Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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.
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!
"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.
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
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
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.
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.
. . . 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
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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
-------------------
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.