Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Final Version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X Released

Posted by pudge on from the bye-bye-microsoft dept.

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."

2 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. What about native aqua? by Yonder+Way · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Unfortunately... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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 am TheRaven on Soylent News