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I'm far from a whiny Mac fanboy, but the linked article is heavy on generalities and short on specifics.

Just what ARE his Word-processing requirements - if he won't buy MS Word, doesn't want to pony-up for the cheaper iWork, and can't stand TextEdit - AND he doesn't want to bother test-driving the WONDERFUL Nisus Writer:

http://www.nisus.com/

Shareware / Freeware? Christ, here's a whole heap of goodness, neatly organized and searchable:

http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/

And what the FUCK is wrong with making a computer that is supposed to run as sold - e.g., so you can't take the OS off and slap it on another piece of hardware?

And every bloody peripheral I own works without drama. Plug it in, the hard drive mounts, the scanner scans, the digital camera disgorges its pictures.

The one real issue he mentions that drives me crazy is the wonky memory-management issues in OSX. When it has enough memory, all is good. When it runs dry, bad things happnen - rather, nothing happens and the machine grinds to a halt. Let's hope Leopard sorts this out.

I would posit the latter. Look at some of the ODBC problems in M$ products for Apple. The problems have been around for ages and M$ has no plans to fix them, and hasn't fixed them despite new releases. The solution promoted is to ditch Apple. That company doesn't appear to treat Windows users any better, so my solution, however, was to ditch M$ and that has worked quite well.

Yes, the M$ Office for Apple has been profitable, but another reason for M$ to keep it around would be to maintain the lock on the office file formats. So to drop it now is probably just trying to force the few into Windows and thus the InfoPath / MS OOXML lock-in. IMHO, it's a premature move and will cost them.

There are a quite a few options, that are in most ways better, though different. The weakest points, which could go away in short order, are the file formats. The M$ formats are still undocumented and only some on the list below fully support OpenDocument, though that number is rapidly growing.

• Neooffice
• Mariner Write, Mariner Calc
• Abiword
• NisusWriter
• ThinkFree
• Mellel
• OpenOffice.org (still needs X11, I'm fine with that myself since I use X11 anyway, but others may not be)
• iWork (includes Keynote)

That's just focusing on word processors. There is a similar range of choice for spreadsheets and presentation graphics. Now see how important control of those file formats is.

No, I can see his point. Apple apps have drawers that come out the side and often look a lot like this. The only thing is, screens tend to be wider than they are high, so putting the "ribbon" at the top is a ludicrous waste of screen space. Take a look at:

http://www.nisus.com/Express/

Okay, let's see...

There's AbiWord. I wasn't real impressed, but you could try that out. Also check out Mariner Write, Z-Write, and, of course, NisusWriter. You might also check out ThinkFree Office.

Try checking out the Macintosh Products Guide for more information.

On the Mac, Office totally dominated. The Mac version of Word has always been, and remains to this day, superior to the Windows version. In ten years of working with Macs and running IT for Mac shops, I've never seen a product for the Mac OS that could really compete with Office.

As a whole, yes, you are correct. However there has always been Nisus Writer which has been the choice of many writers for a long time. It has 90% of Word's features for a fraction of the cost, disk space, and CPU usage.

The last versions for "Classic" Mac OS supported System 7.1 all the way up to Mac OS 9.2.2 and required only 2 MB of RAM.

The Mac OS X version, Nisus Writer Express, is still an excellent word processor and makes for a great complement to Apple's page layout app, "Pages".

http://www.nisus.com/Express/

I don't think that, if Apple release any office suite, that they'd want to use a base of OOo, or anything else, for that matter, for several reasons. Against OOo's favour is the fact that it's very Win/Linux geared, both in terms of interface and, I've heard, that even getting it to run in X11 on OS X, let alone Quartz/Aqua, is challenging.

The reason Apple wouldn't use any third-party app for a base is simply that it wouldn't give them enough room to create something truly unique and innovative.

All of that said, I could see Apple using the import/export engine of an open-source app (see Nisus Writer Express http://nisus.com/ for an example using AbiWord's engine). Then again, might improve upon what's already present in TextEdit.

Kirin

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...

Note that Nisus Writer Express doesn't (yet) allow footnotes, endnotes, nor integrated tables. Those are must haves for me.

I know I don't have to mention it, but Keynote is where it's at if you need to do a presentation. At least with these programs you can have part of an office suite.

I'm still looking for a decent spreadsheet program myself. So if anyone knows of a native OS X spreadsheet program that is at least on par with Nisus Writer Express or Keynote please enlighten us all.

OO.org is dead for me as well. It started when I downloaded StarOffice back when I was using Windows, can anyone tell me why the hell I needed two taskbars and two start menus? wtf. Now I know OO.org isn't like this anymore, but things still bother me about it. Like the file path in the toolbar, ugly, useless and tacky.

I've been using Word 5.1a on an old Apple PowerBook 180 to write papers. It does everything I need. Then I discovered the free version of Nisus Writer and use that now too. Of course, neither is open source, but they get the job done on a laptop worth $20 that can be used outside in the sun without the screen washing out :)

True, at least in my opinion.

as someone who has just finished two books on Microsoft Word...
(uses 10% of my processor just sitting open in the dock... has only two choices for background color... has a sub-par thesaurus)
and as someone who has previously written a book on Appleworks...
(document manager slows significantly with over a few hundred documents... plain white background is only choice [yes, this is a nice feature to be able to change when you work with text for 5+ straight hours]... doesn't consistently convert files properly... finally, it appears to be stagnant.)
I can safely say that the next evolutionary step is to Nisus Writer Express. The software has recently been updated and is worth a second look. If this sounds like a plug for Nisus... it is.
New features for nisus can be found here.

If you think there's no solution for appleworks other than Word and other office variants... check it out.

True, at least in my opinion.

as someone who has just finished two books on Microsoft Word...
(uses 10% of my processor just sitting open in the dock... has only two choices for background color... has a sub-par thesaurus)
and as someone who has previously written a book on Appleworks...
(document manager slows significantly with over a few hundred documents... plain white background is only choice [yes, this is a nice feature to be able to change when you work with text for 5+ straight hours]... doesn't consistently convert files properly... finally, it appears to be stagnant.)
I can safely say that the next evolutionary step is to Nisus Writer Express. The software has recently been updated and is worth a second look. If this sounds like a plug for Nisus... it is.
New features for nisus can be found here.

If you think there's no solution for appleworks other than Word and other office variants... check it out.

• GNUMail.app
  
• Nisus Email
  
• PowerMail
  

I'm not sure that I can consider the MacOSX port of OpenOffice as "usable" until it has the capacity to -print-

Then rejoice, for OOO under X11 can indeed print. I think there may be some inkjets that have driver issues (Epson?) but I've used it to print very nicely to two Postscript laser printers (HP4000, Brother HL1470N) and even to PDF.

If you're complaining about the NeoOffice "Flaming Yeti" build, then yes. This is an in-progress Cocoa port. The X11 build has been the focus so far. Now they should make faster progress on the Cocoa one.

But the main juice of OOO is working all right: MS translation. I've found Word 5 documents arrive DOA, but Word >97 docs read in okay. There are formatting glitches here and there, though. Your mileage may vary.

If you just want a kick-butt Cocoa wordprocessor, maybe consider Nisus Express or Mariner Write. They both try to do Word decoding, but in my experience the translation is inferior to OOO.

ps. The OOO work would go faster if Apple pulled a Safari and built a monster WP on top of the OOO translation libraries, and contributed fixes back. He said wishfully.

A few points. First, there's been a deal running for many, many months where you can get MS Office for US$300 off retail if you buy it with a new Mac. About £125 + VAT. Plus, there are other deals, so you don't have to buy full price: £200 is easy to find.

Second, consumer Macs come with Appleworks for free. It reads and writes Word/Excel out of the box, and should be fine for most users. Every Mac comes with a styled text editor (tabs, fonts, colours etc.) anyway.

Third, the rumour sites are predicting an Apple-branded office suite.

Fourth, Word is not the only game in town for word processing, and not everyone needs Excel/Powerpoint. Nisus make a great WP, including macros, a programming language, and styled GREP with/without GUI. Out soon for Mac OS X.

Fifth, there are two or three open source Office clones coming to the Mac. X11 versions here now, give them a few months to get the Aqua versions out and stable.

So no, we don't all buy Office.

Give Me Nisus Writer Or Give Me Death.

For years, the makers of Nisus were known for their programmers text editor QUED/M a programmer's text editor. It was only after building word processing features onto the editor did they come up with Nisus. Hmm according to About Nisus Software Nisus came out in 1989. I guess it might qualify as the early years of the Macintosh by now, but besides ClarisWorks/AppleWorks, I can't think of any other word processors that came after Nisus.

Ok sure I know why OpenOffice is getting play on slashdot... but this same story appeared on may Mac related sites a day ago.

It seems to me 'We' Mac OS X users see the WP world as two camps Office and AppleWorks. Well I would like to point out a great app from Nisus. Nisus Writer was one of the first WP for the Mac and it is insanly great. Right now they are in the process of porting the sucker over to OS X.

Sure OpenOffice is an open source project and is free (and more dev. working on a mac port is fine), but most home users use a WP more than Excel or PowerPoint. I don't think OpenOffice is something that will have little effect in slowing MS domiance under OS X.

Two last things.
1.) Why not just get a java version of OpenOffice so less porting is needed?
2.) Mozilla now has nightly OS X build Yea :) !!!

I have used various portables for a while, and I must say that even though 1024x768 on a 12" screen is a bit small, one can work with it quite comfortably with things like font antialiasing turned on.

On the Mac, the problem is, however, that some software does not support enlarging the screen. On X11, I can manually adjust the screen resolution, thus gaining some control over the desktop's appearance. Even Windows with its font enlargement mechanism caters to this, even though the two levels it offers are both a bit odd and everything in between looks a bit chunky.

For example, when I use software like Nisus, the best multilingual word processor I've ever had the chance to work with, I find that it displays font sizes as pixel sizes - a 12 pt font is displayed as 12 pixel screen font. You can't adjust this manually, so even on the 14,1" screen on the PowerBook G3 that I'm using at the moment the text looks a bit small. Antialiasing doesn't help - while it usually yields better legibility, at these small sizes it makes no difference, and in special cases when you need stuff like "h with dot under" or Arabic vowel signs, it is plain impossible to discern things with antialiasing turned on, so I usually leave it off. That way, however, fonts look a bit clobbered. That effect will be a bit worse on the small screen.

I realize, though, that this problem isn't as bad as it sounds now, because Apple is introducing OS X in parallel anyway, where most of the display routines are better virtualized, being more or less directly PostScript-based. It will be much more easily possible to customize screen display than on most other platforms I know, so in the end you get the added resolution on the smaller LCD for finer display of details. I think it will be possible to live with it.