Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice.org for Mac Delayed Two Years
Athyra writes "According to their Mac porting page, OpenOffice.org will not release a native version of their software for Mac OS X (not counting the X11 version) until 2006. According to the project timeline, no real development can happen again until OpenOffice.org 2.0 hits Windows, Linux, and Solaris in 2005. Looks like Microsoft's got a cozy ride ahead on the Mac side of things for a while."
Fonts. Dock. drag & drop. etc, etc, etc.
this is good news for Nisus though.
must... stay... awake...
the console windows shouldn't pop up. If your gf has a .xinitrc. or an xdefaults file, trash it, and the quartzwm should show up in aqua goodness.
and you won't have to run x11 in panther -- it will have a compatibility lib to display x11 via aqua.
as a last point, not many people complain about the lack of a native port for mozilla -- it still uses its own xul interfaces instead of aqua goodness. with x11 libs in aqua, a native port isn't as necessary.
(to start out with, the development of the next-generation graphics/userinterface/toolkit stuff doesn't go on in the normal OpenOffice mailing lists, but rather at http://gsl.openoffice.org/)
Currently, OpenOffice's interface is based on two different subsystems: UNO and VCL. UNO (Universal Network Object) is the component model that OpenOffice uses. It is roughly comparable to Microsoft's COM. Unlike popular thinking, UNO is NOT COBRA-based, although it does use a COBRA-like IDL. VCL (Visual Class Library), is how OpenOffice draws it's interface. VCL is cross platform, and is designed to maintain a common look and feel in all the platforms that OOo runs on (mainly, Windows, OSX-X11, and non-OSX-X11..)
Now, the problem is that VCL doesn't interface with native widgets that well. There are some crude hacks to try to integrate OOo slightly better, such as Ximian's OOo, but they arent' as effective as using native widgets. It'll take quite a lot of work to make VCL do this, and won't happen before OOo 2.0. The current plan is to reimplement VCL to make it a very abstract library that eventually calls native functions.
Now, there are several ways that this can be done, and it hasn't been decided by OOo developers which course to take. First, there can be a mapping of controls themselves to native controls. For example, OOo could tell Cocoa/Carbon to "draw a button at 300,100", etc.. Another approach is to map windows and dialogs as a whole with native windows and dialogs. This would be akin to OOo asking an Aqua frontend to "display a print dialog". The final approach is to make VCL a simple UNO interface and make each OOo frontend "do their own thing". This is how existing applications like Abiword. Thus, each OOo frontend could look completely different.
There are several OOo frontends that are planned for OOo 2.0. A Win32 frontend, being the most important platform that OOo runs on, is a foregone conclusion. Also planned for certain is a Java-interface for platforms that don't have a native frontend yet. A native OSX (using Cocoa or Carbon) frontend is also likely to happen. On X11, there has been a strong commitment as of late from OOo developers not to focus on one toolkit, but to support several. A gtk+ frontend is a very certain frontend. It looks like there might be a Qt frontend too. Less likely is a wxWindows frontend.
Now, there have been many people who question why OOo just doesn't use a multi-platform toolkit like wxWindows, gtk, or Qt. The answer is that the OOo developers don't want to focus on any single one. Additionally, there are problems with certain toolkits, such as wxWindows, which lacks a significant amount of accessiblity support.
In recent versions, quartz is used to draw text in XDarwin, and the dock is fully supported. Drag and drop is planned for the future.
So what's wrong with the X11 version?
With the time I wait for X11 to start up, I might as well be running my paid versions of Word 5.1 and Excel 98 under Classic.
Have you used the spreadsheet? Full-screen redraws for something that causes cells to recalculate. Actually, half-screen, then full-screen.
For those of us using third-party USB scrolling mice, scrollwheeling scrolls twice for every ratchet of the mouse, and the redraws are so slow you find it's buffered your impatient scrolling and you're pages from where you wanted to be.
Inserting/deleting rows occurs on the row with the selected cell, not on the row you right-clicked. And slow full-screen redraws as you do it, undo it, and do it again.
And each time I open it, the window gets taller. Eventually it gets so tall that the resize widget is off the screen. I just had to scale it down manually again yesterday as it was getting too close to the edge of the screen.
Did I mention the redraws are slow? Quartz Extreme must be amazing if that's tolerable with it enabled. My system is PCI-based, not AGP.
I also have no idea if 1.1 is going to fix these problems because they don't promote builds for 1.1 RC3 for Mac X11--the links from the download page for 1.1 RC3 for Mac go to the 1.0 page--and attempting to download what looks like it could have been the 1.1 build (only 79.4 MiB) failed to complete overnight (over DSL).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Apple has announced that X11 will be installed as part of Panther. So what's wrong with the X11 version?
Well, let's see...
Don't get me wrong - OpenOffice is a great product... Just not on the Mac. I've used OO a lot on Linux, and it works great there. But on the Mac, it's not good enough that something "mostly" works. If it doesn't walk like a Mac app (key bindings) or talk like a Mac app (open/save dialogs, print dialogs, etc.), it ain't a Mac app. Until there's a native version that integrates nicely with the rest of the OS and its apps, even power users such as myself will have a hard time justifying the use of it - free or not.
As a slightly off-topic aside, I will say that there are things I don't like about MS Office on the Mac as well. Take the key combos, for example. In every other Macintosh program holding the Command key and hitting the left or right arrow will take you to the start or end of the line. But in Word, this just takes you back or forward one word. Very annoying.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
The only thing that the timeline states is that the 'official' OpenOffice.org 2.0 won't be available on Mac OX X until 2006, and it won't be on ANY platform until 2005.
There is still a port (branch, aquafication, quartzification, whatever) going on, a couple in fact. Check out NeoOffice and NeoOffice/J (Java):
www.neooffice.org
www.neooffice.org/java
trinity.neooffice.org
The Register spoke with Dan Williams (one of developers) whose said that they "may be able to wrangle a 1.5 release with our required changes or something. Others, like Ximian, want to add stuff to. So the long and short of it may be that there isn't an "official" Aquafied OpenOffice.org release until 2005 and OOo 2.0, but there could be an interim release". There is heaps more info in the article, so have a peek.