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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.
There already is free full-featured office suite that runs on Mac OS X. Openoffice.org has run on Mac for a couple releases now. Having used both open office and Koffice(koffice on Linux, openoffice on Linux and Windows), I find openoffice to be more versatile. It is all a matter of opinion though
But no, a version that requires you to load an X server doesn't count.
Congratulations to everyone who's worked on this.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
There is a build of OpenOffice under X11 on OS X.
KOffice doesn't require X11. KWord, for example, runs natively under OS X.
GPL Deconstructed
it looks nice but why would they use kde toolbar icons if they're porting it to OSX?
> "I allege that SCO is full of it" -Linus
So even thought some of the other screenshots are in the ugly Motif theme they will soon be all re-taken using the OSX theme.
Also notice how in the Dock the KDE applications icons show up (and scale wonderfully!). We have a script that generates OS X .app directories of the KDE applications and also generates those directories with the proper icons. You can see some of them in the background of the screenshot in Finder.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
"...hard part is over, and now a lot of cleaning up and bug fixes..."
Does only me finds this funny? NOW the hard BORING part starts...
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!
This is going to potentially have more impact on the popularity of Open Source software than anything to date. Office X on OS X has some really annoying "features" like the finking on it's self through a LAN. If this is solid and "Mac-like" it could prove to be a very popular alternative for Mac users who want to be free of Redmond.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
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
Unfortunately, in almost all Open Source projects the 'hard' and 'easy' parts are reversed...
The challenge and glory is done, now all that's left is methodical, monotonous bug chasing. Who's up?
Wah!
Ok, you do have a point there. Most people who buy a Mac could afford MS Office. But here's my question, do you want to use MS Office? And this is my point. I us a Mac (I'm on my 12" PB right now) because I DO NOT want anything from Microsoft! I personally intend to give what I can (I'm poor after all) to help support the KOffice team. I really appreciate the hard work they guys and gals have done to make this happen. In the Mac world a native non MS full featured office suite is huge.
An eMac costs 899 . Office:Mac costs 509 . So, yes.
Yet another troll.
Even a 3-year old reposting from a October 2000 review of Koffice in KDE 2. A for style, F for brains.
I think I need a new sig here.
OpenOffice on OSX has fallen behind. They are only up to 1.0.3, when other supported platforms are up to 1.1
The installation process on the Mac is much harder than other platforms also. X11 (and a few other dependencies) are included in the download, making it a whopping 173MB! That's roughly 100MB more than Windows and GNU/Linux versions.
I'm certain if KOffice was ported better than OpenOffice on OSX, it would be a more popular choice for those looking for a free office suite.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
KOffice comprises the customary litany of applications...
This posting is plagarism of the worst sort. Cut and paste in its entirety from: LinuxPlanet. Taking someone else's work and presenting it as your own without attribution is simply dishonest. It is not informative or insightful.
Sailing over the event horizon
"now all that's left is methodical, monotonous bug chasing. Who's up?"
Apple? Like they did with khtml.
Given the price of a Mac, is *free* that big of a deal? Open source I understand, but it doesn't seem that anyone who can afford a Mac can't afford an office suite.
Consider the example of lack of Hebrew support in Microsoft Office for Mac. There is no technical reason for it; the Unicode-based MacOS X is ready to support Hebrew out-of-the-box. It's just a political decision of the vendor of this particular office suite trying to force Israeli Mac users to abandon their platform of choice. I think this example is enough for you to understand why *free* (as in speech) office suite is a big deal indeed, after all.
Man, is that ever an uniformed post. How does being able to afford a Mac equate to being able to afford Microsoft Office too? After paying $2600 for a Powerbook, the last thing I need is to pay another $400 for software I rarely use. Just to make it perfectly clear to you, the idea of people who buy Macs being rich is a STEREOTYPE. I'm not rich, but I did get a Mac, because it is a very worthwhile expense. Every aspect of it is well designed, from the hardware to the software. Based on what I've heard from people using sub-500 MHz Macs, and from what I've seen with Panther, I fully expect this system to only improve over time. I bought a Mac because I want a high quality computer, not because I had pocket change to burn.
I expect I'll use a word processor on my personal system four or five times a year. Therefore, spending $230 on Word would be a complete waste. I welcome a free word processor.
what a great marraige... finnally the world renouned ease of use and power of KDE Office gets the wide distribution it deserves on the market dominating OS X platform.... oh wait...
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
Snub the mac??!?!? Office for OSX has a better feature list than the PC version.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
Yeah, and look how it 'devastated' the Mac community. :)
I'd say MS needs Apple more than the other way around - I've heard the Mac business unit at MS is among the most profitable, compared to how much they spend on development. Probably a lot less piracy going on in Mac-land.
According to the developer list, most of the bugs have been worked out and OO team are fairly close to finishing an installer for 1.1 for OS X. I wouldn't be surprised at a release next week for the SF expo.
-Alex
OpenOffice on OSX has fallen behind. They are only up to 1.0.3, when other supported platforms are up to 1.1 It was a loss cutting measure. 2.0 is going to be the first carbon port. For now deal with 1.03 or use whatever you've been using.
I don't knwo about you, but I for one will welcome our carbon OO overlords at that time.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Michael wrote: There's also a story on the dot.
:-)
He really should have linked to the story on dot.kde.org
"The dot" is "news for KDE-freaks - stuff that matters" so to speak. Hop on over, it's a nice place
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
This is not entirely true. You can grab 1.1 binaries (not 1.1-release though) from most of the ftp mirrors. They are in the same directory as the 1.0.3 build you are referring to. I use and outdated ooo1_1_mac_01-1 on a daily basis. It's stable, and installation is only a matter of running the setup script. The file is 80MB in size, which is still a lot but less than half of the 173MB for 1.0.3
I'm running 10.3.2 on a tiny PB12" with X11 from Apple, and it's working just fine. Give it a try, report back and help it develop.
Lets be nice and send fresh underwear to all the product executives at MS. They need it after this news.
If the Mac platform loses MS Office, they lose any chance of selling systems where reliable interoperability is an issue. By which I mean, where people need to be able open and edit Office files natively, without getting the formatting all munged up by import/export filters. This means no more workplace Macs (except maybe the art department) and no Macs purchased by people who need to take their work home. The pundits says this would probably mean the end of the Mac, and I don't see any flaw in their logic.
And yeah, you'll have reliable interoperability when all those PCs get Windows and Office overwritten by Linux, KDE, and KOffice. Which would be a nice change but one I'm not holding my breath for.
As other posters have pointed out, Open Office requires a running X server. I like the idea of a native Koffice. Would probably be a better alternative than Appleworks, which is what I currently use on OS X.
I think Koffice is under-appreciated. Though I prefer the power of Open Office on Linux machines with sufficient resources, Koffice is faster and looks good. It's also more intuitive. Hooray for more choices.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
it's a far cry better than MSOffice in many ways and defecient in only unimportant features
So your telling me that I can script openoffice documents in a high level language in an event driven and object based way. Sure I could leanr the schemas and write XML manipulating programs, but thats not as easy as a VB script.
Yes for the 95% of us, VBA is unused, but in that 5% you have enterprises that thrive upon it, programmers that do it for a living and authors that have written books about it.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Yes they are.
Please stop trying to equate laptops and desktops. Even if we do use laptops:
Dell Inspiron 5100: $1,860 (15" LCD/2.66GHz P4/512MB/DVD-CD-RW)
Apple PowerBook: $2,198.00 (15" LCD/1GHz G4/512MB/DVD-CD-RW)
I'll even allow that the G4 may be more powrful than the P4, but not 2.66 times as powerful, so the PC wins power and price (though arguably loses in both cool-factor and the ethereal 'usability').
Build me a very powerful desktop Mac for less than $1000, inculding a 19" CRT. I did this 2 months ago. PCs are cheaper b/c there is more than 1 vendor - and isn't that why everyone hates MS? They only have one monolith to bitch at? As usual w/the Apple crowd, there's a double standard.
-bZj
PS: I hate MS just as much as anyone who uses computers for hours a day, but facts are facts.
.sig
Valid point, and there are other issues too, even, if you're no entirely anti-MS. For example, if you'd be willing to write right-to left languages like Hebrew or Arabic, you'd be completely out of luck.
I have a bit similar issue, as it is currently impossible to get any native word processor for OS X with Finnish language tools (there are classic and X11 alternatives) - MS has them for Windows, but not for Mac. This make me unwilling to buy Office X, even though I like Excel, because I don't want to pay for word processor without support for my native language, and the sole Excel without other office programs would be more expensive for me than the whole suite, as there are no academic editions of the separate programs.
Currently I'm running OOo 1.0.3 on top of X11, but now I'm looking forward for KOffice to replace it soon.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
I intend to give this suite a try regardless, but just curious: is there an automated system a la Mozilla to provide bug info back to the development team when an application crashes? I'd like to help further this development along, but this is about the extent of what I could provide right now.
sig != null
. . . the hard part is over . . .
Not by a long shot. It's hard to say this without sounding like a troll, but what most open source developers just don't get is that the hard part isn't the coding, but putting on the polish so that the app is useful to someone else. Looking at the screenshot, I can pretty much tell you that no Mac user is going to be comfortable using what clearly is not a well-designed Mac app. The fake widgets are out of place. The nested tab views (or two rows of tabs, depending on how you see it) is a terrible interface error straight out of Windows. I imagine trying to use this thing would show it to be even more clunky than the X11 version, where a user would more understand what they're getting into.
Apple gave a very public lesson on the proper way to port OSS when they did Safari. This port clearly took nothing from that lesson. I don't really want to come down on the developers who got it working, because I know the kinds of efforts involved, but I have to say that if anyone thinks this will be of real help to the average Mac user, they are very much mistaken.
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.
Yes, of course you can. What makes you think that OpenOffice.org does not have a macro language with a complex object model available behind it ?
Not sure, well check out the complete (if somewhat involved) developers guide at OpenOffice.org API project.
Since partially completed ports apparently count, I recommend checking out the developer Aqua release of OpenOffice.org, Neoffice. Downloads of a test binary have been here for awhile.
Moreover, just yesterday, lead developer Dan Williams posted this state-of-the-port message on what still needs to be done to have a complete port of OO.o in Aqua:
All in all, these aren't problems that require all that much technical expertise, just a lot of trial and error, and a bunch of debugging. A lot of the issues that we have had for a long time, like the widgets and menus and the event loop, are actually solved; we simply need to convert our old hacks over to the new frameworks or clean up the code as it is. We can of course do this, but as always it requires more manpower.
So? Volunteers?
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Bad: "embracing" an existing standard, extending it incompatibly behind closed doors, flooding the marketplace with incompatible software and claiming it supports the standard.
Appropriating existing application software (not exactly standard in the same was as, say, TCP/IP), developing it thoroughly, and contributing the useful changes back to the original development teams is a bit different. It could be done badly, yes, but Apple doesn't seem to have a poor track record lately in this respect.
I'm not holding my breath.
You might not need to. See The State of the Aqua Port 2004 message from developer Dan Williams.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
and available software is NOT an issue unless you use AutoCAD, cause just about every other package out there, there is a version for the mac, unless its a very propitary. that plus TONS of unix software kills that argument. Of and did I mention VPC5 whihc works great for your few windows programs. My girlfriends dad even runs OS 2 warp software on his mac with no problems.
and I wont go into the nature of prossesors cause to this day PC users cant get it into their heads that prossesor speeds mean absolutly NOTHING if your computer cant give it info fast enough.
I could go on but as someone who works in a IT enviroment and repairs computers and intigrates them into networks for a living, i would chose a Mac over a PC ANY DAY on our network.
and given the fact that we have 800 macs and only 200 PC's on our network because maintaining them is cheaper (our mac budget is 5,000 our PC budget 15,000 and this is including computer purchasing since our PC side has to replace its Dells almost every year because they had catostrophic failures due to continuous use)
Trust me Macs might cost more on the onset but you look in any major IT industry newspaper and they all say that in the long run you spend more maintaining a PC.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Yea, all ten of you Hebrew-speaking Macintosh users should boycot this blasphemy!
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
OK, I've done GUI's and am usually totally anal about compliance, but here I have to agree with the post: the hard part is over.
You have here a free and native alternative for Office.
No money. People will use it if it is reliable. Because it's free. That's great!
Maybe, if the programmers want to have more people use it and everybody to stop bitching, yes, it would be a good - no, a great idea to make it more Mac-compliant, but they don't have to, really. They've already made it FREE.
People will be plenty happy already when the bugs and kinks are worked out.
So congratulations!
BTW, now please give us a free and easy (meaning no coding) database program and we're in HEAVEN!
xxx
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I tried and it is AWFUL!
Working on my Master's coursework I wrote some documents using Apple Works. Saved them in MSWord format (only format the Univeristy officially accepts - although I later discovered my tutor is also a Mac-head and would accept PDF), anyway, saved it in MSWord format. Came back to edit it later. All the formatting has been lost !!! OK so put it all back, cross fingers, save in Word format again. Come back later to edit, this time AppleWorks crashes each and every time I try to load a file IT HAD WRITTEN! That was the last straw so I went and bought MSOffice- and discovered the Entourage is actually quite a good email client (although now Mail has folders I've switched back to that).
Edward
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I doubt this will happen. Mac OS, formerly System 7, goes back to the days of the Lisa... that is a lot of code that Apple has tried and invested in, why would they throw it out? I expect a major updating of the Mac OS, splitting it to 2(Client / Server) OSes that all use a similar GUI.
I just don't see Jobs throwing out Mac OS, and moving to NextStep (or BeOS, which is just as possible an alternative). It wouldn't make a lot of sense.
If Apple charged the same price as Windows XP Professional (~$250+). I'm sure many people would be happy to choose the Apple OS over Microsoft and Apple would be making a pretty good margin.
It wouldn't. Befere 1997 Apple had authorized clones and the clonemakers paid flat rate of $50 for each Mac-compatible machine sold. It was a bad deal for Apple. It's always better to have a $500 margin selling a single PowerMac (and their margin on G5's is obviously much higher) rather than sell 5 copies of OEM MacOS for $50. They traded their market share (that plummeted) for profitability (that rocketed), but that's a wise choice - commericial companies go for profit, not for market share.
This is a great thing for sure, but I have to question the Nativeness of Native here. For one thing I would have least expected it to use the native OSX widget set instead of a themed QT... and does it run without the need to have an X server running atop of aqua?
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp