Slashdot Mirror
Friday Mac Release Roundup
An anonymous reader writes "The new RealPlayer 10 beta was released for Mac OS X. It's got a built-in web browser built off Apple's WebKit. This, along with all the Mac-specific UI tweaks, makes for a pretty solid release overall, imho."
lucadex writes "Open Office 1.1.2 has been officially released on Mac OS X. This is the first official O.O. upgrade since version 1.0.3."
Tom Davies writes "Oracle has released an early adopter's release of 10g for Mac OS X."
adamhauner writes "Mozilla.org released final version of Camino 0.8, a Gecko-based browser optimized for Mac OS X with a Cocoa user interface. This version, besides having other new features, also upgrades the Gecko HTML rendering engine from Mozilla 1.0 to Mozilla 1.7."
...that OOo finally reached 1.1 on Mac, too. It has been pain for me to always print a PostScript file and then throw it to Preview just to get a PDF.
/. have any suggestions for Windows/Linux/OS X cross platform office suite? We're currently planning to migrating most of our Windows desktop to Linux, but as we have to leave few boxes for specific purposes at least in the beginning, we will need cross-platform compatibility - and we also have Macs, which have to stay, although they need to be upgraded to OS X first.
Btw, does anyone on
OOo just isn't quite there, as I really can't force X11 apps down our Mac users' throats - they just feel way too different, and I haven't been able to find anything else, either. We could use different software for Macs, like we are actually doing now, and wait for OOo's upcoming Aqua-based 2.0 -version, but if anyone here does have better suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
The native version is postponed to the 2.0 release.
It will be released in late 2005 or early 2006.
You know, we all here have a tradition of saying nasty things about Real player...
Well, I want to stand up, stick my neck out, and say "Sorry! You guys seem to have made up for it!"
As a Cocoa programmer who just doesn't understand why big companies don't dive in and *properly* port their software, I'm impressed that Real has written what seems to be a real, honest-to-god cocoa app. The preferences window is a *real* Mac OS X prefs window. The app behaves like a proper document-based app, where the program won't shut down if you close all the files. And so on, and so on; I'm really impressed.
And, while I have no idea what it's like on windows ( I haven't touched a windows box in at least a year ), real player is being quite nice about not stealing your file associations, unlike what I remember a few years ago on Win2K. It doesn't hide anything as far as I can tell, and the default associations are not only few, but reasonable.
Good show, real. I think I'm *finally* going to pay for your product.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
To all those people who, for some reason, seem to enjoy insane load times and lack of real nativity at the Altar of Firefox, please try Camino. It is actually now quicker at rendering than Safari (or at least it appears to human usage), and is written in full Cocoa. Do try it if you're using anything else. If development keeps apace, I don't think even Safari 2 would make me change.
One of the major benefits of 1.1.2 over 1.0.3 is that the speed of the app has improved dramatically. With both 1.0.3 and NeoOffce/J the start up time on my 933 G4 was pushing a minute. With 1.1.2 I can be editing a document from clicking on the icon within about 10 seconds. This is now the same sort of speed as MS Office X on the same machine. While I am also disappointed that we still don't have a proper aqua version of OpenOffice I understand their reasons and once 2.0 comes out for Windows and X11 they will be able to do the job properly. At that point, I expect MS will do the same as they did with Internet Exporer and drop Office for Mac as they will have real competition and we know how much they like that! Besides which, the supposed benefits of Office on the Mac is the compatibility with Office on the PC and frankly, that is simply not true. I had a doc that I created on the Mac and Office 2K on the PC had problems with a table so I fixed them, saved the file and loaded it back into the Mac to find that yes, the table was also OK but now all the courier font text had changed to arial! The funny thing was, the emulation of Office in OpenOffice was so good that it had exactly the same problem with the table even when I opened it using OpenOffice on the Mac! I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple pitch in fully with OpenOffice 2.0 just to break the last link with MS.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
I'd like to point out that there is a semi-native hack for OpenOffice called NeoOffice. It wraps OpenOffice in Java, which means you don't need to run X11 first, you can use native key bindings for everything, the system clipboard works properly, and (best of all) the native OS X print system is used.
Sure, the UI is still an ugly Windows-esque menu-in-the-window scheme, but it's better than nothing. :) I've been using it for my work and school papers, and found it to be as stable as an official OpenOffice build for OS X. It also seems to be a lot faster... initial startup time (because of Java) is as crappy as ever, but once it's running, it's a lot smoother.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
Yeah, that part about using Apple WebKit means that it's using the framework automatically provided by the OS.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
The first place to start would be to read through the official OOo 1.1.2 Installer FAQ which has answers to this as well as other support issues and questions. There are a number of other FAQs on trinity that can help you address problems.
;)
Also don't be afraid to post and browse through the online support forums where users exchange hints, tips, bug reports, and the like.
All of us volunteers have put up extensive OOo support resources for Mac OS X users, and there are links to all of them on the "Support" section of our website and even in the README included with the installer itself! We spend a lot of time helping users get things working. If something doesn't work, why not try taking advantage of all the written documentation and live volunteer support? It seems that open source is no different then commercial apps...people still don't read the manuals
ed
(PS: the answer to your problem is that OOo is already installed by that point in the install process...you may just be missing one or two fonts, but it works just fine)
Just an FYI, the slow startup time isn't actually due to Java. It's still 98% C/C++, and the slow startup time is actually due to inefficiencies in "ucb" and writing out an initial temporary registry database. That step is written in C++ and takes about 3 seconds by itself. Another large chunk of time is spent loading the hundreds of megs of shared libraries, all of which are written in C++.
:)
The parts of it that are Java are actually on par, if not faster then their X11 equivalents. Feel free to break out Shark and take a look for yourself
ed
(Disclaimer: I'm the lead volunteer for OOo Mac OS X)
There is no Java in OpenOffice.org. It is just horribly inefficient C++. The only time Java is used in OOo Mac OS X is during the build process to validate some XML configuration documents; at runtime it doesn't need Java at all. That's why it's possible to run on DarwinPPC even though you can't compile it on DarwinPPC.
Remember, it wasn't written by Sun, but by Star Division. It was started back in the mid to early 1990s and was definitely back in the day before the AWT was anywhere near stable or cross platform. It may have even been started before Java, but I'm unsure of the timelines.
ed