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Native KOffice for Mac OS X
bsharitt writes "A preliminary version of KOffice has been built natively on Mac OS X. It looks like a lot of the hard part is over, and now a lot of cleaning up and bug fixes stand between Mac OS X and a free full featured office suite." There's also a story on the dot.
Perfect opportunity for Apple to do what they did with Safari and Darwin. Extend it, make it better, include it as an Apple branded product, and give the changes back to the community.
I wonder how long it will be before Appleworks is nixed in favor of a kOffice - based product. Microsoft Office for the Mac is actually a really good product, and Appleworks doesn't touch it. Get to work Apple!
As a Mac user I like it that these apps don't require X-windows and that they already look quite a bit like native OSX applications.
really, excellent work.
A friend of mine has Openoffice running on his powerbook, indeed it "works" but since it doesn't look as slick as the native OSX apps, I am not that eager to try it.
I hope that now a lot of other K-software will be ported!
best regards, Tom
OpenOffice is the best! I use it in my office every day to produce tons of heavily formatted documents. It saved me. I'm never going back to Microsoft Office. Koffice was not as useful as OpenOffice when I tried to switch before. Why not just concentrate on making OpenOffice better and better?
I'm laughing at clouds.
Well, since there is a project underway to develop a QT interface for OO then OO/QT will compile natively on OSX and all is well. KOffice never seemed to deal well with MS Office docs as far as saving them correctly but OO rocks..and with a QT UI for OO then QT/Mac will be the God sent for OSX users. :)
Tell me what you believe...I'll tell you what you should see.
What annoys you about it? Granted, it took me a while to get used to my iBook, but I love it now. Sure its a little weird not having a differentiation between a maximized window and one thats just the size of the screen. However, once you embrace the Jobs way its useable.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
This is a great milestone but...
Trolltech needs desperately to update the OSX port of QT. The widget have a cumbersome appearance and need to be updated to Panther style. Text alignment is in need of some fixing up. This isn't a complaint... the OSX version is still in its infancy and I'm sure time will allow a more integrated look... I'm just anxious.. because QT really is a great toolkit / API.
Good Job!
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
The port of Konquerer and KOffice is using the native QT/Mac port. This is great for two reasons. For one it helps find bugs and missing features in QT/Mac. That'll make porting future projects easier and make using QT/Mac for cross platform development better. Secondly it will enable a lot of fairly good programs to run native.
I agree that KOffice isn't that great, although it holds promise. But having it native is a big deal. Open Office might be more powerful, but because it is an X11 app, it really doesn't have an Aqua look and feel. Further cutting and pasting of graphics or drag and drop don't work. That's a rather large failing with Open Office. (I also think Open Office is weak compared to MS Office and further Apple is expected by some to be releasing its office suite this winter or spring)
I'd kind of like to have a native Konquerer, if only to deal with directories with lots of files. Something the Finder doesn't deal well with. Using it to organize my web directories would be very nice as well...
Yes there is an openoffice port for OS X, well sort off. As other people has said there is only a X11 dependent version of version 1.03. There is no plan to port version 1.1, instead they are working to get the necessary hooks into version 2.0 port for a native port, maybe by 2005 -2006. Till then it's a long wait.
Now that porting KDE apps is seemingly straight forward it may be easier for the OS X porters to piggy back on the KDE intergration effort so things will shift along a bit faster.
Which is odd because I thought the QT for Mac was supposed to use the OS X native widgets.
I don't want to suggest this means it's useless. Obviously, having an application you can place anywhere in the file system, double click to run, associate with files (with a file, as the default for a type of file where the file isn't associated, and used for Open With...), etc, is infinitely better than an X11 version, but, well, I suspect most of those with MS Office or even AppleWorks will probably stick with their proprietary apps for now. Which is a shame.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It does. But it's optional, since none of the programs that an average user will ever see need it, and not installed by default. And even if it were acceptable to make the user dig out their OS CDs and install another piece of software just to use an office program, it's X11, which means it takes a certain amount of expertise to use it. Apple has made it as simple as possible, but in this case, when the unstoppable force met the immovable object, the immovable X server won the usability battle.
As for the name (I'm hoping your post was sarcastic on that point, but you never know) X is the roman numeral for 10. Mac OS X came after Mac OS 9.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
There would be nothing wrong with how you altered the statement if MS Office were open source. Since MS isn't open source, non-programmer type folks who work daily with a word processor on heavily formatted documents have limited choices if they care about trying to implement open source in a professional office. OO is the sole open source application that currently stands up to the proprietary competition. It would be great if it could be improved further.
I'm laughing at clouds.
Because they're more interesting. They've had a hell of a year.
Besides, Microsoft has been sitting on their laurels. Groklaw has an interesting bit where PJ notes that Investor's Business Daily made up their "Top Ten Tech Stories of the Year" list without mentioning Microsoft a single time in any context. This isn't because the "regular" PC world is losing relevance, but more just that there isn't much going on in the "regular" PC world.
But... that's what happens when one company is in charge of most of what people do: Nothing. Why should they do anything? They've got 80% of the world using their stuff.
People also look at the price. For poor people like me price is still a big factor in what influences my decisions to run what software.
Make me your friend. All my friends get +1 modifier and I need friends :)
Where can I donate specifically to the team of programmers working to bring KOffice up to finished, final release quality on OS X?
I would gladly pay to encourage their efforts.
Native to me does not mean native widgets. Native to me means "if I download this, it will run smoothly without parts of another operating system installed for emulation (or X11)." Once this is running smoothly, it will satisfy my criteria for "native."
I'm yet to see a Qt/Mac app that doesn't look like ass. Though I've only tried a couple (LyX, Psi, and some game), all the "native" widgets were bad emulations that fit in worse than a Java Swing application, and in some cases didn't really work.