Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice Beta for Jaguar/X11 Released
kaldari writes "After great work by the development contributors and astounding help from the new testing team, the X11 build is now stable enough for beta testing to begin! This build can run both on DarwinPPC 6.0 and higher and also Mac OS X 10.2 and higher with help from other open source projects. For more info, check out the OpenOffice site."
That is nice and all. IMO, it is hard to get someone to use a 'ugly' windows look-a-like program on OS X when they can use something else that is 'guaranteed' to work that matches the purtiness of OS X. It has also been my experience that the average Mac user is more inclined to pay for something (Office v.X) that works than not pay for something that somewhat works.
Their roadmap is to first get a version that works fine on OS X using X11 for windowing, then to make a version that draws everything manually in quartz and still looks like the X11 version, but it runs without X11, and then finally to make a version that uses aqua widgets. They plan to be done with this by summer 2004, so don't go trashing your copy of office just yet ;)
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/timeline.html
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
No guarantees, I haven't even tried this, and /. may kill it, but try here. Google cached it here.
blarg.
If you want an "alternative" office suite for OS X, consider ThinkFree Office. It's not open-source, but it's a working, Aqua-style office suite that's not made by Microsoft. No free downloads, though (it costs $50).