Sun Denies StarOffice on Mac OS X

mattworld1 writes, "MacCentral is reporting that while development of OpenOffice for Mac OS X will continue, Sun is denying that a version of StarOffice is in the works. This is unfortunate, as it would be nice for Mac OS X users to have a good alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office." Apparently it's not all bad news, as VValdo writes, "The recent announcement of a collaboration from Apple/Sun on a Java-based version of StarOffice for Mac OS X shocked and angered many of the OpenOffice developers who had been left totally in the dark. After two days of intense programming on a proof of concept, they announced a first look at Open Office in Aqua." Neat!

Comments

FP

[Anonymous Coward]

Suck it.

FP!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fp!!!! Oooooh yeah!!! Fp baby!!! Fp!!! Fppp!!11

Re:FP!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

seems like the "first look" link got slashdotted within 1-2 posts, I wonder who got "first look" instead of "first post"...

Has anyone seen Sun's stocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets face it, Sun is going to be concentrating on projects that will GENERATE REVENUE.

Yeah, Star Office for Mac woulda been great, but it wouldn't generate the revenue they need.

Remember, folks, Open Source is great unless you want to make money.

Re:Has anyone seen Sun's stocks?

[Narchie Troll]

Now, if Star Office was open source, you might have a point. It's Open Office that is open source. Star Office is a closed source commercial product.

Wow. WIPO!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Allow me to present... The WIPO Troll alive and well.

Suck It

[Anonymous Coward]

Suck it, Loser.
Gotta be quicker than that.

Old story.

[peterdaly]

This was on other sites yesterday. Isn't that scary that that is considered "old" now adays?

Some reported didn't understand the difference between a "Sun Project" and a Sun employee working on the OpenOffice project. Simple as that. Good news is the publicity made by the mishap sped development along quite it bit as thousands of new users and developers tried the app for the first time.

-Pete

Re:Old story.

[mAIsE]

how can i help !!?!?!

I cant code much at all, but im willing to do anything else!!

OS X already has an alternative

[Jonny Ringo]

Its called emacs, join, sort, grep and cut.

Learn these tools my Mac friends and you will not have to shell out $500 for MS Office. :-)

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and grandma will have a great time trying to understand that.

Lets face it, people buy Office for the userfriendliness.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[vidalsasoon]

emacs, join, sort, grep and cut is an alternative if you go back in time to 1985.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[Lev13than]

That may be fine for the 1% of computer users out there who actually use the tools. It's far more important to let joe-average user (teacher, student, homemaker, small business owner, retiree etc...) know that there is no real reason to spend extra money on microsoft office products. There are lots of viable alternatives out there, be it StarOffice, AppleWorks or whatever.

In my view the biggest problem is the lack of standards in document formatting these days. For example, if people would simply save word processor files as .rtf instead of .doc we'd all be a lot better off. File convertors are a clumsy non-solution - you don't see us 'converting' e-mails written in Outlook so we can read them in .vi, so why do we continue to operate this way with text files? The proprietary features of Microsoft products (PowerPoint, complex text manipulation in Word etc...) are only really required by a small percentage of business users, in which case the money spent is a good investment.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[mr. marbles]

you forgot to add LaTeX, some people actually have to format their work.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[Jonny Ringo]

I agree, the average joe does need to be educated that they don't need fancy $500 MS Software.

I don't believe that the tools I mentioned are hard to learn. The average home user isn't using spread sheets and database software, but you could do all of that with the tools I mentioned any way.

People feel they need super office apps, I just want to point out that if they don't :-)

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[Valdrax]

Cute. That's a nice solution if you don't need anything like tables or fonts or any of the rest of "that fru-fru crap." While you're at it, maybe you'd like to suggest a replacement for replace Excel and Powerpoint too.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[rampant mac]

Sorry to say, but for professionals who require it, there's no substitute for MS Office.

It's like telling a graphic artist who relys on Photoshop to just "Gimp" their next project...

Besides, most Mac users barely use the command line...

Telling my Grandma to "emacs, join, sort, grep and cut" when all she wants to do is WRITE A LETTER will probably require a change of her adult diapers.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[jbolden]

I don't know. I look at lots and lots of "joe average user" docs. I've seen lots of OLE. I'm seeing lots of using of versioning and automatic document merging. I assume the rather good grammer and spell checking features are getting used when I compare to email. I'm not sure joe average user isn't getting quite a bit out of advanced features.

Even before word was popular why was everyone using WordPerfect 4.2 or 5.1? There were much easier to use (and cheaper) word processors and the WP format was easily convertable.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

" I assume the rather good grammer and spell checking features are getting used when I compare to email"

Don't you think we approach email and letters/docs differently? Much as we speak differently in different situations?

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[jbolden]

Yes I do. But lots of users have naturally bad spelling and grammar . I'm a good example of this, I didn't check that last post and spelled grammar with an "er". That wasn't a typo it was an error of knowledge. Given the levels of errors of knowledge revealed by email it is clear that Word is clearly allowing people to perform better in the areas of spelling and grammar than their underlying knowledge would allow them to.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[Jonny Ringo]

Well, I'm sorry to say your wrong. I do consider my self a pro, I use
to use all of the MS office applications (excel, access, word). I have
no joke, replaced them with Emacs, join, sort, grep, and cut.

I realize that most Mac users barely use the command line, but I also
realize that Mac users are intelligent people. If they wanted to they
could figure those commands out. Its really not that hard after you
learn the basics of the command line. Its even easier to learn if you
tell yourself its easy. In fact go open a terminal in OS X right now, its in the applications directory. Mess around with it, look up some commands on the net.

Now, as far as you Grandma goes.. Well to be quite frank does your
Grandma read /.? No? well than I wasn't talking to her. Shit, I
would even want to try and teach my Grandmother how to use MS word.
If she wants to write a letter she can pick up a pen and paper,
nothing wrong with that.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[mr. marbles]

I have no joke, replaced them with Emacs, join, sort, grep, and cut.

hope you don't mind me asking but what exactly is it that you do with your computer? As a student i can't imagine myself giving up ms office although i think it's slow as hell and i have a list of bugs i want fixed. explain how you would write a lab report or something like it with just those tools.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[vadim_t]

Well, written with Emacs it wouldn't be very pretty, unless you have LaTeX. Then it should look better than what you can do with Office.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[hawksmoor]

What are the proprietary features of Microsoft Office, anyway? The paperclip? By necessity I use a lot of Word and Excel at the office and I can't imagine that most of what I use them for isn't so logical a function that it could be patented (and I work at a patent law firm). I know I probably won't get many answers buried way down here, but I'm curious.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[quinto2000]

What? Professional who requires MS Office? When I think of professionals, I think: Lawyers (Use WordPerfect), scientists (SPSS or LaTeX). People who need to submit formatted documents usually have classes available in LaTeX that automatically apply the correct formatting, and if they prefer MS-Word have to convert to LaTeX before submission. I can't think of any professional who actually needs anything that's a feature specific to MS-Word. A lot of people write crappy excel macros and then become dependent on Excel, but that's not the same as "dependent on MS Office." Tell me, who actually needs MS-Word and couldn't use something else with only minor adjustment?

I think what you mean is, I'm used to MS-Word, I've never used anything else, and I want to defend my choice since I've already made it.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[tumbaumba]

explain how you would write a lab report or something like it with just those tools.

Get a good book about LaTeX and give it a try. It will be a bit odd at the beginning but soon you will see that it is faster then Word processor and of course instantly you will see far superior output on a paper comparing to anything else you can and cannot afford to buy. There is also nice GUI frontend called klyx, don't know if it available for MacOS X.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[scotty]

Replacing Microsoft Word with LaTeX and Emacs - possible I believe, after you spend time learning all the markup in LaTeX. I actually prefer Vim but that's not the point, and I used to use LaTeX to do all my reports and thesis awhile ago when I was still in uni. However I don't even know how to get my document skeleton right in LaTeX now, since I have not been using it for a few years! You see - something that takes time to pick up, you can loose it easily as well. Whereas I can fire up OpenOffice/MS Word anyday and use it without much prior knowledge.

And I just cannot understand how people can replace Excel/OpenOffice Calc with join(1), sort(1) and grep(1)!! I am working with some financial advisers who have spreadsheets of a few thousand cells with lots of interdependency and different data sources. The re-calculation of the sheet itself might take a few minutes (maybe because it is in Excel). However, people don't just use spreadsheet to represent data in simple tabular format! People don't just use spreadsheet as a simple 2 dimentional database! There are lots of different uses of spreadsheet that just cannot be replaced with command line utilities.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[Jonny Ringo]

Ok, I'll give the LaTeX argument. I can see how people after not using it for a while would much rather open up word or something. - good point.

However, I work for an online emcomerce company. Not saying wich one :-). and I deal in LARGE amounts of data in which I use to use Access and Excel. I now use the linux tools to manipulate data. Now, it does happen from time to time that things get sooo complicated that I may use Perl, but that is super rare when it comes to that.
When its all done, the person that needs my data can easily import it into excel if they want to.

With the tools I mentioned I can grep out data, sort it by different collums in different ways, yada yadda yada.

Now, I believe this whole conversation started talking about the "joe user". Which is why I mentioned those tools in the first place.

I do agree with you that things get so complicated you need databases (obviously). But the average user probably isn't going need to use a db.

I honestly believe they can get away with the tools I mentioned.

People like visuals, different pretty fonts and all that.. I know, like I said I use to do all the stuff I do now in access, and excel because I didn't relize it was possible another way.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[rampant mac]

I'm sorry, can you submit that to me in PDF or Excel format?

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember who wrote emacs, don't you? That's right. Your friend and mine Richard Stallman. He is a very brilliant man.

Stallman is a programmer, but not just any programmer. Probably more than anyone else, he created the foundation for a software genre--and a movement--that is one of the last buttresses against the monopolists who want to capture perfect control of the technology business and the money that flows through it.

His creation became known as 'free software,' the notion that users of computers need and deserve the ability to freely use and modify the crucial programs that make these machines work. Proprietary software abridges those freedoms.

Stallman's GNU project helped spark the Finnish software genius, Linus Torvalds, to create a crucial piece, the crucial component, of what is now called the Linux operating system. Stallman calls it GNU/Linux. He has a point.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

"Word is clearly allowing people to perform better in the areas of spelling and grammar"

Fair point but, do you not think we are rapidly reaching (perhaps have reached) a stage where we vastly over-value spelling/grammar?
Intially there was some return on the effort - phonetic spelling at time of widely divergent dialects was unrecognisable outside its dialect pocket.(I regularly speak to people with irish accents but I have to concentrate to SLOWLY read Finnegans Wake.)
Whether you spell grammar er or ar is unimportant. I know what you mean. Language is after all first and formost about communication - getting the message across. Spelling varies slightly between UK and US english, and between regions of each but to an english speaker gray/grey are the same word as are jail/gaol or color/colour. When a convention of spelling becomes valued over tone and content we have a problem.

Our "underlying knowledge" is of a spoken language, writing is but speech writ down and speaking for myself, I not only find Word's grammar checking intrusive, I find it absurd that a machine should be judged to have a better understanding of the possible constructions of the English language than a native speaker.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[jbolden]

Well first off let's not forget that we were talking about why I believed the "joe average user" was getting some genuine value from Word. We both agree that society attaches a great deal of importance to spelling and grammar and that Word is assisting people with better spelling and grammar than they would otherwise have.

As for your general point regarding overvaluing: My opinion is that grammar evolves very rapidly to achieve a good balance between:
a) reducing complexity of the rules of grammar
b) allowing people to understand vague constructions within the language
c) maintaining consistency across time

In other words I'm Pollyannaish about the whole thing the level of grammar in use is probably pretty close to the level of grammar that needs to be in use to handle the rest of the language. Take for example word order, English is very strict about where words can appear and you have very little freedom to choose the position of your words inside your sentence. The rules regarding word order are not terrible complex and they have remained highly consistent though time so I can easily understand the parts of speech for various words even reading say Chaucer.

On the other hand we haven't had enough Asian languages yet to need rules governing verb-noun compound words, Walkman -- the portable tape players from the 1980's, being the only example of a verb-noun compound we borrowed that comes to mind. It's highly likely though during my lifetime these rules will be introduced into English as our level of contact with Asia keeps increasing. To see the importance of this does "Walkmen" mean:

a) More than one Walkman tape player
b) A variety of different types of Walkman tape players

What about "Walkmans" does that mean (a) or (b). Which should mean which? How would you understand which I meant given that we don't have a rule of grammar?

As for computers doing a better job than native speakers: they don't though they are taught to pick up certain types of common mistakes and that is useful. OTOH I see no reason that a computer in this day and age shouldn't have the whole "11th English book" down cold and be able to correct every single grammar error better than a professional editor. I certainly would consider that valuable. Why not throw style on top of that have the computer mention the fact that in this post I changed voice and ask which voice I want and unify the voice throughout the post?

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well first off let's not forget that we were talking about why I believed the "joe average user" was getting some genuine value from Word"

You're 100% right, its just overstrict spelling/grammar is a pet bugbear of mine, apologies for drifting off topic.

"My opinion is that grammar evolves very rapidly"

I agree, which is why the idea of rules for it cast in stone in a grammar checker seems so wrong. Grammar is fluid and there are shades of grey.

"English is very strict about where words can appear and you have very little freedom to choose the position of your words inside your sentence"

I think this is true until it isn't - my mother's family are in S.Wales and sentence structure among the Welsh seems to follow its own logic - though its meaning is still plain to a native english speaker.

"On the other hand we haven't had enough Asian languages yet to need rules governing verb-noun compound words, Walkman"

To slightly distort your point here its the notion of having laid down rules which I feel is so wrong. The french might well have used walkman then been instucted, "non, c'est le petitmusique". I don't think you can wall in a language you just end up with an abstract "correct english" and then the language that people actually use - and the poor old BBC will get all sorts of stick about going boldy too bally far.

But that all said, I fully see your point and can accept the logic. I just sometimes feel that our frozen spelling reduces an alphabet to pictograms and that rules of grammar tend to be artificial - the spoken language is after all the "trial by jury".

But once again, this is just a pet bugbear of mine and I've no doubt I'd be shouted down in any sane gathering. Many thanks for letting rave.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[jbolden]

Well two points:

1 - I'm using grammar to mean the rules governing language people use. This may a difference between the US tradition, Webster -- words mean what people think they mean and England.

2 - As for spelling that clearly isn't changing fast enough. A great deal of English spelling is based on 17th century pronunciation. From what I know roughly 25% of the words that aren't spelled the way they sound totally change spelling with each generation. Our problem is that pronunciation seems to be changing very quickly. While you can read 17th century English easily understanding spoken 17th century English would be very difficult.

Re:OS X already has an alternative

[vlvtelvis]

Klyx is majorly out of date. Lyx, from which is spun off, is still being activly developed. I use it for all my acedemic writing. Check it out: http://www.lyx.org

Jeez

[sjgman9]

Can they just make up their minds?!?

While they are at it, Sun should work with Apple to make a much faster JVM in OSX. Having Java 2 version 1.4 would be a big help.

Java is their crown jewel, but a cocoa-ized version of Star Office would be kick ass.

Re:Jeez

[ProofOfConcept]

Can they just make up their minds?!?

They had their minds made up from the beginning. C|net, on the other hand, didn't.

Re:Jeez

[Anonymous Coward]

Jaguar includes Java 2 1.4 you see the shared libs being built the first time it boots...

Re:Jeez

[Anonymous Coward]

don't get me wrong, a faster jvm for OSX would be great, but for porting OOffice, why don't they use QT? It's fast (compared to java swing) free for use in Windows, Linux & OSX, and blends in well to all enviroments - kde3 automatically aplies it's current style to qt3 apps, same for OSX & cocoa, and even windows XP & luna

Re:Jeez

[Anonymous Coward]

This is incorrect. Jaguar will not be shipping with 1.4. While it is in development and in good shape, it will not be in the Jaguar product shipping in August.

Java based Office...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, before people start railing on "how much memory this takes", or "how slow it will be" because its an app in Java, may I suggest you run over to Borlands site and tryout JBuilder. Most developers think its a C++ app, when, in actuality, it is a Java app.

And no, its not slow, and no, it doesn't have a major memory footprint.

Re:Java based Office...

[thufir]

Too bad that JBuilder isn't 100% java.
They didn't use pure swing for the GUI! They wrote their own native widgets for each platform JBuilder supports (osx, windoze, linux...).

Re:Java based Office...

[AdamInParadise]

You're thinking about Eclipse, which does use SWT instead of AWT. JBuilder is 100% Java. Borland claims that they did the Mac OS X port in 3 days...

Re:Java based Office...

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran the unix version of jbuilder on a Mac before the Mac release. It is 100% pure java.

Re:Java based Office...

[betis70]

Well this post would be accurate for JBuilder 3.5. I believe earlier versions were in C++.

However, since JBuilder 4, it is 100% Java (they are now on JB7). Perhaps you haven't used JBuilder since 2000, which of course gets you a +1 Informative on slashdot.

Re:Java based Office...

[Joe Tie.]

I was extreamly impressed when I gave it a try a couple weeks ago. I really didn't think my computer had the memory to really handle a java based IDE, given that netbeans gave me about a minute or more to make and position a button. JBuilder amazingly enough though actually ran at speeds comparible to kylix for me.

They'd rather give SO to Apple

[JHromadka]

From this C|Net article: "I don't want to sell StarOffice for OS X," [Tony Siress, Sun's senior director of desktop marketing solutions] said. "I want Apple to bundle it. I'll give them the code. I'd love it if I could get the team at Apple to do joint development and they distribute it at no cost--that it's their product. Nobody makes a product more beautiful on Apple than Apple." Perhaps Apple could rework AppleWorks to incorporate Sun's work.

Re:They'd rather give SO to Apple

[Thenomain]

While a move like this would (hopefully) stick in Microsoft's craw, wouldn't that also prompt them to say, "See? See? They're doing it too! Go after them!"

Re:They'd rather give SO to Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Or simply give the format from Apple Works out to the Open Office group.

Clarification

[Nomad7674]

My understanding is not that the StarOffice story was materially WRONG, but that it was a bit distorted.

Essentially, Star and Apple programmers have been working with the OpenOffice developers on getting out a version of OpenOffice (which the original reporter confused with StarOffice, the commercial version of OpenOffice) for MacOS X. But it is still under the aegis of OpenOffice and will be a called OpenOffice and will not be sold by Sun. It was never an official Sun-sponsored initiative and no one was given a paid position to support a MacOS X version. But Sun employees did some work, Apple employees did some work, and the StarOffice team provided informational help on the structure of OpenOffice, when asked.

This distorted reporting has spawned a lot of scathing commentary on all sides. Shows that having the right facts in the wrong order can be as bad as having the wrong facts, as far as the community is concerned.

Re:Clarification

[ProofOfConcept]

Essentially, Star and Apple programmers have been working with the OpenOffice developers on getting out a version of OpenOffice.

No, they haven't. The project is being done completely by volunteers.

Re:Clarification

[BitGeek]

The project is being done completely by volunteers.

I don't think there's a major mac product in existence that hasn't had some work "done" on it by apple-- at least some assistance. I'm not saying people need apple's help, but, hell, I'm the smallest of the small fry of Apples developer program and I've had an apple engineer sit down with me and help me with a problem I was having in my code -- not to mention the two technical support incidents I need to use before they expire.

That Apple and or Sun has put engineers on the project helping it out does not undermine the value of the effort contributed by the volunteers. It just points out apple's desire to support applications on its platform.

Hell, they even hired the guy that did chimera, and I suspect a large part of his job at apple is working on chimera.

My objection is not over the fact that it is a volunteer project, or even "all volunteer". But that you emphasized completely-- implying that apple is providing no support at all. I find that hard to believe as I expect there are a number of apple employees volunteering in unofficial or official capacities ... and if there aren't apple DTS is ready to help any project that needs it.

It must be true!

[Dutchmaan]

After all.. what company would deny (lie about) working on a project that's in early development!?

Reminds me of the Bungie denials about Microsoft only days before the buyout was announced.

Appleworks

[gypsyx]

Appleworks is a good alternative! Appleworks has everything I need in an office suite. Plus, it's not buggy like Star Ofice or slow like MS Office X.

Re:Appleworks

[rindeee]

Buggy like StarOffice? You've used SO on a Mac then? Wow...way ahead of me. Myself, I've only used it on my WinTel and *nix boxes, and haven't ran into a hitch yet.

Re:Appleworks

[Anonymous Coward]

For those not amongst the faithful, how well (or not) does Appleworks read/write the MS Office file formats?

Re:Appleworks

[piggy]

I haven't had any problems with AppleWorks 6.1.2 reading .doc files. However, .xls files are a different story. If the .xls has a lot of macros or even uses multiple cheets, it often imports all funny like. Note that formulas are imported, it's just VB macros which don't work so well.

In my mind, the lack of multiple sheets in AppleWorks is a big deal.

That said, I haven't had trouble with the majority of Windows (or Mac) MS Office created files.

Russell

Re:Appleworks

[simpl3x]

i have osx loaded on my son's ibook (g3/600) with appleworks... it is quite fast, stable, and plays well with the other apps--word.

Re:Appleworks

[BattleCat]

Oh, yeah, you know, .xls files are cheating all the time on us, mere users. My (former) wife lost two days of financial work due to xls was broken all the way down after sudden Win2k crash.
And I told 'er - "make backups..."
Now she's studying linux extensively :-)

Re:Appleworks

[Valdrax]

Not well. It always screws up something about formatting when I import documents -- especially if you use the odd tab settings that Word likes to auto-format your documents with. I find that it doesn't do formatting of text around embedded images well, nor does it handle footnotes 100% correctly. However, with the exception of the tab settings crap, I find that it usually only takes about half a minute per page to fix imported work.

I would love a port of OpenOffice to the Mac, but I'd rather see it done using native APIs rather than have yet another half-assed attempt at a port of a Win32/UNIX app via Java. Give me speed and native system color-correction and font-smoothing!

Re:Appleworks

[daddymac]

it is quite fast, stable, and plays well with the other apps--word.

To my mama?

Re:Appleworks

[gypsyx]

No, smartass. I've run it on RedHat 7.[12] x86 boxen. I had terrible luck with it. The stupid thing kept crashing on me every time I'd open certain Word files. No errors about not being able to read the files, no "format not supported yet" popups. The application would just go away without warning.

Even if it comes out for the Mac, I really don't care about Star Office. That fact is, I use ed/ex for everything. If I really need to constantly see everything, vi is the answer (nothing wrong with emacs of course!). When the boss insists on sending a word document, I run strings on it to get the vital info. If I really need the formatting, AppleWorks is the best solution, IMHO.

I'm not trying to say Star Office is crap. It really seemed like it was good software. It just crashed a lot for me. I call that a bug. In my experience, Star Office has been buggy. AppleWorks is much easier to install than Star Office. AppleWorks is snappy even on my soon to be out of date Pismo hardware. The cost is a lot better than MS Office which runs slow on modern hardware.

Re:Appleworks

[CJ Hooknose]

[Appleworks] always screws up something about formatting when I import [Microsoft Word] documents -- especially if you use the odd tab settings that Word likes to auto-format your documents with. I find that it doesn't do formatting of text around embedded images well, nor does it handle footnotes 100% correctly.

This is not particularly surprising. (experiment done in late 1998:) Take a document written in MS Word 97 on an x86, with a fair number of embedded images. Open this document in MS Word 98 on a MacOS 9 machine. Watch all the pagination and image formatting go to hell. Fix pagination and images, save document as "document-mac.doc". Open "document-mac.doc" on an x86 with MS Word 97... guess what, pagination and images are screwed.

Really, if slightly different versions of MS Word using the same document format can't render things in the same way, you've got to wonder what chance 3rd-party applications have at doing the right thing. Or if MS products do the same thing as Appleworks does, can Appleworks claim it as a feature?

Re:Appleworks

[MeNeXT]

This is not a flame. I'm running OO on FreeBSD with Linux emulation (RH 7.1) and it's solid. It's up now for over 45 days.

Re:Appleworks

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been dissapointed with Appleworks. It does have an acceptable word processor but the rest of the apps seem less than optimal. I wasn't expecting MS OFfice like functionality in a $79 product but I was expecting a usuable database.

IMHO Appleworks desperately needs to be reworked from the ground up. The interface is dated and clunky, some features are just missing or difficult to find, and it really doesn't use OS X. It's got potential but it's not really there yet.

Re:Appleworks

[PierceLabs]

Apple should bury Appleworks in the desert with all the ET cartridges and continue their OpenSource initiative by building a native port of OpenOffice.org. Appleworks is a very novel application, but is pretty much useless for anyone needing to do much more than type a letter to mom.

Re:Appleworks

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with Appleworks is that it is way gay. It might be OK for a homosexual, but normal individuals shy away from it.

Re:Appleworks

[Anonymous Coward]

"Appleworks is a very novel application"

What do you mean by this?

Re:Appleworks

[rat_herder]

Apple Works rox. you need to extract your head from your ass

Re:Appleworks

[Ristretto]

In fact, the Mac & Windows versions of Microsoft Office are not "slightly different." It's been several years since the codebase forked. We're not talking two branches here, folks, we're talking about two separate products.

Slashdotted soon for sure...

[peterdaly]

There are more screenshots, but again, have patience with and mercy on the connection!

That's never a good sign on a site slashdot links to. I saw one blury screenshot (stopped the page load after a couple minutes.)

That server's toast for sure. Anyone have a higher bandwidth mirror of the screenshots?

-Pete

Re:Slashdotted soon for sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ed P is working on getting at least the images to a faster box. Its a on a 10kbit/sec upstream link for God's sake.

Re:Slashdotted soon for sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.iceni.org/~peterlin/first_aqua.html

Ahhh Poor mac users NOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see. Mac users are supposedly better edumacated then us other lusers. Let them pay for the expensive M$ office suite. They deserve what they get.

Re:Ahhh Poor mac users NOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you, man. Some of us will take ANYTHING to not have to buy an MS product. I suffer through Appleworks just to be able to read friggin' .doc files without MS Office.

What I'm wondering is.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell is pudge???

Re:What I'm wondering is.....

[hether]

To quote pudge.net, the link from his name:

I work for OSDN (Open Source Development Network), a division VA Software, working on the Slash code and editing stories for the Apple section of Slashdot.

Re:What I'm wondering is.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell is pudge???

He's just another Slashdot pudge facker.

Proof of concept...

[ashitaka]

That announcing a "First Look" at something "Neat" for geeks will result in an instantaneous Slashdotting.

What would be great

[bogie]

Is that if Apple bundled OpenOffice with OSX. I don't see any reason why they shouldn't. This would make OSX even more compelling. It would also allow Apple to tell MS to shove that carrot they dangle over Apple where the sun don't shine. They are already overcharging their customers already, why not charge $10 more per machine to cover tech support costs for OpenOffice. They by this fall with Redhat and Apple including OpenOffice we would actually start to see some market share. If we are ever going to get out from under MS's thumb we have to start somewhere. Next is to port Evolution to windows, and Mac and get a free exchange plugin going.

Re:What would be great

[MattHaffner]

It would also allow Apple to tell MS to shove that carrot they dangle over Apple where the sun don't shine.

You mean where Sun does shine? :P

Of course the way Apple's operating these days, it would be Aquified, renamed iOffice, bundled (but require 10.2 of course), and be free for a year or so. After that, they would announce that you can now only save your documents to your iDisk, which of course costs $100/yr now.

Sigh...

mh, long-time, but now severely cynical Mac-head...

Re:What would be great

[Anonymous Coward]

"overcharging" in a capitalist system means that people stop buying whatever you're offering. If Office is selling, then by definition they're not overcharging.

If Office continues to sell for such a high price when StarOffice and OpenOffice and AppleWorks are available, that says a lot about the quality of those alternatives.

A buggy, ugly, almost-compatible bunch of amateur bloatware like OpenOffice isn't going to make MacOS X any more compelling. And $10 extra per machine? Oh, an Open Source tax. Remember, that's a good kind of tax, unlike the bad Microsoft Windows kind of tax.

It's amazing to see an Open Source communist like yourself pretend to want something like market share... is it just that misery loves company?

Re:What would be great

[hondo77]

Reality check time: OpenOffice is not a threat to Microsoft Office. It might be nice to think that it is and in the distant future it might be but as of right now, no way. Besides, I'm happy with that other alternative to Office: AppleWorks. Okay, it's not a package-by-package alternative but my needs are fairly simple and it gets the job done (except for AutoCalculate).

Re:What would be great

[divec]

"overcharging" in a capitalist system means that people stop buying whatever you're offering. If Office is selling, then by definition they're not overcharging.

I can only be glad that you're (presumably) not in charge of enforcing ant-trust law.

Re:What would be great

[Anonymous Coward]

This would make OSX even more compelling. It would also allow Apple to tell MS to shove that carrot they dangle over Apple where the sun don't shine.

Until OS X (including Aqua) is ported to the x86 architecture Apple can take it and shove it where the sun don't shine for all I care. I'll stick with Linux. Now, it'd certainly be nice to have a pretty interface for Linux compared to the shite like Gnome and KDE but we shouldn't hold our breath.

Re:What would be great

[FatherOfONe]

Ok I think that I know why they won't do this.

A TON of businesses switched to Windows95 from Apple when 95 came out. If Apple wants to maintain or even possibly grow their market share with businesses then they need Microsoft products. This includes the Exchange client (Outlook etc...).

So lets say that Apple ships OpenOffice with OSX. Microsoft could then stop or greatly slow development for I.E., Outlook, and Office for the Mac. This would force quite a few comopanies to switch off of the Macintosh platform. Or at lest take a long look at how a Windows XP machine would perform instead of a Macintosh.

My point with this is similar to Filemaker for the Mac. Apple now ships/supports mySql. That pissed of FileMaker and now they focus "most" of their development on other platforms. I realize that Filemaker is NO Microsoft, so Apple didn't really seem to care.

The best thing they can do is try and build OpenOffice to be a great Mac app. Then possibly put links for "free" downloads from their site. Even this might incur the wrath of Microsoft.

For everyones sake I hope OpenOffice gains a 20+% marketshare over the next five years.

Re:What would be great

[ivan256]

Just because they don't overcharge everybody doesn't mean that the retail box price isn't overcharging. Why do you think so many people pirate Office? How many people do you know that have gone out and purchased a copy off the shelf? The bulk corporate and OEM pricing is pretty reasonable. The single unit price is outrageous. Of course Microsoft has the BSA claim that the piracy is lost revenue, and works on copy protection, rather then addressing the real issue: People can't afford Office.

BTW, everyone I know that uses office at home (Not me, thank you. I don't use it) has "borrowed" the CD from work, or had it come with their PC. I don't think I've ever met somebody who has actually gone and bought it for a personal machine.

Re:What would be great

[ivan256]

If apple came out wuth OS X for x86 cpus, what makes you think it would run on non-Apple machines? It wouldn't.

Re:What would be great

[Morgahastu]

So its wrong for microsoft to include their browser with their operating system but its ok for Apple to include an office suite?

Re:What would be great

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only be glad that you're (presumably) not in charge of enforcing ant-trust law.

If I was there would be nothing to do. There are free alternatives but people still prefer to pay for Office. It doesn't come pre-installed. Nobody has to buy it. Microsoft hasn't tried to shut down competitors who have reverse-engineered the file formats. Quit yer whining! Inferior products don't deserve to be successful, certainly not just because they're "free".

Re:What would be great

[Anonymous Coward]

>So its wrong for microsoft to include their browser with their operating system but its ok for Apple to include an office suite?

MS is not accused of of "including" IE, they're accused of "tying", which is different. With "tying", they've made Windows so that (or at least claim that) IE can't be removed without breaking Windows. If Apple made OS break when you remove OpenOffice, yes, that would violate antitrust law.

MS is also accused of exclusive contracts. If Apple had resellers and wouldn't let them include any OpenOffice competing products, that would also be illegal.

And of course, if Apple changed OS X so that OpenOffice-competitor products stopped working (where the changes add no new value, and are there solely to eliminate competition), that would also be illegal under antitrust law.

Re:What would be great

[dhovis]

Somebody mod this (-1, Dumbass) please.

From Filemaker's website.

FileMaker, Inc. is a subsidiary of Apple Computer, Inc

It's a little hard to get pissed off at your parent company.

Re:What would be great

[bogie]

Its not about it being "threat" its about a good free product that can replace Office for 99% of Mac users. Feature wise it compares very well, and eveyone I know who has tried it has been impressed with this free program. Apple's market share is home users, schools, and artists. It is NOT Fortune 500 companies where Exchange is mandatory. You say how Appleworks is enough for you well guess what, your just like the rest of Apple's users. Have you noticed how poor Office X sales are?
OpenOffice is a great substitute for MS Office for Mac users.

Re:What would be great

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow!

Someone with a clue?

If the original post of this thread had been about how winxp2 should come witth ms office for free, the hate-post thread would most likely be 500 long.

And people who advocate OSS wonder why they are in the minority...?

Re:What would be great

[hondo77]

In the context of the post I first replied to, it is all about being a threat to Office:

It would also allow Apple to tell MS to shove that carrot they dangle over Apple where the sun don't shine.

For Apple to do that to Microsoft, OpenOffice has to be a threat to Office and it just is not. IMHO it's not even a threat to AppleWorks but that's just me.

Re:What would be great

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, Mail in 10.2 supports Exchange.

"To help you work remotely, the Mac OS X Mail client lets you connect better with a Microsoft Exchange mail server. Your INBOX can pretend to be an exact duplicate of what's on your work machine, so you can check your mail, delete a few items, then leave other items for when you're back in the office.

Re:What would be great

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't read the license, have you? If you use it at work you may also use it at home.

Re:What would be great

[nedrichards]

iDisk is WebDAV yes? So you can save your documents to it if you want. OpenOffice.org (and by extension StarOffice) include WebDAV support.

Re:What would be great

[sql*kitten]

It's a little hard to get pissed off at your parent company.

Have you ever worked in corporate America? A subsidiary is usually wholly-owned, sure, but if it wasn't a separate organization with its own agenda, it wouldn't be a subsidiary, it would simply be an operating unit of the parent. It it not at all unusual for subsidiaries of the same parent to compete with one another, or even with the parent. (I once worked for a member of the Omnicom kieretsu, it was a real education into the way holding companies and conglomerates function).

All Apple, or any other parent company for that matter, care about is that their subsidiaries make money. How they do that is really a matter for their own management. It certainly makes little sense to run a subsidiary as a loss leader, and it would lead to a savaging by Wall Street.

Quartz Open Office...

[Anonymous Coward]

They had a quartz version of open office before this mess came out (alpha mind you based pre 1.0). Nothing new on that front other than it now has an aqua theme.

Re:Quartz Open Office...

[openstep]

bingo. this aqua patch is just built right on top of that version (OO638C). we haven't yet started the process of moving our build system, makefile, and source code patches to OOO_STABLE_1 yet. It's on our list.

What also could be nifty is that with some cleanup work to the patch it'll be possible to turn the Aqua LAF on and off at runtime and switch between Aqua or one of the themes available on the other U*ix platforms. The downloadable Darwin one already contains some switchable 'themes' accessed in that view settings panel, including Macintosh (platinum-ish controls) and OS/2.

ed peterlin

Won't be any good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, some folks are trying to port it over to the Mac, but let's face facts, the port won't be any good. The better Open Source programmers concentrate on creating programs for Linux platforms with a much larger market share than Macintosh (take away the number of machines they've dumped into schools and they must have less that a 1% market share).

This project, due to the second team programmers attracted to it, will fall apart quicker than the average teenage boy's SourceForge game.

Posting Stories without checking facts...

[jaaron]

The whole "problem" here has nothing to do with Sun or Apple, but it has everything to do with CNET running an inaccurate story that was picked up by the other "news" sites like Newsforge and Slashdot, thus furthering the rumors. This in turn created quite a fuss with the OpenOffice programmers who thought it would have been nice for Sun to tell them directly rather than getting the word through a news story.

The really interesting part of this little mixup is how quickly misinformation travels. While this episode might not be all that serious in the grand scale of things, I wouldn't be surprised if one day this same sort of mix up (ie- online news sites reporting some rumor story that spreads like fire through blogs and other online portals) will create a real problem or crisis. You watch. Information (thankfully) travels much faster and more freely these days, but that means the consumer of the information must pay more attention to filter out fact from fiction.

For those looking for more facts, check out the FAQ at
OpenOffice.org about the OS X port.

Re:Posting Stories without checking facts...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2000plat form/SP/SP3/NT5/EN-US/w2ksp3.exe

Re:Posting Stories without checking facts...

[_Sprocket_]

The really interesting part of this little mixup is how quickly misinformation travels. While this episode might not be all that serious in the grand scale of things, I wouldn't be surprised if one day this same sort of mix up (ie- online news sites reporting some rumor story that spreads like fire through blogs and other online portals) will create a real problem or crisis.

I figured this was exactly how the stock market worked. Or, at least, how it worked in the hayday of day-traders, online news and 'investment' gossip forums... and clicky-clicky friendly online tool sets.

Re:Posting Stories without checking facts...

[captredballs]

No kidding. Isn't it funny how the western economy gets more and more fake everyday?

Market forces are remarkably similar to daytime soap operas except that the soaps are written and controlled by a small group of people... oh fuck.

We're all just pawns, aren't we? Shit. At least they give us beer to make us stupid enough to not notice the fact that... that uh... hey, is that the 2002 Explorer? Wow man, I bet Sarah will come back to you when she sees that shit. Does it have a TV inside?

Have you fed your Illuminati lately?

Re:Posting Stories without checking facts...

[Anonymous Coward]

"story that was picked up by the other "news" sites like Newsforge and Slashdot, thus furthering the rumors."

To be fair, all Newsforge & Slashdot did, all they do, was link to a story they thought would interest their readership and invited them to discuss it. They didn't recycle the story themselves using C/net as a source.

As I recall part of the Slashdot discussion questioned the C/net story's facts.

On the plus side all the hoo-ha seems to have been good for the Open Office Mac team so, all's well that ends well?

Re:Posting Stories without checking facts...

[zakharin]

I've heard somewhere that the Monica Lewinsky scandal started because of a rumor someone posted on AOL. Mind you, I have no idea how much truth there is to this.

Re:Posting Stories without checking facts...

[nelsonal]

There was one scandal two summers ago with Emulux, involving a fake press release, put out by a grad student who couldn't cover his shorts. It was formatted like an official press release and sent to InternetWire I believe, anyway it kept getting picked up by more reputable sources, Bloomberg got it pretty quickly from one of their partner feeds, and the stock price fell in half within the hour. It was halted after the NASDAQ realized they hadn't been informed that news was forthcoming, so they could halt it for disemination. When it re opened it climbed back up to nearly the level it started at before the false announcment. What I find funny is that the grad student only covered his short sales which saved him well below $100,000. The SEC & CBOT thought that the creator was behind several option trades that would have earnedalmost $600,000 for who ever put in that lucky trade. He got arrested, and I think I later heard of a trial, but I have no idea what happened to him.

Re:Posting Stories without checking facts...

[Corvus9]

... I wouldn't be surprised if one day this same sort of mix up ... will create a real problem or crisis.

It's happened many, many times.

My favorite example is when the British tabloid "News of the World" published the names and addresses of convicted pedophiles. Some Brits went amok, trying to burn down a house a pedophile once rented (and the innocent family then living there), and running a pediatrician (which they apparently thought was the same thing as a pedophile) out of town.

Check out one BBC news article.

Re:Posting Stories without checking facts...

[Joe Tie.]

I remember hearing a story on this american life about a story Al Gore told in a school about a little kid alerting people to love canal. Somehow a reporter misquoted him in a paper, and all across the nation news organisations were getting the story wrong. And then refusing to print a retraction once they were contacted by the school, who actually had a tape of the speech.

ThinkFree Office

[mssymrvn]

While not free (as in beer or speech) ThinkFree Office is an alternative to Office.X. And it's only US$50. Of course, it's quite slow (Java-based) but it supports the MS file formats that I've thrown at it (Word and Excel v.X) and is quite stable. Of course, I've already sold my soul to Office.X but ThinkFree Office *is* a decent alternative.

Re:ThinkFree Office

[zangdesign]

Java-based AND slow? This is a recommendation?

Re:ThinkFree Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention redundant.

There will be StarOffice...

[thrillbert]

It's just that it's going to come in 78 3 1/2 inch floppies.

Of course, since Mac's do not come with floppies any more, this is going to be quite a challange to get it installed on a non-networked system. <snicker>

---
After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn.

Re:There will be StarOffice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that the best troll you could come up with? Man, that was *weak*...

Re:There will be StarOffice...

[thrillbert]

May have been weak, but at least I did it without wimping out and posting anonymously..

---
You will be surprised by a loud noise.

Re:There will be StarOffice...

[mkldev]

Get a beige G3 and....

MkLinux Floppy Driver

(Note, servers down right now due to blackout.)

Who is behind it?

[sn00perz]

Follow the $$ trail. Its in M$'s best intrestes to hamper development of Office alternatives.
They have been unhappy about poor OfficeX sales which leads me to suspect they are pressuring Apple to stop cooperating with Sun developers.

Just say 'NO' to intellectual property

Re:Who is behind it?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Just say 'NO' to intellectual property

So, did you lose your intelligence long ago???
or give it away?

I've got your StarOffice right here ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Apple,

I ama homosexual. I boughtan Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being "the" gay computer. Since I have become an Apple owner, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gay friends. It is really a pleasure to meet and compute with other homos such as myself. I plan on using my new Apple computer as a way to entice and recruit young schoolboys into the homosexual lifestyle; it would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to young boys. Thanks in advance.

with much gayness,

Father Randy "Pudge" O'Day, S.J.

Re:I've got your StarOffice right here ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who in the hell modded this "interesting"?

For more info...

[jaaron]

For more information, check out the NewFactor article at : http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18805.html

Also check out this GeekNews story: http://geek.com/news/geeknews/2002Jul/gee200207310 15675.htm

(Don't need the Karma, I just want people to get the facts straight. I hate misinformation being spread around...)

Hrmmm...

[captredballs]

Maybe they are denying this news because in truth SUN AND APPLE ARE MERGING!!!

Wouldn't that make a great little conspiracy story? Come on, think about it. Sun has positioned themselves such that they need desktop software and Apple SHOULD be looking to G4/5 alternatives, particulary 64 bit options if they want to maintain any customers in the movie industry. The sparc wouldn't be a poor choice, since it seems like its roadmap goes farther than the vanilla powerpc chips.

Okay, it would be pretty un-applish to want to port Aqua to solaris rather than darwin, but you never know. Or the apple/sun conglomerate could maintain 3 difference unixes (don't forget that Sun has a linux distro coming out). It should would strengthen both companies pitch to the business sector since the whole office could come from one vendor (server, clients and office software). You can even picture what the new logo would be: a purple apple with sunbeams gracing one side, casting a shadow northward... no, farther north... yeah, past Oregon.. yeah, that far northward.

Come on silicon valley! Mount a RISC offensive against Redmond!

Re:Hrmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

that can't happen. I mean apple is using a BSD unix base, while Solaris is now SysV. I mean merging those two would be unholy... and would probably resmeble linux

Re:Hrmmm...

[captredballs]

Well they wouldn't have to merge them, they'd just port Aqua over to solaris (if they didn't just maintain both). I almost be that porting to solaris would be easier than porting darwin to sparc.

Here is one thing to think about: each company usually has cooler looking cases than their wintel counterparts. Hrrrm... now if they brought SGI into the picture then we'd have some serious looking rigs on our desks.

Oh wait... no... this would be awesome... All the new Sun's would have Titanium style cases. Awesome! And they would have a big apple/sun logo etched into the metal... Oh wow, the server room would have more silver in it than a rich wife in the burbs who just traded her car in for all stainless steel appliances.

Re:Hrmmm...

[cpeterso]

that can't be. I thought that Disney and Oracle were competing to buy out Apple...

Re:Hrmmm...

[powerlinekid]

No no you got it all wrong. First IBM is going to buy Sun because we all know in our lifetimes its going to happen. Next IBM is going to move its new "Sun Division" away from sparc and to IBM's 64 bit powerPC. Now IBM will merge with Apple, move AQUA on a linux base instead of BSD or Solaris slap it on these 64 bit powerpcs with it's IBM Star Office and drive Microsoft straight back into the hole it crawled out of. Now its kind of scarry that it would take 3 companies to kill MS, but if someones gonna do it it might as well be IBM because they started this mess in the first place.

Re:Hrmmm...

[captredballs]

Yeah, eventually, as in "not soon enough to matter". As if IBM's purchase of PwC won't slow it down enough, the last thing that big ol' lumbering IBM could do is take on MS through a purchase during the next two years. Hell, it would probably hurt IBM more than helping it, considering the amount of $$ they make on MS solutions.

One company wouldn't be able to take on Microsoft, especially not a company that was purchased and integrated. You just can't do that without some severe growing pains. Microsoft is huge, but they've learned how to do it. They can still move faster than any other big-ish company out there (damn them).

Re:Hrmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't laugh. Sun and NeXT worked together to develop the OpenStep spec that is now the basis of OSX. Also, at least one of the ancestors of OS X, NeXTStep (not sure about OpenStep 4.x), ran natively on SPARC hardware.

Re:Hrmmm...

[CoolVibe]

Actually, the old SunOS was a BSD variant. It mutated into this twisted freak that we now call Solaris.

Sun is quite good at making BSD like systems. I wish they never put in that SysV crap. SunOS 4 was the best. *sigh*

Re:Hrmmm...

[BitGeek]

In January 1996, The Wall Street Journal reported that over the prior weekend the boards of Sun and Apple had agreed to merge and that the deal was done, and to be announced later that week. For weeks after that people were claiming online that it really had happened and that the announcement had just been delayed.

As far as I know, the WSJ never retracted that story.

IF you want to talk about printing bad information-- the WSJ is a great example.

Re:Hrmmm...

[d0n quix0te]

You are all wrong its Disney and Sony who are going to buy Apple.

NEWSFLASH: Disney Buys Apple. Sony Also Buys Apple.

In a startling turn of events that has left the Macintosh community reeling, the Walt Disney Company, after years of rampant speculation, has purchased Apple Computer. In a second, equally startling turn of events that occurred just hours later, the Sony Corporation also bought Apple Computer.

With Apple stock trading at a 52-week low today, Disney finally seized the opportunity to conduct a leveraged buyout of Apple.

"We've been meaning to do this for years," said Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney. "At last the right opportunity presented itself and we couldn't be more excited! Now the company that popularized the mouse owns the company that popularized the mouse!"

A Mickey Mouse character standing next to Eisner nodded emphatically and clapped his white-gloved hands.

While Disney was holding its press conference, Sony was putting the finishing touches on its own acquisition of Apple.

Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei, paraphrasing Remmington president Victor Kayam's classic line, said, "I liked Apple's digital hub concept so much, I bought the company!"

A Sony Aibo standing next to Idei nodded emphatically and barked.

Wall Street analysts are uncertain exactly how it is both Disney and Apple were able to purchase the same company.

"It's possible there was some sort of mix-up with the paperwork," said Daniel Niles of Lehman Brothers. "You'd be surprised how often that happens. Or, maybe not..."

"At any rate, I'm sure they can work it out. Maybe Disney can have Apple on even days and Sony on odd days."

A more likely scenario has Disney owning Apple during the day in the continental U.S. and Sony owning it during the night, which is daytime in Japan.

The Macintosh community, stunned by the announcements, sought for a silver lining in the acquisitions.

Macworld columnist Andy Ihnatko said, "The combination of Disney's marketing ability and Sony's innovation could drive Apple to heights the Macintosh community has never seen. Think of the possibilities!"

"On the other hand, it could just be about putting Disney ads on Macs in schools and hooking a dumb electronic dog up to Macs in homes. I hope not, though, because that would just suck."

Re:Hrmmm...

[powerlinekid]

Actually IBM acquiring sun isn't that bad of an idea. IBM really couldn't care less about sparc or sun's workstation/server market (although I'm sure they'd find a use for it). What they really really want is java (I know, I'm actually an IBM java developer) and I would think that a combination of Linux and Java would scare the crap out of Microsoft, especially with IBM controlling it. As for MS solutions being IBM's big thing, I can think of a $Billion$ reasons why that might change (think IBM investments in linux). Also IBM has an incredible amount of Windows machines that they'd like to break from the obscene licensing that Microsoft has. Just my 2 cents...

Re:Hrmmm...

[jafac]

Supporting this conspiracy theory (which has been around much longer than you'd care to think) is the fact that OS X's Cocoa API is based on the old OpenStep API - which, at one point WAS implemented under Solaris. I don't think it was ever productized, but in theory anyway, writing a program to OpenStep meant that you could RUN the thing on NT, Solaris, and NextStep.

There was a *DIM* hope back in the old days, when Apple first purchased NeXT, that this cross-platform capability (using platform-specific runtime libraries, not really a Virtual Machine) would be preserved, and then people might start considering developing in OpenStep/Objective-C, so they could hit all three platforms.

What were we thinking? That would make too much sense.

Re:Hrmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

That does bring up a point,

Think of the ramifications. There are all sorts of antitrust issues that would normally arise out of an Apple, Sun, and lets throw in IBM for good measure, merger.

But, how could the antitrust guys do anything at all given they've essentially let MS go unscathed.

Re:Hrmmm...

[Billly Gates]

...and then have another big old monopoly. Yikes!

When IBM was king things were really expensive. Sure MS Office went from $150 to $800 in just 8 years, hmm wonder why, but pc prices have come down and innovation was king. If IBM were to reign king again they would control not only the software but the hardware which would be drm trustworthy based which of course could only run IBM software. Go look into who is funding drm? IBM is funding like %80 of it. They want DRM in all their scsi hard drives infact they are already have drm in them. Scary shit! You could not switch even if you wanted too. I guess the fsf would have to gain capital funding and now start a multi billion dollor hardware based company with chip manufactoring plants just to compete so we could write software again.

After this we all would look at Microsoft era as the good old days of computing.

As much as I dislike Microsoft I would not want a change like this.

Re:Hrmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that was supposed to be a joke, but let's be straight here: why would Apple merge with Sun in order to dump the G4 for UltraSPARC, the slowest RISC architecture on the market? Apple's looking to *improve* its long-term CPU situation.

Re:Hrmmm...

[rlangis]

No no you got it all wrong. First IBM is going to buy Sun because we all know in our lifetimes its going to happen.

Egads I certainly hope not. Scott McNealy would have a heart attack were that to happen. In reality, Sun is doing better than IBM's high-end server division. I personally don't think that IBM has the capability to manage what Sun does.

I also don't think that we *need* to kill M$, after all it is the bloat in Windows that gives us 2.4Ghz processors and cheap ram and hard disks. We simply need to make THEM restructure themselves to meet OUR needs, not their own.

Plus, if OO/SO get over to the Mac, that will be one more platform on which M$ no longer has a monopoly with the Office suite. I'm all for that.

Re:Hrmmm...

[g4dget]

The last thing Sun needs is another proprietary desktop. They tried that before several times and it failed miserably. Their customers are X11 users through-and-through; the ones that aren't have already moved to other platforms.

If Sun wants to do something for their desktop, they should develop a Java-based desktop to prove that Java is suitable for client applications. So far--no go.

Re:Hrmmm...

[TWR]

Considering that NeXT had foundered for years with the cross-platform OpenStep concept, it doesn't seem like it would have been a good idea at all.

Java, like it or not, has become the cross-platform language/API of choice. Other systems, like Galaxy, have died in the face of the competition. Considering that Sun is the force behind Java, how much help would they have been in improving OpenStep for Solaris?

Apple/NeXT did the only thing that made sense: focus on the Mac.

-jon

thinkfree is a very good alternative

[thaigan]

I saw this demo'd at the NY Macworld and it looked pretty good...
http://www.thinkfree.com
...And low cost too!

You First post Boys are stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest that instead of first posting, that you guys start a FIRST LOOK. Be the first to check out a slashdot link before it gets slashdoted. The proof on how you'd be first? Mirror the sitee and put it up. Then come heere and say FIRST LOOOOK!

Java based StarOffice - blow me!

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll my ass all you want!
I hate slow programs! Especially productivity programs where I need to type/work as fast as I think. Having to wait for some fucking interpreter really pisses me off! The performance of programs these last couple of years has degraded to retard level. WTF! When I started programming - ya know - in the snow - up hill - both ways - we made sure the poor fucking user didn't have to wait around for the fucking computer to thrash, swap, and all that horseshit!
With all these new fangled processors that have a gagillion gigiahertz and gagillions of bytes of RAM, there shouldn't be ANY delay in proocessing! But NOOOO, I have t wait for my fucking computer to thrash it's drive and I have to wait SECONDS before the screen updates!
Write the fucking code and make it native. Fuck this interpreted shit! It didn't work for BASIC!Perl - well, you got me. I guess that's because Perl programmers are smarter and know when to use an interpreted language.
Leave the Java shit for WEB shit - OK!

I'm getting Open Office! Fuck the Java shit!!

Re:Java based StarOffice - blow me!

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree. I get very pissed off when people try to write productivity applications with languages like java. A lot of these new languages are very useful and powerful but they also make programmers lazy and lower the bar for programming.

The face of a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever wondered what slashdot trolls look like? Well here is a pic of the Wipo troll.

Re:The face of a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

thats hilarious.

he's such a nice young man

Java office suites

[_narf_]

I'd missed the original article, so I don't know the whole story. But if there IS any truth to the Java port, I feel the need to point out Corel's failed venture to port the Wordperfect suite over to Java.

Why would it be any better to try such a thing now?

Re:Java office suites

[JohnA]

Absolutely. Java has come a LONG way since Corel tried to port Office to Java. Corel was trying to port to JDK 1.1, which was totally pre-swing and pre-Java 2D. This meant that there was no font support outside of "monospaced", "serif" and "sans-serif", and it also meant no access to acceleration tools provided by Java 2D.

Any effort to create an office suite today would have a tremendous chance of success, although it would still be a challenge.

Re:Java office suites

[AJWM]

Why would it be any better to try such a thing now?

Well, here are a few reasons for starters:

• Processors are an order or magnitude or two faster now than they were then.
• "Hotspot" and similiar JIT compiler technology means JVMs run orders of magnitude faster even on the same processors.
• Java itself has improved greatly from the, what, 1.0 or 1.1 days of Corel's venture?
• And Java programmers are a lot more familiar with the technology these days -- I imagine Corel's Java coders probably weren't very far up the experience curve.
• Then there's the whole J2EE web services thing, which might make a lot of sense for an organization that wants to maintain some sort of central control over its office documents, but that's a whole other issue.

I'm not saying it necessarily makes sense even now to do a cross-language as well as a cross-platform port, just answering your question.

Re:Java office suites

[ikekrull]

Correct me if i'm wrong, but since 1.1 was using native widgets as opposed to Java2D's 'lightweight' Java widgets, the 1.1 AWT is a lot faster than the Swing GUI, especially on 500Mhz machines.

Please don't bother telling me that everyone has a 1GHz machine now, as this is not true, and won't be for a good 5 years.

Re:Java office suites

[JohnA]

Actually, that totally depends on the VM. For 1.1 AWT under Windows, Microsoft's VM is actually the fastest.

As for the Swing vs. AWT issue, that really is a toss up. The main reason for this is twofold:

• Swing now has access to native video accelleration throw Java 2D, eliminating most of the advantage native peers had over swing widgets
• VMs have matured greatly over the last several years, and continue to improve. The most noticable difference came when the Hotspot VM was introduced in JDK 1.2.

So, unfortunately, the question is difficult as the answer varies from problem to problem.

An interesting compromise between AWT and Swing has emerged in the form of Eclipse's SWT. For more info on that product, check out the eclipse home page.

Re:Java office suites

[FatherOfONe]

I won't tell you that everyone has a 1GIG machine now, but I will say that in less than 3 years most fortune 1000 businesses will have >1Gig machines.

New Dell >1GHZ is now less than $700.00

I will agree that Swing is slower than native widgets, but at least when you write a Swing app it will behave the same way on different GUI's. It can also have the look and feel of the default OS. I have Windows users who have said time and time again that they would NEVER run a JAVA app. Well, they do, but they just don't know it. Our apps look and act just like ones created with VB or C/C++. Our slowest desktop is currently a PII 300 with 64MB of RAM. It runs our apps fair. Our 600MHZ PIII's with 128MB or RAM run great.

So yes the speed will be marginally slower, but the JITs rock now, developers don't have 1 year of Java experience AND processors are generally 10X faster than they were in 1996. Also the amount of RAM a system has now is greatly increased.

Now if you haven't upgraded you computer since 1996, then I would say.
"Dude buy a Dell" For ~$700.00 you will see a great performance boost.

Re:Java office suites

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone actually used an application written in Java that wasn't slow? I'm honestly curious, because I've yet to find one. My pet peeves are with administration GUIs written in Java that are just plain mind-numbingly slow. One of them can block for 2 minutes while it's doing whatever it is doing and then suddenly pops back to life. I've NEVER seen a program written in a compiled language behave like this unless it was utter shite.

Re:Java office suites

[FatherOfONe]

I agree with your post, but our test have shown that Suns JDK 1.3 with Hotspot Server (yes Server) actually outperformed (barely) Microsofts JVM in a lot of test. Hotspot client wasn't out when I ran the test. I also would bet that the 1.4 JVM by Sun is as fast or faster. These test were with AWT, not Swing.

One interesting point is that we tested quite a few JVMs and the only ONE that didn't behave exactly as expected was Microsofts. It rendered things weird.

Re:Java office suites

[RocketJeff]

I won't tell you that everyone has a 1GIG machine now, but I will say that in less than 3 years most fortune 1000 businesses will have >1Gig machines.

Nope, they won't. The Fortune 1000 probably trail other businesses in upgrading their machines (due to depreciation, other uses for the $, etc).

I work for one of them and basically the speed of your machine is related to when you started - the longer you've been here the slower your machine is. Simply, a new employee gets a new machine (the latest and greatest) - but that machine doesn't get replaced ever unless it either breaks or there's a legitimate business need (or you're a manager...). Just replacing machines 'because it's old/slow' isn't a business need.

Case in point - I started almost 3 years ago and have a 700Mh Pentium III. One of my co-workers started 4 years ago and has 233Mh Pentium II. Companies don't just run around upgrading people's machines willy-nilly.

Re:Java office suites

[chez69]

check out eclipse

www.eclipse.org.

the gui parts are written with a set of java widgets called SWT - java wrappers around native widgets.

Re:Java office suites

[AJWM]

Troll? Troll!?

Somebody's ass is grass in metamod.

Mac rumors

[bsDaemon]

Why is it that the Macintosh is always haveing rumors about it? Apple in general. What is it about Apple folk that makes them need to start/spread them? This isn't supposed to be a troll, honestly. It just seems that Apple has developed a cult that (most) other computer companies have not (slaves don't count).

Re:Mac rumors

[rampant mac]

It's like owning a Porsche. Just not as fast :D

Re:Mac rumors

[rjung2k]

Apple is an interesting company, that does interesting things, led by an interesting CEO.

If it wasn't for the illegal monopoly (and the ensuing fortune that came with it), nobody would give Bill Gates the time of day.

Read the parent comment again...

[Simon Carr]

I believe the original poster stated that the Sun and Apple programmers that worked on it were volunteering time (not getting paid).

I don't know who works for who on the dayjob side but it wouldn't particularly surprise me if employees from Apple and Sun were contributing.

If you look at The about page It's clear there is participation from at least Sun employees.

I think it's cool. I like OpenOffice. If people are looking for an alternative to MS Office, that's one of your better bets.

Just in time

[eskilling]

I've installed OpenOffice on the Win2K hard drive I have at school to show people that yes there is an alternative to MS Office. I installed it even though I had access to a liscenced version of Office XP. The learning curve was negligible and it opened all the existing Word docs I had.

I'm looking very forward to OpenOffice on the Mac. I have AppleWorks which is fine however after using OpenOffice I was hooked.

Now if I could only look at the "First Look" ;)

Why don't you just get a REAL operating system...

[Anonymous Coward]

...instead of trying to trick developers into writing software for your obsolete OS?

Windows has tons of Office suites. Although there is no need to use any of them since MS Office works perfectly for everything!

Sun plans Apple takeover!

[weefle]

Yeah, this rumor has floated around countless times, almost as many as the one about how Apple's about to just go bankrupt and call it quits. But somebody passed it around to me about six years ago with the funniest spin:

Yeah, did you hear? Sun's going to buy Apple! Yeah, and do you know what they're gonna call themselves after the merger?

Snapple!

Re:Sun plans Apple takeover!

[captredballs]

Listen Dude. That was somebody else's rumor. THIS ONE is mine. Did they have the OpenOffice spin? No. Was MacOS UNIX then? No, it wasn't. Was the powerpc chip too slow to keep up with intel back then? Ooops! I guess that's always been the case.

My Sun/Apple "rumor" is way cooler than any of those other out of date rumors.

The Snapple thing IS funny, though. I give props to the rumors before mine. I'm truly standing on the shoulder's of giants.

Re:Sun plans Apple takeover!

[FatherOfONe]

Actually I have another rumor.

IBM is going to buy Apple.

The new company will be called.
IBM

or

Red Hat and Apple are going to merge

The new company will be called
Red Delicious

Re:Sun plans Apple takeover!

[Brian_at_Work]

Hrmm... I know your joking, but IBM used to make some of their CPU's and IBM is opening a huge new chip factory hrmmm.....

Re:Sun plans Apple takeover!

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to? IBM make all the G3's... like the new, very fancy ones in the current iBook.

Re:Sun plans Apple takeover!

[kyrre]

As far as I understand IBM still makes cpus for Apple. The chip in iBook is supposed to be of IBM brand. I only found this link to back up my claims, but I originally read it somewhere else.

PEDOPHILE ARE EVIL

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.kfor.com/Global/story.asp?S=874963

i hate pedophile

The name of the merger....?

[Doctor Fishboy]

So would they call the new company Snapple?

It would be great

[Damek]

if Apple bundled OpenOffice with OSX. I don't see any reason why they shouldn't.

It sure would be neat (and I don't even own a Mac). But I can think of at least one thing that, while it may not be "a reason why they shouldn't" bundle OpenOffice, it's certainly a big consideration: they'd have to provide support. With MS Office, I imagine users with support questions get help from Microsoft. With an Apple-bundeled OpenOffice, Apple would have to have a team to handle support requests.

Re:It would be great

[f.money]

With MS Office, I imagine users with support questions get help from Microsoft. With an Apple-bundeled OpenOffice, Apple would have to have a team to handle support requests.

So Apple is different from every other OEM why? If any OEM bundles an M$ product, they provide support. The only way you can talk to M$ is to pony up the ~$100 or whatever it is now.

Jon

So?

[Anonymous Coward]

that can't happen. I mean apple is using a BSD unix base, while Solaris is now SysV

Sun has a rich BSD history. A Sun founder was one of the writers of the original BSD. The old SunOS was BSD based. NetBSD & OpenBSD have Sparc ports. Porting Darwin over to Sparc would probrably be relatively simple (by kernel hacker standards).

Or they could port Aqua over to the old SunOS :)

more screenshots

[minus_273]

are here.. :) very nice

Re:more screenshots

[openstep]

Anyone wanna mirror these for me? :)

Most of these are almost historical now, showing how the patch evolved over time with the various additions. Through them you can kinda see the process that started with buttons, then antialiased text, then radio buttons, then checkboxes, up to backgrounds.

We've been swamped with answering people's questions recently, but next we're trying to work on bevel buttons for the icon/palette buttons you can see at the bottom left of the sdraw window, getting only the default button of a dialog to draw in blue and have the others white (as per the Aqua guidelines), and work on 10.2 style focus rings instead of that awful rectangle around the label of the button has the keyboard focus, a remnant of the Win95ish controls that were previously there. We also need to clean up the patch as well so it's not quite as much of a hack and won't break a build (right now it has to be built separately from a regular OOo build... You can see the results of a vcl build probably (the files delivered lies) in some of those terminals in the screenshots along with warning messages from parts of the graphics layer that still need to be completed, e.g. fonts.

ed peterlin

Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill? Is that you? Where's that $20 you owe me?

Not quite correct...

[codemachine]

I'm not sure if people can't read or what, but I've heard many times now that the OS X port is being done by just 2 people. And I believe that neither of them work at Apple or Sun. OpenOffice itself IS being developed in part by Sun employees, but not the OS X port. I wouldn't be surprised if that changed in the near future though, especially with the interest in the product that this reporting error has caused.

I think the problem here is people seem to be confusing the whole OpenOffice product (which has been in development for years and hit 1.0 not long ago) and the OS X port of OpenOffice (which just began recently and is a long ways from 1.0 quality). I've heard a few people who think that OpenOffice as a whole won't hit 1.0 for years now, just because they read that this port could take that long. Someone should get the word our that OpenOffice already is at 1.0 on most platforms.

POWER, not SPARC

[PCM2]

Apple SHOULD be looking to G4/5 alternatives, particulary 64 bit options if they want to maintain any customers in the movie industry. The sparc wouldn't be a poor choice, since it seems like its roadmap goes farther than the vanilla powerpc chips.

The rumors I've heard lately say that the Apple branded hardware they'll call the "G5" isn't going to use the chips that are currently marketed as PowerPC G5 chips, but rather IBM's POWER line. This would put them on the same manufacturing page as IBM's POWER-based workstations etc., which would probably be a smart move for the road ahead, unlike the idea of switching to yet another processor architecture.

Question: Macs & Unix Workstations

[Stephen VanDahm]

I have a question for folks that know more than me. If trends continue, we can expect Apple processors to become more powerful, meaning OS X will run faster on the newest Apple hardware. We can also expect more and more software, like OpenOffice, to be ported to OS X.

Could the Macintosh reach the point of becoming a viable alternative to the traditional UNIX workstation (like a Sun or an SGI)? I know that the old-school workstations are popular for scientific and mathematical work, but OS X could provide the convenience of a regular desktop OS and still let folks run their custom UNIX software. Do you think Sun is worried about losing market share to Apple?

Steve

Re:Question: Macs & Unix Workstations

[FatherOfONe]

I don't want to start a flaim war... but I will take a stab at this.

Apple has ONE core market now and SUN has the other. Both could spend time and resources trying to get the other market but neither can afford the resources to do that.

Could Apple take FreeBSD errr OSX and make a huge million dollar server? Yes, but it would come at the cost of them getting OSX better for the desktop. Can they afford that? I don't think so.

Could SUN make a workstation for the masses... I personally don't think so. Sun is in a weird position now in that their threat isn't from Apple but Linux on X86. They are going to have some tough descisions in the next few years if the Intel 64Bit stuff takes off.

Re:Question: Macs & Unix Workstations

[homer_ca]

Depends on what kind of science and engineering work you want the workstation for. Mathematica, Matlab or a homegrown numerical simulation run on just about any ole' system, and the raw processor power of x86 has the edge there. If you have big data sets and need 64bit addressing, that rules out x86 and Apple. If it's 3D CAD, you'll need a good OpenGL accelerator (not a gaming card) and it has to run your favorite CAD software.

Re:Question: Macs & Unix Workstations

[bockman]

Do you think Sun is worried about losing market share to Apple?

The real treath to SUN on the workstation side is Intel/Linux, not Apple. In my field of work (aereospace) I see more and more Linux PC used in places where years ago you had to buy a Sun/IBM/Digital/HP workstation.

We absolutely love our computers

[Anonymous Coward]

The work exactly like we think they should.
The interface simply fits.

Yes, yes they have.

[Anonymous Coward]

Us Mac users just think different (tm), I guess.

Actually, I think it's the convergence of two factors: 1) The Apple corporate ("Insanely Great") culture, and 2) a user base which is a definite minority that is dominated by a unique mixture of artists and geeks.

MS' culture is smash-mouth business domination, which is attractive to some, but not conducive to rumors. And the others in the Windows camp, such as Dell, are all about surviving in the Intel-based toaster market, so don't have the time/energy/budget/desire/clue to buy a culture. (Not to mention that their customers, almost by definition, don't give a rip about style or radical innovation.)

Linux -- speaking as an outside observer -- has the geek subculture and is also a minority, like Apple users. But it doesn't have the depth of artist influence and it doesn't have the "Insanely Great" corporate culture.

And after all, how could there be Linux rumors? No flashy spokesperson, no big announcements, and everything out in the open for any programmer to take a look at. Not much grist for the rumor mill.

(I.e. to have rumors, you must have secrets and these secrets must be about something imaginative/exciting.)

Uh, Appleworks

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, how about Appleworks. Besides, who gives a fuck about openoffice or star office. They suck. I've used both quite often in hopes that they would turn into something useful but they continue to suck. They are also slow as shit and now I hear talks of doing teh whole thing in Java. Give me a fucking break. No wonder teh quality of software has gone down so much in the past few years.

One pissed off computer user.

Re:Uh, Appleworks

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a real joy when I get a negative karma on slashdot. That means I hit the nail on the head with extreme accuracy.

u?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is unfortunate, as it would be nice for Mac OS X users to have a good alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office

Wheres that good alternative? haven't seen any good alternative for Linux yet. Perhaps the linux community should accept that MS Office is the best office suite around and try to make something competetive, at least for once.

There's not such a thing that deserves to be called a good office suite for linux.

I just don't like Star.Open Office.

[RatBastard]

I'm not trolling, but I really do not like Star/Open Office. I really dislike the way it works. I've tried several versions and they all just annoy the crap out of me.

Of course

[theolein]

Only idiots use words like "edumacated".

woah the screenshots look realy

[Anonymous Coward]

wicked.

so this should be the alternative to ms office ?
be honest!

Looks like crap

[anarkhos]

It looks like crap and I doubt it will ever behave like a Mac app. Has this person even READ the human interface guidelines?

Re:Looks like crap

[Anonymous Coward]

It's no worse then how god awful Mozilla 0.9x looked when they started their process of looking like Aqua vs. running in X but looking like Classic.

Apple OWNS FileMaker

[mijkal]

Apple owed Claris, which was renamed "FileMaker" after Jobs brought most of the Claris apps back under Apple. Just look at the copyright notice on every FileMaker page.

Open Office on Windows

[vex24]

I'd love to switch my users to Open Office, but they've made it a near impossibility, as you have to "install" Open Office for each user that will use it, meaning many hours of work for yours truly.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, install OO on a Windows 2000 box, then log on as a regular user and try to run it... doesn't work at all. Maybe someday it'll work out of the box, and I'll be thrilled to make the switch.

I don't want Apple to do StarOffice

[TheBishop]

Because I think Apple would be better served by improving their own Office suite -- Appleworks. Not that I don't like Staroffice (or Openoffice.org). I would be concerned that if Apple "took over" development on Star/Openoffice for OSX that

• Apple would merge and have only "one" suite - which would be Appleworks + Staroffice as a blend. This would translate into less choice, not more for the OSX user.
• If Apple took it over, I forsee that 99.9% of the development would be by Apple itself. Yes Apple gives back to the community, but then the Star/Openoffice.org group would see that as a chance to slack off. What OSX needs more than Apple working on things is *other people* working on things. Diversity breeds innnovation. Apple is good, but they shouldn't have to do everything.

Appleworks has come ("free") with every iBook/G4 Powermac I've bought at our company since OSX 10.1 came out. It's default loaded in the dock even. That's the best exposure any Mac office suite can get.

Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system.

[Mikey-San]

I'm sorry, I was distracted by your blue screen of death. And my copy of Office for Mac OS X.

What were you saying?

Karma? Screw that noise. Burn it to the ground.

RTFM!

[Max von H.]

From the official "Instructions for Installing and Setting Up OpenOffice.org 1.0"

"If you have multiple users set up on your machine, then each user who wishes to use OpenOffice.org 1.0 will need to install separately. This uses up a lot of disk space. As an alternative, you can use the multi-user option instead, though installation is a little more complicated:

Unzip the downloaded file into its own folder. If you have Compressed Folders installed, the easiest way to do this is to right click on the file and then choose Extract All...
Open Command Prompt (if you have Windows NT, 2000 or XP) or MS-DOS prompt (for other versions of Windows). You should find this on the Start Menu somewhere under Programs (on some versions of Windows, it is in the Accessories folder).
You should then type the location of the folder followed by "install\setup /net". For example, if you unzipped the files to "C:\OpenOffice Setup\" you would type C:\OpenOffice Setup\install\setup /net followed by Return.
Then follow the on screen prompts ... make a note of the folder in which OpenOffice.org 1.0 is installed onto your computer.

This will install a shared version of OpenOffice.org 1.0 on your computer. Now each user who wishes to use the program can double click on the program setup.exe that was created in the folder you have made a note of in step 4 above - this will install the files necessary for that user and use only a few additional megabytes of disk space."

Wasn't that hard, was it?

Cheers,
-max

Re:RTFM!

[vex24]

I'm very much aware of how to do it, it's just that running setup.exe for each and every user (or listening to them on the phone clicking and tapping) would be a harrowing experience at best.

If I had nothing but programmers or other computer-savvy people as users, this would be fine. In my case, it needs to be easier. MS Office doesn't require all this nonsense, and isn't that who OO/SO is competing against?

Makes me wonder why we need so many "settings" files for a single user who hasn't tapped a single keystroke yet...

Re:RTFM!

[Max von H.]

Yeah, I admit it can be a bugger. I hope it'll be corrected in the next release.

Since I'm the one installing software on the boxen, it's not much of a hassle: I'm paid by the hour...

OO still is a relief from MS, and after a brief learning curve is just top-notch. My clients like the price tag too!

Cheers,
-max

Re:RTFM!

[vex24]

Yup, I really wanted OO.o to work out as we're still using the very aged Office 97 where I work... I actually just emailed Lee Corbin (the name off the installation instructions page) to ask him if they have plans for simplifying it.

I simply don't have time to do all those user installs... especially not with all that support Office 97 needs. ;) I'm just happy Mozilla 1.0 turned out so well... I load it on every machine that I set up now!

Re:RTFM!

[nedrichards]

http://installation.openoffice.org/ Tells you everything. Ask on the mailing lists for more clarification. Lee's mainly a Graphics guy through he did some cool hacking for dictinstall.

Re:RTFM!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm ...
On Linux when a new user executes the soffice binary, the setup program automatically pops up ... accepting the default options just copies all of the user stuff to a directory in thier $HOME.

This doesnt seem like a big deal. Isnt it similar to this on win2k?

Re:RTFM!

[bockman]

I think that if you do a 'default setup' on a test account and then remote-copy all the setup-generated files on each of your users home directory,open office will assume that a setup is done and will just start, whithout running the setup program.

I never tried it, but it sounds logical.

(Do users have home directory in Winxx[xx]? I hope so.)

grousing about rejected submissions

[margaret]

I know you're not supposed to "grouse about rejected submissions" but I can't help it this time. I submitted this half an hour after it was posted on maccentral at 7:30 AM eastern. What to you have to do, pay that Taco guy to get your story posted!? No thanks :-P

Re:grousing about rejected submissions

[Anonymous Coward]

As if you didn't already know, Taco, pudge, Homos, etc. are something of a gay club. If you don't blow them (literally or figuratively) you are cut out of the loop. They pretty much only accept submissions from their friends. Probably 90% of the submissions don't even get read because they are filtered out automatically by user ID.

StarOffice a distribution of OpenOffice.org

[WebMink]

No it's not. StarOffice is a commercial distribution of OpenOffice.org, just like Red Hat is a commercial distribution of Linux.

Re:StarOffice a distribution of OpenOffice.org

[Anonymous Coward]

So where can I get SUN's source code?

schmuck.

Office and OS

[Anonymous Coward]

What would happen if MS was two companies - an Office company and an OS company? I think we'd have MS Office on Linux OS - MS's worst nightmare. I think the reason they sell MS Office for Mac OS is they know a Mac OS can't hurt their Windows OS market share - it's too simple and it's restricted to Mac hardware. Linux could - it's free - like IE. IE killed Netscape. Can Linux kill Windows? Maybe some day - maybe soon. There was a time when Word Perfect, Corel, or Novell's Office was a contender - it wasn't that long ago. I've heard many complaints about Microsoft's software assurance license switch. Is anyone willing to take a risk and run Linux? What about a free office suite? Too much risk, for now.

the problem is Apple

[g4dget]

OpenOffice basically runs on OSX. But it isn't usable by the masses because it requires an X11 server, and installing that is beyond the abilities of most users because it doesn't ship with the Mac.

There is no technical reason why OSX couldn't support, in addition to Carbon and Cococa, access to the graphics system through the X11 protocol. The amount of code required on Apple's side would be small (a few hundred kbytes of binary), and users would not be able to tell whether an application talks to Quartz through Carbon or the X11 protocol.

Of course, efforts like OpenOffice would still have to work on implementing Apple GUI guidelines, but they would have to do that even if they use native widgets.

Many of Apple's new users picked the Mac because it is UNIX; Apple should support graphical UNIX applications fully and out of the box rather than insisting that other people spend large amounts of time unnecessarily on ports.

Re:the problem is Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

You may be interested to know that the latest binary installer from OOo for MacOS X will install an X server and window manager too if they're not on a machine (well, at least sublaunch like 5 other installers). I think GIMP does this as well.

Re:the problem is Apple

[HeghmoH]

If Apple did what you're proposing, then MacOS X would descend into UI inconsistency hell and be indistinguishable from any other UNIX. You really think that somebody who's too lazy to use Quartz will still make all of his X11 code conform to Apple's UI guidelines? That's funny! Tell me another one!

Re:the problem is Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Except, of course, that would mean Apple would be expected to actually support the nightmare that is X.

Many new Mac users chose MacOS X because it is UNIX with a decent interface. If those users want to maintain the quality of that interface adding X11 support won't help, it will only hurt. Steve likes his interface the way he wants it, and shipping with X11 preinstalled will open up the floodgates to lots of software that will never conform to Apple UI guidelines. And Apple will take the blame.

Sure it will open up the masses of X11 software to MacOS X users, but so what? We already have it. Those folks who want to install X11 apps can install X easily from a number of sources.

By the way, I love the notion that its "only a few hundred kbytes of binary" as if that were a valid measure of code complexity ("The Linux kernel is no great accomplishment its only few MB of binary"). To paraphrase an old quote "Everything is easy for the person who doesn't have to do it."

Re:the problem is Apple

[g4dget]

If Apple did what you're proposing, then MacOS X would descend into UI inconsistency hell and be indistinguishable from any other UNIX. You really think that somebody who's too lazy to use Quartz will still make all of his X11 code conform to Apple's UI guidelines? That's funny! Tell me another one!

It's naive to think that by not making X11 available, Apple will force people to write Cocoa-native applications. Instead, either people won't bother porting at all, or they will put Cocoa backends on their toolkits. That won't make the applications look or feel any more native (such backends will usually not even use Cocoa widgets), it just takes time away from trying to make the applications work better on Macintosh.

Besides, it's a myth that Mac or Windows are particularly consistent. Many applications on either platform are already written using cross-platform toolkits, and the vast majority of applications are written by people who don't know and don't care about the UI guideliens.

Re:the problem is Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Except, of course, that would mean Apple would be expected to actually support the nightmare that is X.

That's absolutely ridiculous. X11 is a graphics API. It's much smaller and simpler than Carbon. It's mature. There is nothing to "support", and there is no "nightmare". OS9 support under OSX, now there you have a software engineering and usability "nightmare".

Sure it will open up the masses of X11 software to MacOS X users, but so what?

It would mean that my parents could actually get the software that they see running on my Linux machine. Right now, I have to tell them: "Sorry, it won't run, and there is nothing like it available for Macintosh OS X yet. Maybe in another year."

By the way, I love the notion that its "only a few hundred kbytes of binary" as if that were a valid measure of code complexity. [...] To paraphrase an old quote "Everything is easy for the person who doesn't have to do it."

It has been done, a number of times. It really isn't hard. Apple could buy it very cheaply. Or, for that matter, they could just bundle XFree86 and better support its further development. Without XFree86 on Mac OSX, OSX would not have seen the boost that it has.

Re:the problem is Apple

[HeghmoH]

I just call it like I see it. I use a Mac daily; all of my apps look the same and work the same (except where they do different things because they're different programs, of course). I use a UNIX system running X11, and every app does things its own way. It's enough to drive a man nuts. You're right that one could ignore the guidelines and still use Cocoa, but they usually don't. Whereas with X11, there would be no reason to do it in the first place. Not to mention that certain things would be very difficult, such as using the system-wide menu bar, working with all the compositing, blending, and antialising the OS offers, and things like that.

Re:the problem is Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

That's absolutely ridiculous. X11 is a graphics API. It's much smaller and simpler than Carbon. It's mature. There is nothing to "support", and there is no "nightmare". OS9 support under OSX, now there you have a software engineering and usability "nightmare".

You say that as if Carbon APIs were always a given under MacOS X, which they were not. Remember that Carbon only came about because the apps Apple depends on to sell machines (PhotoShop, etc.) basically told everyone they no intent to port to Cocoa and Apple had to meet them halfway (or maybe 3/4 of the way, depending on your perspective).

Its an invalid comparison. To argue that because Apple did one hard thing (move many MacOS 9 APIs to MacOS X) means that they should do another hard thing (maintain and _support_ an X11 to native windowing toolkit) is silly. You may want them to do it, but one does not imply the other.

And as for support, apparently you've never actually worked in a support position. Unlike Linux, when something goes wrong with software on a Mac Apple gets the phone call (calls I used to answer when I worked there as a college job). Users don't care that the app is poorly written or was written without any consideration for Apple guidelines. Unlike Linux you just can't tell them to ask in a newsgroup. That's a real support cost.

It would mean that my parents could actually get the software that they see running on my Linux machine. Right now, I have to tell them: "Sorry, it won't run, and there is nothing like it available for Macintosh OS X yet. Maybe in another year."

Strawman. You know XFree86 is available for Mac and could help them install it. Again, those Mac users who need X11 apps because they are Unix users from other platforms (or have a family member who is) can get X11 in a simple download.

What the discussion is really about is would Mac users beenfit in general from going to SourceForge and downloading the latest GTK calculator or whatever. And the answer is probably not. Sure they could, but it would cost them their interface consistency.

The Slashdot crowd needs to get it through their heads that X11 is not the end all of graphic toolkits and that Apple is not interested in offering just another Unix. That niche is taken these days, mostly by Linux. Apple wants to offer a better Unix, one that embodies their traditional UI quality particularly in the area of UI consistency and X11 has no place in that.

Re:the problem is Apple

[g4dget]

I use a UNIX system running X11, and every app does things its own way. It's enough to drive a man nuts.

Well, if you deliberately mix applications from different UNIX desktops, they are going to be inconsistent. That's your choice. If it bothers you, stick with all KDE or all Gnome or all Motif. Most people don't seem to have a real problem with this in practice. Note that cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, selections, and window management--the stuff that really matters--is consistent among applications.

Not to mention that certain things would be very difficult, such as using the system-wide menu bar, working with all the compositing, blending, and antialising the OS offers, and things like that.

That's up to the toolkits: toolkits need to be adapted to handle those things, whether or not the backend is based on X11. And they will be. But there is overall a lot less work if the backend is based on Quartz, so there is more time for those details.

Not so great for the Apple software industry

[davids-world.com]

Wouldn't be as good. Apple has a (short) history of damaging Apple-based software businesses by including functionality for free. This happened with CD burning software (Toast used to be much more important...) and some smaller multimedia utils such as Winamp (there was an alpha version for OS X - it won't be cont'd probably due to iTunes).

It's essentially the same strategy MS persued when "integrating" IE into Windows.

Of course, those Apple applications are neat and a huge added-value. But at some point, Apple will hurt its industry partners - that's bad because the OS X platform needs new software and new ports.

Can you blame sun?

[AxelTorvalds]

They are in a situation right now. They've got to deal with that sitatuion and they won't be profitable again for at least 2 more quarters.

They can't support Solaris 9 on Intel, an existing product for the most part, let alone branch out in to MacOS land

Basically, when I run out of toilet paper I have been wiping my ass with Sun stock certifcates as of late...

Apple should chunk AppleWorks and help OpenOffice

[mactari]

[So lets say that Apple ships OpenOffice with OSX. Microsoft could then stop or greatly slow development for I.E., Outlook, and Office for the Mac. This would force quite a few comopanies to switch off of the Macintosh platform. Or at lest take a long look at how a Windows XP machine would perform instead of a Macintosh.]

Apple's already developing and supporting AppleWorks (once ClarisWorks, and it's always, even if you had to use MacLinkPlus, opened and saved Word .doc's) so I doubt bundling OpenOffice would change much from MS's Mac division's point of view.

And if Apple could take the effort spent on AppleWorks and give it to OpenOffice.org we'd have a better product all around. I've been using OpenOffice this week, and it's better than AppleWorks imo.

Though I'd still prefer they'd just stopped at MacWrite 2.0 and got M$ to stop pushing new .doc formats every year or two. *ah*, we can all dream.

Ahhh Poor mac users

[opusuno]

StarOffice is the BIGGEST POS BloatWare I've ever used. Ha! I would NEVER install it on any of my Linux machines, much less my Mac. In the immortal words of Python: "Piss Off"

Something's not right with the screen shots...

[gozar]

Looking at this shot: http://www.iceni.org/~peterlin/full_sdraw.jpg
brings up a few questions:

Why does the OpenOffice application have the focus, but the menu bar says that Terminal does.

Interesting set of applications running. What does Photoshop have to do with this?

Now I haven't done any development under OS X, and the terminal windows looks like legit. What's up?

Re:Something's not right with the screen shots...

[openstep]

The app launches from the Terminal and is a child process and doesn't have the voodoo magic to put a name in the menubar. I suspect this will go away when we solve the problems with application packaging for OS X which is still a mess. Wanna help us out (hint hint)?

Photoshop is open since I needed something to convert TIFFs into JPEGs and create the thumbnails for the website :) A bit hypocritical I guess. I should've used GIMP.

The binaries are sometimes not downloadable because my server's being hammered from being on slashdot and several mac sites. Try reconnecting a few times and it may come up (they're actually 10 megs compressed, and dashboardbuddha is on a 10K/s upstream connection and already unhappy with the load :).

regards,
ed peterlin

Re:Something's not right with the screen shots...

[gozar]

Makes sense... That's what I assumed was happening, but you never know! :-)

Aqua

[zapfie]

Aqua is not only a look but also a feel. Is the plan to just change the widgets to use the Aqua graphical style, or will they also be re-laying out the interface to conform with the Aqua UI guidelines?

Re:Aqua

[urmensch]

maybe you couldn't read the article at the time you wrote this... check it out now. they address your question.

Re:Aqua

[zapfie]

Oops.. heh, I thought I read the whole thing, but apparently not. :) Thanks for pointing that out.

Re:Aqua

[openstep]

Yes, we will be working on retooling it to conform to Aqua. That's a major undertaking for us, though, and we'll need lots of help to design how we'll do it as well as execute it. It's easy to draw buttons in two days...to get it to be sheets, tabbed dialogs, drawers, etc. isn't :)

Apple cannot support StarOffice for OSX

[logout]

One interesting thing about OS X is that Microsoft is an important figure in the world of OS X; without Microsoft, OS X won't be able to run Internet Explorer and Office X. Although OS X is a great software with its Aqua interface and BSD level stability, I don't think anybody will be willing to use it without decent web browser and word processor.

Therefore, one handy strategy for MS when Apple *bravely* tries to break the alliances is to stop support for IE and Office for OS X. Thus, it may follow that there will be no Aqua desktop ported to x86 hardware nor any attempts to provide substitues for IE and MS Office.

In this respect, Sun's decision to not support StarOffice for OS X can be a good strategy; you don't need to convert Microsoft into an enemy by explicitely supporting StarOffice for OS X. Rather, supporting OpenOffice would be a better choice, building the potential for Open Office as a competitive substitute for MS Office. Moreover, Apple is in the worse situation than Sun when competing against Microsoft. For Apple, supporting StarOffice will mean the massive attack from Microsoft. Apple won't like to see it realized in a near future. :)

Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, at least I don't have to beg Sun to publish an Office Suite for me.

Not that I'd want to because MS Office is so perfect!

OpenOffice on Linux/PPC is still OK

[axxackall]

Who cares about that proprietary OSX? OpenOffice works perfectly fine on Linux/PPC (i.e. YDL). Do you want alternative to M$ office suite on Mac? Just make a right choice about OS to install.

and a final completely unuseful tidbit...

[openstep]

The desktop picture in the way back is britney spears on a tree swing.

ed peterlin

OpenOffice on Linux/PPC...and Darwin coming

[openstep]

Kevin's completed the port to LinuxPPC and it's excellently stable under several LinuxPPC distributions. Another great example of what community developers bring to OpenOffice.org.

Don't forget that we're supporting DarwinPPC as well! The OS X team's Darwin port already in a few distributions like the GNU Darwin distribution. They also have screenshots of it running on Darwin, something that I've never seen in person!

ed peterlin

So does M$ Office!

[Anonymous Coward]

ever tried doing the same thing with Micro$oft Office 97? It doesn't work without making the users all Administrators, or doing a registry hack!!
Don't know about Office 2000, but probably the same problems apply

There is already a Java version of StarOffice!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why Sun bought Star Division in the first place. I'ts called portal server (or somesuch) and enables you to access staroffice from a browser.
Not released yet, or maybe even buried by now.
Maybe Sun just took some pieces from this port.

Why

[Anonymous Coward]

anyone would dirty their osx with an ugly product like openoffice. I don't like it and won't use it due to the large # of bugs not even to mention the other inherant problems (xserver - which btw I think it is ludicrous for you to claim apple should support it.. uhhh hello? Native aqua is really starting to kick ass! Jaguar is going to rock even more, and then next release after that is going to be even more advanced, better looking and faster.) I mean all you have to do is look at the other 'news' about the new Quartz api .. 3D icons... 3D windows... don't you think apple can make a better suite than openoffice is? I sure as hell do :p Go ahead and use your ancient emacs or whatever it is you like, but trying to force that garbage on the masses is not going to get apple anywhere! Sad for you, but true to all. Oh, and about that post whoever put up concerning marketshare - obviously you don't know jack. Less than %1 for apple yet linux is more than that? LOL, uh no.. actually linux is ONE-HALF of %1. It's not that difficult to find these generalised, yet mostly correct statistics. And what is with all these trolls in here? Go and get a life you evil bastards!