Final Version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X Released

Ant writes "After two years of work, OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (X11) is golden master and ready for immediate download by all Mac OS X users. This release marks a major milestone. It uses the Unix standard X Window and takes advantage of the immense wealth of open source material. To name but one feature, fonts are anti-aliased, making documents look smooth and clean and wholly professional. If you use Mac OS X there is no reason to wait. This will address your needs. And, as with all in the OpenOffice.org 1.0 family, this free release reads and writes Microsoft Office documents and works freely in heterogeneous environments where one might find Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X machines working side by side. The next step is to finish the Aqua version."

Comments

Selling points?

[Martin Kallisti]

Really, is there nothing more worthy of mention than (gasp!) anti-aliased fonts. I mean, this is supposed to be a productivity suite, not just a Microsoft document reader, right? Apart from that, I would love to hear from people having used recent versions. Is it actually good enough to fully replace Office v.X?

Re:Selling points?

[mashx]

One of the most useful things about OO for me has been this: being the only TiBook user in a company awash with Compaqs and very many different versions of windows, I get many different versions of Word documents, and some of them would force Office 2001 and Office v.X to quit: open the document, application quits! However, when I opened them in OO, it accepted it perfectly. I could then save them (type a space, delete the space) in the same format, but OO would save them in a format that either MS Office would then play nicely. Incredible but true!

However, I wasn't able to use the last beta for my work, simply because it didn't support the number of features that I required for working e.g. version tracking, embedded tables, full bullet point customisation, spacing between bullets etc. It has some of these, but doesn't pplay the same way as office, and in this company I can get away with using a Mac, but for presentation purposes, I need to play the same unfortunately.

If there was one thing I didn't like which I couldn't forgive it for was that you had to set all documents the same size - at least - I couldn't find a way to set them differently.

Still. having said that I have downloaded this latest version, and will again see how well it works. The IT guys want to get rid of Office (purely for the licensing), and are waiting for OO to be possible as a replacement..

Re:Selling points?

[TheRaven64]

Is it actually good enough to fully replace Office v.X?

No. It's slightly better than Office '97, although 1.1 looks like it should be quite a bit nicer (and hopefully the OS X changes can be merged with the 1.1 changes without a huge amount of effort). The real problem with OOo is that it is a Win95 app in terms of look and feel, and so will be quite alien on a Mac, and to quote Greg Lehey (FreeBSD core developer) 'OpenOffice is not a good example of the UNIX way.' so it looks a bit out of place.

For my use it's fine, I don't do any really complicated spreadsheet work (nothing that a 16-bit version of works wouldn't be able to have handled), most of the presentations I give are printed for OHP (although the OOo powerpoint clone is much better than the one that came with SO 5) and I use LaTeX for any non-trivial documents. OOo does everything I need it to do, but I doubt that the same could be said for someone who uses it in a commercial setting.

Re:Selling points?

[1010011010]

Here in our Microsoft-ridden office, I use OpenOffice to recover corrupted Word documents for others. We all love it when Word creates files it can't read back in.

What about native aqua?

[Yonder Way]

X11 is nice and all, but I'm going to risk losing some karma here and say that it is not going to be useful to me for day to day use because of simple little things like lack of system clipboard integration (X11 apps have their own clipboard). When/if OOo runs natively as an aqua app I'll be glad to switch.

Re:What about native aqua?

[EricHsu]

I'm using a beta of OOO (not the latest). Apple X11 lets you take X11 clipboards and paste to the Mac side. OOO had a bug that limited the clipboard to 255 chars, but I think they are working on that. There is another little issue with creeping windows in Apple X11, but overall I'm quite pleased with it. It's the only program I've ever used that comes close to decoding the (criminally obfuscated) MS Office formats. I think the interface is really clunky, but not more so than the Office that they are cloning.

Someone with the dev release of Panther respond!

[amichalo]

The key here is that with the (development) release of Panther, with integrated X11 client released (currently, X11 is Beta 3), will Open Office also enjoy an integrated clipboard, new Font Book, and other (as yet to be named by this author) features that limit the adoption of said orphan (huh?) office suite?

If someone attending WWDC who was given the developer release of panther (and high quality, brushed metal, $129 retail value kaleidoscope) would let us know ASAP, "that would be great".

Office Space, the poor man's lite beer

Re:This will address your needs.

[gerbache]

The mere fact that X11 on OSX is still using a separate clipboard is enough to keep me from wanting to use it. I find it really annoying when I have to struggle to copy and paste between my word processor and the rest of the apps in my system. There is one thing I will say in it's defense, however. It makes it really handy for me as an engineering student because currently Matlab only runs on X11, so I can use it to integrate my plots and such into my reports. Otherwise, I'll stick with commercial office suites until oo.o goes aqua.

The Day of the Apple?

[xyrw]

Whoa! In the last 24 hours:

• G5 computers
• Safari 1.0
• Panther
• Will Linux pass Apple?
• OpenOffice.org 1.0

Damn cool. This is one of those days when I feel especially proud to be a Mac user.

Apple X11 clipboard

[Jimithing DMB]

Hmm. As far as I can tell the clipboard works just fine. Selecting text in an application will make it the PRIMARY selection and it can be pasted with the middle mouse button in to other X11 apps.

Using an X11 apps copy feature will place the selection into the CLIPBOARD buffer which will make it available to all applications (including Mac ones).

In GVIM you can do this by prefixing your commands with "+ (quote plus). As in 4"+yy or Vjjj"+y or "+P or "+p among others. With GNOME and KDE apps you simply use their Copy/Paste features.

If your X11 app does not support CLIPBOARD, then you can use xcutsel to transfer PRIMARY to CLIPBOARD which will allow you to paste into OS X apps. Likewise, you can select text in OS X, copy it, then transfer CLIPBOARD to PRIMARY and use middle-mouse paste.

Granted, I'd love to see middle-mouse paste implemented across the board in OS X. It's a feature that would not confuse novice users as all OS X apps already have normal Copy/Paste and novice users don't have middle mouse buttons anyway and it would really benefit those of us who appreciate having that extra quick select and paste a la X11.

It seems to me that Cocoa could easily support this as most Cocoa apps that do anything with text use the absolutely wonderful NSText system which could have this feature added quite readily.

I for one would be willing to live without the ability to do this from Carbon and Classic apps.

Come to think of it, I'd be willing to bet this could be done using an Objective-C category. Actually, I'm absolutely positive it could be done that way without even having Apple's source. Any takers?

Re:Apple X11 clipboard

[hmccabe]

The key to this would seem to be an Input Manager bundle. I'm not sure how they are programmed, but I have a utility called Cocoa gestures that interprets mouse gestures ( similar to a feature in Mozilla, I hear ) and passes events to the current application. If something like that were to monitor for the third button to be pressed, then pass the paste command to the application this would give you paste in Cocoa apps, but not, like you said, in Classic or Carbon apps.

Re:Unfortunately...

[TheRaven64]

No, the Quartz version will behave exactly like this version. There are three threads to the OOo on OS X development effort.

1. The first is to get the whole thing to compile and work under X11 on OS X as it would on any other *NIX. This is the one that was released today.
2. The next stage is to replace the X11 code with native Quartz code. It will still feel the same, probably look the same (although they may introduce some more Aqua-like graphics at this point) but it will be a native OS X / Quartz app, with no need for X11.
3. The final stage (and I'm really hoping that Apple will get involved at this stage and bundle the resulting office suite with the OS as iOffice, or something) is to redo all of the menus, dialogs etc. so that they look just like a real OS X app. Once this is done (The roadmap says Q2 2004) then it should be a competitive office suite on the Mac.

Hopefully now that the OOo OS X team has a working release build they will be able to keep it synchronised with the main trunk.

I need to print

[Funksaw]

As a guy who's stuck with AppleWorks (since he's sworn off pirated software) and doesn't want to give money to Microsoft, I'm waiting for a usable port of OpenOffice to MacOSX.

However, I'm not sure that I can consider the MacOSX port of OpenOffice as "usable" until it has the capacity to -print- the documents I create in it.

An Aqua/Cocoa port would be great, but right now, I just want full functionality.

Re:which is better

[Jucius Maximus]

"If I have to chose do I download openoffice or staroffice? Do they bear the same relationship as mozilla and netscape navigator?"

I would choose OpenOffice -- StarOffice is Sun's own blend of OO.org. I find that OpenOffice tends to work more 'smoothly' and it has a better presentation program than StarOffice. Not to mention that you have to pay for StarOffice 6.0.

after years

[minus_273]

and years of training.. i too am golden master!