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Porting OpenOffice To OSX
jeffy124 writes "ZDnet has an interesting article on how OpenOffice, Sun's Open-Source version of StarOffice, needs some serious help in being ported to the Macintosh OS-X. With Microsoft about to release Office 2001 for OS-X and demo it at next week's MacWorld Expo, support in getting a Mac OS-X port out for OpenOffice is critical to keeping a Microsoft dominance of yet another operating system's office suite to a minimum. The project is need of someone to step up to the plate as a project lead."
GTK already exists under OS X.
If I remember correctly, GTK has already been ported to OS X. Try http://www.macgimp.org
Pardon my french, but I still prefer AppleWorks to OO, and AppleWorks is already available in an OSX-compatible form.
Even Linus has admited that in such applications that the inner workings are fairly static and its the presentation and interface that matters, commercial software still has a leg up over open source. Word processors were a given example of such an application, iirc.
Give it a rest. Help port OO to Linux/PPC first. (its more than just recompiling, people. Ask Kevin Hendricks. He's been doing most of the work.)
"Meanwhile, there is an internal kernel API, which is undocumented and should not be called directly"
Then why do MS apps call these hidden API's all the time? Which, btw, ends up crashing my box quite frequently. I suppose they prefer instability for absolutely no reason at all. I'm sure there's no competitive advantage at all to using these APIs.
And if you think the only hidden APIs are in the kernel then you must be very naive indeed. wake up dude. The key word to remember here is "UNDOCUMENTED", yeah sure you could locate the APIs with a DLL viewer but that doesn't really help you in terms of understanding how to use those APIs.
The solution.
Unfortunately, both the Mozilla and StarOffice people decided long ago that it was easier to only wrap the basic Drawing API and write their own widget set than it was to use the native one. So while StarOffice/OpenOffice looks like windows widgets on windows (and linux), it's not windows widgets. Same would be true for an OSX port. Maybe if we're lucky, the core functionality of Open Office will be available in such a way to allow native UI programs based on them, much like galeon for mozilla.
That combo leaks memory like Niagra leaks water.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
And they're most certainly not using old P166s where I worked. :)
The first 'commercial' word processor for NeXTstep was WordPerfect. Want to see what happens when you take the code for another platform, and mung it enough so that it kind-of works on an elegant system like NeXTstep? Then you want to see WordPerfect.
I'd really hate to see that happen on MacOS X too...
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
I don't think *any* free software should be ported to Apple's user interface API (Cocoa?). It's worse (less free) than Qt. It seems to be missing much of the basic funtionality of X11, i.e. network tranceparency. If Apple wants to pay for free software to be ported to their proprietary interface, that's their business. Expecting the comunity to do it for them is unreasonable.
I just don't see how it benifits free software to port to OSX. It might be useful to build a Cocoa wrapper for X11. That would enable code written for OSX to run on Real Linux/Unix.
Which is why Office XP is going to have a hard time making inroads in the market. Microsoft isn't going to let you install it without guaranteeing you paid for it, and no one is going to be interested in paying nearly $600 for an Office suite.
Sure, there will be "cracks" for Office, but the majority of folks aren't interested in actively stealing Office. They won't go out of their way. They will simply stick with what they have got.
Hear hear! I have Mozilla branch nightlies set as my primary browser on OSX and about the only thing I use the IE 5.1 preview browser for anymore are sites that insist on sniffing for IE. The current Mozilla _NIGHTLY BUILDS_ crash less than IE 5.1 on OSX 10.0.4.
.rtfd is a bundled directory format (like .app and .kext, among others) IIRC, an .rtfd bundle contains an .rtf file along with any embedded graphics. Like the other types of bundles on OSX, users can manipulate (i.e. move, copy, rename, etc.) the bundles as discrete objects from the gui. Try cd'ing into a .rtfd directory from the shell... As to how open and/or documented it is, I don't know.
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Breakfast served all day!
I think he was specifically refering to the OS X port, not the whole thing.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The FSF doesn't give you the right to pull back the copyright. They give you the right to use the code you donated under any license you want, given a month's notice. (They claim the month's notice is merely some sort of legal CYA thing.)
The main reason they need these people is to help establish themselves as THE "Ultimate Office Suite". Whether that will happen I do not know but it will be sure fun to find out
If this ends up being some stupid C++ hack I'm gonna puke! Repeat after me: Cocoa, Objective C...Cocoa, Objective C...
Not really. It's not the C++ support that they're working on (that *is* the gcc team's job) it's C++/Objective C integration. This would give coders the ability to mix C++ and Objective C in the same file. I believe that a Objective C runtime merge is going to happen as well. And *that* would be cool.
No.
Maybe I'm missing something here but how is MSOffice going to be on OSX if it's based on BSD and Microsoft's apparently not developing Office tools for UNIX.
As I've heard, it will be offered in both Carbon (legacy MacCrap [tm] API) and Cocoa (spiffy-keen NeXT OO API) versions. Of course, the Cocoa version might compile with some tweaking under GNUstep. But I'm not expecting MS to do something like that. Hell, we can't even get *OMNI* to do it with OmniWeb.
Hey, the Abiword developers' hearts are in the right place, but the thing is still nothing more than a richtext notepad with rudimentary column support. Wake me up when it's caught up to a word processor from 10 years ago.
KOffice is much farther along feature-wise, maybe because they have a real roadmap and they're people who don't have contempt for office suites. You get the feeling the Abiword people prefer TeX and Emacs and don't understand why anyone would want to use a word processor for something with a glossary, footnotes and embedded images.
OpenOffice may be a slow, lumbering beast, but it's a full-featured slow, lumbering beast. Its only intractable weakness is the same one that dooms SmartSuite and Corel Office and the rest. It's not 100% compatible with MS Office. And it can't be. Endgame.
Yeah, good fucking luck. Maybe you didn't notice, but both Microsoft and the Open Sores kiddies make a browser for Macs. And IE kicks the living shit out of Netscape/Mozilla on that platform.
Oh please, not by a long shot. Mozilla 0.9.2 on OS X might take a little longer to start up, but it's a MUCH better browsing experience than the IE 5.1 previews. IE might have useless auction managers and the like, but Mozilla bests it on features that actually matter, like image blocking. And on my 400 MHz G4, Mozilla outperforms IE by a wide margin. IE 5.1 has to be the slowest browser I've ever used.
Zico doesn't know very much.
So does FSF and the GCC team. Lots of Free Software requires you to sign over the copyright.
I don't think he was implying that this makes it non-free so much as he was saying that it's more trouble than it's worth. Even a bugfix can span more than 10 lines of code.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Does this mean that we can expect MSOffice on Linux soon? Maybe I'm missing something here but how is MSOffice going to be on OSX if it's based on BSD and Microsoft's apparently not developing Office tools for UNIX. Then again maybe that was what they were planning all the time. Remember the rumor about Microsoft hiring Linux developers, maybe it was for this development. .NET at a charge of course.
Watch out though as you probably be required to allow root access for installation and then you kernal will be patched to route all traffic through
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
To read the latest discussion on Abiword development, check out this page.
I wonder how many people have tried MacGIMP because Adobe's taking so long to release Photoshop for OS X? Judging from some of the chat boards, I'm guessing a lot.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
That is true, a fork could be done.. however, that would require quite a bit of work. It would be nice if ones copyright was assumed transferred by commitment or by electronic decree, rather than snail-mail/fax.
First, before anyone asks.. OpenOffice is licensed under the following licenses.
:)
GNU General Public License (GPL)
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL)
further information: http://www.openoffice.org/license.html
The problem I find with contributing to OpenOffice is that they will not accept code submissions over 10 lines of code if one has not assigned copyright to Sun. This can not be done electronically, only by snail mail or fax.
I was considering helping but I'd like to keep my copyright. Also, I'd have to sell out the bucks for the upgrade to OSX
BTW, to those who asked.. openoffice just opens a large window and draws its own widgets inside of it, so the platform issue of toolkits/apis is at a minimum.
That isn't a true Aqua-native version, though, is it? I thought that was still running using Xfree86 as it runs on MacOS X (which is a bit clunky from what I understand).
D
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I use office because I really feel like if there is something I want to to, it has a way of doing it. And generally its not to hard to figure out. I have used star office, ABI word, Koffice, and always found that it was burdensome, both to my computer, and to me as the user. So why should I use a second rate program, when I have Office, which has always been 100% reliable for me?
The answer? I am not going to go pay $100+ bucks for it. Its just not worth it. I have a copy of Office that came in my laptop. But when its time to get Office XP, I won't be "upgradeing." And since I can't just "borror" a copy from a friend, I will probably just switch to useing Open Office. I have a feeling that when many people find that in order to start useing the lates MS software, that they actually have to BUY it, more people will start useing Open Office.
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
Actually the Quartz docs on the ADC site contain some info about Quartz's remote display capabilities. If you look around it's in one of the PDF files describing Quartz. Quartz is split much like X is on traditional Unix machines with a server doing all the display shit and a client on the backend that actually talks to applications. AFAIK the backend will accept RPCs from the network as it would from the local display server. I think Apple's sort of shuffled this capability to the side because xterms aren't their business. You don't exactly but Mac servers to run a bunch of dumb terminals dispite OS X's capability to do so. Besides that I think they'd rather have people use Cocoa for RPCs rather than Quartz. I wonder if you could turn a normal Carbon app into a distributed app by using Quartz...
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
While I like AppleWorks plenty (6.2 is one of the best upgrades ever downloaded, ever) it lacks a good deal of the functionality that exists in Office that most people on /. will probably never use. Microsoft has a whole slew of products that all integrate into one another. It's how they get companies to use exclusively Microsoft products. Word can do a mail merge directly from any product in the BackOffice family. You can keep a customer database on your intranet server and then send e-mails too all clients that fit a certain criteria such as those with outstanding credit or something. One person can do the work from their 600$ Dell workstation that 5 years ago took an entire department to do. There are other ways to do this with various other business suites but few are so tightly integrated as Microsoft's. Word processing and spreadsheets are the bleeding edge of the early 80's.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
To the credit of the developers at Microsoft (who can be some cool guys if you don't judge them for the business practices of their corporate bosses) I've yet to see an business suite as functional and cool as Office/BackOffice. I've got a MOUS for Office 2k thus I've been forced to learn all the things you can do with Office that most people won't ever see. Office and the programs in BackOffice have been worked on for the past couple years to integrate well together. /. is pretty much blindly pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft bitching about MS dominance on yet another desktop OS is expected but still pretty foolish. If you're a company with a non-Microsoft OS on your desktop systems you're very fortunate to have them port Office to your system. Microsoft gets to sell more copies of Office and Apple gets to sell boxes to companies who's only problem with MacOS is a lack of compatibility with their Microsoft supplied back end. Hetrogeneous hardware is a moot point when your software all speaks the same language. If you're sore in the seat because Microsoft uses their own language and doesn't play nice with competition, write an Open analog to Microsoft's service products. Oh, does it cost a bundle with little to no return? Thats because everyone else can use your work for their product and undercut you because they don't have your development cost tacked onto the price. Office/BackOffice has cost MS billions over the years. If I had a suite of products that was worth over a billion dollars I wouldn't be so apt to let other people play with it either.
Companies can replace entire operating divisions of their businesses because because everyone can easily collaborate and access the same data from inside their productivity applications. At a board meeting an Excel worksheet can be brought up calculating how well your company's new more ruthless tactics have increased profit margins. This calculation can be done in realtime because Excel can talk directly to SQL server which is getting database entries directly from POS terminals or your e-commerce front-end. MS Project can form get data for project groups from the employee database and then organize it all into Visio or PowerPoint for the meeting you're late for.
Office suites offering MS file type compatibility are a dime a dozen. Because
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Microsoft may be powerful, but they aren't omnipotent.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Appleworks is just fine for my use. You don't have to jump through the Office hoops, it doesn't eat up resouces, and It does turn out some fine documents. The spreadsheet is OK too.
Sure go ahead and port Open Office, but If you need a mature office suite for much less than MS bloat, try AppleWorks.
photosMy Photostream
OpenOffice blatantly rips off Microsoft Office's UI in a number of ways. No, its not an exact duplicate, but many things work exactly the same as they do in MS Office.
I have StarOffice (OpenOffice's kissing cousin so to speak) sitting on some Solaris boxes at work and have had some dyed-in-the-wool Office users who are not technical people at all sit at them and they were able to get their work done. That's what counts. Not bug-for-bug compatibility.
My journal has hot
There are a lot of posts here to the effect of "MS Office is already dominant, and it's pretty good as well, so why bother with a competing product?"
Do most of you Mac users really feel this way? Perhaps Mac users have had only one office suite for so long that they have forgotten the improvements that can be had by competition.
No realistic person thinks that OpenOffice will overtake MS Office any time soon even if it is as good or better feature for feature. But the presence of two full featured office suites will cause both of them to improve through competition. Remember how bad Word 6 was on the Mac? Microsoft did improve it later, but had they had competition, it probably would have never been that bad in the first place, and Mac users wouldn't have had to suffer through several years of a bad word processor because there was no other viable alternative.
The Mac market is small, and perhaps that's why there are several areas where most of the players except the dominant one have dropped out, but if the Mac platform is to grow as Apple would like, it will need to once again have competition among applications.
OpenOffice is a good way to reintroduce competition, because being an open source product, it does not need to have large market share at first since it does not need to bring in revenue.
MS Office X will be available sometime i the forth quarter, OpenOffice is well over a year away from even having a rudimentary presense on OS X. This project should have started two years ago if it wanted any hope of acheiving the stated goals (have an open solution on OS X at the same time Office X is released). Furthermore OpenOffice is being pulled in ten directions at once - gnome/gtk+ - windows - XUL. Pulling in one more (quartx) won't help matters much. Microsoft _will_ achieve dominance on OS X, it is a certainty, the question is whether others will be able to crawl up or pull it down. That question is open, but a jihad to beat them to the punch is an obvious distaster.
-Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
What are the chances that the
To survive they need to write their own browser, email program, Office compliant word processor, etc. No other company is going to give them what they need, neither will some well meaning ronin programmers. If they don't figure this out they'll just continue the slide towards becomming another generic PC manufacture and I'll never be able to buy my parents a computer they can easily use.
I think you're on the right track here, and I think Apple agrees with you. Take a look at iTunes (mp3 player, net radio, cd ripping & burning, all in one simple window), iMovie (same but for movies), and iDVD. Their plan is to become the 'digital hub', as they put it. There are also rumors of an upcoming iPhoto (or something like that) to do the same for digital photography.
I think they're moving in the right direction here. Microsoft already provides them with a great browser (on OS 9 anyway, the OS X version still needs work) and they have their own office suite. But everyone has browsers and office suites. Apple needs to go further. They are working on enabling people to do things they could never do on their computers before, like making movies & CDs. (Not that these things couldn't be done before, but now your Grandma will think they're easy.) They are hoping for another revolution like desktop publishing, which they still pretty much dominate. This is where they can gain an advantage, unless of course Microsoft keeps ripping off their applications. (I hear that XP has a video editor very similar to iMovie.)
Anyway, I completely agree with your opinion, I just think you're looking at the "killer apps" from a couple years ago, not the ones for the future.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
I do not think any open-source programmer in their right mind should bother with that. Everybody now knows that mixing text editing and layout processing is a BAD thing. Content and form should be separated.
We have a majority of the population which is mistrained and thinks wysiwyg is simpler and easier whereas it only gives users the feeling they can do things without any training and actually makes doing things well and efficiently impossible.
DO NOT DO IT. What the word needs is a good stylesheet editor.
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Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
It's not about dominating one market. It's about options being available, AND people actually making use of the options.
I'm sure I could write a mission critical application using the Atari 2600, thereby making sure that someone doesn't "dominate" the market. Whether or not anyone will actually use it.....
Rushing a port of this thing out is exactly the wrong thing to do. Having a buggy piece of software available will delight few, and alienate most. You want to be best to market, not first to market.
I don't think *any* free software should be ported to Apple's user interface API (Cocoa?)
Cocoa is one of the sets of APIs available to developers. Others are Carbon, Java and raw BSD.
It seems to be missing much of the basic funtionality of X11
Oh, the irony of this statement.
i.e. network tranceparency.
Quartz (the window server/graphics API) does not, at this time, have remote display capabilities. Considering everything that had to be done for the first release of Mac OS X, and taking the target audience into account, it's not surprising that this wasn't a high priority.
But that's about where it ends. Quartz is quite full of functionality.
If Apple wants to pay for free software to be ported to their proprietary interface, that's their business. Expecting the comunity to do it for them is unreasonable.
Another poster addressed this, but just to reiterate -- Apple probably doesn't care all that much if OpenOffice runs on Mac OS X. I mean, they might promote it at the Mac OS X site, but they're not in desperate need of another office suite. MS Office is the biggie, and Apple makes the alternative -- AppleWorks. These are both built FOR the Mac. They're probably going to provide much a better end user experience than Unix-dervied OpenOffice ever will. The idea is to do a for users/by users port of OpenOffice so there's a free alternative.
I just don't see how it benifits free software to port to OSX.
So more poeple can run it?
It might be useful to build a Cocoa wrapper for X11. That would enable code written for OSX to run on Real Linux/Unix.
You probably want GNUStep, but it's not exactly finished.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
As someone who has to support MS applications on Mac OS, I have every right to bash MS.
First off, MS changes the damn file format with each major revision, forcing upgrades and general havoc when people try to exchange documents-- especially between MS-funded Universities and poorer school districts running ages-old MS software. You can hack solutions together, but generally they're expensive in terms of user education (find out what other person running, send document several times until you get a format that works) or monetary costs (deploying document translation software, plus user education, additional license hassles, and etc).
Secondly, MS Office apps are not WYSIWYG. The same document looks slightly different between different versions of Office, e.g. Office 98 vs. Office 97 vs. Office 2000. Makes it a real pain when someone is trying to print something on a version of Office different from what they wrote it on.
Printing wise, PowerPoint is just a pain. The Office 98 version of it comes with a hard-to-find "black and white printing by default" that you have to futz around in the print dialog box to undo on each new install (let's hear it for plain-text prefs files!). Also, PowerPoint prints funny; I can't tell how much time I've wasted trying to get poster-sized documents to print out right, while other applications (AppleWorks, FrameMaker, raw PostScript on unix) print just fine.
Security wise, Office applications are a joke, requiring the installation of anti-virus software to patch a deficient scripting system. Besides the auto-start worm, MS Office word macro virus are the only virus I've seen ever on the Mac OS platform (in 12 years of usage). On machines without Office, I don't need to go to the trouble and expense of installing and maintaining anti-virus software.
Expensive, buggy, insecure bloatware.
Well, originally, there was WriteNow.app, which was originally a Mac product (Apple paid for its development in case MacWrite didn't make it), then NeXT bought the company to have a wordprocessor to bundle. ~100,000 lines of M68K Assembler, not sure who owns it now (T/Maker?), but not terribly easy to port to Mac OS X....
:(
:( they're still refusing to do anything with it 'cause Apple renegged on their promise of free ``Yellow Box'' (i.e. Cocoa) run-time library licenses for Windows. PasteUp.app (written by Glenn Reid of www.rightbrain.com, he also worked on iMovie and PasteUp.app, which Adobe has lost :( is similarly locked up.
WordPerfect 1.0 for NeXT was roughly equal to WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS (but with the 5.1 table editor?), but Services and Display PostScript made it quite nice---ported in just 6 weeks too (but they started from the working Unix version), but Corel seems to've lost the code, and it's way out of date anyway
CedarWord has been mentioned, but no sign of activity at http://www.cedar.co.uk/ (interesting program, uses TeX's H&J algorithm)
OpenWrite was absorbed by Sun when they bought Lighthouse.
WriteUp.app's status hasn't changed AFAICT from www.afstrade.com
There' is TeX of course, and NeXTTeX, TeXview.app and InstantTeX are unmatched for integration and features anywhere ('s why my NeXT Cube at home is still my main machine)
William
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Lettering Art in Modern Use
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
mr100percent asked:
.html support
(re: WordPerfect for NeXTstep 1.x being out of date)
> How can a word processor be out of date?
- Can't open recent word-processing format files
- No
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
besides that, there was a whole set of productivity applications from LightHouse Design
The really interesting/ironic thing is that it was Sun that bought out Lighthouse and then proceeded to kill all those apps. If Sun really gave a damn about OS X, they would open source that code. Their dropping of support for OpenStep in favor of their over-hyped Java has not amused many developers either.
The absolute worst thing which could happen is 'porting' OpenOffice in some way whereby it adopts the Aqua appearance without the mac behavior.
If you port the application with the correct APIs in Carbon or Cocoa, I don't believe there would be any way for it to behave differently. The OS X services are built in when ported to the correct APIs, this affectively grants a level of similarity between all applications that are OS X native. If you have Aqua, you have the OS X behavior as well...
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
Here we go with the tired old myth again... The real story (check "Inside Windows 2000" or http://www.sysinternals.com if you don't believe me), is that there are indeed 2 sets of APIs, but not for the paranoia-fuelled reasons that /.ers like to present.
/.ers, who want to play with the kernel for reasons varying from genuine interest and curiosity through to full-on intellectual masturbation, but in reality most people want to get on and use the OS. And if you think you can't mess with NT internals, check the references above...
Programmers call the Win32 API, which is fully documented (http://msdn.microsoft.com), and is the interface to Windows that everyone should use for development. Meanwhile, there is an internal kernel API, which is undocumented and should not be called directly. This allows Microsoft to modify kernel functions without breaking application code - it's a simple abstraction layer.
Now, OK, you might well argue that Microsoft should document their kernel API too, for the masochists in the crowd. However, how many people really want to mess with low-level IO calls which may change in the next servicepack, when Win32 exposes a consistent set of filesystem calls for file creation, deletion etc.?
This sort of thing may be anathema to die-hard
Right, the Gimp in OS X runs ina rootless Xfree86 mode, so you have the windows alongside OS X apps, but there is no functionality between them (drag and drop) and the apps don't recognize each other. Not great.
Perhaps I'm jus cynical, but paid programmers will probably do something better than we-work-for-kudos programmers.
Or are they like the Spanish Inquisition? An almost fanatical devotion to the GPL?
How can a word processor be out of date?
I agree wholeheartedly. For advances I rely on apple, and for open file format I use RTF
You're right about the resentment.
It coud behave differently in that there is no drag and drop support, no standard dialog boxes, it'd be way different.
Hey, those all support drag-and-drop, bet you 30 bucks OpenOffice won't.
Oh, and all of them except QT4 follow most of the guidelines.
Isn't that gcc's job?
Volunteering their time for the OS X VERSION.
Blah blah hidden APIs blah blah.
OK, so Office runs under Wine, right? So why don't you look at the debugging logs to see which functions it's calling in which DLLs, then you can disassemble them (like the Winers have obviously been doing) and see what they do. Then you can download the source to OpenOffice, and take advantage of the super hidden APIs! And stop whining!
Or were you trolling?
OK, I think there are cheaper ways of not giving money to Microsoft, but whatever floats your boat...
The point is, that for Microsoft to lose market share, someone else must gain it. It would seem a bit wrong for OpenOffice to gain market share for some other reason than being a good product. I mean, it clearly isn't at this point, unless you want to run it on a platform on which MS Office is not supported, or if you're too tight to pay for it.
And there's the fact that OpenOffice is clearly copying MS Office. If there's going to be competition, is it competition between features? Ease of use? Different paradigms? Or is it just "use this, because we wrote it and it's open source and you should be sticking it to the man"?
I have already explained my point, but for your benefit, it goes something like this. In all of the cases you mentioned, the MS product was *better* than the competition. Competition is *good*, right? Right? Only it sucks to lose doesn't it?
If you want to compete, you have to *make a better product*. That's what your first concern is. Not what happens to the other guy. What are *you* going to do to make Joe Punter buy your shit instead of the other man's?
OpenOffice is trying to compete with MS Office, and good luck to them. My point was about good and bad reasons. Hopefully I have clarified this for anyone who might have been confused.
ps. OK, maybe not Access. Whatever, it's pretty user friendly, but I am not a database expert.
support in getting a Mac OS-X port out for OpenOffice is critical to keeping a Microsoft dominance of yet another operating system's office suite to a minimum
Does anyone actually want to make a good product any more? Or do they just want to ensure that Microsoft loses market share? What about the fact that Open/StarOffice are pretty much rip-offs of MS office anyway?
The reason Microsoft has had such trouble getting folks to migrate past Office 95 is that there is not enough new features worth paying for or screwing up your machine for. Office applications are commodities now. The opportunity here is to standardize on a file format and release it to the public. Then let the tool builders build small little apps that provide all of the required functionality individually. Lots will be free or shareware. People can use whichever ones they want. Look at all of the little HTML and XML editors you can get for nothing. The same thing will happen here.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
I've always preffered WordPerfect to office. I used 5-8 on Windows and 8-2000 on Linux, and found the interface more appealing. One thing I did notice is that Microsoft made Office "easier" by hiding a lot of options out of direct view. While it may be helpful for new users, it wasnt necessarilly as efficient to get to the features. Wish I could be more specific, but I havent used either Word Perfect or Word in a little under a year.
As an MCSE who happily goes home to his Linux and Mac Boxen at night, I'd suggest tacking a look at OmniWeb for your browser, OS X's very good mail application Mail and keep your eye on the office suite market because Office 98 is getting long in the tooth and its replacement seems to be having some problems (especially Entourage).
I think you might seriously reconsider your blanket condemnation of the Open Source movement (and business model) since Apple has certainly decided that there's money in open source and have based Mac OS X on an open source core (a freeBSD derivative called Darwin).
DB
"KOffice already runs on OS X"
AFAIK, KOffice requires KDE to run at all. KDE requires QT which is made by a nice friendly company called Trolltech. Trolltech technical support kindly informed me that they aren't going to make QT compatible with Mac OS X until they are ready to release a point upgrade past 3.0 (which isn't out yet).
DB
Omniweb's taking care of the browser, the email app is written already (and called Mail), and they are likely to have MS-Office itself for the forseeable future.
Now I predict that within a year or two, you are going to see Mac OS X develop a Linux compatibility layer (just like every other BSD variant) so it is quite likely that anybody programming for Linux is going to have at least some of their userbase being run on a Mac.
I don't think that you quite understood. I called the software company that makes Qt (trolltech) and *they* say you can't run it on Mac OS X since they need to port it. If you can get it up on Mac OS X, please give instructions...
Actually, The Office that will be presented should be a carbonized app that runs under OS 9.1 OR OS X natively...
> Why is MS Office so popular?
It has nothing to do with the actual application, and/or its ease-of-use. It has everything to do with the fact that MS Office file formats are THE method that people use to collaborate on documents over the Internet. They send these things around in emails like they weren't full of hidden, private information, the last ten versions of the document, and carrying viruses.
Imagine that your boss sends you a Word document, with the revisions tracking features on, and you open it up in OpenOffice, work on it, save it, send it back to him, and he opens it in Word and it is garbled. You and OpenOffice are going to be blamed. Much better to just suck it up and use Word from the start, then when something goes wrong with the document (something almost always does) you will be able to say, "hey, I'm using the newest version of Word, here, it must be somebody else's fault."
What's needed is PERFECT support for the newest Microsoft file formats, available as a BSD library or something, so that anybody could hook it up to their app and everybody would be able to read and write this common format FLAWLESSLY. Failing perfection, it will go nowhere. It is useless to anybody unless it is guaranteed to work just like the newest version of Office. That way a person can use it while knowing that they are not going to destroy a Word document that comes across their desk during their daily work by opening it in OpenOffice or whatever they prefer.
I like to write in BBEdit, but I have to paste the stuff into Word before I give it to a publisher, and then work in Word on any edits that were made, once the document comes back to me. Can't see a way out of that yet.
Microsoft's dominance in office software is not about the features or the ease of use, it's just that office workers need to share their work with co-workers, and they are used to doing that with a haphazard system of sending MS Office documents of differing versions to each other by email. The documents sometimes carry viruses, and they still send them around. The documents often contain private information and previous revisions that are accessible to anyone with a plain text editor, and they still send them around.
... it would have to be open to the user plugging into a translation dictionary that wasn't made by Microsoft, it would have to open a Word document and then save it as a Word document, or open a WordPerfect document and save it as a WordPerfect document, (all this without every asking you to save a document in the app's OWN format) and it would also have to promote a new, common, open format so that we could do away with the past cruft. That would be software that actually does what Office users need. (Mac OS X may be providing the groundwork for this with the object-oriented Cocoa environment, Services, AppleEvents, QuickTime translation, and more.)
... very open, very compatible, easy to use, reasonably priced. Good security, no viruses (can you believe!), and respect for the user's humanity would also be a nice bonus. It is there for the taking. A key is to stop thinking "word processor", "spreadsheet", etc. and just think of a user sitting down to do some office work at a fast, stable machine that's always connected to the Internet. Those machines are available all over running BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and some versions of Windows. What can you do to enable office people to get their work done better and easier than they can by starting up MS Office? What can you do to enable collaboration between users, regardless of what company developed their software?
If you create a better system for people to do office work and share it with their fellows, that is what will replace MS Office. It would most likely be HTML and XML based, and leverage the Internet and company network heavily. It would run on every platform, and be cheap. It will do all kinds of things for the user that Office is not doing, removing whole levels of complexity. It will have to be available as an open source BSD-style licensed library that EVERYBODY can use to make their app a part of the office workflow. Sort of like what MS Office would look like if you really made it take advantage of the Internet
A new office system to replace MS Office will have to look at the needs of Office users and satisfy them in a way that MS never can
Sun has released the project to the community (which I intrepret as dis-owning it)
Sun have dis-owned the StarOffice/OpenOffice project? Wow, that's big news, how did you deduce that?
StarOffice/OpenOffice is not GTK+ based. Stardivision used to have their own widget library that acts as "frontend" for other widget libraries. That means the most work for doing a new port was actually porting the widget library called "StarView" to the new platform's native widget library.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
- Hey, maybe you can help me. I've got a dual boot 333MHz machine running Win98 and Mandrake 8.0/Gnome 1.4 and StarOffice on both. The same machine runs most windows apps and browsing between 3-5 times faster than Linux
Dont run gnome 1.4. Maybe you dont realize this, but Gnome1.4 was designed for 800Mhz cpu with 256MB of ram. Recent versions have improved that slightly, but it's certainly not gonna run well at all on a 333Mhz cpu. I assume by 3x slower you mean launch times. If you've got Gnome1.4 taking up 90% of your ram, of course your start up times are gonna turn to shit. Lets face it, you haven't really researched the linux platform well, if you think your choice is optimal or appropriate. But that's ok.I think it's fair to say that Open Office, more than any other piece of desktop free software, is pushing Linux/Free Software onto the corperate desktop. It's hard to beleive that the recent announcement from Ford Motor Company about its long term goal to move to completely Open Source desktop was motived by Gnome Office or KOffice. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if Ford had in mind Windowmaker + Open Office on old pentium 166 - 300 machines. It sure beats buying Pentium IV's to run the new-fangled XP suite of bloatware.
Of course, when subscriptions happen you wont be able to pirate all your MS software. I think the first rule of drug dealing is: the first few times are always free. (beside the point and not relevant, but the second rule is probably: Always keep them waiting!! Ugh!).
Yes. I have a link for you. Basicly, Ford says that it's a long term goal of theirs to move to an Open Source desktop.
Article on Ford's announcement.
The first thing they need to do is to light a fire under Apple's butt to get the C++ support in gcc for OS X up to snuff.
. ht ml
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/macosx_issues
The article said they needed people, but didn't suggest one way or the other that they'd be paid for their work. Maybe so, maybe not.
Why should I help Scott "no privacy" "gates sucks" McNealy with his corporate strategic goals, without getting much in return?
Secondly, the writeup says 'lead'. Wouldn't the folks who are already writing bits of this product be the best applicants? Fishing for people out of the blue with no experience on the architecture of this particular product seems kinda strange, given that the source is open.
Closed Source pays its developers. I use that to pay my rent, which won't take free-as-in-beer lease agreements. Open Source is a spare-time hobby for the most part (the luminaries get speaking fees, the rest of the developers get... source code).
Hey, there are some projects that are sponsored, and some guys are finding cool companies that pay for open source. I hope this is one of those cases, but the article didn't give me much hope or indication of that.
[
programmers and porters would be well served to throw in some 'MS Office Compatibility' in terms of functionality and/or 'Help for Microsoft Office Users'
Microsoft Excel has for years offered "Help for Lotus 1-2-3 Users", and Microsoft Word has for years offered "Help for WordPerfect Users."
Since these applications are trying to be fungible by supporting all of the commodity features in approximately the same way, the only reason to stay in the market is to get a piece of the market share. There's no corporate advantage to being compatible, other than to muscle in on established turf.
[
Paradox was a database? I thought it was a torture device! ;-)
;-)
(I did have to work with it a bit in about 1997, but honestly I'd blocked it from memory. Maybe that was a good thing. Thanks a LOT for remind me of it!
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
I agree, porting this to have a nice Cocoa-based GUI wrapper would be a LOT of work. OTOH, the same is true with GIMP, which may be more worthwhile (maybe). I do wonder if just starting a Cocoa office suite from scratch might be a good idea. Any old NeXT users around? What was "the" word processor for NeXTStep? Was there one? Does it still exist, and if so, who owns it? I know "the" spreadsheet was Mesa, which rocks.
Frankly, I've been pinning my hopes on Nisus, which is rewriting Writer for Cocoa (not Carbon) and has always had a sweet word processor. However, these days, just a good wp and spreadsheet isn't enough; people want integration with that abomination powerpoint (ugh, the bane of corporate presentations... not cuz the app sucks, but cuz the presentations suck), the worst database ever (access), and other MS garbage.
Frankly, I think the most crucial feature of an office suite is TRANSPARENT handling of ALL the features (cruft) of MSOffice documents - revisions, that stupid highlighting stuff, etc - and that's hard to do. I still worry that many users will be "forced" into using MSOffice, not because better suites aren't available, but because MS has embraced/extended what a word processor or spreadsheet should do to the point where nobody can really compete.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
All the openoffice comments are in German, don'tcha know.
house, with a boarded front door. There is a small car here. A grue is chasing your ass and you have 5 seconds to start the car and drive away before he eats you. Would you rather have the ignition placed next to the steering wheel just like you expect on all other cars, or would you rather have a little variety and have to go searching around for it?
Remember, you only have 5 seconds. Choose well, grasshopper.
Better find another "funny" acronym. Although I never found the Mac OS to be less stable than Windows 9x, Mac OS X is extremely stable. I've got an unsupported 6-year-old Power Mac 7500 with an overclocked PowerLogix G3 processor running Mac OS X, and it's been up for 10 days straight so far. The only times I've had to reboot it in the last month is when I updated the OS.
Recently I compiled/installed MySQL, the newest version of Apache, PHP, and PHP-Nuke, and I'm hosting a PHP-Nuke site off of it. And it's still running without a hitch.
I've run my share of Microsoft programs, and I'd to say that their software has gotten better, but it's still a little flaky. In fact, I used to be able to completely freeze my Mac (requiring a reboot) opening a corrupted Word document. Mac OS X may be the perfect environment for Microsoft because Mac OS X can handle their buggy software.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Because when it comes right down to it, the average Joe in his cubicle doesn't give a rodent's posterior about "fighting the Microsoft hegemony," he's just trying to do his job with as few complications as possible.
And by 100% compatible, I don't mean you can import the file and resave it in native format. As soon as the user sees that progress bar pop up that says "Converting from MS Word," you've suddenly shattered all illusions of 100% compatibility; they know that some formatting, somewhere, is going to drop out, and they'll never find it (but their client undoubtably will).
Ok, I am the first to jump on the bandwagon and say that Microsoft is an evil plot to undermine advancements in technology. But, if one can step back and look at MS Office objectively then there is no denying that MS Office is the one application that has gained its recognition on its merits. Once MS Word was able to overcome WordPerfect as the superior word processor there has only been improvements in the complete office package. The only office product to even attempt to compete against MS office was Lotus and that was a vain attempt with a weak set of applications.
MS Office is the standard and instead of trying to fight it we should get behind any, yes ANY, attempt to port this product to ANY non MS Windows platform. If MS Office is ever ported to Linux or BSD it will be the first step in moving that OS into the mainstream as a workstation OS. Until then they will be primarily used as servers and the fringe devotee.
Oh and YES I want the paperclip guy to DIE DIE DIE!
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
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.
After about an hour of use, IE on OS X usually allocates about 150 megs of memory. A browser that only takes 30 sounds like heaven.
--
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
True, but be careful what you wish for. If Sun can bind you with electronic agreements, so could everyone else. Fax doesn't sound like it'd be too bad though, I'm sure most of us have a few old fax modems lying around.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
So, by giving Sun your copyright, you allow Sun the possibility of abandoning the GPLed version and releasing a commercial version. By retaining your copyright, you allow anyone with sufficiently deep pockets to fight it out in court to release a commercial fork. In either case, I think the bad publicity would offset any advantages, anyway.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
If it really bothers you, you are obviously allowed to fork it, ala Xemacs. A bit more work than you're probably looking for, but certainly a viable option (and you can keep taking code from them forever, as long as new realeases stay GPLed)
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I think you forgot your anti-paranoia pills...
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Well, there was FrameMaker. I'd love to see that for Mac OS X... besides that, there was a whole set of productivity applications from LightHouse Design.
I'd be happy to take on the task. I've got a team of developers that would love to make this happen. We're very interested in giving back to the community. If you'd like to join us, send an email to bill@gatesfoundation.com and we'll be happy to answer all of your questions.
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
So what's my point:
- I agree that most people use MSO for compatibility reasons more than for ease of use.
- I think that (at least for the all important Word Procesor) people who clame MSWord is easy to use have never really tried anything else.
- It is quite possible to make a better User interface than MicroSoft's, It will be an issue of compatibility that will make or break Open Office.
Perhaps the best thing that could happen would be for OfficeXP (even more) Restrictive and convoluted license to bomb and send the market looking for alternitives.JfMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
What is really missing is an Exchange-Client for Linux/BSD/OS X Outlook for OS X will come its way but to gain market share in the corporate market it is necessary to be able to connect to the "standard" mail and calender server most corporations use. Ximian is trying something for gnome, but the best would be something working with all windowmanagers
It is not possible to use technology to solve social problems
I'm sure I could write a mission critical application using the Atari 2600
You'd better learn to put the squeeze on, as Atari 2600 has only 128 bytes of RAM.
Will I retire or break 10K?
For $100 million, you don't think MS couldn't get all the hidden APIs they wanted?
My problem with OpenOffice/StarOffice is that it claims to be so "OPEN" .. but it can't even open wordperfect documents.. whats with that??
Strikes me that Microsoft's porting
:-)
Office to OSX finally answers the
popular troll about porting Office to linux.
No doubt it will run SUID root with
Active-X and Outlook.
Talk about "embrace and extend"....
The problem with MS Office dominance is that people don't get to see any alternatives. Be it Lotus Smartsuite, Corel Wordperfect Office, or any other. I don't know if these produts still exist today.
The other problem, is that the vast majority of people use Office, and need to exchange documents with others, and it forces everyone to use Office.. At my school all the computers with printers have NT4 and Office 2000 installed. If I do some work in my home computer and need to print it, I need to convert the files into office 2000-readable formats. Combined with incompatibilities in the filters, I need to spend a lot more time fixing the documents in word before I save to a zip disk and go the school to print. Heck, if I need to use word to fix formatting errors, I might as well use Office from start to finish, without hassle. But it needs to be the same office version as the one my school is using, or it's the same thing if I used Staroffice. Office can't even read properly documents saved in a previous version, so open source developers can't take the blame.
Last year I had to make my last year's project report, and I used Office. It was a complete nightmare to have it print correctly. Some pages had no page number, others had pictures split between two pages, formatting styles were completely diferente on screen and on paper... I spent almost two days correcting everything. And to all my colleagues it happened the same thing. WYSIWYG? More like WYSIWYWBICBBTDI (what you see is what you wanted but I can't be bothered to do it).
On a side note, IBM had a rather basic, but still cool Works for it's OS/2, that I used for a while when I fell in love with OS/2. It wouldn't hurt if it's source was released and had ports for Linux/*BSD/BeOS or OSX.
You are so far wrong it'snot even funny.
Is OpenOffice GTK+ based? I seem to think it is, in which case the big problem here would be to get GTK+ or a reasonable facsimile ported over to OS X. Question is, can that be done easily?
/Brian
One thing I'm curious about is what the release timeline is like for openoffice.
I'm all for the standard open source 'release it when it's ready' approach, but it would be nice for the countless minions waiting to ditch MS Office to have at least a vague idea of when the promised revamping (with the xml file formats) is coming out.
On the openoffice.org site, they have a roadmap that has no mention of a schedule other than a cover date of 'through dec. 2001'.
Anyone have any approximate idea of a release schedule?
Sun plans on using OpenOffice as the basis for StarOffice 6 -- just like Netscape uses Mozilla as the base for Navigator.
Unfortunately, quite a few parts of StarOffice weren't owned by Sun, so Sun couldn't relase the source for them. Because of that, much got broken when the propriatory parts were no longer available.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I use Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Office 98 daily with no problems at all. Compare this to bloat/shovelware Netscape and their inability to release a stable browser in years that requires less than 30 megs of RAM.
I will continue to use MS office products as well over some unstable open source port that will never have the dedicated update support that a money making company can provide.
Lots of stuff runs on OS X's unix compatibility APIs, including XFree and Qt-Unix and most anything else that you'd want to port.
However, non of this stuff will be considered by the userbase to be 'native' applications. (Mac users have this nasty habit about actually caring about cut-n-paste!) So consider anything that isn't Carbon or Cocoa to be an interesting experiment by hackers and not a Mac OS X application.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
...getting a Mac OS-X port out for OpenOffice is critical to keeping a Microsoft dominance of yet another operating system's office suite to a minimum. The project is need of someone to step up to the plate as a project lead. Let's not forget that MS made a ton of its initial cash selling office software for the Apple and Macintosh Operating Systems. In fact, MS Office first appeared on those OSes and NOT on Windows. Though many Mac users have chosen to use Corel's Office, MS has always been #1 or #2 on that platform. -Kryptonik
own browser, email program, Office compliant word processor
Well, two out of three ain't so bad: witness AppleWorks, a word processor/productivity suite free with every "consumer" level Mac, and the email client on X. Does AppleWorks lack some things? Sure. But it's also good enough for writing letters, and good enough for lots of people that use Office only because they think they need to. AppleWorks also imports Word docs, now too, although the import feature leaves a lot to be desired.
Incidentally, the extended Apple Warranty also covers their consumer software products, including Appleworks. Different than guarantee, yes, but a start in the right direction.
Note Bene: In Jobsian, "consumer"==iMac and iBook. "Pro"==G4 and TiBook, and Apple doesn't give you AppleWorks because they assume you'll buy Office.
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$tar -xvf
I was kinda hard on Sun. The tone of the article was absurd though...
"The project is need of someone to step up to the plate as a project lead"
Give me a break... Any fool who volunteers his time to make it easier for IBM & Sun to sell workstations is a complete and total idiot. Where is CmdrTaco & company? They are constant open-source nags/cheerleaders but you see nothing from them but Slashcode. (Which is a slow, bloated piece of shit)
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Sun Microsystems needs an experienced developer to lead a team of volunteers in porting Sun's OpenOffice application to Mac OS 10.
The candidate will be compensated soley by free Sun t-shirts, mousepads and mugs. No salary or fringe benefits are available.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
So Microsoft is releasing Office 2001 for OSX next week and someone just now decided that Open Office needs a Project Lead in order to prevent Microsoft dominance? And today's Friday? And oh by the way - do it all for no pay. Look's like someone is going to have a busy weekend. Talk about pressure to get a major release out...
Microsoft Office has held a commanding lead in the Mac market for about 10 years - far longer than in Windows, where MS has to fight off Lotus and Borland back in the Win 3.1 days. Mac users are also historically very willing to put up with shit from Microsoft - e.g. the very slow and buggy Word 6. Now that Office 2001 (and previously 98) work well, why switch?
sulli
RTFJ.
Of course, if/when MS moves to subscription pricing, then GPL software looks more attractive. But will it be any good? This story implies that it won't.
sulli
RTFJ.
No one actually buys Office. It comes "free" with your computer, if not most people copy it from a friend. I've never actually seen someone go to the store and buy it.
Um, no. The Macintosh came out in 1984. At the time it was released, DOS was king. Windows 1.0 didn't ship until almost 1986!
Seriously, if you're not going to do it right, don't bother. It needs to have documentation, good icons, help files, and work like a MacOS program. If it's just a cheap port of the Linux version with MacOSX windows and buttons, you might as well not bother. Mac users won't put up with that crap the way *nix people will.
I could be way off, but it seems that crossplatform compatability is the biggest deal here. I work in an office of 40 Windows computers and 25 Macintosh computers. We use Microsoft Office because we can share files so easily with eachother and people outside the office. All our vendors and clients use MS Office. Microsoft knows how to make software speak "MS Office" better than anyone else ... because they wrote it. And that's the biggest issue, being able to share with others.
Even if OpenOffice blows MS Office away, MS already has a strong foot hold that even the new people want to be able to communicate with, trouble free.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Every Mac you buy comes with AppleWorks which works
on OS X pretty well. MS will release Office for Mac
(OS X version) this fall. Do you think you need another
office suite for Mac?
Well, I don't.
Mac users want a mac interface. That's why most of them hate Mozilla and most Java apps. They don't follow Mac human interface conventions.
The absolute worst thing which could happen is 'porting' OpenOffice in some way whereby it adopts the Aqua appearance without the mac behavior. Unless you're going to completely rewrite OpenOffice as a mac app it's better just to use rootless X11. At least then it'll be easy to differentiate between mac apps and mac app wannabes
---
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
I must disagree. I can think of atleast one certain website that, if the /. effect took its toll, would increase productivity 10x fold.
IE: $0 vs mozilla $0
Office XP ~$600 vs Open Office $0
Let's be honest here. Why is MS Office so popular? A lot of people will say 'ease of use', but it's really just that most people who use it are used to the set of features and mentality that Microsoft has gotten everyone familiar with. Open Office if anything, is easier to use than MS Office. Still, getting it to run on OSX, programmers and porters would be well served to throw in some 'MS Office Compatibility' in terms of functionality and/or 'Help for Microsoft Office Users'.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Along with the other comment about Win32 APIs versus kernel APIs, there's a very simple way to see there's hidden code. MSDN supposedly has all Win32 API calls documented. However, if you use a simple DLL viewer, including those supplied by MS to developers, you will find functions that are otherwise undocumented. Using non-MS tools, you can investigate DLLs for classes that are undocumented as well.
The functions and classes are there. But unless you look, you won't find them because MS, for whatever reason, won't document them.
---
Developers: We can use your help.
People here seem to be forgetting that Apple has been producing their own Office competitor for some time. It's called AppleWorks, and the latest version (6.2) is an OS X native application. Sure, it may not have all of the bells and whistles that Office has, but it does everything that I need it to, including:
Open MS Word and Excel files.
WYSIWYG word processing with all of the standard gizmos (spell check, mail merge, etc.).
OLE style drag-and-drop functionality for video clips\sound files\whatever.
PowerPointish presentation software.
A decent spreadsheet and database.
Plus it integrates super-well with all of Apple's other software, such as iMovie and Quicktime. All that, for a third (or less) of the cost of M$ Office. I got my copy yesterday, and I'm very pleased with it.
While I would love to see OpenOffice for my platform, I don't feel that I'm without options. One of the beautiful things about OS X is that it's still a free-for-all and there are no dominant applications. Without a stranglehold on the OS, Microsoft has to compete just like everyone else.
This
For OS X, they will both be running natively using only Apple's public API's, and we will get to see how much better OpenOffice is when not running on a crippled MS Windows platform.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Warum ist das ein Problem, Amerikanischer Schweinhund? Wissen Sie nicht das Englisch ist eine Deutsche Sprache?
T-Bone
"They're German, don't mention the war! I did once, but I think I got away with it."
- John Cleese, Fawlty Towers
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Sorry, my German is rustier than I thought. Perhaps I'd better oil her.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Office 2002 does not run on OS X it runs on OS 9.1 or whatever that emulation layer is called. OpenOffice will be a true OS X application.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
1997? Ha! that's nothing. You should have had to work in the DOS version, with just QBE, no SQL support.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Two points: one, Apple has a buddy relationship with Microsoft, so they're not going to create anything that competes directly with Microsoft products. They used to have an integrated web browser email client (cyberdog) but abandoned it years ago. Appleworks is equivalent to MS Works; it's under-powered for most tasks. Two: Apple has changed its relationship with the developer community. You no longer have to cough up megabucks for the documentation or tools; they're free for the asking from the Apple Developers' site, and the tools come on the OS X CD. Much better than when you had to spend $500 on CodeWarrior, $200 on Inside the Mac OS, a few years ago.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Microsoft should at least release a free PowerPoint viewer for OS X, as they have for Windows, but I agree that PowerPoint is a tool to make uncreative people think they're creative.
And Access isn't the worst database ever; I guess you never had to use Paradox :)
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
There are some interesting comments over there, too.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
They're recommending using C++ and C to call the OS X Windowing APIs, which doesn't sound like a good idea, since the GUI could be built much quicker with Objective-C and AppBuilder.
It almost seems that building a MacOffice from scratch would be easier than this port, but I'm no expert in porting projects.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
"You want to be best to market, not first to market."
That all depends. If your sole motive is to make the *Best* product, then being first is not that important. If you are after market share and want a return on your investment, then being first is critical.
If you look at the software industry over the past few years, the "first to market" strategy is clearly being followed.
Look at micro$oft. IIRC ever 1.0 version of software they have ever shipped has been crap. (IE, 16-bit windows, first version of NT, and so on). Eventually the patches and bug fixes are released and the product is usable. (OK, maybe in the case of M$ that is a bit of an overstatement, but grant the point for the time being).
There are tons of games that ship and you need to download megabytes of patches to make it playable. I think in the case of Half Life, I had to download a 25MB patch. Should it have shipped if it needed that much work? Probably not, but if they did not ship it when it did, their sales opportunities might have suffered.
The point is, if you can get to market, first, people will purchase it, regardless of the quality. Once they have it, these same people will stick to that product and are not likely to replace it with an alternative.
To coin a phrase, being first isn't everything, it's the only thing.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
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
Good question. Especially since Apple has their own office suite, AppleWorks, which I myself use because it does the basic stuff I need and only costs $79 (compared to $429.95 for MS Office 2001). And AppleWorks has already been ported to OSX.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Okay, so there are a area a lot of Mac people who use Microsoft Word out there. And they have very talented Mac programmers that make pretty good applications - I would go as far to say that their Mac apps are greatly superior to their PC apps. But raise your hand if you actually bought it instead of copying it from a friend. The reason this project is so important is that, as a community, we should have an option to not have to buy Office X. Or Appleworks, either. As a community, we can create our own applications. And StarOffice sounds like a good start. (And for those complaining about the OS X IE: All the alternatives, OmniWeb, iCab and my favorite, Opera, are much better. All browsers for OS X are still in beta, so pick another one to use.)
Two: Apple has changed its relationship with the developer community. You no longer have to cough up megabucks for the documentation or tools; they're free for the asking from the Apple Developers' site, and the tools come on the OS X CD.
The problem with Apple isn't so much that's it's a closed system. It WAS their problem, it was the reason they lost to the IBM clones, but we're all beyond that now. The problem is that they're currently trying to emulate existing computer models rather than trying something different. Opening up their systems to open source is a good move, better late than never. But it isn't going to save them, between Microsoft and the Unix derivatives there isn't much room to manuever. Apple's best hope is the home market.
Computers are still alot more difficult to use than they should be. The home market would love a simple box to surf and check their email with but they're not going to buy them unless they can expect that they won't need to be replaced anytime soon. Apple is in the best place to do this, but they need to be able to guarantee the software on their boxes as well as the hardware. They seem to have a reluctance to write their own software if they can help it, probably for the reason you mentioned.
To survive they need to write their own browser, email program, Office compliant word processor, etc. No other company is going to give them what they need, neither will some well meaning ronin programmers. If they don't figure this out they'll just continue the slide towards becomming another generic PC manufacture and I'll never be able to buy my parents a computer they can easily use.
Omniweb's taking care of the browser, the email app is written already (and called Mail), and they are likely to have MS-Office itself for the forseeable future.
The problem is that these are all 3rd party software. In order to design a truly user friendly machine, I mean a whole lot simpler than the PCs that are available today, you can't rely on a bunch of different pieces of software. Not only do they need to be preinstalled on the machine and easily accessible, they need nearly identical user interfaces. Essentially Apple (or somebody else, Microsoft isn't doing it) needs to provide a single, unified user interface that a trained monkey could figure out. Any machine should of course be expandable but the essential design should be very, very simple. One click internet and all that. There is a definate market here, but it is evidently beyond Apple's grasp.
The problem is that Microsoft isn't going to allow a free product to dominate over Office, under any circumstances. We know that. What will be really interesting to see is how they manage to stop it in an environment that they don't have absolute control over, ie OSX.
I am not a mac user or developer, but perhaps this article should be distributed on sites which may have an audience likely to undertake such a project. Surely there are popular mac or open source for mac sites on the web? Maybe even posting this article to a BSD site would cater to interested users in an effort to drum-up support for Mac OpenOffice?
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
I have one quote for you, "Chaos is the Spice of Life and Order is its Nemesis, How May I Assist Your Quest?"
I didn't pull this one out of the blue. If you know where this one came from, well, you probably played too many computer games.
Anyways, a little variety and custom interfaces never hurt anybody and will help people get used to something more then they the limited they have developed or pictured in their mind. Not saying Mac users still won't use it, I'm saying is if it is just an interface their not used too, that is no reason for not using something. A learning curve never hurt anybody.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
What do you think. All cars should be black, manufactured by Ford, and have the title of being a Model T or should we have Subaru, Toyota, Chevy, etc. The interfaces are generally, via. recognizable, but not so different that you wouldn't be able to recognize it without much effort. People don't respond to extreme changes but get bored with no change, in other words, I'll take the second because it shouldn't be so different I wouldn't be able to find it(no one would buy it.) If they were all the same, no one would buy them either. Some Chaos is better then complete order.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
it was quite a nice program, though apple already have something similar for OSX. having Works for other unices would be nice.
remember the old days when there were loads of different business applications in every category? why did we let it slip away...
A question - do you (or anyone) know what the difference is between rtf and rtfd? I can't find any documentation or information on what rtfd is, just know that TextEdit uses it. What are the differences? I was curious if either was a viable option for an open standard.
--- What?
The only way to go is to create an open file format for documents and then get enough companies/groups on as many OSs as possible to create much better applications than what Microsoft so pathetically offers. This does not mean, as Microsoft believes, piling on the features whether or not they are actually a good thing nor whether or not they are implemented well. It means doing the basics the best and innovating intelligently. We need to put them behind the curve, and in an open source, widely available, very easy to use way. That and perform a whole heck of a lot of human sacrifices.
Microsoft dominates without justification, as always, but I believe it is possible to topple them. Everyone gave up on being better a long time ago and instead tried to emulate. Now it's time to bring back real advances.
--- What?
Okay, I'm a Mac user too and I do wish for an alternative to: MS office, MS Outlook, MS Explorer. Why ? Simply, because I like to use the SW that works for me. While MS office is certainly feature-packed, it simply is a pain to use. I have to use multiple languages etc. Altough having disabled all "autofarmat" etc. option it still does it ! When highlighting _one_ letter to make it upper case, it does so with the whole word. When two consecutive words start with an asterisk, autiformatting kicks in. I just can't stop it. It's tiring, time consuming. The other products aren't good either. I don't want to go on here with it. The plain fact why we need good products is, because the ones we "have" to use aren't. Office is so overautomated, it takes me 5x more time to write a text with it, than, let's say ,with SimpleText.
The news about Nisus sounds encouraging.
Here are a few featured I'd definitely like to see: a) Ask user whether he/she wants a progress automated.
b) Make it _easy_ to enable/disable autoformat.
c) Unicode support
d) right -to-left capability
e) print to pdf
f) high degree of customizability
If I were a programmer I'd certainly step up to the mark. I'd aim for a Cocoa application - certainly not the "single window/desktop" mess that StarOffice seems to be.
As it is I've thought about things like this a lot. I'm working on starting up my own consultancy/training business. My aim is essentially to have a small team of consultants and trainers and have two programmers for conultancy work. 50% of their job will be to do what we call our business. 25% will be to surf the web and troll on /. The remaining time will be to contribute to things like the OSX port of OpenOffice...
I think it's important to contractually oblige people to surf the internet and troll around on /.
I agree, and I would also like to add the following:
Mac OS X Server 1.x did have network transparency. It was based on a Display PostScript imaging model which allowed redirection of the PostScript to any host's Window Server (provided the security settings allowed this). Not only did this function so well that every program automatically worked remotely (without special code to enable the ability), one could even calibrate a monitor with a program running on another host (useful for when the monitor is attached to a HP PA-RISC machine and the calibration program is only compiled for Motorola).
In the conversion from Display PostScript to Quartz's PDF imaging model, this universally available command-line feature went away. The only hope is an obscure comment in one of the FatBrain books on Mac OS X which mentions the ability to redirect the display to another host. The word on the street is that Apple has left this as a "third party opportunity."