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."
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
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
(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