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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!
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.
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.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
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.
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.
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
Soccer Goal Plans
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.
.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.
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
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
That announcing a "First Look" at something "Neat" for geeks will result in an instantaneous Slashdotting.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
you forgot to add LaTeX, some people actually have to format their work.
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.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
For more information, check out the NewFactor article at : http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18805.html
0 15675.htm
Also check out this GeekNews story: http://geek.com/news/geeknews/2002Jul/gee20020731
(Don't need the Karma, I just want people to get the facts straight. I hate misinformation being spread around...)
Who said Freedom was Fair?
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!
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
They had their minds made up from the beginning. C|net, on the other hand, didn't.
Java-based AND slow? This is a recommendation?
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
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.
-- The unsig...
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.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Any effort to create an office suite today would have a tremendous chance of success, although it would still be a challenge.
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!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
So would they call the new company Snapple?
To my mama?
If something I said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, I meant the other one.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
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
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.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Well, I'm sorry to say your wrong. I do consider my self a pro, I use
/.? No? well than I wasn't talking to her. Shit, I
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
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.
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.
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?
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
- 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.From the official "Instructions for Installing and Setting Up OpenOffice.org 1.0"
/net". For example, if you unzipped the files to "C:\OpenOffice Setup\" you would type C:\OpenOffice Setup\install\setup /net followed by Return. ... make a note of the folder in which OpenOffice.org 1.0 is installed onto your computer.
"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
Then follow the on screen prompts
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
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
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.
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.
[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.]
.doc's) so I doubt bundling OpenOffice would change much from MS's Mac division's point of view.
.doc formats every year or two. *ah*, we can all dream.
Apple's already developing and supporting AppleWorks (once ClarisWorks, and it's always, even if you had to use MacLinkPlus, opened and saved Word
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
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
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?
slashdot!=valid HTML
Troll? Troll!?
Somebody's ass is grass in metamod.
-- Alastair
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.