AOL AIM, but one of those features missing is the spyware.

Trillian? How about that?

Programming - Do I even need to compare the long list of free, open-source and standardized Unix/Linux tools to the not-quite-as-affordable MS Visual Studio??

A lot of developers say that VisualStudio is the best programming environment. Others say it's Xcode. Both aren't FOSS.

PS: No, I'n not bashing FOSS. Most apps I use are FOSS like Firefox, Thunderbird, or Fire Messenger, but theres more closed source software that's better than it's FOSS counterparts than just Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Opera is cool. Trillian is cool. MS Office:mac, Explorer (not IE), or Windows Media Player not so bad either.

No wonder OSS gets a bad rap with most mac users. Not enough exposure to the right web URLs, not enough googling to do anyone any good :(

to those needing OO on OS X but don't want to hunt down obscure and tempramental dependencies to make it work on X11 I suggest checking out NeoOffice http://www.neooffice.org/
it seems a little sluggish but it does what I need it to do and even has a drawing app for simple graphics...and its FOSS

NeoOffice.org
Current release is based on OO.o 1.1.3 I believe. Works rock-solid. Check it out!

In the mean time, you can get the X.org (or is it XFree86?) version of X11 to install on any OS X via Fink. This is probably your best bet.

However, if you only want to run OpenOffice.org, there's a program called NeoOffice/J that eschews X11 and POSIX-crap for Java and OS X shtuff. While imperfect, it's about as stable as the original and doesn't require fiddling with special "OpenOffice.org launcher" programs that never quite work the way you want anyway. Other than appearance, NeoOffice/J works like a regular Mac OS X app.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 is for Mac OS X (X11)
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_download s.html

OO is for X-11...no-one I know has been able to install it properly due to dependency hell

don't bother with OO -- use NeoOffice instead (office suite)
http://www.neooffice.org/

or AbiWord (word processing only)
http://www.abisource.com/

or spend $60 and get
Nisus (word processing only)
http://www.nisus.com/

I have all three and like each for different reasons but tend to use NeoOffice and Nisus the most...

There's a patch that give NeoOffice the Aqua menus, but when I downloaded the latest beta, I found they have already included Aqua-style menus. The scrollbars are still un-Maclike, though.

I have been trying out the beta version of NeoOffice/J, which is based on OpenOffice 1.1.3, and have found it to be much nicer than the X11 version of OpenOffice.

The main downside is that it is somewhat sluggish on my G4 Powerbook being written in Java (using the Carbon interface). But having access to all of my fonts, and better rendering make up for any speed issues I have noticed.

-H

Although it's not on the main download page yet, we also do have a torrent available for the main installer:

http://trinity.neooffice.org/torrents/NeoOfficeJ-1 .1_Beta.torrent

There are only a couple of seeders right now, but if the mirrors slow to a crawl the torrent may be a better choice.

ed

At one point in antiquity, both J and C were prototypes. C was really a hack to explore technologies, but J was engineered a bit more carefully. The idea was eventually that OOo X11 would yield to the short-term solution of J to the long term solution of C.

Unfortunately, Cocoa was just too difficult to fit to the OOo event model. While I hacked and struggled with Cocoa until he smote my ruin upon the mountainside, the Java+Carbon of J the amazing engineering of Patrick and his testing crew was triumphant and created a stable, functional app. When it comes down to it, redoing all that work in Cocoa is just reinventing the wheel for no tangible benefit aside from pure geek thrills. Even if done, the result still wouldn't be using ObjC, Interface Builder, or any of the other tools that make Cocoa so scrumptious. It'd be the penultimate Cocoa hack job. Doing OOo in Cocoa is kind of like trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. Cocoa suffers from the fatal flaw of all framework technologies; they really don't work well for building apps that are not engineered to conform to the framework design.

Frustrated with Cocoa, the decision I came to was to shelve C for a while and go join Patrick and help him bring Aqua into J, stop splitting our efforts, and combine to make a kickass app. Thus the Aqua menus were born with the other widgets to come. Eventually when J is finished, I am hoping to find time to take the "core" parts of J out and wrap them into a framework that can then be embedded into Cocoa apps, similar to the Gecko engine. That's a long way off yet...

For more of my own logic read a more detailed discussion about why J is the best engineering choice for now.

ed

NeoOffice works great.

We're not a non-profit but we're also not a commercial entity either. We're a group of volunteers who are doing this and hosting the project. For two years we didn't have any type of donate page or the like and just encouraged people to contribute by answering questions in forums, testing, or developing. Funny enough, there are still people who don't want to contribute in those ways. This started a fairly vigorous discussion as to whether we should give those people another vehicle for helping out. You can check out the user community debate back in November as to how things wound up the way they are now and where they will hopefully be going.

To organize as a non-profit in the state of California requires filing paperwork, meeting minimum tax requirements, and other state and federal requirements. We're not expecting to see a lot of monetary donations, so instead of shelling out all that capital to set up a new corporate entity and lose money we don't have (!) we just reused one of the S-corps we already had set up.

We couldn't just take money directly as that opens us up to personal legal liability, a bad thing for us Americans with our predatory legal system. We also can't afford to do it personally due to tax reasons. Right now we're only hoping to get enough to pay for bandwidth and hosting costs. If people actually do start donating enough though we've already decided we'll go through all the hassle of setting up a non-profit entity. It's unfortunately not worth that much hassle for just a few hundred dollars in donations ;)

Still, I'd rather encourage people to donate time, support, and hopefully code instead. It's much more useful then money. Unfortunately time and code are more then most people are able or willing to give :(

ed

Disclaimer: I am on the OOo Mac OS X team and a founder of NeoOffice. The opinions expressed here are personal and don't reflect official positions of either organization, Apple, Sun, or my employer.

People have definitely been wondering why Apple hasn't supported or started their own engineering work on OOo themselves. In my own opinion, I think the real reason why they haven't is pure politics. For better or for worse, the Apple platform really does need Microsoft Office. Think of how many Apple marketing materials include references to Office. It even makes it into their technical pieces with phrases along the lines of 'I can run my Unix chemical structure modeling software and still use Powerpoint on the same box!'. I also personally have many switcher friends who really require being able to do work in Office on their home machine for business, and probably they would not have been able to switch without it. Office is a crucial piece of software to have available for the viabilty of the platform.

If Apple started very public support for OOo (e.g. by firing off lots of engineering resources at it), it could easily jeopardize the continued development of Microsoft Office for OS X now that there's no agreement in place. Don't forget how quickly Adobe dropping Premiere after FCP was released. There's precedent from Microsoft as well with the release of Safari having been cited as one of the primary motivators for dropping Internet Explorer OS X development (a horrid shame as, yes, there are still a few web sties that require VBScript).

So although there may be many good logical arguments for why there should be support for a project like OOo, or even an enhanced business oriented AppleWorks derivative, there's always that one good motivator for not doing so...the continued existance of Microsoft Office for Mac OS X. Given its current positioning as bullet 8 on their top 10 reasons to switch, I highly doubt that Apple would make any type of moves that would jeopardize Office.

ed

BTW: pyobjc rocks!

The native theming work was actually pioneered in NeoOffice/C Flaming Yeti back in 2002. Dan, who helped me get the intial widget stuff in, moved on to be one of the primary architects of the Native Widget Framework that does the theming in 2.0.

While NeoOffice/C was way to hacked to make the transition into a maintainable project, NeoOffice/J is actually using portions of that framework for the Aqua menus. We 'backported' 2.0 into 1.1.x to do the most requested native widget (and arguably the most complex) menus. Having it in the official 2.0 sources helps us because it means we won't have to hack to make the infrastructure ourselves :)

ed

Disclaimer: I am a member of the OOo Mac OS X "team" and a founder of the project.

NeoOffice/J isn't a prototype anymore. It got so good and stable that we decided to make it an official project. We just haven't changed the slogans and copy yet. NeoOffice/J 1.1 is going to be going beta this week, based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 (not even available for Mac OS X X11). It will contain Aqua menus, too.

After we work out all the bugs and get NeoOffice/J 1.1 to final release, we're going to plow ahead with scrollbars and buttons and whathaveyou for a 1.5 release. We'll also be starting on the native work for 2.0 sometime next year, but that will take some effort, considering OOo 2.0 isn't finalized yet.

Our goal is to put out a final NeoOffice/J that is stable, well tested, polished, but most importantly, fully functional. It's generally our opinion that it's more important to be bug-free then pretty. It doesn't matter if it's got pretty blue buttons if it crashes after typing 5 words, and there are definitely testers and users who agree ;)

ed

Disclaimer: I am a member of the OOo Mac OS X "team" and a founder of the project.

NeoOffice/J isn't a prototype anymore. It got so good and stable that we decided to make it an official project. We just haven't changed the slogans and copy yet. NeoOffice/J 1.1 is going to be going beta this week, based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 (not even available for Mac OS X X11). It will contain Aqua menus, too.

After we work out all the bugs and get NeoOffice/J 1.1 to final release, we're going to plow ahead with scrollbars and buttons and whathaveyou for a 1.5 release. We'll also be starting on the native work for 2.0 sometime next year, but that will take some effort, considering OOo 2.0 isn't finalized yet.

Our goal is to put out a final NeoOffice/J that is stable, well tested, polished, but most importantly, fully functional. It's generally our opinion that it's more important to be bug-free then pretty. It doesn't matter if it's got pretty blue buttons if it crashes after typing 5 words, and there are definitely testers and users who agree ;)

ed

I'm amazed at all the complaints about the lack of an OS X version of OpenOffice, when NeoOffice has been in development for a while:
http://www.neooffice.org/

I've been using it for about a month and even though it's still in alpha, it's terrific. Runs a bit slow and occasionally crashes on quit (that always amuses me), but I've had no compatibility issues so far. Development on the project is strong, as evidenced by the frequency of quality patches made available.

I would not be at all surprised to see NeoOffice become the de facto OS X version of OO. Check it out, and contribute if you can!

Disclaimer: I am one of the members of the Mac OS X OOo team and a founder of the NeoOffice project

OpenOffice.org X11 on the mac is effectively dead because it is horrendously understaffed. There are less then 5 people actively working on it. Not good for an 8 million line + application.

While Apple's developer documentation may be first class, OpenOffice.org X11 is not built using Apple-specific technologies. It is built from the command line and is using X11 with its own internal widget toolkit. Oh yeah, and takes 9 hours to compile on a dual G5 2GHz. That hurdle is a bit too high for just someone to stroll on in and casually check out the project.

OpenOffice.org is a large and thorny Unix application. There are very few Mac OS X programmers that actually have X11 and Unix skills and the patience to deal with something of its size. Most developers come to the project and are like "can I build it in XCode" or "can I use InterfaceBuilder", find out they can't and then leave. The lack of a sufficiently large pool of skilled volunteer programming experts effectively killed OOo on the Mac from the start.

The native work has effectively moved to the NeoOffice/J project, which is 95% code identical to OpenOffice.org and uses Carbon and Java instead of X11. It still doesn't use Apple development tools directly, but it does have two of the original developers of OOo Mac OS X working on it continuously.

ed

Disclaimer: I am one of the members of the Mac OS X OOo team and a founder of the NeoOffice project

OpenOffice.org X11 on the mac is effectively dead because it is horrendously understaffed. There are less then 5 people actively working on it. Not good for an 8 million line + application.

While Apple's developer documentation may be first class, OpenOffice.org X11 is not built using Apple-specific technologies. It is built from the command line and is using X11 with its own internal widget toolkit. Oh yeah, and takes 9 hours to compile on a dual G5 2GHz. That hurdle is a bit too high for just someone to stroll on in and casually check out the project.

OpenOffice.org is a large and thorny Unix application. There are very few Mac OS X programmers that actually have X11 and Unix skills and the patience to deal with something of its size. Most developers come to the project and are like "can I build it in XCode" or "can I use InterfaceBuilder", find out they can't and then leave. The lack of a sufficiently large pool of skilled volunteer programming experts effectively killed OOo on the Mac from the start.

The native work has effectively moved to the NeoOffice/J project, which is 95% code identical to OpenOffice.org and uses Carbon and Java instead of X11. It still doesn't use Apple development tools directly, but it does have two of the original developers of OOo Mac OS X working on it continuously.

ed

Disclaimer: I am one of the community members of the Mac OS X OOo "team" and founder of the NeoOffice project

It will probably be a while before you can even see X11 support for 2.0. Eric just got the 2.0 X11 based code to *compile* for the first time yesterday and it won't even run as setup crashes.

Part of the problem is that OpenOffice.org really isn't a "team"...it's primarily Sun Microsystems. Sun has four priorities: Linux x86, Windows, Solaris, and Solaris x86. Sun pays no one to work on Mac OS X support. Since it isn't one of their priorities, they frequently code without keeping the special needs of Mac OS X in mind, doing stupid things like hard-coding shared library extensions to only be ".dll" or ".so", neither of which are used by Mac OS X. They can't claim ignorance since folks have been trying to write Mac OS X code for over three years now, but yet they still don't even keep simple compatibility needs like that in mind.

Getting true native support for OOo without X11 on Mac OS X is most likely not going to happen within the OpenOffice.org project. All of our native work has been going on in the NeoOffice/J project. It uses a mixture of Carbon and Java to run using ATSUI for native fonts and Quartz for native drawing and printing. We also use full GPL licensing so we can incorporate the good work of contributors who can't get their translations and patches into OOo due to licensing and politics.

The process of giving it Aqua widgets has already begun. The latest 1.1 Alpha patches use native Mac OS X menubars. Aquafication is slow, though, because our first priority is to make it functional first, then make it pretty second. It doesn't matter if it looks pretty if it crashes after 5 minutes!

For what it's worth, it's already taken over two years just to get NeoOffice/J to the point where the native Mac OS X support is functional. By functional I mean that it can copy and paste both formatted text and images with other Mac OS X applications, has correct fonts and font layouts, functions with most all of the Mac OS X printer drivers, launches properly from the finder, works with the scrollwheel on those funky mice some Mac users have, has an integrated WordPerfect filter, uses the Apple Installer, has automatic upgrade notification, automatically translates the interface based upon your preferred language in the System Preferences language pane, etc.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 X11 has no native non-X11 support in it, much less the level of integration with Mac that we've achieved with NeoOffice/J. It's taken two years of some really dedicated engineers (namely, Patrick) to get NeoJ up to that stage. Replicating all of that work within OOo will probably take nearly that long and perhaps longer if the experts aren't there to help.

NeoOffice/J is in fact OpenOffice.org 1.1.2, and is 97% identical on a source code level. It's even got bug fixes that aren't in the OOo GM (such as functional JDBC support). This week we're going to be taking NeoOffice/J to 1.1 Beta after all known crashing and deadlocks have been fixed. And...

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Beta will be based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, which isn't even available for Mac OS X X11!

Just keep up to date on the latest Mac OS X porting news on trinity instead of the infrequently updated OOo pages. RSS feeds are available too.

And don't let all of the politics and scare tactics of the OpenOffice.org denziens scare you either. NeoOffice really is the 'official' place for Mac OS X native OpenOffice.org and is where all of us core developers work (Patrick, Dan, and Ed).

ed

Disclaimer: I am one of the community members of the Mac OS X OOo "team" and founder of the NeoOffice project

It will probably be a while before you can even see X11 support for 2.0. Eric just got the 2.0 X11 based code to *compile* for the first time yesterday and it won't even run as setup crashes.

Part of the problem is that OpenOffice.org really isn't a "team"...it's primarily Sun Microsystems. Sun has four priorities: Linux x86, Windows, Solaris, and Solaris x86. Sun pays no one to work on Mac OS X support. Since it isn't one of their priorities, they frequently code without keeping the special needs of Mac OS X in mind, doing stupid things like hard-coding shared library extensions to only be ".dll" or ".so", neither of which are used by Mac OS X. They can't claim ignorance since folks have been trying to write Mac OS X code for over three years now, but yet they still don't even keep simple compatibility needs like that in mind.

Getting true native support for OOo without X11 on Mac OS X is most likely not going to happen within the OpenOffice.org project. All of our native work has been going on in the NeoOffice/J project. It uses a mixture of Carbon and Java to run using ATSUI for native fonts and Quartz for native drawing and printing. We also use full GPL licensing so we can incorporate the good work of contributors who can't get their translations and patches into OOo due to licensing and politics.

The process of giving it Aqua widgets has already begun. The latest 1.1 Alpha patches use native Mac OS X menubars. Aquafication is slow, though, because our first priority is to make it functional first, then make it pretty second. It doesn't matter if it looks pretty if it crashes after 5 minutes!

For what it's worth, it's already taken over two years just to get NeoOffice/J to the point where the native Mac OS X support is functional. By functional I mean that it can copy and paste both formatted text and images with other Mac OS X applications, has correct fonts and font layouts, functions with most all of the Mac OS X printer drivers, launches properly from the finder, works with the scrollwheel on those funky mice some Mac users have, has an integrated WordPerfect filter, uses the Apple Installer, has automatic upgrade notification, automatically translates the interface based upon your preferred language in the System Preferences language pane, etc.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 X11 has no native non-X11 support in it, much less the level of integration with Mac that we've achieved with NeoOffice/J. It's taken two years of some really dedicated engineers (namely, Patrick) to get NeoJ up to that stage. Replicating all of that work within OOo will probably take nearly that long and perhaps longer if the experts aren't there to help.

NeoOffice/J is in fact OpenOffice.org 1.1.2, and is 97% identical on a source code level. It's even got bug fixes that aren't in the OOo GM (such as functional JDBC support). This week we're going to be taking NeoOffice/J to 1.1 Beta after all known crashing and deadlocks have been fixed. And...

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Beta will be based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, which isn't even available for Mac OS X X11!

Just keep up to date on the latest Mac OS X porting news on trinity instead of the infrequently updated OOo pages. RSS feeds are available too.

And don't let all of the politics and scare tactics of the OpenOffice.org denziens scare you either. NeoOffice really is the 'official' place for Mac OS X native OpenOffice.org and is where all of us core developers work (Patrick, Dan, and Ed).

ed

Disclaimer: I am one of the community members of the Mac OS X OOo "team" and founder of the NeoOffice project

It will probably be a while before you can even see X11 support for 2.0. Eric just got the 2.0 X11 based code to *compile* for the first time yesterday and it won't even run as setup crashes.

Part of the problem is that OpenOffice.org really isn't a "team"...it's primarily Sun Microsystems. Sun has four priorities: Linux x86, Windows, Solaris, and Solaris x86. Sun pays no one to work on Mac OS X support. Since it isn't one of their priorities, they frequently code without keeping the special needs of Mac OS X in mind, doing stupid things like hard-coding shared library extensions to only be ".dll" or ".so", neither of which are used by Mac OS X. They can't claim ignorance since folks have been trying to write Mac OS X code for over three years now, but yet they still don't even keep simple compatibility needs like that in mind.

Getting true native support for OOo without X11 on Mac OS X is most likely not going to happen within the OpenOffice.org project. All of our native work has been going on in the NeoOffice/J project. It uses a mixture of Carbon and Java to run using ATSUI for native fonts and Quartz for native drawing and printing. We also use full GPL licensing so we can incorporate the good work of contributors who can't get their translations and patches into OOo due to licensing and politics.

The process of giving it Aqua widgets has already begun. The latest 1.1 Alpha patches use native Mac OS X menubars. Aquafication is slow, though, because our first priority is to make it functional first, then make it pretty second. It doesn't matter if it looks pretty if it crashes after 5 minutes!

For what it's worth, it's already taken over two years just to get NeoOffice/J to the point where the native Mac OS X support is functional. By functional I mean that it can copy and paste both formatted text and images with other Mac OS X applications, has correct fonts and font layouts, functions with most all of the Mac OS X printer drivers, launches properly from the finder, works with the scrollwheel on those funky mice some Mac users have, has an integrated WordPerfect filter, uses the Apple Installer, has automatic upgrade notification, automatically translates the interface based upon your preferred language in the System Preferences language pane, etc.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 X11 has no native non-X11 support in it, much less the level of integration with Mac that we've achieved with NeoOffice/J. It's taken two years of some really dedicated engineers (namely, Patrick) to get NeoJ up to that stage. Replicating all of that work within OOo will probably take nearly that long and perhaps longer if the experts aren't there to help.

NeoOffice/J is in fact OpenOffice.org 1.1.2, and is 97% identical on a source code level. It's even got bug fixes that aren't in the OOo GM (such as functional JDBC support). This week we're going to be taking NeoOffice/J to 1.1 Beta after all known crashing and deadlocks have been fixed. And...

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Beta will be based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, which isn't even available for Mac OS X X11!

Just keep up to date on the latest Mac OS X porting news on trinity instead of the infrequently updated OOo pages. RSS feeds are available too.

And don't let all of the politics and scare tactics of the OpenOffice.org denziens scare you either. NeoOffice really is the 'official' place for Mac OS X native OpenOffice.org and is where all of us core developers work (Patrick, Dan, and Ed).

ed

NeoOffice is OpenOffice on OS X. It's been out for quite a while, and works fine most of the time. It is built on top of Java. Building it on top of Java was apparently much easier than building on Cocoa.

You have two choices at the moment - OpenOffice.org for X Windows, the official port, but development is very slow, and recent version(s) do not compile... or, NeoOffice/J, a port that runs in Java, with the OpenOffice toolkit although this is being worked on to have a native Aqua interface.

In other words, be patient, (or in true OSS-style) join either or both project and start helping ;)

I use NeoOffice/J on my mac - its a little slow, but i prefer it to running X just to use an office app

Somebody else replied with this URL but it looks like he got modded down for being a jerk at the same time. NeoOffice is a version of OpenOffice.org that runs without X11. Not exactly native looking yet but they did just add a patch for moving the menu out of the window and onto the real Mac menubar. See here for the patches and download link. Looks like since September they've updated it to using OOo 1.1.2 so it's probably improved a bit since I tried it a couple months back. Good luck.

If you happen to be working for a non-profit you can also check out Techsoup.org and pick up a copy of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac for like $20 a copy. Yes, it sucks to support Microsoft but I've got 8 users here who would go berserk if they were faced with OOo or even NeoOffice in its current condition. Both still need a lot of work on the Mac. And here I thought OOo was supposed to be cross-platform... Anyway, Techsoup.org, a good way for non-profits to avoid giving Microsoft too much money and still be legal.

From the article:

Our Mac OS X build is fantastic, and I use it every day, for articles, presentations, spreadsheets. It never crashes, and it allows me to work with my Linux and Solaris colleagues while maintaining my Mac glow of happiness. It's entirely community built, the work of Ed Peterlin, Dan Williams, Kevin Hendricks, Eric Hoch, Terry Teague, Patrick Luby, and many others (all of whom have day jobs). It runs in X11, in a way that is very elegant and very pleasing to the eye. The job they have done is truly brilliant. The next step is to make the build run natively in Aqua. However, moving to the Aqua interface is an enormous undertaking.

It sure is. I want to take this opportunity to congratulate the openoffice.org team, but also to invite OS X developers (and users) to take a look at NeoOffice/J, an effort to port OO.o to OS X-- and make it look good, blue buttons and all.

The project basically has only three developers, but so far they have created an extremely stable office replacement that does NOT require X11. The latest addition-- Native menus.

Although the project is technically still in alpha mode, I know many people who use Neooffice/J for day-to-day use, including myself. (I'm probably not supposed to be saying that yet.. but it's true.) The project needs your support-- if you've got the skills and the resources, please come and help.

(For anyone who has used the OS X version of OO.o, Neooffice/J does not require X11 to be running.)

Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X community developer for OpenOffice.org and a founding member of NeoOffice

There is one obvious reason for this clause that I can think of off of the top of my head. Microsoft Office XP has a feature by which Office documents can be saved in an XML format. Obviously, this means that the information in the resulting Microsoft Office generated files is not as obfuscated as it is in a binary format (provided key information isn't just base64 encoded into elements). Microsoft knows this feature can negate the lock-in to .doc and other Office formats. So they were clever...

Microsoft has patented their XML schemas. In order to write software that uses these Microsoft Office XML schemas, you must sign a patent license with Microsoft.

Obviously, OOo will want to be able to open these new Microsoft Office XML formatted files similar to its support for the .doc format...but Microsoft has prevented anyone from using their patented schema in a "free as in beer" environment. These clauses in TFA allow Sun a cop-out: Sun can freely write code and use it in OOo that uses the Microsoft Office XML schemas. In the Sun-branded OOo distributions (Linux-x86, Solaris, Solaris-x86, Windows only...they have a Sun logo on the startup screen) Sun is free to use the patented Office schemas as well. Because of this, Sun will most likely contribute the code to work with these schemas into the core source code of OOo.

Other companies make derivatives of OOo too (Red Hat, Novell/Ximian, BSDMall), individuals like myself, and even just translators non-Sun builds for mainline platforms who don't program at all. The Sun-MS agreement says that Sun's patent licensing for the Office Schemas does not apply to any OOo derivatives or builds that are done outside of Sun. Either all of these companies and individuals need to sign the Patent License Agreement with Sun or else they are open to lawsuits from Microsoft and potentially pay royalties to Microsoft in the future to use their schema.

It's really another clever way Microsoft has come up with to continue to ensure their file formats remain closely guarded and their own property.

As to whether a patent of an XML Schema can stand up in court, well, I know I personally as a single developer don't have the kind of money to challenge Microsoft on patent litigation if they sue me as an individual. Unfortunatley I have neither the time nor the skills to scrutinize all of Sun's contributions to OpenOffice.org's source code to see if they use Microsoft's patents in such a way that's legal for them, but not legal for me. I either must take my chances or stop being a non-Sun developer of OpenOffice.org. Unfortunately now any non-Sun entity working on OOo has to make that choice for themselves.

ed

Load of garbage is pretty strong... it's annoying and ugly, and sometimes doesn't work, but certainly not a load of garbage. Call it "alpha quality".

NeoOffice is the way to go - http://www.neooffice.org/

True, but I'm a recent convert to NeoOffice/J, frequently mentioned on here, which is a wrapped-version of OOo that does support native cut and paste, along with double-clickable documents from the Finder and vastly improved font-rendering.

That last point is worth stressing - I used OOo through X11 and working with imported spreadsheets was a pain due to the vast font differences. This is vastly improved in NeoOffice. In fact the issue is gone for me, but I'm not so rash as to say gone for everyone.

Cheers,
Ian

The first place to start would be to read through the official OOo 1.1.2 Installer FAQ which has answers to this as well as other support issues and questions. There are a number of other FAQs on trinity that can help you address problems.

Also don't be afraid to post and browse through the online support forums where users exchange hints, tips, bug reports, and the like.

All of us volunteers have put up extensive OOo support resources for Mac OS X users, and there are links to all of them on the "Support" section of our website and even in the README included with the installer itself! We spend a lot of time helping users get things working. If something doesn't work, why not try taking advantage of all the written documentation and live volunteer support? It seems that open source is no different then commercial apps...people still don't read the manuals ;)

ed

(PS: the answer to your problem is that OOo is already installed by that point in the install process...you may just be missing one or two fonts, but it works just fine)

The first place to start would be to read through the official OOo 1.1.2 Installer FAQ which has answers to this as well as other support issues and questions. There are a number of other FAQs on trinity that can help you address problems.

Also don't be afraid to post and browse through the online support forums where users exchange hints, tips, bug reports, and the like.

All of us volunteers have put up extensive OOo support resources for Mac OS X users, and there are links to all of them on the "Support" section of our website and even in the README included with the installer itself! We spend a lot of time helping users get things working. If something doesn't work, why not try taking advantage of all the written documentation and live volunteer support? It seems that open source is no different then commercial apps...people still don't read the manuals ;)

ed

(PS: the answer to your problem is that OOo is already installed by that point in the install process...you may just be missing one or two fonts, but it works just fine)

The eventual aim of the NeoOffice people is to produce a genuine OS Xified OO.o, so it's a project worth following. They have a technology preview of that branch of the project called Flaming Yeti, which you can play with, but it's far from being complete. Don't download it if you were one of the people who played with early versions of Mozilla and wrote Mozilla off as a result.

If you just want to avoid X11, give NeoOffice/J a try.
It's a bit of a dog, but it does *kinda sorta* work... ;-)

Nothin' perfect, yet. NeoOffice and NeoOffice/J are two projects trying to Mac OS X-ize OpenOffice. NeoOffice/J is largely usable, but also very large (~500MB, memory usage typically runs above 100MB) and slow. It's also ugly as sin.
I haven't been following it much, but someone is also in the processing of using Qt's cross-compatibility to port KOffice to OS X.

NeoOffice/J is a test version of OpenOffice for OS X that does not require X11, as it's coded in Java. It's the best version for most users right now. neooffice.org/java/

I agree that OOo on Mac is pretty painful. But for some odd reason, I keep using it instead of OfficeX. If it *really* bothers you that much, you can try one of the builds at:

http://www.neooffice.org/

It's semi-beta stuff, but it's supposed to be all of OpenOffice without X11.

The people at NeoOffice.org are working on two parallel OOo ports. The first, NeoOffice, attempts to port OOo to Aqua. It seems to have stagnated, but the very promising NeoOffice/J is rapidly approaching 1.0!

NeoOffice/J replaces the dependency on X with a dependency on Java, which is treated as a native toolkit in OSX. NeoOffice/J may not look like an Aqua app yet, but it does integrate nicely with the AA fonts and can use OSX's copy and paste. It takes a good 30 seconds to launch on my G3 iBook 700/640MB RAM but once it's up and running it is quite fast. I recently removed the OOo X11 port from my machine, as NeoOffice/J works more consistently for me.

NeoOffice/J is based on OOo 1.0 but it's still much better than nothing, not to mention much better than the X11 port. It's very easily installed with a DMG file and the standard Apple installer, once installed it behaves like any other OSX app, setting up the MIME types properly, etc.

I've installed 0.82 in the Mac lab here at work, as we didn't purchase MSO with the machines and students were trying to open PPT lectures. Anyway, I'd take NeoOffice/J over AppleWorks any day of the week. I even prefer it to MS Office on OSX. (Sorry, it may look Aqua-ish, but it's an odd duck too.)

----------------------

From the NeoOffice/J site:

No X11 software required

NeoOffice/J uses the JavaTM technology that is built into Mac OS X. By using Java, there is no need to download and install the X11 software that OpenOffice.org requires.

Integrated with Finder and Mail

The Mac OS X Finder will automatically launch NeoOffice/J and open OpenOffice.org and MicrosoftTM Office documents that you double-click on. Also the Mac OS X Mail application will open OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office attachments in NeoOffice/J.

Uses Mac OS X fonts

Unlike OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J uses the same fonts that all of your other Mac OS X applications use. This means that NeoOffice/J will handle reading and writing of Western European characters (e.g. characters with accents, umlauts, circumflexes, cedillas, etc.) and some fonts will even handle Japanese, Chinese, and Korean ideographs. Also, NeoOffice/J is able to use any fonts that you install in your Library/Fonts subfolder or the /Library/Fonts folder.

Handles international keyboards

Unlike OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J will use an keyboard layout that you use. I routinely switch to a Spanish keyboard without a problem. Also, if you switch your keyboard layout while NeoOffice/J is running, NeoOffice/J will automatically switch as well.

Native printing support

NeoOffice/J supports printing using Mac OS X's native printing functionality. Like other Mac OS X applications, you can use NeoOffice/J to print, preview, or save a document to a PDF file.

Native copy and paste support

NeoOffice/J supports copying and pasting using Mac OS X's native clipboard so you can copy and paste text and images between NeoOffice/J and other Mac OS X applications.

NeoOffice -> Download -> one of the NeoOffice/J mirror sites -> NeoOfficeJ-0.8.2.dmg

The site states that it doesn't have any binaries though - anywhere you can get builds of this? Or will I have to set up CVS?

NeoOffice -> Download -> one of the NeoOffice/J mirror sites -> NeoOfficeJ-0.8.2.dmg

The site states that it doesn't have any binaries though - anywhere you can get builds of this? Or will I have to set up CVS?

Counter to what the competitive points claim, Sun provides fee based support for the top-tier platforms (Linux-x86, Solaris, Win32) for OpenOffice.org, not just for StarOffice. It's right in the "Commercial Support and Training" portion of the OOo support homepage next to the Sun logo. There are also some other firms and independent consultants listed. Gee, not only can you get paid support from Sun, but price around your support needs as well! You'd think that if MS is trying to sell Office with support as a major bullet point they could at least have given the webpage a look!

While I can't speak for other places, on trinity where I host and answer OOo OS X support forums there's usually a Mac OOo expert answering questions within one day of asking. There are non-programmers who volunteer their time to help new people with installation, deployment, how-tos, etc. It seems unfair to belittle one-on-one expert help just because it's done for free :)

ed

t the X11 port of OOo is ugly, has poor font handling and doesn't conform to any of the Mac's environment. Even cut and paste still uses control and not command.

From NeoOffice

Welcome to the online home of "Neolithic Office", or NeoOffice(R) for short. NeoOffice is a prototyping project exploring different methods for porting OpenOffice.org to run natively on MacOS X. It is a free software port of OpenOffice.org to the MacOS X platform, currently in its prototyping stages.

I sent Scott an open letter on behalf of NeoOffice.org nearly one month ago and haven't yet heard a response and no discussions are ongoing. It's really a straightforward request for myself and a few other OOo volunteers, and we can't even get publicly snubbed! I wonder what Eric Raymond and IBM have that we don't...

ed <---the ninth insignificant wonder of the world

OpenOffice is slated for a native version for OSX, but that's years down the road. The X11 version is pretty nice, I like it, but for my spoiled habits, it's not cutting it just yet. But I have high hopes for it none-the-less.

Try NeoOffice. It's an alternative porting effort for OpenOffice.org for the Mac. I have it on my Mac OS X 10.2 machine, and it looks and works pretty much like Oo.org 1.0. Alas, they're not up to the Oo.org 1.1 base yet, but you can't have everything...

OpenOffice should run fine. It will also run with OSX using apple's X11, but not natively under Aqua.

Actually, the current preferred implementation is called NeoOffice/J. It uses Java to make OO.o act much more like a native Aqua app. The GUI still looks out-of-place, but it supports native fonts and printing, standard OS X keyboard shortcuts, OS X's various foreign language input methods (like Japanese), double-clickable files, and is self-contained as a .app package.

I don't even bother with office for OSX anymore, as openoffice seems to suite my needs. Just find a Cocoa based launcher and your set.

Have you checked out NeoOffice/J for your OpenOffice needs? It makes the X11 server unnecessary for running OpenOffice. It also has cut-and-paste support & native printing built-in, which is great. It isn't a full Cocoa port (not even close, really), but it's good at what it promises to do: let you run OpenOffice on OS X painlessly.

--Mid

Since partially completed ports apparently count, I recommend checking out the developer Aqua release of OpenOffice.org, Neoffice. Downloads of a test binary have been here for awhile.

Moreover, just yesterday, lead developer Dan Williams posted this state-of-the-port message on what still needs to be done to have a complete port of OO.o in Aqua:

All in all, these aren't problems that require all that much technical expertise, just a lot of trial and error, and a bunch of debugging. A lot of the issues that we have had for a long time, like the widgets and menus and the event loop, are actually solved; we simply need to convert our old hacks over to the new frameworks or clean up the code as it is. We can of course do this, but as always it requires more manpower.

So? Volunteers?

W

There is no open source grammar checking library! At least none robust enough to provide any useful information.

Grammar checking is notoriously difficult...hell, back in the day there used to be companies like Casady & Greene (sniff...I liked their stuff) that made standalone grammer checkers like Grammarian. Many other companies with standalones went under, but their source code is now relegated to the sands of time.

The cloest thing I've seen to what may become a viable grammar checking library for open source is the Link grammar parser. It seems pretty good and has a online sample of what it can do, including some automated translation!

You can use this project for free in non-commercial applications. Alas, this runs afoul of the SISSL license used for OpenOffice.org since it explicitly allows for commercial products to be derived from the OOo source code (like StarOffice). It's also incompatible with LGPL and GPL, too, since it would place an additional restriction on how LGPL/GPL software is used. AbiWord has some bindings for the link grammar parser in its code, but they're not activated due to licensing restrictions.

About a year ago when I contacted the team, they said they were going to do a rereleas under an MIT style license or a GPL-compatible license, although thus far I've not heard anything since. Anyone know them and want to help set a few wheels in motion?

The other alternative is to add in a bridge to communicate with a separate process from a GPL licensed project, where the separate project is never loaded into the same address space and is under a non-commercial non-GPL license only. I've wanted to do this for NeoOffice and have sketched out rough APIs, but I haven't had the time to sit down and actually code it.