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OpenOffice.org For Mac OS X Hits 1.1.1 (Finally)
berchca writes "So it looks like OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X has finally hit 1.1.1 (for X11). They've also stated they probably won't do a native (Aqua/Carbon) release until OOo 2.0 is out, in late 2005 or early. Great work guys! Now I can get decent macros." I hope 1.1.1 has some speedups over 1.1.0, which works well but takes forever to start.
Errr...umm....how about Keynote to replace Powerpoint?
Otherwise you have to wait for the installer to be finished.
Since building it requires fink (which I hate) and I am building far too many other things at the moment, I will wait.
I am glad to see it though.
I would prefer seeing OpenOffice being able to handle everything from the same build tree like almost everything else I build for OS X.
Maybe one day they will have things together enough to merge the trees.
I expect that they will have to do a lot more work for that to happen though.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
OpenOffice On OS One Oh, one.one.one
Instead of pissing in the wind with X on Mac, all of the effort should be for the native aqua version. The X version looks horrible and performs horrible. I just helped my cousin, who is a complete nube, buy an Ibook online last night for his first computer. It's a damn good thing AppleWorks is coming with it. I'd have hated to tell the guy "well, you know nothing about computers, so I guess you'll either have to shell out huge bucks for MS Office for Mac, or buy an XP box".
While we Nix people like the BSD underneath, one of the Mac's best features is that it's a great machine for for people with ZERO comp expierience to use. Asking one of these people to "put in X, and then compile OpenOffice" kinda kills the easy part, doesn't it? So quit wasting time, and get on that native version, OO.org developers...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I was using it on Linux daily, I have not used MS Office for years. When I switched 20 months ago, I had to learn that OO.org is sucking on OS X and nobody really cares about it. It does not look native, slow, big and buggy. Suddenly it just sucked. Macs spoiled me. OS X spoiled me. And it's a good thing. I have changed from hardcore geek to somebody wo does not want to use slow unusable crap.
I wanted the ultimative usability experience and OO.org could not satisfy any of that. Since 20 months I am on search for The Office package. Haven't found one yet. I hope Apple is coming up with one soon, my another hope goes to the KDE + Qt/Mac porting project especially the koffice part of it. I gave AbiWord a shot, but it did not performe well. And there is no matching Spreadsheet app.
OO.org is dead for me. Big, slow, and too many of itch-scratch people working on it. No innovations.
In Ulrich Drepper's paper on writing shared libraries, there is a discussion of why it takes so long to start up. Debian lets you use prelink to speed up the dynamic linking time. I dunno how much speedup you get.
From Drepper's paper:
With the knowledge of the hashing function and the details of the string lookup
let us look at a real-world example: OpenOffice.org. The package contains 144 separate DSOs. During startup about 20,000 relocations are performed. The number of string comparisons needed during the symbol resolution can be used as a fair value for the startup overhead. We compute and approximation of this value now.
The average chain length for unsuccessful lookup in all DSOs of the OpenOffice.org 1.0 release on IA-32 is 1.1931. This means for each symbol lookup the dynamic linker has to perform on average 72 x 1.1931 = 85.9032 string comparisons. For
20,000 symbols, the total is 1,718,064 string comparisons. The average length of an exported symbol defined in the DSOs of OpenOffice.org is 54.13. Even if we are assuming that only 20% of the string is searched before finding a mismatch (which is an optimistic guess since every symbol name is compared completely at least one to match itself) this would mean a total of more than 18.5 million characters have been loaded from memory and compared. No wonder the startup is so slow, especially since we ignored other costs.
the problem with keynote is that it makes all of the people who have never seen it before too distracted. What's that? Why doesn't my powerpoint look that good? How did you make it do that thingy with the cube! that was too cool! How come your inlaid videos work and mine never do? No one ever pays attention to my presentation!!! ; )
Why not contribute instead of just complaining?
When are people going to stop repeating this tired old line? Just because you have an opinion about the direction of some software, doesn't mean you have time or skills or motivation to contribute yourself, just because the code is there.
For fuck's sake. The OO.o developers do their shit by choice, and they put the results out there of their own accord, for people to use and consume. That means if other people want to use it, and be critical, or say what they think on Slashdot, then they're fucking well entitled to do so.
So can you please stop repeating that tired old mantra of 'shutup or contribute'. It's completely silly and unrealistic.
Porting OO.org to Aqua is a HUGE project and it's not going to be done overnight
All the more reason to be doing it now, rather than, as the parent said, 'pissing in the wind'.
if you want it so badly, give them some help
And finally, he doesn't, he said he's a Nix user. It's other people who want it. And those type of people are the LEAST able to contribute.
For those who need a good, basic word processor with advanced language and academic style features, it's hard to beat mellel. Check it out at redlers.com. Cost is $29 shareware, so you can't beat the price, and it is definitely much better than MS "I reformat every document to make it not really Turabian because 'it looks like you are trying to write a letter!'" Word.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Having ported other (admittedly small) apps from Linux to OSX, I'd have to say that it's highly unlikely that any work that is done for the OSX/X11 is "wasted", as most of the porting is likely to be from the library/kernel differences, not from moving from one XFree86 install to another.
The waiting-on-2.0 is because 2.0 will have an abstraction layer above the UI toolkit, which will also allow native Gtk/Qt builds.
If nothing else, this can help them gather interest (and thus developers) *now* instead of in a year or more, when the native version might be ready. Except it won't without help...
well, I'll tell you what, I had exactly the same idea as this guy last night and tried to download the subversion package, and gave up half way through recompiling the new version of Fink (WTF, I just downloaded it as binary and it wants to download (AND COMPILE!!?!?!?!?!?!) a new version of itself??). You're about as helpful as the myriad documents I had to plough through to get that far.
It's a mess, and if you're used to that kind of software deployment and want to put up with it, great, but frankly, it's about 10 years behind the rest of the world. I don't mind messing around on the command line to get a command line tool up and running, but what's with this 'auto-update' that actually has to compile most of the software again and a graphical client that doesn't even manage to hide the command line (please type in your response (what, you mean, like on a command line but with a little dialog that gets in the way?)) and has lots of cryptic menus (selfupdate-rsynch)? Yes, I *can* go away and find out what the menus in the app mean, but it's a tool for getting new software, not photoshop; I'd expect the menus etc to be straightforward and legible for someone who's not familiar with the program. It could at least have chosen a default update method rather than sticking at that point. The flat file layout (just like on the command line then, how about nested trees of categories at least?) and basic GUI I could put up with, but it took two hours to get software that should have been painless to install.
Why exactly should I have to download and compile a new version of software and all the libraries it depends on just after I've downloaded the binary?? Then it gives me messages like this... (note the mistake (at least I damn well hope so) in file size). The only advantage is the dependency checking, which it doesn't even seem to work all the time.
Need to get 4933kB of archives. After unpacking 1980MB will be used.
Take a look at bundles on OS X (ship the used version of the library with the app, in a nice neat package), then look at fink and tell me it *just works* if you know what you're doing. For certain values of knowing what you're doing, yes it just works. I think the point of the parent poster was that he doesn't want to have to go through all that pain just to try out some software. Not that he can't 'learn fink' but that he doesn't see the benefits which repay all that effort. Ah, I must go, I have another 'please provide your response to the command line' message.
I think you're laying the blame in the wrong place here. Until the main source team has completed certain parts of the 2.0 code, the 2-man porting team can't even really get started on the porting effort (and we're not going to see a full attempt at getting OO.org to OS X with anything but the 2.0 source).
So where should Apple throw their developers? Put them to work on the main source? THEN pull them off and put them on the porting effort? No.
The job is a big one, and the payoff just wouldn't be there at this moment in time. As soon as the 2.0 source is more complete and the porting work can begin, maybe then we will see Apple commitment (in the OS X port ONLY).
It's not Apple's fault, it's just that complex software takes time, and OO.org is pretty complex. Sure, the porting team could attempt to move OO.org 1.1.1 to native Aqua, but all their work would be broken with regards to 2.0, as the source is changing significantly in this transition (a lot of it to do with abstracting interfaces so that this kind of problem is surmountable and we can get an Aqua version).
But sadly, we're just going to have to wait - it's a big job, and Apple have much more pressing things to put their developers on than a two year project involving fixing up the main OO.o source, then moving to another 6 month - 1 year project to port it.
At the moment, Apple gains a lot from being able to claim Microsoft Office support, especially with the new Office 2004 coming soon. How much business sense does it make to be seen to be throwing your resources all over the shop into a competing office suite when despite that effort, the suite isn't going to be available for over two years? Not a lot! The way Apple should/is playing this is to support MS Office on the platform as it's really needed, and only attempt to publicly move momentum to something like OO.o when the transition can be swift, and OO.o is near mature for the platform.
Look at what happened when Apple supported the open source KHTML engine for Safari, as soon as Microsoft were snubbed they removed IE support. Luckily Safari was (juuuust about) ready to fill the gap left by MS. Now look at OO.o - it is NOT ready to fill the gap left by MS (as evidenced by all the posts here) how bright would it be to give MS any excuse/reason to withdraw support for Office on OS X before a replacement is ready to be announced?
As for KDE rivaling OS X, well each to his own I guess. You say that there is little that will be in Panther that won't be in KDE in a year - well I think more accurately would be 2-3 years... and then you are forgetting that Apple updates their OS too, and in that timeframe OS X would be moving forward also.
In terms of "Linux & Co breathing down [OS X's] neck...", well I would love to see a Linux distro give me what OS X gives me (then I wouldn't have to pay for it!) but I simply don't think you're right. Look at how things have moved ahead in the last three years (since OS X 10.0). Sure, KDE and Gnome have made nice enhancements, significant ones, much needed ones too. But when you compare where KDE/Gnome and OS X (or Aqua I guess) was three years ago, and where they both are today - the paths are NOT converging, OS X is moving further and further ahead at a fantastically TREMENDOUS pace... sure KDE and Gnome WILL implement the same features, but these features will by their nature be copy-cat features, and OS X at the moment is simply moving faster adding new features than KDE/Gnome can copy the old ones.
This sig has been deprecated.
But it's available now. If they'd insisted on doing a native Aqua port instead of building and maintainging the X11 version first, OpenOffice for OSX would still be vaporware... vaporware that a lot of people would be sitting on the sidelines questioning whether it was ever going to happen. This way we know that OOo is going get ported to OS X, because it already has. That builds confidence, establishing that OOo is a real cross-platform app, not just a Linux app that's been successfully ported to one other OS.
That's particularly important to me, because it means I can finally run the same wp and work on the book I'm writing (on a USB keydrive) on my iBook out on the front porch, during my lunch break on my Windows machine at work, or in the wee hours on my main desktop running Linux. That's so much more convenient than some kludge importing/exporting files with AppleWorks, and worth putting up with the painfully long launch time of OOo 1.0 on a G3/500 (I leave it running and put the iBook to sleep between uses) and the Win/Lin-looking UI.
It's a damn good thing AppleWorks is coming with it....
Depending on what functions your cousin needs, there are other non-MS apps available for OS X (Nisus Writer, Mariner Write/Calc, FileMaker).
Asking one of these people to "put in X, and then compile OpenOffice".
Compile? 1) Download X11 from Apple.com and run the install package. 2) Download the latest OOo*.dmg file (one for 1.1.1 should be along soon) and run the install package. It may not be fully noob-compatible, but it's not as difficult as you make it out to be.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The people at NeoOffice.org are working on two parallel OOo ports. The first, NeoOffice, attempts to port OOo to Aqua. It seems to have stagnated, but the very promising NeoOffice/J is rapidly approaching 1.0!
/Library/Fonts folder.
NeoOffice/J replaces the dependency on X with a dependency on Java, which is treated as a native toolkit in OSX. NeoOffice/J may not look like an Aqua app yet, but it does integrate nicely with the AA fonts and can use OSX's copy and paste. It takes a good 30 seconds to launch on my G3 iBook 700/640MB RAM but once it's up and running it is quite fast. I recently removed the OOo X11 port from my machine, as NeoOffice/J works more consistently for me.
NeoOffice/J is based on OOo 1.0 but it's still much better than nothing, not to mention much better than the X11 port. It's very easily installed with a DMG file and the standard Apple installer, once installed it behaves like any other OSX app, setting up the MIME types properly, etc.
I've installed 0.82 in the Mac lab here at work, as we didn't purchase MSO with the machines and students were trying to open PPT lectures. Anyway, I'd take NeoOffice/J over AppleWorks any day of the week. I even prefer it to MS Office on OSX. (Sorry, it may look Aqua-ish, but it's an odd duck too.)
----------------------
From the NeoOffice/J site:
No X11 software required
NeoOffice/J uses the JavaTM technology that is built into Mac OS X. By using Java, there is no need to download and install the X11 software that OpenOffice.org requires.
Integrated with Finder and Mail
The Mac OS X Finder will automatically launch NeoOffice/J and open OpenOffice.org and MicrosoftTM Office documents that you double-click on. Also the Mac OS X Mail application will open OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office attachments in NeoOffice/J.
Uses Mac OS X fonts
Unlike OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J uses the same fonts that all of your other Mac OS X applications use. This means that NeoOffice/J will handle reading and writing of Western European characters (e.g. characters with accents, umlauts, circumflexes, cedillas, etc.) and some fonts will even handle Japanese, Chinese, and Korean ideographs. Also, NeoOffice/J is able to use any fonts that you install in your Library/Fonts subfolder or the
Handles international keyboards
Unlike OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J will use an keyboard layout that you use. I routinely switch to a Spanish keyboard without a problem. Also, if you switch your keyboard layout while NeoOffice/J is running, NeoOffice/J will automatically switch as well.
Native printing support
NeoOffice/J supports printing using Mac OS X's native printing functionality. Like other Mac OS X applications, you can use NeoOffice/J to print, preview, or save a document to a PDF file.
Native copy and paste support
NeoOffice/J supports copying and pasting using Mac OS X's native clipboard so you can copy and paste text and images between NeoOffice/J and other Mac OS X applications.
I've tried several versions of OpenOffice.org on OSX and on other systems. My major issue with this project is that it's a complete carbon copy of MS Office. I realise that compatability with MS Office is vitally important to any success of this project, but the entire user interface does not need to be copied. The major reason that I hate using the Windows version of MS Office and earlier versions for the Mac was the god awful interface. It was far too much effort to do simple things like change the font on type size. OpenOffice.org has copied this atrocity of an interface. Frankly, the OSX vesion of MS Office is far better, and pricewise, isn't too bad for a student (3 licenses for $150). If OpenOffice.org can't come up with their own interface, they could at least copy a good one. I have fond memories of Corel WordPerfect 3.5 for MacOS. Look at that.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.